Great presidents lead. In a sense, Lincoln “rammed” through the Emancipation Proclamation just as FDR “rammed” through Lend-Lease, Truman “rammed” through desegregation of the military, and Lyndon Johnson “rammed” the Civil Rights Act down the throat of a gagging South. These might be considered more dramatic issues than mundane health care, I grant you — but grant me an exception for someone putting off doctor visits because he or she can’t afford to be sick. To that person, this bill is as dramatic as the difference between sickness and health — the great divide of mankind. –Richard Cohen, Washington Post [ READ MORE ]
On Monday morning, President Barack Obama ratcheted up his attacks against insurance companies in a last-ditch attempt to get a reluctant public and skittish Democrats behind his health overhaul legislation. [ FULL STORY ]
Bonus Video: The first couple welcomed guests to the White House on Monday, marking International Women’s Day. Mrs. Obama looked ravishing in a grey draped dress by Lanvin. [ READ MORE ]
Republican Goon-LIARS Respond:
Fox News’ Special Report, chief White House correspondent Major Garrett falsely claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had not found projected savings under the Senate health bill to be “meaningful” in its second decade. In fact, CBO estimated that the bill would reduce the deficit in its second decade. [ READ MORE ]
Meanwhile, conservative media cast Democrats as “suicide bombers” in push for health care reform: Reacting to progress on health care reform legislation, conservative media figures have repeatedly referred to President Obama and Democratic officials as “health care suicide bombers” and characterized their efforts to pass a bill as “a Kamikaze mission” and “political suicide missions.”[ READ MORE ]
Fox’s Garrett distorted CBO findings on long-term savings under Senate health bill
Rush Limbaugh Promises To “Leav[e] The Country” If His Health Care Distortions Come True
Hannity & Dick Morris: “People stopped [health care reform] up to this point and I think they’ve got to now finish the job”
Limbaugh repeatedly refers to “Democrat” Party as “a gulag“
Rush’s new theory: Senate health care bill will lead to “250 million uninsured“
O’Reilly To Ingraham: “You have an IV attached to your arm — drinking Kool-Aid”
From The O’GARBAGE Factor: Last week Bill O’Reilly a.k.a. Osama Bin O’Reilly called Ingraham “a blind ideologue” and “a Kool-Aid drinker” after she criticized his praise of first lady Michelle Obama.
Ingraham who looks a lot like a horse with an adam’s apple, has never liked the first lady — part jealousy, part racist instincts.
When filling-in as guest host for Laura’s bigot-radio-show, Tammy Bruce characterized Michelle Obama as “trash in the White House,” a statement obviously sanctioned by the host herself – Laura Ingraham. Tammy Bruce is another horse — caked with mascara from toe to hair to conceal her ugliness. Take a peek at her twitter background. Now , who is the “Trailer Trash“!?
The worst of these Fox News horses, of course, is Ann Coulter — AN EVIL CRAZY BITCH — who reminds me of a scarecrow or a bony-ass mannequin. For all I care, these three horses could be men masquerading as women.
When Michelle Obama wore a sleeveless dress and was widely congratulated for her well toned arms, Laura Ingraham went to you know who — Bill O’Reilly’s O’GARBAGE Factor to show off her own scrawny goat-like arms — and to challenge Michelle Obama to an arm-wrestling contest:
Ingraham uses platform as O’Reilly Factor guest host to advocate against re-election of Dems who support health care bill
I don’t like these two assholes, O’Reilly and Ingraham — both are bigots, but once in a while I do give O’Reilly credit when he deserves it, as in this instance.
….White Tribalism? Why not just call it what it is — Blatant Racism!
Matthews panel identifies Beck, birthers and “white tribalism” as plague of 2009: “The nutty talk went off the rails“
Breitbart: “Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism, and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianty”
Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage — is an intimate and ultimately riveting look at their unique-relationship, and the humor, faith, fortitude, and grace that define it. It is, above all, a uniquely American love story. Given the obvious historic significance of what they accomplished-together, the marriage of Barack and Michelle stands as one of the great personal and political partnerships in American history.
Yet, incredibly, the true nature of the marriage remains a mystery. And now, for the first time, Christopher Andersen draws on important sources–some speaking here for the first time–to paint the first complete, compelling portrait of America’s first black First Family.
