Tag: Barack Obama

Is Being Fat a Crime

Seth Anderson0 comment

Fox News, Matt Drudge and their minions like Bill O’Reilly are trying to make political points by criticizing Obama’s nominee for the US Surgeon General post, Dr. Regina Benjamin. Sadly, Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune has joined in the bully brigade.

Lobby Horse

The question is at the heart of a debate set off when Dr. Regina Benjamin was nominated for surgeon general. A MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient who set up a medical clinic in hurricane-ravaged Alabama, Benjamin hasn’t responded publicly to criticism that her extra pounds may set a poor example.

[Click to continue reading Weighty issue rages in surgeon general debate — chicagotribune.com]

Even though Ms. Deardorff’s article doesn’t linger on the question of whether Dr. Benjamin is too fat to work for the government, even using the “criticism” as a jumping off point to a discussion of fatties legitimizes the “criticism” and the ignorant dispensers of the “criticism“.

The Less You Know- oil

Last I heard, brains and accomplishments are what matters, not what size dress one wears, unless one’s job is working for Fox News. The logic baffles me: are these bullies suggesting that if one is not model thin1, one has to be unemployed? Sent to a fat farm in Siberia? What exactly are the anti-chubbies suggesting? Their leader, Rush Limbaugh, aka The Vulgar Pig Boy, is not exactly svelte himself.

Footnotes:
  1. and white – since body types often do have a racial and cultural component [↩]

My Dinner With Andre

Seth Anderson0 comment


“My Dinner with Andre (Criterion Collection)” (Louis Malle)

Saw this last week for the first time in ages, what a great film. It had been unavailable for quite some time before the Criterion Collection geniuses put out a new 2 disc edition

Wally and I would get quite upset because wherever we went people were saying, “It’s one of my favorite movies.” It’s one of Barack Obama’s favorite movies. He says he’s seen it eight times. So there was something very sad about the fact that it had disappeared.

[From ‘Andre’ inspires talk almost 3 decades later]

On the surface, sounds like a boring film, two guys yammering at dinner, but it isn’t.

Roger Ebert added it to his Great Films collection:

Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of cliches. I thought for a moment, and then answered, “My Dinner With Andre.” Now I have seen the movie again; a restored print is going into release around the country, and I am impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.

The title serves as a synopsis. We meet the playwright Wallace Shawn, on his way to have dinner with “a man I’d been avoiding, literally, for a matter of years.” The man is Andre Gregory, a well-known New York theater director. Gregory had dropped out of sight, Shawn tells us, and there were reports that he was “traveling.” Then one evening recently, a friend had come across him in Manhattan, leaning against a building and weeping. Gregory had just come from an Ingmar Bergman movie, and was shattered by this dialogue: “I could always live in my art, but not in my life

…

Like many great movies, “My Dinner With Andre” is almost impossible to nail down. “Two men talk and eat (in real time) at a fancy New York restaurant,” writes CineBooks. Wrong, and wrong. Not in real time but filmed with exquisite attention to the smallest details by director Louis Malle over a period of weeks. And not in a New York restaurant but on a studio set. The conversation that flows so spontaneously between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn was carefully scripted. “They taped their conversations two or three times a week for three months,” Pauline Kael writes, “and then Shawn worked for a year shaping the material into a script, in which they play comic distillations of aspects of themselves.”

Comic? Yes. Although the conversation is often despairing (Gregory speculates that the 1960s were “the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished”), the material is given a slight sly rotation toward the satirical. There is a lot to think about in the torrent of ideas, but also a saving humor. Gregory plays a man besotted by the ideas of the new age; he almost glows when he tells Shawn about an agricultural commune in Britain where instead of using insecticides, “they will talk to the insects, make an agreement, set aside one vegetable patch just for the insects.”

[Click to continue reading My Dinner With Andre :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

Luckily, you can rent the film from Netflix, or purchase your own copy. It is one of those films that rewards multiple viewings, so owning your own version is not a bad idea.

At The Criterion Collection’s website, Amy Taubin writes, in part:

The idea for My Dinner with André originated with Shawn. For several weeks, he and Gregory recorded their conversations about the strange extended episode in the latter’s life when he went in search of the miraculous. The script made its way to Malle, whose enthusiasm for the project might have had to do with the challenge of making two men talking over dinner into a compelling cinematic experience. That is to say, it was a perfect fit for a seriously eclectic career. As much as Steven Soderbergh today, Malle seemed determined to try something new with every film.

