Presidential Hopeful ...

[btramsey]

Senator Barack slipped in a compliment — of sorts — about a fellow 2008 hopeful during his appearances on the Iowa stump last weekend.

"I want to wait and hear what John Edwards has to say, he's kind of good-looking," Obama envisioned Iowa caucus-goers from the small town of Clinton telling themselves. During an appearance in West Burlington, Iowa, the phrase appeared again, this time with Edwards as "kind of cute."

[employmentlaw]

LOL friedman, I know what ya mean!

I liked best the cave thing -- the special underground shelters in Missouri, yanoo

That's why Jenny did not go I think

[so leb dein leben]

- In a 2004 fund-raising letter for her husband, Michelle Obama referred to the brutal partial birth abortion as a "legitimate medical procedure."

- In 2001 and 2002, Obama was the only Illinois senator to speak against the "Born Alive Infants Protection Act" on the Senate floor and in 2003 killed the bill in committee. This would have outlawed a practice first uncovered in his state known as a "live birth abortion," where labor is induced and an infant is delivered prematurely only to be put in some dark corner of a hospital until she expires on her own.

What a shame!

[mas]

Senator Barack has chastised fellow Democrats for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people," and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans. "Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," he said in remarks to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty.

"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,'" he said. "Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats."

Any time a political party begins courting voters on the basis of religion I find that I have to begin rejecting it entirely. As a voter, you are allowed to have religious beliefs and make decisions based on them. But the idea that there should be any de facto religious test in order to successfully win political favor is repugnant to the ideals of the Founding Fathers and repugnant to the philosophical basis of democracy. Courting any religious stripe results in a government indistinguishable from any Middle Eastern nation ruled by Islamic law, and bodes ill for the hopes of a civil society of free ideas and independent thought.

[spoons]

In his first book, "Dreams from My Father," Barack Obama described the marijuana that he smoked as a young man as "something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory." This confession of youthful indiscretion was at once more sober and more lyrical than those proffered by Presidents 42 ("I didn't inhale") and 43 ("When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible"), and it comes as little surprise to discover that another, less publicized intoxication to which the young Obama succumbed was the composition of lyric poetry.

In 1981, Feast, a literary magazine produced at Occidental College, published two poems by Obama, who was then a student there. The first, "Pop," appears to be a loving if slightly jaded portrait of Obama's maternal grandfather, with whom he spent a large part of his childhood. Free in structure and with a bold use of enjambment, it goes like this,

Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I'm sure he's unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he's still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He's so unhappy, to which he replies...
But I don't care anymore, cause
He took too d**mn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I'm laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; 'cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop's black-framed glasses
And know he's laughing too.

The second, "Underground," offers a vivid if obscurely symbolic description of a tribe of submarine primates. The exemplary lines go,

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

Harold Bloom, who in 53 years of teaching literature at Yale University has had many undergraduate poems pressed hopefully upon him said, when reached by telephone in New Haven last week, that he was not familiar with Obama's oeuvre. But after studying the poems he said that he was not unimpressed with the young man's efforts -- at least, by the standards established by other would-be bards within the political sphere. "At 18, as an undergraduate, he was already a much better poet than our former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who keeps publishing terrible poetry," Bloom said. (Cohen has published two collections of verse: "Of Sons and Seasons," in 1978, and "A Baker's Nickel," in 1986.) "And then there is Jimmy Carter, who is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States." (Carter's first volume of poetry, "Always a Reckoning and Other Poems," which was published in 1994, included a work called "Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia":

No churches can be built
no privy holes or even graves
dug in the rolling hills
for those milking Firestone’s trees, who die
from mamba and mosquito bites.

Of the two Obama poems, Bloom said, "Pop" was "not bad -- a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection." He went on, "It is not wholly unlike Langston Hughes, who tended to imitate Carl Sandburg." Bloom was fascinated by Obama's use of an unusual verb, "shink"

He ... Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck

a word that does not appear in any of the dictionaries that Bloom consulted but which is defined in an online slang dictionary as "an evasive sinking maneuver." It undoubtedly was a word that was in common usage, having to do with feeling very strong emotion, in this case a very strong need for comfort," Bloom said. He takes the subtext of the poem to be Obama's reckoning with his absent father, for whom his grandfather is, inevitably, an inadequate substitute. "This is, in effect, his own father," Bloom said. "That's very touching, and it also shows a kind of humane and sad wit. There's a mind there."

"Underground," Bloom said, is the better poem of the two. "It gave me the oddest feeling that he might have been reading the poems of D. H. Lawrence -- it reminded me of the poem 'Snake,' " Bloom went on. "I think it is about some sense of chthonic forces, just as Lawrence frequently is -- some sense, not wholly articulated, of something below, trying to break through." Poetry aside, Bloom has formed a good impression of Obama -- "Though if Mayor Bloomberg runs, I am voting for him," he added. In any case, he said, Obama has chosen the right career, at least if it comes to a tossup between politico and poet. "If I had been shown these poems by one of my undergraduates and asked, Shall I go on with it?, I would have rubbed my forehead and said, On the whole, my dear, probably not. Your future is not as a person of letters," Bloom pronounced. "But they would by no means have seemed to me unworthy of my attention." ♦

[Victoria Principal]

The second, Underground, offers a vivid if obscurely symbolic description of a tribe of submarine primates. The exemplary lines go,

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

This is really a great piece!

[jackolaw]

He doesn't have the composure, doesn't project the manly image needed -- he looks likes those skinny hyperactive kids in elementary school that run around and stumble on words when reading too fast.

He does not talk too fast, in fact he makes long pauses at times..

[kaligula]

LOL friedman, I know what ya mean!

I liked best the cave thing -- the special underground shelters in Missouri, yanoo

That's why Jenny did not go I think

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVE81BHBD0E&mode=related&search=

[so basically]

He doesn't have the composure, doesn't project the manly image needed -- he looks likes those skinny hyperactive kids in elementary school that run around and stumble on words when reading too fast.

He does not talk too fast, in fact he makes long pauses at times..

With the passing of time ADD/ADHD kids become like that due to the medication they take -- their vocabulary consists of some 200 words and they have serious difficulties describing the most basic ideas and situations. 

[Sallie]

District of Columbia Mayor Adrian M. Fenty threw his support behind Democrat Barak Obama's presidential bid Tuesday, citing the Illinois senator's strong support for giving the city full representation in Congress and his stance on urban issues. Obama "ha[d] the right ideas for education, like incentives for high-performing teachers, the right ideas for health care, like creating affordable coverage for all Americans, the right ideas for livable communities, like an affordable housing trust fund," said Fenty, who was joined by Obama at a news conference outside a recreation center in southwest Washington.

Fenty, in office just 6 (six) months, is a fellow Democrat leading a heavily Democratic city. Like Obama and Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, who also has endorsed Obama, Fenty is considered part of a rising new generation of black politicians.