About the Author: Christopher Andersen is the critically acclaimed author of twenty-eight books, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages worldwide. A former contributing editor of Time magazine and senior editor of People magazine, Andersen has also written hundreds of articles for a wide range of publications, including Life magazine, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair.
Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage
Andersen, 60, a former senior editor at People magazine and author of 29 biographies, including The Day Diana Died, calls his new book “a positive story. A love story.”
The White House had no comment.
“What’s odd is that our first non-white first family is really the most all-American, down-to-earth couple we’ve ever had in the White House,” Andersen said in an interview with USA TODAY. “They’re comfortable in their own skins.”
But they’ve had bumps along the way.
Left alone for long periods of time while her husband built his political career, Michelle Obama grew frustrated, Andersen says. “I think she could have walked at one point. She felt abandoned.”
One thing that brought the couple back together was when daughter Sasha, now 8, was diagnosed with life-threatening spinal meningitis as an infant. She recovered.
And once Michelle, 45, decided there was no stopping the Obama bandwagon, she jumped on, Andersen says.
“She’s the reason he is where he is,” the author says. “She taught him how to be an effective politician to punch harder against Hillary, for instance.”
Andersen also says Michelle Obama is “wary” of the Clintons, and that’s why Hillary wasn’t the vice presidential candidate: “Michelle didn’t want the Clintons down the hall.”
What she did want was Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court. “She thought it was time for a Hispanic,” Andersen says. “She likes her style.”
As for women flirting with her 48-year-old husband, the first lady is pragmatic. “He’s loving it,” Andersen quotes her as saying at one point. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”
Andersen, however, discusses an attractive campaign worker named Vera Baker who was on Obama’s Senate campaign staff and then vanished from the scene.
The state of the Obama marriage today? They’ll celebrate their 17th anniversary Oct. 3.
“I think they’re flourishing in the White House, happier than they’ve ever been,” Andersen says. “The funny thing is you write a book about the ultimate power couple, but it’s really just another classic love story. People can connect with it. It’s hard to connect with a dynasty (the Kennedys) or a driven couple like the Clintons.
“They’re devoted to each other. It’s unique. They’re one of a kind.”
MediaMatters: On his radio program, Fox News’ Sean Hannity claimed that The Washington Post is trying to “smear, besmirch, [and] demonize” Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell (R) by going through “the great effort to dig up a graduate school thesis that he wrote,” adding that a thesis “by design is supposed to be provocative” and that McDonnell wrote his “20 years ago.” But during the 2008 presidential campaign, Hannity aggressively attacked Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton for college theses they wrote more than 20 years ago.
Hannity was referring to an August 30 Post article about controversial views McDonnell expressed in his 1989 master’s thesis at CBN University, which was founded by Pat Robertson and named after his evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network; the university has since been renamed Regent University. [ READ MORE ]
Here is Sean Hannity Smearing Michelle Obama During The 2008 Elections: In several broadcasts of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Sean Hannity repeatedly distorted a passage from Michelle Obama’s 1985 Princeton senior thesis to suggest that Obama was asserting her own views when she wrote that “[i]t is possible that Black individuals either chose to or felt pressure to come together with other Blacks on campus because of the belief that Blacks must join in solidarity to combat a White oppressor.” [ READ MORE ]
The Fox is Always Wrong!
…..and these diabolical G.O.P. attacks on Michelle Obama NEVER WORKED!Michelle Obama’s detractors had very thin gruel to fuel their outrage: a happy remark in Wisconsin in February that “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country;” a relatively downbeat primary-season stump speech that stressed the struggles of working-class and middle-class Americans; her imputed blame for the past and recent antics of the Obama’s long-time pastor, Jeremiah Wright; and a Princeton senior thesis written more than two decades ago that was been ignorantly described as an endorsement of racial separatism.
But this limited material generated endless hostile conservative blog posts, a series of tirades by pundits ranging from Bill O’Reilly to Christopher Hitchens, a cover article for National Review calling her “Mrs. Grievance,” and a racially tinged internet ad sponsored by the Tennessee Republican Party.
And where there was no “evidence” to distort of Michelle Obama’s supposed anti-American bitterness, radicalism, and racialism, was invented, as shown by the viral rumor, completely unfounded, that there was some video floating around showing her ranting about “whitey“–in some versions, in the company of Louis Farrakhan. [ More on Why The Blistering G.O.P. Attacks On Michelle Obama Never Worked ]
Reference: Media Matters offered an admirably comprehensive look at Fox News dog-man Sean Hannity’s most wet-brained (but creative!) Obama smears of the entire 2008 campaign. Here are the five cleverest
[ By: Charles Onyango-Obbo ] I think we are in danger of getting carried away by Obama and forgetting to do one of the things that has enabled Africans survive all sorts of hardships — have a good laugh.