He had made his mark, as part of the French New Wave, with an anxiety-ridden, noirish quartet of character studies—Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its smoldering Miles Davis score; The Lovers (1958), which established Jeanne Moreau’s reputation as the thinking person’s sex symbol; the borderline nihilistic The Fire Within (1963); and Le voleur (1967), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in what could be viewed as a rejoinder to Godard’s Breathless. He punctuated these walks on the dark side with the dazzling proto-pop-art ode to the city of Paris Zazie dans le metro (1960) and the somewhat less successful romp Viva Maria! (1965), which teamed Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Despite his great talent for directing actors, Malle then undertook, as his filmmaking second act, a series of documentaries, notably the epic Phantom India (1969) and its devastating spin-off, Calcutta (1969). Malle’s third act took place largely in the United States, where he tried his hand at studio movies. In the strongest of them, Atlantic City (1980), Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster give performances that are both emotionally true and larger-than-life. But the American films that embody Malle’s understated mastery of cinematic pace and rhythm and his skeptical humanism are his two collaborations with Gregory and Shawn, My Dinner with André and, thirteen years later and just a year before his death, Vanya on 42nd Street.

In addition to the challenge of making a film that was literally all talk and no action, Malle must have been excited by the mix of fact and fiction in My Dinner with André (that’s true of Vanya as well), and by André’s descriptions of his far-flung journeys, which echoed aspects of Malle’s own travels in India. And there is also the matter of the Holocaust, the nightmare that haunts André’s quest for enlightenment. Wally is clearly embarrassed by these references—perhaps he thinks André is being excessive or flip when he says that sometimes he feels he should be “caught and tried like Albert Speer,” or that he imagines an SS officer identifying with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, a book that has great significance for him. The references are so casual that you can’t quite believe you’ve heard them, but they gather as the film goes on to become a dark subtext and suggest something that André never articulates: that in his travels, he was fleeing the horror of the past as much as he was pursuing the pure light of cosmic consciousness. Shawn and Gregory come from families of Jewish descent. Malle does not, but his traumatic childhood in France under the occupation became the subject of two of his most painful and personal films, Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Au revoir les enfants (1987).

[Click to continue reading My Dinner with André:Long, Strange Trips – From the Current]

Until I watched the new edition, I didn’t realize who Louis Malle was, even though I really enjoyed Elevator to the Gallows [also available via Netflix]. I just added a bunch more of his films to my over-stuffed queue.

Cheney Is to Blame for the Next Attack

Seth Anderson0 comment

Frank Rich writes about everybody’s favorite Darth Vader figure, Diamond Dick Cheney

Patches of sky

The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.

Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch.

[Click to continue reading Frank Rich – Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack? – NYTimes.com]

and there is the Fourth Estate, both good and bad, though by volume, more bad journalism than good as is usually the case:

Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”

One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.

At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.

Obama’s Presidential Bid Linked to Swinger’s Club

swanksalot1 Comment

By a certain logic, exactly and completely true. Strangely enough, I blogged about one aspect of this back in 2004.

Red Light Night

Barack Obama would probably never have become the Democratic Presidential nominee if he hadn’t first won the Senate race back in 2004… and there was a good chance that Obama would never have become senator if Jack Ryan hadn’t withdrawn from the election… and Jack Ryan wouldn’t have withdrawn from the election if the story had never broken about he and Jeri Ryan visiting swinger clubs… and his visits to swinger clubs never would have become public record if his wife, Jeri Ryan, hadn’t mentioned it in their divorce proceedings… and maybe Jeri might not have wanted to get divorced in the first place if Jack hadn’t tried to pressure her into sexual situations at swinger clubs that she wasn’t comfortable with… and maybe she would have actually gotten turned on that night back in 1997, and said “Yes” to swinging if only she hadn’t seen my bare naked ass.

I hate that someone (anyone) was adversely affected by simply going to a swinger’s club. Especially someone like Jack Ryan. But that pebble was dropped into the water here in New Orleans back in 1997 and it rippled until Jack Ryan’s campaign was doomed. Funny how much can happen… just by dropping a stone.

[From Obama’s Presidential Bid Linked to Swinger’s Club | Kasidie.com, April 2008]

As an aside, too bad the Chicago Tribune does not believe in permanent links to its archives, because I would like to read (and link to) the original Eric Zorn column. In 2004, every blog post was related to me reading the actual print edition of something1 – yet the original article is lost to the ether now. Too bad, I’d like to revisit the complete article.

