Welcome, President Obama

Nice to have you.

Please don't get tripped up when former President Bush lets the door hit him on his way out.

Changes: It Seems Heaven-Sent

This would've been more timely two weeks ago, but I've stopped pretending to myself that I'm either cutting-edge or quick on the draw.*

Anyway, it wasn't too likely, but Tupac's "Changes" should've been the Obama theme song.


Kinda obvious why it wasn't, but it should've been.

I'm not sure when he recorded it, but it was released posthumously, so maybe twelve or thirteen years ago. Anyway, Pandora popped it up just now for me, and I was struck how it sounds both outdated and painfully relevant at once:

"Changes"
...
I see no changes wake up in the morning and I ask myself
Is life worth living? Should I blast myself?
...
We gotta start makin' changes,
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers.
And that's how it's supposed to be—
How can the Devil take a brother if he's close to me?
I'd love to go back to when we played as kids,
But things changed, and that's the way it is...

I see no changes all I see is racist faces.
Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races.
We under, I wonder what it takes to make this
One better place. Let's erase the waste,
Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right,
'Cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight,
And only time we chill is when we kill each other.
It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other
And although it seems heaven-sent
We ain't ready, to see a black President.
It ain't a secret, don't conceal the fact:
The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks.
But some things will never change...

And still I see no changes can't a brother get a little peace
It's war on the streets & the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty they got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me...

It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes.
Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live,
And let's change the way we treat each other.
You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do
what we gotta do, to survive.

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* Or original. I just did a Google search and am shocked--shocked!--to discover that I'm not the first person to have had this thought. Whatever. Time-traveling plagiarism artists and other haters will not drag me down.

It Intensifies Your Political Philosophy, Man

I'm psychic.

And remarkably good-looking, but the psychic part is more relevant here. On Friday, I responded to Paul Krugman's ecstatic proclamations about Obama's "mandate" and how he'd won that mandate during a referendum on "political philosophies" that "the progressive philosophy won." I said:

In 2004, cultural conservatives misunderstood the significance of Bush's victory--they thought so many people voting (in part) out of fear of terrorism meant that the country was ready to return to 1948, only with better wiretapping technology. It wasn't. And this year, so many people voted (in part) out of fear for their pensions. That doesn't mean the country is salivating for the New New Deal. Voters in 1932 knew that the stakes were much higher; contrary to FDR's speeches, Depression-era voters had to fear not only fear but also starvation.

And then today, Krugman wrote this:

Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.... Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

Krugman, god bless, clearly hasn't slept since Tuesday. Near as I can figure it, since they called the election, he's been using America's maxed-out credit card to scrape transcontinental, Union Pacific rails out of a Montana-sized pile of powdered optimism.

Get some sleep, dude. Barack Obama will still be President-elect when you wake up and come down.

It's Even More Impressive...

So I was going to write post entitled, "STFU About Joe the Plumber." But that was pretty much all I had, so I was stuck on what to write about.

Then this came along:

This charming image comes courtesy of Diane Fidele, President of Chaffey Community Republican Women, a San Bernadino group not far from my new hometown. Fidele mailed it out to about two hundred people, including some of the group's members.

Sure, the image does call food stamps "Obamabucks." Sure, it does have a picture of Obama superimposed on a cartoon donkey at its center. Sure, it shows Obama surrounded by Kool-Aid, ribs, and watermelon. Sure it's a festival of racist stereotypes.

But that doesn't mean it's racist. As Fidele told a local newspaper: "I never connected. It was just food to me. It didn't mean anything else."

I can see that.

I mean you wouldn't believe the flak I got from those panty-bunchers over at the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance when I launched my new drycleaning business two years ago: Chinky Slanteyes' SuperStarch Laundry--"We Wash You Rong Time!" Apparently, that's some kind of obscure ethnic slur. And I guess they weren't too happy with these really great pictures I had of buck-toothed coolies with huge ponytails. Just because I used canary yellow for the skin color or something.

Anyway, that killed my promising business. I hope things turn out fine for poor Fidele. Sounds like an honest mistake.

------
It's impressive that Fidele managed to Photoshop this without taking off her hood, but it's even more impressive she did it with her hooded head crammed that far up her colon.

Oh, Right, Real Issues... Yeah...

Found this via David Rees' blog and felt an unaccustomed moment of optimism and gratitude. It's Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO talking about race and union voters in this year's election:

Lame Bedfellows

So the New Yorker's latest issue has a caricature of Michelle & Barack Obama on its cover. She looks like a cross between Sister Souljah and Angela Davis, and he looks like Osama bin Laden. There's an American flag burning in the background.

Obviously--obviously!--this is a satire of all the untrue rumors about Obama that range from the (should-be) benign (Obama = Muslim) to the clearly insane (Obama = al Qaeda sleeper). It's well done and kinda funny.

Naturally, nobody involved in the major parties' campaigns admits to having a sense of humor about it.



An Obama spokesman told reporters, "The New Yorker may think... that their cover is a satirical lampoon... But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." John McCain weighed in on the issue himself, calling it "totally inappropriate" and adding, "I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive." Heck, even Michael Bloomberg said, "We all have to watch very carefully what we say — our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people — because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage."

Isn't it bad enough that during a presidential election our candidates' debates involve no real debate and that their policy positions have about as much detail as a 4-dpi image? Are we supposed to sacrifice our senses of humor too?

Well, as far some are concerned, yes. But the really annoying thing is that I'm convinced that neither McCain nor Obama is truly offended by these cartoons. There's no way that anybody who has even the vaguest idea what the New Yorker is would legitimately believe that the cartoonist was being serious. And it's a pretty funny drawing. I'm almost positive that both candidates responded as they did solely in order to put position themselves as centrists.

By claiming to be offended, Obama gets to take a swing at a lefty publication and remind people that, indeed, he isn't a terrorist and that his wife doesn't hate whitey. And John McCain gets to present himself as a racially sensitive kinda Republican who's wiling to agree with his opponent on matters of principle when their principles overlap.

Except here the principle they share is "I really want to get elected." And, of course, to bore us silly in the process. Only it's the kind of silly that we're not allowed to laugh at, apparently.

Almost Forgot about Them

So, yeah, the NRA. Great.

The NRA is proudly proclaiming that it's going to carry out a $15m campaign against Barack Obama. Now, I kinda suspect that figure's a strategic exaggeration, but still, the NRA would seem to mean business on this one.

My favorite quote from the CNN article I've linked to:

The NRA's beef with Obama: He supports a ban on semi-automatic weapons and on almost all concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month.

Yup, clearly the man's a fanatic.

12,008

I'm so desperately unhip that I got this link from Newsweek, but it amused me. (It's funnier if you've seen the will.i.am Obama video first.)