Barack Obama: New 44th President Will Face Real Challenges, Responsibilities

Barack Obama:
44th President of the United States

New President Will Find Responsibilities Replace Rhetoric




Electoral Win Solid, if Not Spectacular

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Barack Obama was elected in Election 2008 as the USA's 44th president and almost immediately will face hard choices in governing, both on the domestic and foreign fronts.

The media has called Obama's election "historic", and on that--unlike most other matters of fact--they are correct.

Obama becomes the country's first bi-racial candidate, and even those that opposed Obama on policy issues can find much good in the hope that his election will put issues of race into their proper perspective.

The raw statistics surrounding the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the nation's 44th president indicate that the country gave a Democrat presidential candidate a majority of the popular vote for the first time in 32 years.

Obama's 52.4% of the popular vote surpasses Jimmy Carter's 50.1% total in 1976 election. That total could finish up or down, but not by much. Obama's total was far short of predictions that he would approach Lyndon Johnson's 1964 total of 61.1%.

The electoral college total had Obama winning 364-174 over challenger John McCain.

Bill Clinton exceeded both totals in the electoral college--in spite of never winning a majority of the popular vote--in both 1992(370) and 1996 (379). Obama did surpass Carter's 297.

Obama will be tested immediately, it seems on foreign policy.

Russia reacted to the news of Obama's election within hours. From Russian missiles to counter U.S. defence plan: Medvedev.

Russia will deploy short-range missiles in the Baltic Sea region near the border with Poland in response to plans by the United States to build an anti-missile system in Europe, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.

The proposed U.S. anti-missile system, which would include 10 missile silos in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic to help detect and shoot down any ballistic missiles, threatens Russia's national security, Medvedev said in his state-of-the-nation address on Wednesday.

"To neutralize — if necessary — the [U.S.] anti-missile system, an Iskander missile system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad region," Medvedev said. "Naturally, we are also considering using for the same purpose the resources of Russia's navy."

There will be the traditional 'honeymoon' between the new Obama administration and the press. DBKP is no different: we wish the new president well for the sake of the United States.

We'll reserve comment on the press' relationship with the Obama campaign before the election for another post.

Obama's campaign mantra of "hope" affects even us: we hope that what we don't know about the Senator from Illinois won't affect his good judgment for the good of the country. We also hope that the Obama we see in White House really the go-slow, tax-cutting Obama we saw in the last weeks of the campaign.

Obama's campaign mantra of "hope" affects even us: we hope that what we don't know about the Senator from Illinois won't affect his good judgment for the good of the country.

Republicans in Congress continued to pay a price for their free-spending, pork-barreling ways when they had control. We hope they learned a lesson, though we are a bit skeptical.

Barack Obama is a smart man. We hope he uses his intelligence to study the effects of what happens--to Democrats and Republicans alike--when they try to buy votes using the hard-earned money of their fellow citizens.

We Barack Obama a hearty "Good luck".

by Mondo Frazier

Live RNC TV Coverage - thursday

This is a nifty test of a streaming of the RNC. We'll see if it works.

by Mondoreb

Republican Voter Apathy: The McCain Monologues

"Pop the champagne, cue the music, let's party! McCain has wrapped up the Republican nomination."

"Champagne? For McCain, are you kidding?"

"How bout some Cold Duck, would that suffice?"

"Why are you in the mood to celebrate?"

"I thought we should, after all, McCain's our man!"




"McCain's our man, true, tell me one thing McCain's said this election that you can recall?"

"Umm, I can't remember anything McCain has said."

"Have you felt "inspired" by anything McCain has said?"

"Ah, actually nothing I can recall."

"So let me get this straight, you want to celebrate the nomination of a guy whom you say does nothing to inspire you and you can't remember a single thing he's said the whole election?

"True."

"Then why did you want to celebrate?"

"Because all the fun and excitement is over on the Democrat's side. I mean, it's neck and neck between Obama and Hillary, all the twists and turns, the drama of da feet, the thrill of victory."

"You mean the "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat."

"Yeah, that's it, the agony of da feet. Besides, I'm jealous, even though I'm not a Democrat I wish the Repubicans could have had a guy who inspired me, inspired everyone actually, to vote Republican, to feel good about being a Republican."

"McCain just doesn't "do it" for me."

"Me either."

"Kinda sad."

"Yep, kinda sad."

"McCain can't help it that he's boring."

"Nope, he can't."

"My McCain level of excitement on a scale of one to ten is .5."

"Mine's .32."

"What do we do now?"

"We watch the Dems have all the fun."

"That's not fair."

"Life... is not fair."