Footnotes:
  1. in this case, the Chicago Tribune [↩]

The new era of Obama

Seth Anderson2 Comments

from the archives1 :

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the University of California Irvine School of Law
Never in my adult life has there been more hope surrounding the election of a president. And never in American history has there been a president as knowledgeable in the law, and especially constitutional law, as Barack Obama. The most obvious place where this will matter is in his judicial appointments. There likely will be somewhere between one and three vacancies on the Supreme Court over the next four years. Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 years old and it does not seem likely that he will still be on the court at age 93 in 2013. There are rumors that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter might step down.

Obama’s replacing one or more of these individuals likely will not change the ideological composition of the court in the short term; he is likely to choose individuals who have similar views. But Obama’s picks for the lower courts, especially the U.S. Court of Appeals, could be transformative. Most federal courts of appeals have a majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents, but in many places that will change over the next four years. In light of a Senate with at least 56 Democrats, Obama should be able to pick judges without confirmation fights.

Obama’s knowledge of constitutional law will matter in other areas. He has the chance to overturn Bush administration policies that compromised basic human rights. One of Obama’s first actions should be to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and either transfer its inmates to federal prisons or release them. Guantánamo is an international embarrassment and has become a symbol of America’s violations of international law.

Obama also needs to immediately rescind Bush administration policies authorizing torture, permitting renditions that violate international law, and authorizing extrajudicial spying on Americans. From the moment of his inauguration, Obama must declare that the United States will comply with international law and follow its own Constitution.

In fact, Obama must take the difficult step of initiating the process for war crimes prosecutions of men such as Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo. In her brilliant book “The Dark Side,” investigative journalist Jane Mayer provides compelling proof that these, and likely other individuals, violated basic norms of international law. Moving forward requires taking the difficult step of holding these individuals accountable.

[From The new era of Obama | Salon ]

Footnotes:
  1. never finished this blog post for whatever reason [↩]

Lobbying vs Good Policy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Drug companies are fretting that their huge advertising budgets won’t be large enough to sell their expensive drugs at the expense of cheaper generics, so are ramping up lobbying efforts.

Crack in your Bridge

U.S. drugmakers led by Merck & Co. and Biogen Idec Inc. are stepping up their fight against President Barack Obama’s move to encourage cheaper medical care.

Already the biggest spender on influencing policy, the drug industry is hiring well-known individuals, some with stories of personal battles against disease. They include Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic leader who has epilepsy; Andrea LaRue, counsel to Tom Daschle when he was Senate Democratic leader; and the firm of Democratic fundraiser Tony Podesta, brother of Obama adviser John Podesta.

The firepower shows the drug industry’s resolve to stop Obama from using comparisons of medical treatments to force cuts in health costs. More than half of medical care may be based on insufficient evidence of effectiveness, the Congressional Budget Office said in March. Meantime, the Health and Human Services Department says all medical spending will probably rise this year to $2.5 trillion, or 18 percent of the economy.

“The companies fear that older generic drugs might very well turn out to be better than the newer advertised drugs, which bring in much more of a profit,” said Julian Zelizer, a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. “In difficult economic times, the drug companies don’t want to take any risks, so they are bringing out the biggest lobbyists in the business.”

[Click to continue reading Merck, Biogen Boost Lobbying to Defy Obama’s Drug Comparisons – Bloomberg.com ]

Pathetic, but will undoubtedly be effective. In these sorts of matters, money usually trumps good policy. Would be surprised if the Obama administration (and 111th Congress) would be any different.

Bob on Obama

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (Barack Obama)

Bob liked Barack Obama’s book enough to support him in 2008.

Bill Flanagan: In that song Chicago After Dark were you thinking about the new President?

Bob Dylan: Not really. It’s more about State Street and the wind off Lake Michigan and how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them. I was trying to go with some old time feeling that I had.

BF: You liked Barack Obama early on. Why was that?

BD: I’d read his book and it intrigued me.

BF: Audacity of Hope?

BD: No it was called Dreams of My Father.

BF: What struck you about him?

BD: Well, a number of things. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

BF: In what way?

BD: First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii. Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise – so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise.

BF: And he was thrown out of the garden.

BD: Not exactly. His mom married some other guy named Lolo and then took Barack to Indonesia to live. Barack went to both a Muslim school and a Catholic school. His mom used to get up at 4:00 in the morning and teach him book lessons three hours before he even went to school. And then she would go to work. That tells you the type of woman she was. That’s just in the beginning of the story.

BF: What else did you find compelling about him?

BD: Well, mainly his take on things. His writing style hits you on more than one level. It makes you feel and think at the same time and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He’s looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people and he’s wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors.

