Presidents Archives - Page 3 of 9

Barack Obama: Born in the USA

When Barack Obama became President, the economy was on the verge of collapse. And now it’s not.

Arthur’s FIRST question to me for this round, about Barack Obama, I took some time answering:

BoyOhBoyOhBoy, have I been waiting for THIS! You asked me a LOT of awesome questions, – I DID! but one I thought of for you keeps popping into my head, and it’s heavy:

About a year ago (and probably early this year), many political commentators were saying that President Obama would be regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in US history”. Given that the Orange Guy and his Republican Congress are poised to undo everything President Obama accomplished over the past 8 years (and pretty much every good thing done by all presidents, Republican and Democratic, over the past several decades…), do you think the pundits’ assessment is now laughable? Or, will it be that Obama’s image will soar, much as even Bush the Second is already being seen as “not so bad, really…” in light of the Orange Guy about to take over? I’m not asking about President Obama’s legacy so much as to what extent will he be relevant when all his work is undone?

First off, W’s legacy will continue to be in the pits for going into an unnecessary war in Iraq and presiding over an economic collapse ~~unpresidented~~unprecedented in decades.

Also, there are legit complaints I have with Obama, mostly having to do with drones. And I had thought to write a more balanced piece on him after his eight years. But the disinformation about him has been so strong that, like you, I’m not feeling the need to be fair and balanced, to borrow a phrase.

I really can’t talk about Obama, though, without talking about his legacy. And there’s a bunch of things that Agent Orange simply cannot take away:

* He was the first black President, Bill Clinton notwithstanding.

And he had a lot of expectations put on him. I remember reading in 2008, “Rosa sat, so Martin could walk. Martin walked, so Obama could run. Obama is running, so our children can fly.” What a burden!

Barack Obama had the right personal biography to not only get elected but re-elected. Lest anyone think that was easy, you should check out My President Was Black: A history of the first African American White House — and of what came next by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates wasn’t always a fan of Obama, but it is clear that it was different for this POTUS than it was for the other guys. (I know you can’t get The Daily Show there, but if you get a chance, watch Obama on the Daily Show, and for that matter Coates on the Daily Show.)

Little black kids now know that anyone – well, any GUY – can become President. (And if AO’s election doesn’t prove that…)

And to belabor the point, he ends up having to worry about whether he’s too black or not black enough, usually with good cheer. NOT a question his predecessors ever had to deal with.

No wonder Luther, President Obama’s anger translator, as played by Keegan-Michael Key, with Jordan Peele, seems so believable.

(Have you noticed, online, the number of people who fail to spell his first name – no, it’s not Barak – correctly? He was President for eight years, people!)

* He didn’t pursue charges against the Bush administration.

There was a strong case for prosecuting Bush officials who designed torture policy, but he was trying not to appear partisan and divisive – which he was later labeled anyway. Given his eventual partisan reputation, maybe he should have, but…

*He withstood the constant racist delegitimization of Tea Party wackos, not to mention, ironically, his successor as President.

From “you LIE,” uttered by a representative during a joint session of Congress in 2009 to Georgia senator praying for Obama’s death – in public, he’s put up with a lot of rubbish. Someone said in 2016 that he invented racism in America, someone with no understanding of US history.

And there are STILL people who believe the nonsense.

*When Barack Obama became President, the economy was on the verge of collapse. And now, it’s not.

A second raise in the basic interest rate recently is a pretty good sign of that. He just reached a record-setting 80 months of job growth. Since 2010, businesses have added more than 15.1 million jobs. That’s longer than any president ever has before.

* He did get Obamacare passed.

Those with a memory will recall it came about because private insurance prices were spiraling out of control. Even the “replaced” product the GOP promises will likely protect those with pre-existing conditions, and those under 26 on their parents’ policy. This NY Times article suggests “a transformation of the delivery of health care may be an enduring legacy for the president.”

* He was THE BEST pro-LGBTQ President ever.

