Archive for November, 2008

08w45:2 Mr. President

by timothy. 0 Comments

Office of the President-Elect
http://change.gov/

From the Newsweek article

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

08w45:1 A Year Later

by timothy. 0 Comments

This was posted on Goodreads a year ago. Thank you Andrew Sullivan and the USA for making it real. – TC

Goodbye to All That | Andrew Sullivan
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama
“Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.”

08w44:2 Our Racist National Columnists

by timothy. 0 Comments

Fire Margaret Wente (and Dick Pound) Facebook group
As of November 1 2008: 2560 members

Fire Margaret Wente Facebook Group
As of November 1 2008: 104 members

Stand up for Margaret Wente Facebook group
(started by the National Post‘s Jonathan Kay)
As of November 1 2008: 209 members

Considering the support to fire Wente for what she wrote, there really should be a Facebook group to Fire Jonathan Kay for what he wrote on September 23rd:

It so happens that the very day the Deschamps Doctrine was announced on the HRT Web site, I received my review copy of A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada — in which left-wing Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul argues that Canada is ‘a Métis civilization’ that owes all it has (except for the nasty racist bits, of course) to ‘Aboriginal inspiration.’ The question of how, exactly, a bunch of warring, pre-literate aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies could claim credit for the creation of a modern, democratic, capitalist, industrial powerhouse built entirely in a European image is one that, alas, I must leave for others. That’s because I could not get past Saul’s ridiculous introduction.

Also, from the topic page (Wab Kinew of CBC radio on Wente and Pound) from ‘Fire Margaret Wente’; an report for CBC radio here by Wab Kinew.