In every scene, you are my star, Michelle Obama! Happy birthday, baby!
Harkening back to a time when the Oval Office wasn’t occupied by a criminal cartel. Happy birthday to one of the best First Ladies ever.
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Mr. Mack
Such a beautiful lady, through and through.
Baud
Somewhere out there, Sasha and Malia are embarrassed by the PDA.
TomatoQueen
@Mr. Mack: And he cleans up pretty well.
SiubhanDuinne
After three years, it’s still mind-boggling that we went from this to … well, you know.
It’s good to see their beautiful, compassionate, intelligent faces. Happy birthday, Forever FLOTUS!
Baud
Enjoy your lives, Obamas. You owe us nothing.
chopper
and yet in the fevered minds of republicans their relationship is as fake as the trumps’ is in real life.
PST
I am in Madrid. It is a distinctly strange feeling to stand before a painting you last saw 50 or 60 years ago. It makes me feel old, of course, but not in a bad way. More like I’ve lived a lot. Also, since the painting is Guernica, it reminds me that being born a Boomer in America is a lucky thing, even during dark days. So many have seen infinitely worse.
geg6
Every time I see them lately, it brings tears to my eyes. Happy birthday, Forever FLOTUS.
rp
Is there a German word for an image that’s simultaneously uplifting and deeply depressing?
Baud
@rp: Trumpruiniertalles
MattF
@PST: I was a museum-goer as a teenager in NYC, so I saw that work many times during its exile. Now back where it belongs.
rp
@Baud: Touche
MattF
About the Obamas… the RW reaction to Michelle is just pure, blind rage. If anyone needs convincing that racism is embedded, root and branch, in the Republican Party, look there.
waspuppet
@MattF: I was saying that years ago — their reaction to HER was even more obvious proof than their reaction to him. They freaked the fck out because she said kids should eat vegetables and exercise. That suddenly because controversial.
The photos also harken back to a time when the president and First Lady actually liked each other.
lee
How the &)(#&$)#* do I tear up just looking at those 4 photos?
evodevo
She was everything the Right Wing hates: black, professional, smart, good-looking, talented, moral, good parent, AND A DEM… no wonder they couldn’t stand the sight of her…
pinacacci
Love her and them together so much…since open thread, had to link to this because look at the photo! Second guy from the camera. If that ain’t Trump’s centaur stance I’m drunker than usual.
ETA meant centaur stance. Unicorns on the brain. Drunker than usual =D
lee
@Baud: Actually I think they are passed that in age and are at eye-roll stage (at least my kids are at 20 & 23)
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Serves them right! ;-) And Mommy and Daddy only had sex twice.
JPL
@geg6: Same. I could not finish the Frontline series From Obama to Trump.
OzarkHillbilly
@evodevo: Her crime was in being everything they say blacks aren’t.
catclub
Has there been a post on TRUMP Disrespcting the TROOPS?
The WAPO article where he calls senior brass dopes and babies he would not go to war with? Every GOP pol should be asked if they agree with Trump on this. Repeatedly.
Why is that not a big deal?
JMG
The Obamas are doing some first rate work (probably without meaning to) trolling Trump, the Republicans and much of the media just by their frequent reminders to one and all that they’re happy people living a good and happy life.
OzarkHillbilly
@OzarkHillbilly: No edit, want to add, “in a very public way.”
lee
@catclub: Because it happened a couple of years ago and with the never ending cascade of shit that that Trump puts out it just got buried.
kindness
My biggest disappointment between the Obama years and now is our media. Our MSM tried to play Obama as if he were another Bill Clinton. They always gave deference to every hair brained conspiracy theory generated by the professional rat fuckers and got all defensive and circled the wagons when you called them out on it. They treated Obama abominably. Compare that to Trump where they refuse to repeat the parts Trump/Republican shout and sanitize them daily.
Our MSM is not a friend of a functional, comity led Democratic form of government. They obey the money that tells them how high to jump. That needs to become commonly accepted amongst the people.
Jay
Jay
Gin & Tonic
@MattF: I’ve seen it both at MoMA and the Prado.