"Apparently it's not fun either."

"Apparently."

"Won't this apathy work against us?"

"Yes, it could but at the moment I could care less."

"Yep, me too."


By LBG

Image - Apathy
Image - McCain
DBKP.com - Bigger, Better!.
Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.
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Google Evaluates the Candidates

What Google Tells Us About the Candidates



If you're the kind of voter who casts their ballot according to the candidates' stands on Internet issues, this story might just be your ticket.

If you're the kind of voter who casts their ballot according to how popular the candidates are on-line, this also might be the story you're looking for.

Obama has 271,000 MySpace friends, compared to Hillary's 181,000, and McCain's disappointing 44,000.

Jason Lee Miller has written a piece for WebProNews on how the candidates stacked up based on their appearance at Google's HQ in California.

He looks at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and John McCain for the Republicans.

It's interesting and a video of each candidate at Google was found on YouTube.

This was the summary of each.

OBAMA

If you're the type of person who listens to what President Bush says and thinks we should do the opposite, then Obama's your man. In this Editor & Publisher report, Bush called McCain a "true conservative" (a statement Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingram and Coulter might all disagree with), and said Hillary was "well-prepared for the job." And Barack? Bush doesn't like Obama's lack of foreign policy experience. And if anybody knows about bad foreign policy, it's Bush.

That's the last time. Honestly.

Obama's well-liked at the Googleplex, especially since he was the only candidate to answer correctly CEO Eric Schmidt's Google employment question, which is about "the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers."

He answered "I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go." That's apparently correct because the crowd applauded. Giving me a math problem is like putting a chimp at the helm of an atom-smasher. Still, I think this is the correct answer: "Give them to a Google employee."

Obama at Google

Net Neutrality is a big Internet issue at the moment.

Google employees wanted to know about how the candidates felt about that particular issue, and Lee fills in the blanks.

During that interview, Obama voiced support for Network Neutrality (a topic you're unlikely to hear about off the Internet), and unveiled his technological plan for the nation, which included the appointment of a Chief Technical Officer to help make the government more transparent online.

As far as utilizing the Internet in his campaign goes, he's been early and aggressive online, making use of YouTube, MySpace, and Google AdWords, especially to ward off a smear campaign suggesting he was Muslim. That question, by the way,—whether he's Muslim—is the top Google suggestion for "Obama is…."

"Smear" here is in the eye of the beholder. There are legitimate questions concerning Obama, religion and his religious advisers. None of those questions constitute a "smear" in the classic sense of the word.

However, "smear" has come to mean "any unpleasant questions" in the modern political lexicon.

McCAIN

Google Suggest suggests that McCain is an insane, liberal traitor, or at best an old conservative. But if you're the type to go against anything MoveOn.org says, which has thrown it's support via donated money and advertising to Obama, then McCain's your man.

And he's earned your support. For every dollar McCain's campaign spent online he earned $4 in campaign donations. Not a bad return at all. His email campaign did better, pulling $189 average donations at a cost of $8 per donor. He's savvy when it comes to Internet campaigning, utilizing AdWords, AdSense, and MySpace to bolster support.

His ads don't always hit the mark. Some of his AdSense flyovers ended up in enemy territory thanks to some faulty contextual targeting. And he had to diffuse a McCain googlebomb at some point, which seems to have been unsuccessful. His attack on Hillary worked pretty well though.



While visiting the Googleplex, Schmidt let McCain off the hook by not making him answer the efficient bit-sorting thing, and McCain struck a cord with Googlers with this nugget:

“If Google is going to be able to maintain its supremacy in the world, it is going to have to continue to get the best and the brightest from all over the world, and I accept with your gigantic egos, that you are the best…we need an H1B visa program that works.”

But he wasn't pandering. Soon after, a Googler got the "McCain story" Rick Santorum was talking about as the two of them argued about the war in Iraq. And McCain wasn't exactly gentle. And he's still kind of mad at Google and Yahoo for their involvements with China.

He's against Net Neutrality, believing the market will right itself without government intervention. That might be why he took in $0 from Yahoo, and just $1,550 from Google. Don't feel bad for him though, McCain has mentioned making Cisco CEO John Chambers a cabinet member. Cisco doesn't like Net Neutrality either, especially with all the network filtering equipment they make.

And lastly, Hillary Clinton showed up at the Googleplex to talk to the Google employees.

As per usual, she came with a set of pre-conditions.

CLINTON

Google Suggest isn't kind to Sen. Clinton, either, suggesting she "is" a fake, a joke, even the devil. Slate compared her to General Electric, the "mega-cap blue-chip, a juggernaut of the 1990s," but I like the comparison to Microsoft better, especially if Obama is Google.

