Snapping on Ed Henry

It's probably not going to be a good night for your news agency when the President thumps your correspondent's follow-up question.  But such is the life of CNN and Ed Henry tonight, whose attempt at gotcha regarding AIG received the response of the evening (video to follow): "I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."  

Bonus points for using "to talk" and "to speak" in the same sentence.  It's the kind of grammatical formulation that will be helpful for those learning English from the President's speeches.  

Quote of the Moment

I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear...

Honestly, it was all over but the shouting after that today.  A thunderclap in American history.

But check out the speech here.  Obama sets the bar pretty high, and a lot of the initial feedback--and my initial perception from listening to it live--was that it was a really good, but not excellent, speech.  Just a standard Obama speech: strong, bringing the heat.  After reading it, however, it registers just how appropriate his tone was for the troubles facing the nation.  Much like his acceptance speech in Grant Park, there's no sugarcoating our problems--indeed, during parts of the speech, I thought he was going to have to turn around and ask outgoing President Bush if he wanted to excuse himself for parts of it that were, shall we say, not kind in recounting the past 8 years.   It made the pivot to the more optimistic, value-stating portion a relief--not only to alleviate the potential awkwardness of skewering a former President sitting feet away from the podium, but also to lift the spirits of the crowds.  

In person, the relief of moving on to a renewed values statement for the nation outweighed the words themselves.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that the words themselves will echo through the years, much more so than the discomfort of being reminded about our present (and recent past) foibles.

We've been waiting for this hour/history is ours

Setting up a blog seemed like an ideal fit for me: with an appetite for politics, social justice, sports, music, Washington, DC, and pop culture--and an opinion on most of these things--a blog was, and is, an ideal vehicle to hone my writing (conciseness has not necessarily been one of my strong suits) and to share some thoughts on my interests outside of law school.

But today, after experiencing Inauguration Weekend, I am momentarily speechless. The historical significance sets in, every now and then, and this evening is one of those moments. I'll try to reflect and string together some complete sentences in the next few days, but for now, I'll leave you with some photos.

Above: a view from our spot on the Mall.

Shredded Cheese=Pro Move

Lost in the flurry of coverage of Barack Obama's "inaugural" trip to Ben's Chili Bowl yesterday was his order: a half-smoke with everything (mustard, onions, and chili) and a side of cheese fries, with shredded cheese-- "not the Velveeta," #44 specifically called for.  The fully-loaded half smoke is a great call, but even more impressive is the order for shredded cheese on the fries.  Now, I'm not sure about the plain cheese fries, but on the chili cheese fries served at Ben's on U (which, given its overflowing size, is easily one of the best deals in town), traditionally an enjoyable, yet of-indeterminate-origin, cheese sauce smothers the fries along with the signature chili.  However, at the the Ben's outpost at the new Nationals Stadium, chili cheese fries come with shredded cheddar, a step up on the culinary ladder (while a parallel move, health-wise), so I know that the Ali family doesn't have a moral objection to shredded cheese on cheese fries with chili.  Nevertheless, I've always been too intimidated to order the chili cheese fries with shredded cheese at the original Ben's--until now.  Perhaps they'll call it "Obama-style" cheese fries.

Barack Obama Is Your New Food Critic

Next up: old footage of Barack Obama participating on your local public television fund drive?

18 to vote for Obama, 21 to drink on Obama's dime

Young people's ball announced for the "low" price of $75.  Sounds intriguing, but my eye is drawn more to the Neighborhood Ball, a free/low-cost ball at the Convention Center on the 20th.  The Neighborhood Ball, hosted at the Convention Center is also close to Ben's Chili Bowl, which strikes me as the perfect post-Inaugural Ball meal.  

Welcome to the New Neighbors

The Obama Family has moved into the Hay-Adams for the next two weeks until the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW move out.  Perhaps he'll choose GULC's Sports and Fitness Center for his daily workout?

Been There, Done That

Barack Obama is named Time's Person of the Year, for the second time.  

Yawn.  Who hasn't?

Blagojevich Arrested

Illinois' governor, Rod Blagojevich, has been arrested on corruption charges.  Apparently, it's connected to filling the Senate seat that President-elect Barack Obama is vacating.  Probably not the kind of story Obama wants to have floating around...

3 year investigation for white-collar crime culminating in arrest, not surrender, is unusual, Jeffrey Toobin points out.  Either the charges are that big, or there's the off-chance that this is a trumped-up, politically motivated investigation.  I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but we've seen it happen before with a state governor.   

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Politico awards a Certificate of Completion to the McCain campaign for "stretching its dollars" and "staying competitive" against the Obama campaign.

The figures also demonstrate how successfully McCain was able to stretch his $85 million general election allotment into a much richer campaign kitty that could stay competitive with Obama’s fundraising apparatus. 

Meanwhile, President-Elect Barack Obama is preparing his Inaugural Address.  Which is exactly how voters--and the millions of donors to the Obama campaign--wanted it.