[Click to continue reading Bob Dylan on Barack Obama, Ulysses Grant and American Civil War ghosts ]

One of these days I’ll read the President’s books.

Rule of Law and Sancitity of Contracts

Seth Anderson0 comment

Glenn Greenwald notes the absurdity of the claim that AIG’s outrageous bonuses must be paid because we are a nation of laws.

Soulsville cropped

Apparently, the supreme sanctity of employment contracts applies only to some types of employees but not others. Either way, the Obama administration’s claim that nothing could be done about the AIG bonuses because AIG has solid, sacred contractual commitments to pay them is, for so many reasons, absurd on its face.

…

To use Larry Summer’s eloquent phrase (perversely deployed to justify the AIG bonus payments)1: if “we are a country of law,” we would probably do something about these severe violations of law that are right in front of our faces, particularly since we all know exactly who the lawbreakers are.  

Apparently, this “we are a country of law” concept means that hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money must be transferred to the AIG executives who virtually destroyed the financial system, but it does not mean that something must be done when high government officials get caught plainly breaking the law. What an oddly selective application of the “rule of law” this is.

…In comments, EJ has an excellent suggestion as to how the Government can enable AIG not to pay these bonsues:
Couldn’t Congress just give poor, well-meaning AIG immunity from lawsuits? Novel idea, huh?

That would certainly solve the problem.  If Congress (with Obama’s support) was willing to immunize lawbreaking telecoms from lawsuits brought by their illegally-spied-upon customers, shouldn’t Congress be willing to immunize AIG from bonus-seeking lawsuits brought by their executives who helped spawn the financial crisis?

[From The sanctity of AIG’s contracts – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

Yes we are a nation of law, but we are also a nation of lawyers, and since when is a business contract sacrosanct? Just ask a labor union about renegotiating contracts.

such as:

Associated Press, February 18, 2009:

The United Auto Workers’ deal with Detroit’s three automakers limits overtime, changes work rules, cuts lump-sum cash bonuses and gets rid of cost-of-living pay raises to help reduce the companies’ labor costs, people briefed on the agreement said today. The UAW announced Tuesday that it reached the tentative agreement with General Motors Corp., Chrysler LLC and Ford Motor Co. over contract concessions, as GM and Chrysler sent plans to the Treasury Department asking for a total of $39 billion in government financing to help them survive.

Concessions with the union are a condition of the $17.4 billion in government loans that the automakers have received so far.

or, for example, a concession that has nothing to do with bailouts:

Members of the San Francisco Chronicle’s largest union have agreed to contract concessions that parent company Hearst Corp says are essential to keeping the newspaper open.

Members of the California Media Workers Guild voted by a 10-1 margin to approve concessions that would allow the Chronicle to cut at least 150 union jobs and eliminate various benefits and rights, according to a statement on the union’s website posted on Saturday evening.

New York-based Hearst had threatened to close the paper unless it could secure immediate concessions. The company also says that it may close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, or possibly take it online only with a much smaller staff. A decision may come next week.

[From San Francisco Chronicle union OKs concessions | Reuters ]

So please, no bullshit about AIG bonuses being immune to renegotiation. I don’t believe it, and neither should you.

Obama can read between the lines too:

President Obama vowed to try to stop the faltering insurance giant American International Group from paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives, as the administration scrambled to avert a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street that could complicate Mr. Obama’s economic recovery agenda.

“In the last six months, A.I.G. has received substantial sums from the U.S. Treasury,” Mr. Obama said. He added that he had asked Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner “to use that leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”

In strongly-worded remarks delivered in the White House East Room before small business owners, Mr. Obama called A.I.G. “a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.”

“Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses at all, much less $165 million in extra pay,” Mr. Obama said. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?”

White House officials said that the administration is not looking to take A.I.G. to court to stop the company from paying out the bonuses. But they said the Treasury Department would be trying to figure out what they can do to block A.I.G. from making the payments within the legal confines of A.I.G.’s contractual obligations to the

[click to continue reading Obama Orders Treasury Chief to Try to Block A.I.G. Bonuses – NYTimes.com]

Footnotes:
  1. We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system. [↩]

Wood Roasted Scallops are Yummy

Seth Anderson0 comment

President Obama’s fondness for Chicago’s Spiaggia has already been documented, but apparently fondness is too mild a word. Levy Restaunts flew Spiaggia’s chef to a Washington Wizards vs. Chicago Bulls game and surprised the President.