*Osama bin Laden is dead.

And he made the bold decision for redundancy that made the difference between success and possible failure.

*He has released more non-violent criminals from prison than any President

Read about the New Jim Crow why that’s a good thing.

* Barack Obama seemed to enjoy the job, and his pleasure was infectious.

Check out so many opportunities he got to represent the country, most recently, President Obama’s final Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony.

* He’s way better toward the environment than his successor will likely be.

Why We’re Protecting the Arctic

* He is working until the end.

And made it much harder for AO to build his Muslim registry

*All in all, he was a successful President.

Here’s Bill Maher with President Obama on Real Time the Friday before the election. As Mark Evanier noted, “I think history will show this man was a very good president — which is not to say those who were convinced he was a gay Kenyan socialist who was planted in the White House to destroy America will ever admit it…”

Rolling Stone named President Obama One Of America’s Most Historically Successful Presidents. Here are more links, including 400 OBAMA accomplishments, with citations.

From GQ: “More to the point, Obama’s legacy is the sort that gets canonized. Because the first rule of Hall of Fame-dom: The times have to suck for the president not to. Civil wars, World Wars, depressions, and recessions. You got to have ’em if you wanna be great. That’s why we rate the Washingtons, Lincolns, and Roosevelts over That Fat Guy with the Walrus Mustache. Like Obama, these Great Men were dealt sucky hands, won big, and left the country better off than it was before.”

Agent Orange simply cannot undo all of these. If he makes things as bad as I fear he will, it’ll be laid at the table of AO. More nukes to make us safer? No need for government research? Anti-everything people heading Cabinet departments? The contrast will be so astounding that this will make Obama look REALLY good.

AND once Barack Obama is out of office, “I’m gonna stop being polite and start getting real.” He’s not finished yet. So if the Republicans use their guide to screwing the working class, it won’t go unopposed.

Farewell, Michelle Obama

There’s no one as Irish as Barack OBama- Corrigan Brothers

SNL’s Proud, Poignant Rap Tribute ‘Jingle Barack’

November rambling #1: Theodosia Burr

I have a lot of Leonard Cohen songs, Hallelujah, Suzanne, and Bird on a Wire, among them, that others have covered.

Analytical Grammar: Homophone graffitil — Analytical Grammar: Homophone graffiti

Why many Americans don’t see Donald Trump as racist

So You Want to Wear a Safety Pin

1st woman elected to Congress, in 1916

John Oliver: School Segregation and Multilevel Marketing

6 Million Lost Voters: State-Level Estimates of Felony Disenfranchisement, 2016

Do You Understand the Electoral College? You should read all of AmeriNZ’s posts this past week, e.g. Fixing the Electoral College, which mentions my favorite fix, Instant Runoff Voting

Trump was unfamiliar with the scope of the president’s job when meeting Obama

Prince Ea: I JUST SUED THE SCHOOL SYSTEM and Dear Future Generations: Sorry

How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News

How Andy Borowitz explained the election to his six-year-old daughter – (NOT fake news)

A 1922 New York Times article about Adolf Hitler catastrophically misjudged the authenticity of his anti-semitism

Writer too strong to live, about sports, sexism and alcohol (HT to Jaquandor)

Deepika Padukone on depression

The men feminists left behind

A Teaching Moment on Sexual Assault and It’s hard to talk about, but it happens to so many women and Reasons So Many Guys Don’t Understand Sexual Consent

Top African American environmental leader faces racial incident in Adirondacks – Aaron Mair, who I have met, is the president of the Sierra Club

Gwen Ifill, longtime PBS news anchor, died after a battle with cancer – she was 61 – made me feel surprisingly devastated

Four-color Christ Jesus

Glenn Beck tries decency

Amy Biancolli interview in Widows and Widowers Magazine

The Dramatic Life and Mysterious Death of Theodosia Burr. The fate of Aaron Burr’s daughter remains a topic of contention

Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

This black woman rode across America in 1930. On a Harley. In spite of rampant racism, she was ‘very happy on two wheels’

Trevor Noah wasn’t expecting liberal hatred

You’ve Just Crossed Over Into … the Rod Serling Gazebo

Ira Gobler and the Star Wars Toys That Never Were

Norman Rockwell Museum Presents Hanna-Barbera: The Architects of Saturday Morning, through May 29, 2017

My Poetic Side: favorite war poets, each related to a different war and ordered chronologically, from The American Civil War to the Iraq War.

