-
sponsorship
Emily, I cringed last night when I saw the clip of Joe Wilson screaming
“You lie!” during Obama’s speech. I’m on the record as thinking it was
silly for people to pull their kids out of class rather than listen to
Obama’s back-to-school speech. But do you really think the vitriol that
Obama faces is worse than what President Bush faced? Insulting the
president reached national-pastime status not long after Dec. 12, 2000,
when President Bush was finally declared the winner of the 2000
election. (Not that it wasn’t a growth industry during the Clinton
administration.) ... (Read more in DoubleX)
-
sponsorship
Everyone seems to agree that it was bad for South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson to yell "You lie!" at the president last night during the health care speech. Gail Collins calls it "not a good plan,"
New York Democrat Joseph Crowley called it "outrageous," and Rahm
Emanuel said: "No president has ever been treated like that. Ever."
That's when I started to get suspicious. Rahm Emanuael? The man known
to fit three "fucks" in a sentence, outraged by "lie"? The president
himself said his opponents "lie" not seconds before, and it's much more
unusual for a president to use that word than for some back-bench
congressman. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
-
sponsorship
A guest post from Jessica Arons, Director of the Women’s Health & Rights Program at the Center for American Progress.
Women have everything to gain if meaningful health care reform succeeds and everything to lose if it fails. Why? Because the current system discriminates against women in numerous ways. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
-
sponsorship
It looks like President Obama managed to deliver a speech to (some of) the nation’s schoolchildren without mentioning health care (unless you count the advice to wash your hands) or otherwise touting the benefits of socialism. I hope that we can all heave a big sigh of relief and get on with more important things. Because that would be better than what happened back in 1991, when the first President Bush gave a similar address to the nation’s kids ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
I find the uproar over Obama's approaching back-to-school address
to be pretty silly. The speech, which schools are being encouraged to
air on Tuesday, is meant to keep kids from dropping out. Sounds
innocuous enough, but Obama opponents are using the opportunity to
compare him to Saddam Hussein. The reason this is all so absurd is
because I was in fourth grade when President Bush the first made a
similar speech, and I remember finding the speech both boring and
confusing ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
It’s not a good week for Alpha Kappa Alpha. For starters, the group’s national president, Barbara McKinzie, may be forced out following allegations of using "the organization’s money to commission a $900,000 ‘living legacy wax figure’ of herself." Then in the New York Times Magazine profile of Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, there was an anecdote about the president dissing AKA on the campaign trail. ... (Read more in Double X.)
-
sponsorship
Jess, here's a theory: Tina Brown told Hillary to take off her burqa
in hopes of starting a rumble. Once the Sec of State has derobed, she
and Obama can start the fight Washington watchers expected them to have
when she took the job ... (Read more in Double X.)
-
sponsorship
Obama 2012 watchers are all aflutter over yesterday’s news that the president’s approval rating in bellwether swing state Ohio has dipped to just 49%, down from 62% in May ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
-
sponsorship
When word broke that Barack Obama is pausing his busy schedule of revamping health care and heeding climate science and not intervening in the electoral process of a sovereign nation in order to spend three hours preaching "responsible fatherhood"—why, I nearly did a jig. The celebrity-stuffed event in the East Room sheds light on a little-reported obsession of the president whose own father abandoned him when he was barely 2 years old... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Jessica, the most striking thing to me about Amanda’s great post on the widely-envied Obama marriage was that I read it immediately before reading Naomi Wolf’s quirky piece in Harper's Bazaar that Willa mentions about women who ostensibly covet Angelina Jolie’s entire life. I confess that while I have glanced longingly at the Obama’s marriage—the date nights; the obvious, palpable affection; the perpetual-motion-mother-in-law—it never once occurred to me to lust after Jolie’s domestic arrangement... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
In a brief essay in Salon, cultural critic Amanda Fortini remarks on the trend of Obama marriage idealization. "Not since JFK was in the White House has there been a political marriage Americans have envied to this extent, a first family they might actually like to emulate," Fortini writes. But I have no desire to mimic the Obama union... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
So Barack Obama's historic speech in Cairo is already getting rave reviews. It was, indeed, vintage Obama (if that's not an oxymoron), using his biography as a point of entrance and connection, eschewing what he views as old, false dichotomies, and stressing a pragmatic, hopeful way forward... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
The Daily Telegraph reports unreleased Abu Ghraib photographs
include sexual torture and "rape." Does that have any bearing on the
debate over whether we should be allowed to see the photographs?
According to the story, the pictures include an American soldier raping
a female prisoner and a "male translator raping a male detainee." Other
photos include prisoners being sexually violated with a "truncheon,
wire and a phosphorescent tube"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California.
Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist,
but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday
so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be
forced to comment on the gay marriage ban... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
Philip Gourevitch’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times adds
another compelling argument to the ones I’ve been making recently about
why releasing more photos of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan is
a bad idea. Obama first supported the release of the latest batch of
photos but subsequently changed his mind, saying
that the pictures in question are associated with “closed
investigations” in which the perpetrators have already been identified
and sanctioned, and that they “would not add any additional benefit” to
our understanding of detainee treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gourevitch, who has written a book about the soldiers who took many of the photos at Abu Ghraib, rightly notes that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
For today's installment of Drawing Obama, we'll start with a terrific companion piece to Dahlia's son's "Dead John McCain." Deanna Newsom swears that she "did not indoctrinate" her 5-year-old son, Jonas. Still, he "came home from kindergarten one day with 'John McCain Falls into a Black Hole.' It was accompanied by another one entitled 'John McCain with Mold Growing on his Face.'"
Breaking into the double-digits for our artists, here's a drawing by 6th-grader Amber Adams-Holecek, submitted by her art teacher, Lindsay Davis. The assignment was to "make a tribute drawing to Shepard Fairey's famous red, white and blue print."
Jonah Goldman got into the game of drawing Obama early—and it paid off. A week before Obama announced his candidacy for president, then 13-year-old Jonah by chance shared a flight to Chicago with the then-Senator, and got him to sign the portrait below.
Keep sending us Obama drawings from the kids in your life.
-
sponsorship
From David Leonhardt's cool and meaty interview with the president. Obama says:
And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are
just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than
men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men
and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically
important....
I
think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay
better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more
men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an
egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the
stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender
stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the
primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.
LEONHARDT: Did Michelle ever make more than you did?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Probably only
for a brief time, because I was working three jobs most of the time
that I was in the State Senate.... But when I started campaigning for
the U.S. Senate and I had to drop some of those jobs, then she carried us for a couple years.
OK, so the last part comes off as a bit defensive. But mostly, hey, he gets it.
-
sponsorship
So, one day after Sen. Arlen Specter transitioned from R to
D, the consensus seems to be that he gave President Obama the best
100-days-in-office gift ever. For all the reasons Slate's John Dickerson pointed out, it's a canny move for
Specter, who knew he faced real trouble in Pennsylvania's 2010 Republican primary. But
here's what I don't get: Why is Specter, who'll be 80 years old by the time
next year's races roll around, so determined to serve another six years? He has
famously survived several serious illnesses, including cancer—twice. Perhaps
it's because I can't imagine working until 80, much less vying for one of the most
competitive jobs in the world at that age, but I just don't get why Specter finds
the prospect of pottering and porch-swinging so unattractive.
Clearly, in a democracy, the voters get to decide if they're
comfortable electing an oldster to represent their interests. Just as clearly,
the seniority system puts a premium on experience. Still, some of these guys
are too old to drive cars—yet we're happy to have them drive the ship of state?
Between the senior citizens on the Supreme Court and the
geezers in Congress, I'm starting to wonder if there's something in the D.C.
air. But we're in a recession: Let's open up some jobs for younger people.
-
sponsorship
Actually, Willa, there already has been a pro-life ad that uses the same concept as the German condom ad, but for a different purpose. While the condom ad implies that your sperm could turn into Hitler, the pro-life ad, sponsored by CatholicVote.com, is called "Life: Imagine the Potential," and it sends the message that the baby you're aborting could be Barack Obama. Check it out below. Just as the "self-flagellation" in the condom ad is very German, it's so American to say that any child raised by a single mother could be president, as if Barack Obama were not an exceptional person.
-
sponsorship
As Easter continued on the White House lawn this morning—and back to the dude-what-about-female-athletes beat—I was heartened to read this from Lynn Sweet’s pool report on the basketball station of the White House Easter Egg Roll:
At one of the baskets, the president is shaking hands with the girls from Woodson, when he spots number 50. “Didn’t I just see a story about you in the newspaper?” Obama says to Johnson.
“Johnson” is Jenice Johnson, a 6-foot-6 18-year-old female hoops phenom, profiled in the Washington Post this March. And later:
Obama tells a youngster he wants to “see you shoot a little game.” Tells another “he’s got good form.” Encourages a kid who misses to “keep on going till you make it.”
One small boy got special attention from the president. Obama lifted up the youngster, extending his arms to lift him high enough so that the boy dunked the ball in the basket.
Obama, concerned that no girls were lining up to shoot, asked, “where are the ladies?” That brought some young girls up. He told one, “you gonna be a star some day.”
Cute! For all the attention the New York Times Magazine lavished on little Allonzo Trier (also check out Jason Zengerle’s great TNR profile of Lance Stephenson and the NYC child hoops industry), it’s nice to see the president shower some encouragement on ladies that can handle the rock.
*Post title cribbed from Ryan Lizza's great campaign postmortem, in which the president talks hoops, and flashes a little of that famous ego.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?