The Fall of Obama

[monkey!]

Of that I was fully cognizant; in this photo she looks like a transvestite James Brown:

Tee hee! I have to agree. But wax James Brown is hot too!

The club doors are opened for you, Reggie.

[nacho]

Masturbation material for Cass:

[Cassander]

yepp....dancing like a high school teacher who has never heard that song.  HoT.

[nacho]

I just want to know whether or not she's seven feet tall or if there's some sort of forced perspective thing going on.

[nacho]

Gallup has him down to 39% approval. Poor Obama...

[monkey!]

What Obama needs to do is launch an illegal invasion/'war' against some poorly infrastructure'd country, throw billions of US$ into the military coffers, destroy the lives of several million 'natives' living in targeted country, and use borderline psychopathic/racist rhetoric to win back the hearts of American voters.

That'll get him the largest popular vote ever!

[Reginald McGraw]

I don't think that's going to play in this climate.

[nacho]

Yeah, we're tired of that gambit after 114 years.

[Reginald McGraw]

HA! Yes! I think it would be political suicide to start a war with anyone right now unless they bombed Pearl Harbor.

[nacho]

HA! Yes! I think it would be political suicide to start a war with anyone right now unless they bombed Pearl Harbor.

That's how they've all started! The Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11... And those are just the recent big ones.

We've never "started" any of our wars, except for the Revolution. And, even then, our history books infer that the Brits started it.

[RottingCorpse]

Remember the Boston Massacre!!!

[RottingCorpse]

Tee-hee!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/obama-solicits-designers-to-work-unpaid-on-jobs-poster-20111019

Obama Solicits Designers to Work - Unpaid - on ... Jobs Poster!

The Obama campaign has more than $60 million cash on hand. In an economy this bad, you'd think a presidential campaign that flush would be happy to pay good money for a talented designer to create a campaign poster.

But the folks at Obama campaign have taken a page from the Arianna Huffington book of economic exploitation and called on "artists across the country" to create a poster ... for free.

And here's the kicker. It's a jobs poster.

Yes, the Obama campaign is soliciting unpaid labor to create a poster "illustrating why we support President Obama's plan to create jobs now, and why we'll re-elect him to continue fighting for jobs for the next four years."

If you win? You get: A framed copy of your own poster, signed by the president ("approximate retail value $195").

And if you don't win? Well, that's too bad. You've not only lost the contest, you've also surrendered your intellectual property. "All submissions will become the property of Obama for America," according to the fine print.

The campaign presents a "creative brief" that offers potential slogans for the poster, including: "Fighting for jobs," "Get America back to work," "Made in the USA," and "Support small business."

To this list, let us helpfully suggest adding the tagline of San Francisco designer Mike Montiero: "Fuck You. Pay Me."

Monteiro — better known to his Twitter followers as @Mike_FTW — is the design director at Mule Design. "I find it ironic that the campaign is kicking off this big jobs program by asking designers to do free work for them," he tells Rolling Stone. Monteiro says he's a supporter of the campaign as well as a donor ("some of that cash on hand is mine"), but he adds: "I get furious when people ask for free design work, and even more furious when designers do work for free."

"The design industry has been hit as hard as a lot of other groups," Monteiro says. "We need jobs too."

The Obama campaign did not return a call seeking comment.

Beyond the not-so-delicious irony of a rich campaign asking starving artists for free work in the middle of the Great Recession, there's also a potential campaign-finance issue at play here. If the Obama campaign asked a printing shop to produce the winning poster for free, for example, it would run afoul of the Federal Elections Commission for accepting an illicit in-kind donation. Providing valuable design work may present the same trouble. While the Federal Election Commission would not comment on the specific poster campaign, spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger tells Rolling Stone that "services offered free or at less than the usual charge result in an in-kind contribution."

Monteiro estimates that the campaign would have to spend anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 to contract with a professional designer to create a poster for a national campaign. That sum is far in excess of the individual contribution limit of $2,500.