Presidential candidates in comic books

Robert Vaughn, Man from UNCLE actor, dies aged 83. I used to play the spy show with sister Marcia. I played Napoleon Solo, the Vaughn role.

Now I Know: Fool Me Twice, Plane on You and Going to Venus in Peace and May The Force Be Costumed and Smell Ya Later?

Doing the Write-In Thing (ROG reference)

Music

Jean Sibelius and the virtual national classical music work of Finland; here’s Finlandia

Mozart Requiem

K-Chuck Radio: Draw that bow, my son…

Jazz ‘Hot’: The Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt

Bohemian Rhapsody performed by excerpts from 260 different movies

An Hour of Jeopardy Think Music

16 Albums That Changed The Music Business

Master Recordings — From Abbey Road to Born to Run — Could Be Lost Forever, Without Archivists’ Help

Copland’s Fanfare: The making of a musical monument

Leonard Cohen died at the age of 82 and hugely influential singer and songwriter’s work spanned nearly 50 years; his 2008 induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; two of of my favorites are this and this

Leon Russell died – His 2011 induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Greatest Invention of One Thousand Years Ago

The 10 Greatest Double Albums In Rock History – you WILL guess most of these

The “432 Hz vs. 440 Hz” conspiracy theory

The Upper Crust of Music

P is for 45th President of the US

I will be voting in the election for our 45th President. I ALWAYS vote.

As you’ve might have heard, the American voter will be electing the 45th President of the United States on November 8. Well, sort of.

Most of the states, 48 of them (except for Nebraska and Maine), are winner-take-all contests, where one candidate or another gets all of what are called electoral votes, which Parade magazine attempts to explain, as does Wikipedia.

Basically, the number of members of the House of Representatives (based on population) plus the number of US Senators (2 per state) equals the number of electoral votes a state gets. The District of Columbia, where the nation’s capital, Washington, is (as opposed to the western state of Washington), also gets three electoral votes.

The candidate with more than 270 electoral votes (538 total electoral votes divided by two, plus one) becomes President. Getting on the ballot on each state is fairly routine for the Democratic Party (candidate is Hillary Clinton) and the Republican Party (Donald Trump). Only one other candidate is on the ballot in all 50 states, the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson. Jill Stein of the Green Party is running in over 40 states. Here’s a list of other minor party candidates.

The winner in November will be either the Democrat or the Republican. Not since 1860, when Abraham Lincoln won, running on the nascent Republican party, won the election. The Progressive Party ran former President Teddy Roosevelt against the Republican incumbent (and former TR Vice-President) William Howard Taft. Teddy came in second, and received 88 of 531 electoral votes. But Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected.

1968 was the most recent time at third party candidate won electoral votes, George Wallace of the American Independent Party, who garnered 46 of 538 electoral votes. “The last third party candidate to win more than 5.0% of the vote was Ross Perot, who ran as an independent and as the standard-bearer of the Reform Party in 1992 and 1996, respectively.” Read more about third parties here.

[Blue is Democratic; red is Republican.]

Each state has its own rules about voting. The deadlines for registering to vote vary. Some allow early voting, before November 8, while others do not. The hours the polls are open are not the same. This is is the nature of federalism, which allows the states to maintain control of certain aspects of the process.

I will be voting in the election for our 45th President. I ALWAYS vote.

