Obamanation
$40-something million? How about $170 million: The country is in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, which isn’t stopping rich donors and the government from spending $170 million, or more, on the inauguration of Barack Obama. The actual swearing-in ceremony will cost $1.24 million, according to Carole Florman, spokeswoman for…
The inauguration festivities seem to be particularly “big” this time around. Wonder why? It seems much more like a coronation than an inauguration (I know, this will probably be taken as me being just another cranky-con. Oh well). Anyway, Michael Drout, Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College (I don’t…
Jeff Jacoby has some suggested questions for U.S. Senators to ask Obama’s nominee for director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. The last one gives a sense of Jacoby’s general concern: 8. You are withering in your contempt for researchers who are unconvinced that human activity is responsible for global warming,…
Apparently, Old Glory isn’t adequate for some Obama supporters. See pictures here, here, and here. One gets the feeling that, in a sense that has not been true for any American President thus far, it’s his country, now. Or maybe time will wrap him in the modest trappings of actual humanity. Maybe.
Yeah, yeah. Go on and tell me that I’m a paranoid right-wing crank slipping into the forthcoming Republican version of Bush Derangement Syndrome, but this sort of thing — beginning even before inauguration — concerns me a great deal: President-elect Barack Obama will need something akin to superpowers to handle the country’s economic woes. Word…
“O” continues to stand for “audacity”: President-elect Obama countered critics with an analysis yesterday by his economic team showing that a program of tax cuts and spending such as he has proposed would create up to 4.1 million jobs, far more than the 3 million that he has insisted are needed to lift the country…
Charles Krauthammer argues persuasively that Obama’s apparent centrism goes only so deep as pragmatism requires: Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But these choices were far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign-policy president. Unlike, say,…
Of course one should temper incredulity when addressing the opinions of a college professor who’s written a book on a related topic, but so wrongheaded does Jonathan Stevenson’s assessment of Osama post-Obama seem that it’s difficult to conclude otherwise than that he has an investment of some kind in the wrong argument: ONE OF SEN.…
Well, that was fast: The Hempstead Union Free School District board voted unanimously Thursday night to rename Ludlum Elementary School as Barack Obama Elementary School. The change went into effect immediately, school officials said Friday. Officials for the Long Island district say they think the school is the country’s first to be named after the…
So here comes good ol’ Tom Daschle back to the government, this time in Obama’s cabinet: Barack Obama is enlisting former Senate leader Tom Daschle as his health secretary, embracing a third Washington insider in the early stages of Cabinet-building by the president-elect who promised change. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the capital’s most famous woman for…