Jay
Oh, and as the Open Thread features the Obamas, here is my “weak tea” contribution to the “Nice Things” comments,
Jay
Christopher Tolkien has died,
Felanius Kootea
@Jay: South Africa is ahead of the US, France and Britain on press freedom? Wow.
zhena gogolia
OMG, you’re breaking my heart. How did we get here????
kindness
My comment got eated. How come?
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: My sister and I share the same birthday, though several years apart, and the other sister was born at an altogether different time.
If you counted back, it was New Years and their anniversary, so we used to joke that our parents had sex twice a year, whether they wanted to or not.
WaterGirl
One of the best?
I ?forever FLOTUS.
NotMax
Open Thread?
Yes, Virginia, there do exist ledes which are unburiable.
:)
WaterGirl
@kindness: Thanks for the Report a Problem message! It’s fixed now.
One of your messages was marked as Spam somehow, and as soon as WordPress thinks one of your messages is Spam, then it thinks you are a Spammer, and everything goes in.
I don’t see anything that should have provoked WordPress, so I am perplexed.
Yutsano
@zhena gogolia: Russian copulation of rodentia and a decades long smear campaign against the Democratic candidate who still won the popular vote.
Wait…that was rhetorical wasn’t it?
JPL
@catclub: Obama had a coffee cup in his hand when he saluted the troops, so both sides.
Jay
@Felanius Kootea:
both France and Britain have variations of “Do Not Publish” Laws, remaining from Censorship during Wartime still on the books, still used, but while enacted to protect National Security, they are more often used to protect the Party in Power from exposure.
As a result, recently used or not, that the laws exist and are still used, always knocks France and Britain down pack in Press Freedom, even during the Cold War.
Jay
joel hanes
I will never understand making a duck face for pictures.
I guess I’m really old, ’cause all the young ladies seem to do it.
joel hanes
@PST:
being born a Boomer in America is a lucky thing, even during dark days.
Reading _Candide_ may bring home the realization that being born anywhere in North America at any time in the last three centuries is a lucky thing, because having your home village repeatedly sacked and pillaged by all sides in an endless war partly justified by religion is not the best of all possible worlds.
We must tend our gardens
Jay
@joel hanes:
Duck face is a photographic pose, which is well known on profile pictures in social networks. Lips are pressed together as in a pout and often with simultaneously sucked in cheeks. The pose is most often seen as an attempt to appear alluring, but also as a self-deprecating, ironic gesture making fun of the pose. It may be associated with sympathy, attractiveness, friendliness or stupidity.[1]
WaterGirl
@Jay: Comments can have 7 links. More than that gets you thrown into moderation. I just released this one.
joel hanes
@Jay:
I know what it is.
I know they do it.
It looks terrible.
Jay
@WaterGirl:
thanks WaterGirl, you are our Hero!
@joel hanes:
for many of the “duck face” selfies, that’s the point, but it’s self depreciating, where in our day, it was throwing rabbit ears behind someone else in the photo.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Hehehe, one just has to look Micheal Obama to understand that smug smile on Barrack Obama’s face.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@chopper: Oddly, some conservative was babbling at me last night with some stupid argument that non-whites aren’t capable of true love like whites. Something to do with Vikings kidnapping and raping women rather than killing them led to Courtly Love and shut up that’s why. After a while I told them to sod off it was so stupid.
I wonder if these pictures are what brought that on.
John Revolta
I saw Richard Burton in the Camelot revival c.1980. He was great of course, but the bit that killed me was right at the end, when everything has gone to shit, the way he delivered the lines
Don’t let it be forgot
That once, there was a spot
For one brief, shining moooment…………….
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I guess he never read Rumi. It was the influence of Islam which introduced the West to the ideals of courtly love, as opposed to the Chaucer which was the norm before.
J R in WV
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Conservative racists have an unending supply of fictitious beliefs about African-Americans, Africans, Latinos, Jews, Catholics (unless they’re Catholic!) etc. The most amazing thing is that a strange and false belief about Africans can instantly become a “known fact” about Jews.
These people hate folks they’ve never met a single specimen of, ever. Really strange… and for reasons that are beyond explanation.
Couch Thing
Those pictures make me want to weep. We used to have decent, intelligent, qualified, humane people in the white house. Now we have a sociopath with the intellect of a potato.