Scallops and Pine Nuts

Levy Restaurants handles specialty catering for the Verizon Center and, it just so happens, owns Spiaggia. So when the company got the heads-up (with about 24 hours’ notice) that President Obama would be dining in the owners’ box Friday night, somebody got the bright idea to ship Mantuano out to make the president’s favorite dish. “I got on the plane the next morning,” Mantuano says. “And next thing you know, I’m riding up the private elevator.”

And what, pray tell, is the president’s favorite dish? “Wood-roasted scallops,” Mantuano says. “He always orders them. Because we run the Verizon, I knew we had a wood-burning oven there.

“When Obama walked out and saw me there, he did a classic double-take and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ It was hilarious. He called the photographer over and said, ‘Take a picture of me with my favorite chef.’

“He said favorite chef,” Mantuano says. “I’ve got witnesses.”

[From Obama’s favorite chef? Spiaggia chef says he got the word | The Stew – A taste of Chicago’s food, wine and dining scene]

Obama Slips in the Shiv

swanksalot0 comment

Greg Palast has a little fun:

curbs

Then came Obama’s money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It’s as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan’s carcass and put a stake through The Gipper’s anti-government heart.  Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S’OK with me.

And here’s the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn’t compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn’t need’m. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama’s weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama’s “post-partisanship.” Heh heh heh.

[Click to continue reading Greg Palast » Obama is a two-faced liar. Aw-RIGHT! ]

Of course, it didn’t quite play out like that, but still, am amused by this description

Obama’s Secret Record Collection

Seth Anderson0 comment

mmmm, vintage 180 gram vinyl. Wonder what sort of amplifier the White House has? They should release some photos of the listening room…

Vinyl is the best

When Barack Obama moved into the White House on January 20th, he gained access to five chefs, a private bowling alley — and a killer collection of classic LPs. Stored in the basement of the executive mansion is the official White House Record Library: several hundred LPs that include landmark albums in rock (Led Zeppelin IV, the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed), punk (the Ramones’ Rocket to Russia, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols), cult classics (Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin) and disco. Not to mention records by Santana, Neil Young, Talking Heads, Isaac Hayes, Elton John, the Cars and Barry Manilow.

During the waning days of the Nixon administration, the RIAA, the record companies’ trade group, decided the library should include sound recordings as well as books. In 1973, the organization donated close to 2,000 LPs.

…

Paul Nelson, then Rolling Stone’s reviews editor — compiled a list to reflect “diversity in what was going on in popular music.” They picked the Kinks’ Arthur1 for its “theme of empire,” and Blumenthal snuck in favorites like David Bowie’s Hunky Dory.

…

But Obama may be pleased to learn that at least a few of his favorite albums — Bob Dylan’s


Blood on the Tracks

Bruce Springsteen’s


Born to Run

— are there if he wants them on pristine slabs of vinyl.

[From Obama’s Secret Record Collection : Rolling Stone]

 


“Trout Mask Replica” (Captain Beefheart)

There isn’t a full list of the albums anywhere, but Captain Beefheart? Really? I wonder if it was ever opened? or played more than once. Is there a CD player too? Did the Bush family leave behind any favorite George Jones albums?

Gram Parsons and Band

Footnotes:
  1. full title: Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) [↩]

Bookmarks for January 20th through January 21st

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for January 20th through January 21st:

  • THE MOON AND WHISTLIN’ ALEX MOORE – “Yesterday (January 20th) – a wonderful day, as pure achievement for black Americans, however much disappointment is in store over the next four or eight years. Among the many joy-inducing, moving spectacles I never thought to see in my lifetime was that of Aretha Franklin singing it her way (and in so splendid a hat), and the elderly civil rights activist Joseph Lowery not only delivering the benediction but including in it quotations from Big Bill Broonzy, which put a grin on the faces of all the good-hearted people on the podium, not least from Michelle and Barack Obama. I can’t imagine how amazed Blind Willie McTell would have been.”

  • A Tiny Revolution: “Black, Brown, and White” – “You heard the uplifting words of Rev. Joseph Lowery:

    Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.
    The reverend seems to be a fan of Big Bill Broonzy. So am I.”

  • Text of Rev. Lowery’s inauguration benediction – “Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.”

  • McCain: Obama’s newest advisor? – ” it’s quite savvy of Obama to seek out his support. He’s essentially buying McCain stock at a low point and will presumably leverage that purchase when that stock inevitably rises.”