Organizing Man

This Washington Post piece is chock full of glowing quotes about "revolutionizing" the presidency and channeling the tech-savviness of the campaign into governing.  But what's really radical about this approach (and that nobody seems to mention) is that, before Obama takes the oath of office, he's already showing how he's going to govern: like a community organizer.  Listening to people; soliciting their opinions; marshaling their passions and energies into the political process: Obama didn't need to be the head of Harvard Law Review to practice those things, as articles often emphasize (though I'm sure it didn't hurt).  Rather, those tools--seemingly innocuous, but also profoundly important to a democratic society.  And that's revolutionary.

Writing on the Wall

Posted everywhere.  Obama, following through on a campaign promise:

Note the Dow above 13,000.

Madame Secretary

It's official: Hillary will be announced tomorrow as the next Secretary of State.  Even more remarkable than Obama bringing on his former rival in such a prominent role, I'd say, is that fact that Obama got Big Dog Bill Clinton to disclose so many donors to his foundations.   

It's clear who's in charge now.

Sports-Industrial Complex

After reading this Jason Whitlock article someone posted on HoyaTalk about ESPN's role in propagating the BCS-Centrism of college football, I turned on SportsCenter, where the 11 am show's anchors Stan Varrett and Josh Elliott "argued" for about 10 minutes about a playoff.  And by "argued," I mean that Elliott came up with a hypothetical playoff system, and Varrett offered stale, falsely equivalent rejoinders supporting the BCS.  The two anchors functioned as metaphors for what I imagine will be the coming debate in college football, particularly if Texas-- 11-1 and victorious over Oklahoma-- gets leapfrogged for the national championship game by Oklahoma.  

On one side, there will be President Barack Obama and, well, most sports fans who understand that playoffs are both a fair and exciting way to determine the best team in a league.  On the other side, there will be ESPN, the Sports-Industrial Complex, who recently purchased the rights to broadcast BCS games.  They need a return on that $500M investment, and if there's no BCS, well, that's just not going to cut it.  Having largely erased the pretense of journalism, I imagine they will use their new and opinion programming to wage a battle against implementing a playoff.  I'll be interested to see if Gregg Easterbrook writes about this in next week's TMQ (as he hinted this past week), but I imagine that he'd come to a similar conclusion.

As always, follow the money.

Ron Suskind on Change

That's writing.

No mention of leaf-peeping

Now the weekly radio address has become the weekly multimedia address.  I like it:

A Pacific Relative of the Garbage Plate?

The New York Times has a look at a favorite Hawaiian dish of Barack Obama's: the plate lunch.  From the name (plate lunch v. garbage plate or plate) to the composition (macaroni salad and rice topped with meat v. macaroni salad and home fries topped with meat) to the look (a mushy mess v. a mushy mess), it seems like there's a lot in common with Rochester's own garbage plate.

That is awesome, and obviously this is going to trigger greater research on my part.  

H/T Washingtonian Best Bites Blog, which also mentions that Barack Obama doesn't like beets, and that Rick Bayless could become the White House Chef.  

John McCain: a Cabinet Position?

Abe Simpson will be meeting with "That One" on Monday.  Perhaps I made the right West Wing comparison to the wrong situation...

H/T TPM

Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State?

That's the buzz this morning.  According to my sources, we can confirm that Sen. Clinton has been in Chicago recently, too.  

Thoughts about this appointment:

1) I think it would a strong move, but not necessarily as radical as the press is making/would make it out to be.  Team of Rivals, potentially--but remember, Lincoln had a Team of Rivals during the Civil War, and their differences were much greater at a much more divisive time.  (Also, it's important to note that the Republican Party was roughly 10 years old in the 1860s, so there just weren't that many top-flight Republicans to choose from who hadn't run for president.)   Remember back to the primaries: Obama and Clinton weren't far apart on most issues.  These would be two former (and potentially future) political rivals, but not philosophical rivals, by and large.

2) Baseless speculation: wouldn't Clinton be good at Defense? Think about it: she's been on Armed Services, she's certainly hawkish enough to pass muster with the conservative military establishment, and she has observed a commander-in-chief's decision-making from one of the closest distances possible.  To boot, it's another glass ceiling to break, ending the streak of white men in charge of the Pentagon.

3) This continues the Obama administration's parallels of the West Wing, where the new president chooses his top political rival to head the State Department. (Learn about the specific parallels--but have the end of the show spoiled--here)

To Fulfill These Rights

This week's topic in Legal Justice Seminar is Critical Race Theory, a fascinating field that I feel like I brushed up against during my work at Georgetown, but never quite got there.

Anyway, during my reflection and discussion of the readings, I thought of Lyndon Johnson's quote about affirmative action: 

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Then, I remembered that it was part of a larger speech about equal opportunity and racial equality given at the Howard University Class of 1965's commencement.  Check out Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge for a great treatment of the machinations that led to the speech, but definitely check out the full text of the LBJ speech, titled "To Fulfill These Rights," here.

Always an important topic to consider, but particularly timely, given the premature talk of "post-racialism" after Obama's election.  Just how far have we come since 1965? Looking at some of the statistics LBJ cites, it appears that progress has been uneven.

By no means is that meant to diminish Obama's accomplishments; rather, understanding the continued struggle for equal opportunity and equal access among people of color today gives it a much more meaningful context than the initial, utopian treatment many media outlets have tended toward.

The work continues.