That’s enough for now – I worked on this piece before and it died when my computer whacked out – but if you have questions about the process, this old poli sci major will try to answer your questions.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

Bill Clinton is 70

Bill Clinton has long confounded me. In 1992, I was somewhat suspicious of the guy some of the nastier pundits dubbed Slick Willie. I certainly did not vote for him in the primary, choosing either former Senator Paul Tsongas (MA) or now-governor Jerry Brown (CA).

I watched Clinton pretty much every time he was on TV, from that surreal saxophone playing on The Arsenio Hall Show to that less-than-comfortable interview, along with Hillary, on 60 Minutes.

Ultimately, I picked him for the general election, making Bill Clinton the first person in my 20+ years of voting for President who actually WON. It may have been because I had tired of Reagan’s third term of George H.W. Bush, with a President so isolated that he didn’t understand a pricing scanner.

Like so many before them, Bill and Hillary failed to enact a health care plan. I didn’t fault them, but it was a lot of political capital spent. Meanwhile, in other areas, I was disillusioned.

After promising to end the ban on gays in the military, the compromise was “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which was quite unsatisfactory to me, in some fundamental way, worse than the ban. And he attacked the safety net that was welfare as though he were a Republican. His emphasis on more incarceration, which he has since repudiated, did not win me over.

And I had serious doubts about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was supposed to create greater competition among providers, so that, theoretically, someone would compete with Time Warner Cable in this market; I had my doubts, and they seem to have been justified.

I did not vote for Bill Clinton in 1996, choosing Green Party candidate Ralph Nader instead. But when he was ultimately impeached for cheating on his wife – OK, lying to Congress about cheating on his wife – it seemed like an inappropriate use of Congressional power. In retrospect, it was especially galling when the Republican leadership had engaged in arguably more reprehensible activities.

In mid-September 1998, I happened to have been staying at Boston Park Plaza Hotel when Vice-President Gore, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and other dignitaries were going to be at the hotel for a fancy (read: high-priced) fund-raising dinner.

I looked from my upper story room saw several hundred protesters. They were split about 50/50 between those who were upset with the President and the effect his behavior had on the country, and those outraged by Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor, who put all of the lurid details about Bill and Monica Lewinsky on the Internet at a level with may not be noteworthy now, but assuredly was then.

(Ironically, Ken Starr got booted from his position at Baylor University, for his poor handling of a sex scandal. Monica Lewinsky gave a famous TED talk about the effect of the scandal on her, and cyberbullying generally.)

I’m not sure what to make of the Clinton Foundation. The goals appear noble, but at least the appearance of scandal troubles me.

Bill Clinton is generally seen as a great asset in his wife’s Presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2016, but I remain unconvinced. His astonishingly bad judgment in meeting with Loretta Lynch while Hillary was being investigated over her emails boggles. He ended up besmirching the reputation of Lynch and FBI Director Comey while making the eventual non-indictment look like the fix was in.

But at the Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton stopped embarrassing Hillary with an emotional speech, telling “an intimate story of how they fell in love and built a remarkable political partnership.

“The…former president chronicled his wife’s accomplishments from working to end housing discrimination to launching a children’s advocacy group in Arkansas to negotiating peace deals as secretary of state.”

A Daily Kos writer proclaimed that the speech was a success because even his dad liked it, and he was no Bill Clinton fan.

I continue to be fascinated by the 42nd President. He is the big kid mesmerized by the balloons at the DNC, and a master manipulator, Rhodes scholar smart, yet perplexingly inept. The term used a lot back c 1998 about him was compartmentalization. If it were true then, I think it’s more accurate now.

I think Hillary, as a woman, takes more heat for the sins of “the Clintons” than he does. He’s more personable, has that flirtatious twinkle in his eye.

What YOUR take on Bill Clinton?

Music and communication

I do have affection for Chester A. Arthur.

More Ask Roger Anything questions from Chris:

How do you explain to your daughter how to vet sources?