In fact, out of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, Clinton pulled in the most from Mr. Softy, the Beast of Redmond, and carried Silicon Valley, too. She also has visited the Googleplex, but unfortunately, it looks like Clinton specified "no math questions" before Schmidt was allowed to interview her.

The piece winds up with the following: "Rest assured, just like Microsoft with Google, wherever Obama is, there you'll find Clinton, too, especially online. In AdWords, on YouTube and MySpace."

And there you have it.

The handicapping of the candidates, according to Google.

While we think Google is an exceptional search engine, we're not so sure about its political advisory capabilities.

After all, in campaign season, it becomes just another interest group.

by Mondoreb
images:
* lockergnome;
* davidallgroup
Source: What Google Tells Us about the Candidates



Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.

Andrew Sullivan, George Bush and the GOP

[Originally written on October 28, 2007, we thought this was one of Blanca's Greatest Hits. Like Rod Serling, DBKP reprints it for your consideration...]


If You Can't Stand the Heat

Mr. Sullivan, I watched Real Time with Bill Maher this Friday. Actually I time-shifted and watched it on Saturday, but that is the genius of the Tivo, without which pundits like myself would be lost. The vapid flow of information, which endlessly streams from the Mainstream Media, is far too much my mind to process timely.

To be quite honest, your breed confuses me.

You try to enter our tent, and then become confused when we want you to enter in the rear--rather apropos for someone of your predilections, don't you think?

This is a Christian party. We occasionally let in the wayward Jew. And once in a while, a couple of black people sneak in.

But for the most part, this party is Christian, white, and straight. We have embraced this for years. If we didn't, don't you think we would have passed some sort of legislation when we owned Congress to help the "others?"

Oh, of course when a minority comes into the party, and passes the prerequisite challenge of having wealth and being willing to abandon others like him, we let him rise high in the party.

We have even permitted a couple of your type to rise, as long as they had the decency to keep their private affairs secret, live in a closet, and clap and cheer when the President introduces legislation designed to make them second-class citizens.

It's the only polite thing to do.

As I watched you complain about our beloved President, I grew more and more angry as the hour progressed. I couldn't understand why anyone would willingly enter an organization, which very vociferously has made it quite clear over the years that you are not welcome.

It would be like a Negro attempting to enter his local chapter of the KKK, and then complain about the lynching policy. It just doesn't make any sense, don't you think?

You seem like an intelligent man. You're familiar with the story of Faust, aren't you Mr. Sullivan? Not the all-male pornographic version, which I mistakenly rented from my local video rental. [Note to self: must change video rental stores.]

No, the original, written by the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A medieval scholar makes a bargain with the Devil in order to gain the knowledge of the world, in essence to gain power.

Knowledge is power. Or, for folks like you: knowledge=power.

Faust is followed home by a poodle, an adorable dog, with curly hair and a penchant for dressing like a sissy, something with which you may be familiar Mr. Sullivan. At home in Faust's study, the poodle transforms into Mephistopheles.

It is at this point that perhaps one of the most quotable lines of Goethe is uttered: Das ist des Pudels kern. For those of you who are Germanically-challenged: That is the poodle's heart.

Why do I wax on poetic, and probably psycholitic in your eye?

You stated on Bill Maher's show that you voted for our beloved Commander Guy in 2000, but you became disenchanted in later years. Perhaps you lacked that simple talent which our Decider has mastered so skillfully, the art of looking a man in the eye and seeing into his soul.

He has done it often with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, or Pootie-Poot, as our Commander Guy likes to call him--a name so fitting for a former KGB officer. Had Faust simply looked into the poodle's eyes, he would have seen the heart, which was the Devil's.



Do I say that our beloved President is the Devil?

Hardly.

But if you, as a man of letters, and a man of conscious, as you so artfully claim, could not have seen into the heart of the poodle which followed the Republican Party home in 2000, then you have no one to blame but yourself.

And like the poodle, which followed the Party home in 2000, the Party followed the Religious Right home one fall in 1994, looking for a home after a brilliant ass kicking by one William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton mastered the art of speaking to the public, to both sides, although not to the fringes. He became the middle-of-the-road President, who occasionally strayed to one side or the other of the line, but who could be counted upon to eventually return home to the medium.

And this double-yellow-line philosophy is what scared the living shit out of us on the extreme right. We knew we could not compete with Clinton on substance alone.