The Guam Option

Seth Anderson10 Comments

I remember my grandfather, Joe Murphy, while still editor-at-large of the Pacific Daily News, oft telling the story of his failed attempts to sell an article about the Kurds being airlifted to Guam during the Clinton administration, and my grandfather’s disgust because no major media outlet was interested in the story. Maybe George Packer read it?

Kurds in Guam

[Kurds being processed at Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, 1996]

In the fall of 1996, the U.S. military evacuated more than six thousand Iraqis—Kurds and others who had worked with American agencies in the north, and whose lives were directly threatened by Saddam’s army—halfway across the world to Guam. There they were screened, processed for asylum, and assigned sponsors in an effort that involved more than a thousand American soldiers and civilians. Almost all of the evacuees ended up Stateside within seven months. Major General John Dallager, the Joint Task Force commander of Operation Pacific Haven, said, “Our success will undoubtedly be a role model for future humanitarian efforts.”

Undoubtedly. Major General Dallager didn’t count on the moral abdication of the Bush Administration in the face of a similar but much larger and more compelling humanitarian crisis. Recently, some conscience-stricken American officials have privately begun to ask why the model of Operation Pacific Haven can’t be emulated today. Flying Iraqis to Guam would solve every problem, real and invented, that the Administration claims is holding up resettlement: the inability of Homeland Security interviewers to meet with refugees in Syria; the near-impossibility of Iraqis getting into neighboring countries; the supposed security concerns that prevent the U.S. from screening Iraqis inside Iraq. With the Guam option, none of this would matter.

[From The Guam Option: Interesting Times: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Sinajana Guam 1945

[Sinajana, Guam in 1945 ]

Mr. Packer wants President-elect Obama to at least consider the Guam option for Iraqi refugees:

I know Iraqi refugees are somewhere around 87th on anyone’s agenda. I know I should be writing about Gaza or economic stimulus—another day. But today, let me call your attention away from those pressing matters to a new report, scheduled for release on Monday, by Natalie Ondiak and Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress (soon to be the Obama Administration’s Heritage or A.E.I.). It’s called “Operation Safe Haven Iraq 2009,” and it’s a detailed proposal for an airlift of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have worked with Americans there and whose lives are in danger, in perpetuum, as a result.

The report establishes the rationale for such an operation, familiar to readers of this blog (where the “Guam option” was first proposed over a year ago). It also lays out, in the careful manner of Washington think-tank papers, the steps that the new President would need to take, to wit:

1. Appoint a White House coordinator
2. Review current efforts
3. Finish background checks of qualified Iraqis
4. Begin a four-to-eight-week airlift, probably to Guam
5. Make sure all government agencies—State, Homeland Security, the military—work together
6. Resettle eligible Iraqis here after they’ve been “processed” outside the country

[From Obama’s Guam Option: Interesting Times: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Illinois coal ash sludge ponds are common

Seth Anderson0 comment

Michael Hawthorne alerts us that Illinois is at risk for a coal ash disaster as well.

Withered and Died

More than a dozen Illinois power plants store toxic coal ash in sludge ponds similar to the one that burst and spread contaminated muck over 300 acres of eastern Tennessee last month, according to a Tribune review of federal records.

The sludge dumps, all Downstate, are among hundreds of makeshift ponds across the nation that are regulated far more loosely than household garbage landfills, despite years of studies documenting how arsenic, lead, mercury and other heavy metals in the coal ash threaten water supplies and human health.

Most of the water-soaked ash—the byproduct of burning coal to generate electricity—is stored close to bodies of water, including Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, the Mississippi River and the Illinois River.

[From Coal ash sludge ponds in use at some Illinois power plants — chicagotribune.com]

The administration of President Obama might be more interested in monitoring this potentially hazardous problem, but nobody really knows yet. Obama received a lot of campaign contributions from Exelon. Also, leaks don’t have to be quick to be dangerous, slow and steady contamination is just as deadly.

The dangers here are two-fold,” said Eric Schaeffer, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who now heads the non-profit Environmental Integrity Project. “You can have the sudden spill and the dramatic disaster that Kingston represents, or you can have slow poisoning as these impoundments leach toxic metals.”

Red and Green

Illinois is in the top ten in a dubious category:

14 of the state’s power plants dumped sludge containing a combined 2,826 tons of toxic metals into Downstate sludge ponds during 2006, the last year for which figures are available from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.

Only nine other states dumped more toxic metals in this way. Alabama led the nation with 6,680 tons; Indiana was fourth with 4,431 tons.

National environmental policies and regulations have to change, lest we all are buried underneath a veritable lake of toxic dust.