It must be from an example. Just recently, my daughter said, of a tabloid cover in the supermarket, “Cher isn’t really dying, is she?” We watch a couple of news networks, plus Comedy Central, not every day, but often enough, so she can clearly see that shows often offer different emphases.

In your opinion, is Wikipedia a reliable source?

Depends on the topic, and the compiler. There’s an old cliche about a newspaper providing perfect information for topics I know nothing about, but less so for things with which I am familiar. I recently linked to the Wikipedia for the band Blotto, and I noticed that it NEVER mentioned the band members’ actual names. This was a failing.

Some posts are frozen in amber, perfectly accurate as of November 2013, e.g., but not so much today. Whereas other posts are updated regularly to reflect new music released or films made. Deaths are often, but not always, caught.

I specifically remember that back in 2004 or 2005, I corrected a mention that the next Presidential election would be in 2007, when, of course, it was 2008.

Still, when I’m doing research for a topic about which I know nothing, Wikipedia can be very useful, ESPECIALLY the links to the various footnotes.

What’s one area of scientific research that you think we should be funding more (other than medicine and climate change)?

Well, climate change is huge and would include the potential for everything from island nations flooding to the future loss of the maple syrup industry from the continental United States. Once you’ve eliminated climate change and medicine, what I think you have left is space exploration. It has very often answered many questions for answers here on earth, including those two topics.

What’s been the most surprising world change in your lifetime?

Communication, for good and for ill. You make friends on Facebook with people around the world, you have fights with total strangers on Facebook, often about really stupid stuff. You text your friends, while you ignore those physically around you.

I’ve been the guy reading the newspaper, maybe only a dozen years ago, and someone, as often as not, would comment on a story, or maybe just quietly read over my shoulder. Or I’d read over someone else’s shoulder. Those electronic devices don’t seem to open one up to one’s immediate environment, even as one can learn about the most recent terrorism in Turkey.

The Internet allows for more information, but also misinformation, disinformation, satire, lies. We can see Arab Spring or police misconduct, but also LOL cats and Stare-down Sammy, which got 34 million views on Facebook, and was shown on the CBS morning news; I thought it was a waste of air time.

There have been conspiracy theories for a long time, but they can propagate far more freely these days. Even objective facts will be disputed, and as a person dealing with, ideally, objective information, this can be both frustrating and exhausting. (See also my answer about Google.)

I’ve actually had this conversation about an article someone read. (I’m a librarian; a variation of this happens a LOT.)

Her: Is it true?
Me: Where did the information come from?
Her: Facebook!
Me: But what was the ORIGINAL SOURCE of the information?
Her: I TOLD you, Facebook!

Who is your favorite president and why?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was rich and rather pompous and arrogant. His ailment thought to be polio at the time, but now believed to be Guillain-Barre syndrome, humbled him, and made him a champion for those less well off. And he had a great partner in Eleanor, with whom he seemed to have achieved an understanding regarding his infidelity.

He was imperfect, the Japanese internment being chief among his failures. But he initiated a lot of useful programs, some of which are around today, such as Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

I do, though, have affection for Chester A. Arthur, a product of the spoils system who became a reformer for civil service.

Tom the Mayor queried:

What is your Favorite Beatles song?

The last time I made a list, it was 3. Help 2 Got To Get You Into My Life 1 Tomorrow Never Knows. Re: TNK, I recently saw Paul, Ringo, and Georges Harrison and Martin discuss its intricacies. But Help! is something I can sing with my daughter.

What is your Favorite Aretha Franklin Song?

The last time I made a list, it was 4. (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone 3. (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman 2. Sweet Bitter Love (1966). 1. Respect
Of course, Respect is a great cover. Since You’ve Been Gone has always been a favorite because it stifled deejays. But Sweet Bitter Love was in a quartet (or more) of songs that I played when romance went south.

What is your Favorite Joni Mitchell song?

The last time I made a list, it was 2. A Case of You 1. River. River reminds me of my late friend Donna George. But the poetry of A Case of You touches me too.