barack obama

  • Fantastic:
    (1) #
    5/15/2009
  • Obama might sign a bill next week to make Great Falls in New Jersey his first designated national park, but is this necessarily a good thing? I love me my national parks, but the linked article asks some interesting questions with respect to the purpose of giving areas this highest protective honor. (8) #
    3/27/2009
  • Steven Pinker thinks that Justice Roberts flubbed the presidential oath on Tuesday because his inner militant grammarian kicked in. (thx, julie s.) (5) #
    1/23/2009
  • The New York Times presents "Obama's People," a photo series by Nadav Kander made up of 52 portraits of "Barack Obama's top advisors, aides[,] and members of his incoming administration." Get to know who's taking over the federal government next week. (And turn it into a deck of cards?) (2) #
    1/16/2009

Choose your Obamicon

In anticipation of Barack Obama's inauguration next week, you can make your own Obamicon in the style of Shepard Fairey's iconic poster. Here's one I made:

Wed, 01/14/2009 - 10:29pm
  • The New York Times has an article about how President-elect Barack Obama may have to give up his Blackberry and emailing in general when he assumes the presidency. I'm sort of hoping they work out the security issues and he can continue to communicate in a way that he finds comfortable. This line also got my attention:
    Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.
    (2) #
    11/16/2008
  • The ACLU of Mississippi has received numerous reports that students are getting in trouble for mentioning President-elect Barack Obama's name:
    [U]pset parents... said a school bus driver told the children on a Pearl school bus that if they said Obama’s name, they would be written up and taken to the principal’s office for disciplinary reasons.

    Another parent said that a coach at Pearl Junior High School told students that if they speak Obama’s name, they would face expulsion.
    This kind of thing isn't completely surprising due to the attacks against Obama in the last two months of the election, but I hope this sort of thing is rare within a year or two. (11) #
    11/7/2008
  • Change.gov. Welcome to the *real* first administration of the 21st century. (23) #
    11/6/2008

President-Elect Obama

I was up at 5am yesterday and worked until 8pm in the nonpartisan Election Protection command center at the ACLU of Nevada's office, so by the time I realized that Obama had it in the bag, I was feeling rather delirious. It was a great day for American politics, only tempered by a lost wallet, now found, and lost rights in California, the recovery of which will be longer in the coming. Other post-election nuggets:

  • All my hard work in Washoe County paid off, as Obama destroyed McCain in both the county and in Nevada as a whole. Alas, the local elections were more of a mixed bag given my preferences. (E.g., my state supreme court choice lost, and a really awful eminent domain initiative passed.)
  • Bill Ayers gave his first interview since he became an election issue to the New Yorker, and he seems like a decent but flawed guy who was heavily caricatured.
  • 2009 will be the first year in 45 years without a Dole or a Bush in elected office.
  • The Marijuana Policy Project, my former employer, had a successful day winning both medical marijuana in Michigan and decriminalization in Massachusetts.
  • Newsweek has an article reporting some campaign items that they couldn't reveal until now: a "foreign entity" hacked into the systems of both campaigns, Palin may've spent more money than was even originally reported on herself and her family, and violent threats to Obama increased sharply in September and October at the same time when the Palin rallies were getting scary.

I wish I lived within driving distance to D.C. for January's shindig.

Wed, 11/05/2008 - 11:04am
  • Obama's vice presidential selection is looming, so I'm going to throw this one out there: could Richard Clarke be his dark horse pick?


    Update: It turns out it's the more famous older white guy with foreign policy experience. Biden will be fun to watch in the VP debate. (5) #
    8/21/2008
  • I'm an Obama supporter and all, but while I think his modified US Seal is kind of cute, it also sort of smacks of dictatorship -- as in, "I'm remaking America in my image." He should drop it.

    Update: He dropped it. (10) #
    6/20/2008
  • Here's an excellent and simple graph comparing the differences between Obama's and McCain's tax proposals. Kevin Drum comments:
    Bottom line: If you're really rich and think that George Bush's tax cuts for the rich didn't go nearly far enough, John McCain is your man.
    (43) #
    6/12/2008
  • Josh Marshall has a fascinating post about why Obama has done so poorly in West Virginia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding areas:
    There's been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama's problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama's problem isn't with white working class voters or rural voters. It's Appalachia.
    The post also has a convincing map of all the counties where Clinton has won over 65% of the vote. (1) #
    5/13/2008
  • SurveyUSA has done the first 50-state poll of the election cycle to see where the Electoral College during the national election might stand. Obama beats McCain 280-258, Clinton beats McCain 276-262. Obviously, this is a poll and the election is 8 months away, so NaCl.


    (8) #
    3/6/2008
  • Dave Winer interviews George Lakoff (UC Berkeley professor of cognitive linguistics and progressive political thinker [wikipedia]) about the state of the Obama campaign, and where he should go from here. Lakoff points out his errors that led to recent losses, insightfully defines the difference between what the two candidates mean by "bipartisanship," suggests how to reach out to white low-income voters, and generally reinforces for me why I supported Obama in the first place. (via joho) (0) #
    3/6/2008
  • An interview with notable designer Michael Beirut on the sleek and consistent graphic design of the Obama campaign. On the consistent use of the Gotham typeface:
    I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect. Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.
    (3) #
    2/28/2008
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