We knew that a populist cannot be destroyed. We unfortunately learned that lesson rather late with the failed attempt at Impeachment. And so when the Religious Right found that lost poodle one day and took it in and fed it, our party wagged the tail, to appease its new master.

Now don't get me wrong, President Clinton was evil, pure evil.

I can't remember why, but Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity tell me this on a regular basis, so I must believe it.

Like all good Republicans, abstract and critical thinking are not my forte. I am much better suited to follow a strong leader, someone who doesn't care what the polls or the people think; one who doesn't care what the international community thinks; one who doesn't care what the facts state: facts have such a well-known liberal bias.

That man is our beloved Commander Guy, one Mr. George W. Bush.

So Mr. Sullivan, you see that you really have no stance, wide or otherwise, in this argument. You knew what you were getting into.

I love my President. He has done the hard work, making progress, moving forward, doing a heckuva job. If you don't like what the party has become (notice I didn't use the word "evolved") then get the hell out.

We really don't want you, anyway.

by Blanca DeBree
[images: blancasphere; theavclub]
Source: If You Can't Stand the Heat

Other October stories you may enjoy from the Blancasphere * Phony * Such a Cunning Linguist * SCHIPS (You Can't Eat Just One)

Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.

Democrats and Republicans: Attitudes on Taxes Highlight Difference Between Parties

Rangel tax plan only one of many clever Democrat schemes

[Click on picture to enlarge.]

A reminder that all political parties are not created equal--at least when it comes to taxes and immigration/open borders.

Cracks are emerging in congressional Democrats' solidarity, as frustrated lawmakers concede their majority status is not enough to overcome Republican resistance on taxes, spending, Iraq and a host of other issues.

The fissures, which became obvious this week, are undermining Democrats' hopes for several key achievements this year. They also point to a bruising 2008 election in which Democrats will say Republicans blocked prudent tax and spending plans to score political points on immigration and other hot-button issues.

Republicans say they simply want to prevent higher taxes of any kind, even if the targets are not-so-sympathetic groups such as oil companies and hedge fund managers.

"Those politicians, they're all alike".

Well, no.

Democrats in Congress think the only reason Republicans have for voting against higher taxes is political pandering.

They truly believe that Americans get up and go to work everyday, not for their families--but to supply tax dollars for Congressmen and Senators to donate to their favorite charities.

The preceding bit of news points out what is still a basic philosophical difference between Congressional Democrats and Republicans. As Ronald Reagan said:

"Republicans believe that every day is the Fourth of July; Democrats, that every day is April 15."


Source: AP - Democrats Cry Uncle on Taxes, Spending


by Mondoreb
[graphic: RidesAPaleHorse]
Reagan quote: Red Planet Cartoons

Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.

CBS Evening News, Initiative Opponents Team Up For Lesson in Investigative Journalism

CBS Evening News Features Courage Campaign Derring-Do

The crack investigative ethic at CBS Evening News, the Courage Campaign, and DailyKOS combine to bust initiative workers and Crooks and Liars brings in a guest to hand out the plaudits.

It is not every day that something from a blog post ends up in the CBS Evening News, but then again using children with cancer to try and steal the White House is pretty egregious. A diarist at Daily Kos noticed that the dirty tricksters, who are advancing an initiative that would switch 20 of California’s electoral college votes to the Republicans were using children’s cancer as a bait-and-switch to get people to sign the initiative and place it on the ballot. The Courage Campaign sent a film crew led by Erik Love to go tape Arno’s signature gatherers (pdf) and we caught them red-handed.

Julia Rosen is the Political Director for the Courage Campaign. CBS Evening News' Dan Rather urged viewers with his trademark: "Courage". Rosen then congratulates soulmate CBS for its courage--well, okay, the pub CC received, anyway.

That video was featured in the weekend edition of the CBS Evening news. Watch the clip. It is a particularly good segment on the initiative. And special thanks to John for grabbing that clip for us.

Of course, Rosen is right: this is a textbook example of how journalists safeguard the Republic from the misdeeds of those who plead for initiative signers. CBS Evening News, alerted by DailyKOS, abetted by the Courage Campaign, is once again a hotbed of investigative innovation.

Hundreds of dishwashers and busboys, who barely speak English, pony up $2300 apiece to Hillary Clinton's campaign: that's not quite so interesting a story.

But CBS is to be applauded. As Rosen points out: opponents busting initiative workers doesn't happen every day.

The chicanery of Clinton campaign fund-raising is old news.

by Mondoreb
[image:buycostumes.com]
Source: Dirty Tricksters Caught on Video: CBS Evening News Edition
[theme:howsthatforbaitandswitch?]



Death by 1000 Papercuts Front Page.