Countdown to getting bigfooted in three… two… one…
(This’ll bring Cole back if nothing else will.)
Proud to Be A Democrat
DNC Open Thread: Proof of Life
Blogmaster JohnGCole is tweeting, again.
Imani ABL’s thumbs are much faster, though.
Can’t hardly wait for the post-con trip reports!
Thursday Evening Open Thread: “Obama’s Way”
With TaMara’s permission, this week’s Recipe Exchange will be on Friday, because right now we’re all too excited to think about eating.
Vanity Fair has a teaser slideshow up for Michael Lewis’ big article in the October issue:
… “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president,” Lewis, who interviewed President Obama multiple times over six months—on Air Force One, in the Oval Office, and on the basketball court—asks. Obama explains that every president is deeply aware of his duty to the American people. “Everything you are doing has to be viewed through this prism,” he says. “I don’t know George Bush well. I know Bill Clinton better. But I think they both approached the job in that spirit.”…
“Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama tells Lewis. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” …
His odd relationship to the news: “One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you. I learned that on the campaign. You have to filter stuff, but you can’t filter it so much you live in this fantasy land.”
His difficulty with faking emotion: “I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m serving the American people better if I’m maintaining my authenticity. And that’s an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I’m at my best when I believe what I am saying.”…
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How go everyone’s at-home preparations for tonight’s big convention celebration / wrap-up? Got your confetti cannons properly aligned?
Thursday Evening Open Thread: “Obama’s Way”Post + Comments (264)
Late Night Open Thread: Big Dawg!
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Stolen from Paddy at the Political Carnival, who has the whole speech up, but I’mma make you click over to watch the rest, as is only fair.
Can somebody on the Twitter ask the Angry Black Lady to check on John Cole, make sure that if he’s passed out from celebratory exuberance, he’s not gonna choke on his own tongue?
DNC Open Thread – Clinton Speech Edition
Old thread getting full up, for the RSS readers.
DNC Open Thread – Clinton Speech EditionPost + Comments (320)
Late Night Open Thread: We’re Gonna Miss Barney
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Thanks to TPM, retiring Rep. Frank from the state of Not Suffering Fools Gladly on whether President Obama “squandered too much capital” on health care reform:
… “Unfortunately, from the very beginning — look, look at the contrast. George Bush came to us on the Democratic side in late ’08 and said, we’re in a crisis, we need your help — and we gave it to him, very openly, very fully. Then Obama comes in to try to deal with the terrible situation he inherited from Bush and the republican media went into full partisan attack. [Senate Republican Leader] Mitch McConnell announcing his number one goal was to defeat the president. I don’t think in the end the timing, unfortunately, would have helped a great deal.”
The man has earned his rest most honorably, but I hope that not having to hondle with campaign donors (from all reports, his least favorite part of the job) gives him a chance to do more political commentary going forward. And by ‘political commentary’, yes, I mean telling Luke Russert, on-air, that debating his twitter-ific outlook would be like arguing with a dining room table. (Extra points if he calls David Gregory more deluded than the average LaRouchie.)
Late Night Open Thread: We’re Gonna Miss BarneyPost + Comments (39)
Open Thread: Politics from the Greyhound Bus Perspective
Paul Constant works for Seattle’s Stranger, so he travelled from the RNC Con in Tampa to the DNC site in Charlotte via an appropriately alternative method of public transport:
If you’re looking for the opposite of the Republican National Convention, you can’t do much better then taking a Greyhound overnight from Tampa to Charlotte. It’s cheap, it’s small-scale, and it’s exactly the opposite of exclusive—older white men and the wealthy are nowhere to be seen. There are a lot of single moms, and as opposed to the white-collar criminals you’ll find at the RNC, the ex-cons on a Greyhound have actually done time in real prisons…
… Before I started my 17-hour trek, I suspected that I wouldn’t hear anything about politics at all. I was wrong; everyone was talking about Clint Eastwood and the empty chair where Obama was supposed to be. They thought it was fucking hilarious. The TV stations in the bus terminals were showing CNN, which was apparently running footage of Eastwood’s chair interview on a 24-hour loop, with Anderson Cooper smirking at it last night, and the Saturday morning news host presenting it straight-facedly this morning. And when my bus was leaving South Carolina, the people sitting around me couldn’t believe the billboard they saw, with an Obama head poorly Photoshopped onto the body of a baseball player. The sign warned us that Obama now had three strikes against him—no hope, no jobs, no something else I didn’t catch. “Look at that shit,” the man in the seat in front of me said. “Look what they’re saying about Obama.” The billboard pissed everyone off.
I have no idea how the DNC will go, but I can tell you that the speakers at the RNC did not mention the people on these buses even once. They don’t care about Greyhound riders. They don’t give a shit about the man who had his license suspended in Florida and was desperately trying to get to New York to get a job as a driver before electronic news of his suspension made it up to NYC. (“I’m 66. It’s not like I’m going to learn how to do anything else,” he told his friend.) They don’t care about the homeless or the mentally ill who have no other way of getting from city to city. They don’t care about the guy who works in Orlando for Disney theme parks because the money’s too good to refuse, even though he commutes by bus once a week to be with his family and girlfriend in Charlotte. This is poverty—the kind of poverty that people like Sean Hannity scoff at—and it’s very real…
And if you need a chuckle, check out his photo of the “full force of the Republican counter-offensive” now going on in Charlotte, too.
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What’s on the agenda this afternoon, for those of us not in Charlotte?
Open Thread: Politics from the Greyhound Bus PerspectivePost + Comments (67)