Over the last two weeks, we read serious stuff from clever men and women discussing what US President Barack Obama’s visit to Africa (Ghana, that is) means.
Would he make some earth-shaking announcement that would open a whole new chapter in US-Africa relations?
What was the significance of his decision not to visit his fatherland, Kenya?
Then, while he is in Ghana and after, the commentators and pundits continued to dissect. Oh, they said, Obama went to great length to appeal to the African youth and try and inspire them to seize the future and save our long-suffering continent from corrupt and thieving leaders.
I think we are in danger of getting carried away by Obama and forgetting to do one of the things that has enabled Africans survive all sorts of hardships — have a good laugh.
I asked myself what my maternal great grandfather, from the comfort of his grave, was thinking of Obama.
He was a warrior and a dedicated cattle keeper, who took great pride in his herd. Even by the standards of his times, the early 20th Century, my great grandfather was considered to have quite unusual views.
For example, he took intellectual property rights too seriously. As a result, whenever he saw an animal that resembled any of his bulls anywhere in nearby villages, he would consider them to have been fathered by one of his champion bulls.
So, claiming copyright, he would seize it and take it to his kraal.
Clearly he would have been scandalised by Obama. As the world’s most powerful man, and because he has roots in Kogelo, in Kenya’s Nyanza, the US president is also the biggest African chief ever. But there was nothing African about Obama in Ghana.
First, African chiefs never travel empty-handed. People know that you are a chief going by what you left in their mouths. I watched carefully, and Obama was greeting Ghanaians “like that” without leaving anything in any of the outstretched palms.
A modern African chief would travel with suitcases full of money, which he would “pour” wherever he went. Let us look at a case from Uganda.
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, after a five-year war based in an area called Luwero Triangle, about an hour’s drive from Kampala.
In 1985 the Museveni rebels set out on a long trek toward the west, from where they regrouped and begun the big push eastward that eventually handed them victory.
Some years ago, Museveni went on a highly sentimental pilgrimage with some of his comrades in the war to retrace that journey.
Peasants, some of who had given the rebels food and other support back then, turned out and stood on the roadside to greet the pilgrims.
Museveni was aware that he was returning as a chief, not a penniless rebel leader, so he carried sacks of money.
Everywhere he stopped to greet the people, he showered them with envelopes stuffed with money. That is the African way. By those standards, Obama was a failure.
Then, and this was the definitive one, he went back to America without a Ghanaian wife. My great grandfather would have been appalled.
The elders would have either accused his wife Michelle of having “bewitched” him so that he could not look at another beauty, or they would have complained that “Michelle was the one wearing the trousers in the house.”
In the good old days when we had real African chiefs and kings, wherever they travelled, the tribes along their path gave them brides.
This served many purposes. First, it helped keep the peace, because a powerful chief was less likely to attack his in-law tribe.
Secondly, it was an instrument for redistributing wealth. Since land, fishes, forests, name it, belonged to the king, there were two ways of getting to share the wealth.
You either joined the king’s army and rose to be a great general, and he would reward you with land and forests; or you ensured that your daughter got married into the palace.
If the king were happy with her, he would give her clan or tribe goodies. Otherwise, there was no fair system for distributing the kingdom’s wealth.
However, Obama did not escape my great grandfather’s Africa altogether. He (and many Africans for that matter) might not have realised it, but those female traditional dancers who put on a show for him — and entertain the VIPs on big national days — are a rather embarrassing relic of this past.
About The Author: Charles Onyango-Obbo — is Uganda’s leading political commentator. He is Nation Media Group’s managing editor for convergence and new products. Charles writes for The Monitor, Uganda’s only independent daily and most influential newspaper and The East African, a Nation-Media publication. Be sure to check out his Article Archive featuring hundreds of Charles’s greatest publications. More Articles By Mr. Onyango Obbo: [ CLICK HERE ]
I think we are in danger of getting carried away by Obama and forgetting to do one of the things that has enabled Africans survive all sorts of hardships — have a good laugh.