UPDATE:

A lawyer in D.C. familiar with elections law writes in to make the case that such a donation of valuable design work could be kosher:

    I'm skeptical of the campaign-finance angle on the Obama Jobs Poster.  Assuming they're only accepting submissions from individuals--as opposed to design firms or other corporate entities--the Federal Election Campaign Act makes it very clear that "the value of services provided without compensation by any individual who volunteers on behalf of a candidate" is not a "contribution." 2 U.S.C. § 431((B)(ii).  The FEC's regulations say the same thing: "The value of services provided without compensation by any individual who volunteers on behalf of a candidate . . . is not a contribution."  11 CFR § 100.74.

    Also, if you dig into the rules of the contest, you’ll see this:

    12.  Federal Election Campaign Act Compliance. You hereby represent and warrant that all equipment, materials and facilities used to produce the Poster are owned by you and were not provided by a corporation, labor union, foreign national or federal contractor. Any disposable materials purchased specifically to produce the Poster will be treated as in-kind contributions to the Sponsor.

[nacho]

The president's incomplete dedication to King demonstrates how far removed he is from the man he was honoring

On a breezy, sun-drenched Sunday, President Obama stepped to the podium at the Martin Luther King Jr National Memorial to induct the great civil rights leader and peace activist into America's pantheon of heroes. The president's dedication rightly praised the "moral imagination" of Dr King, whose March on Washington demanded jobs and dignity for all Americans.

Unfortunately the president only glorified two-thirds of the man, now stone, staring out across the Tidal Basin. While racial and economic opportunity were certainly two sides of Dr King's pyramid of social justice, President Obama made only passing references to the third: peace. That choice was as deliberate as it was cowardly, because a full accounting of who Dr King was and what he stood for would demonstrate how very far removed President Obama is from the man he was celebrating.

To celebrate King's "I Have a Dream" speech is easy, as the president well knows: "That is what our school children remember best when they think of Dr King." But wrestling with the radical pacifist message of King's "A Time to Break Silence" would have meant confronting the truth that the man the president was memorializing, if alive, would be marching against him today.

Addressing New York City's Riverside Church in the spring of 1967, King delivered possibly his most subversive speech of his radical career. A staunch opponent of the war in Vietnam, King called the American government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and excoriated the nation's addiction to militarism. It's not a message of the preacher's taught frequently in schools or quoted in preppy pundit columns, and it's certainly not a quotation etched on the memorial's inscription wall.

But what's undeniable is that those words remain true today under the administration of the commander-in-chief. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq grind on. The American military intervenes in Libya and Uganda without congressional approval. Killer drones increasingly prowl the Pakistani, Somali, and Yemeni wildernesses killing civilians and alleged terrorists alike. In just the last month, drones have assassinated three American citizens in Yemen, a country the White House has not declared war on, without the executive formally presenting any charges against them.

Cynically, American military aid flows to the butchers of Bahrain [pdf] and Yemen, who desperately cling to power while denying democracy and dignity to their people. "[T]he western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries," King said four decades ago. Not much has changed, and the effects have been devastating.

Counting only the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies conservatively estimates the carnage has killed 236,000 people and displaced nearly 8 million people, or the total populations of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.

While King's pacifism and denunciations of militarism sprang from his Christian faith, he understood the calamity and waste of war in a way that transcended faith and ideology. King recognized not only the gross immorality of war, but its opportunity costs as well.

Speaking about Vietnam, he explained the clear connection between war and poverty to those gathered at Riverside Church. "I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," he said. "So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

The same dynamic continues today. Since 9/11, the United States has spent an estimated $3.2 to $4tn, reports the Watson Institute, fighting these multiple wars and low-intensity conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including the $1tn homeland security-intelligence complex built to protect the nation from the blow back of these foreign policies. It isn't hard to identify areas where that money would have been better spent or simply returned to the taxpayer. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr King cautioned, his words more tragically relevant than ever.

"Nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, our work, Dr King's work, is not yet complete," President Obama said solemnly. How very true, and no one more powerful is standing in the way of that work than the man uttering those words.

Sometimes decency dictates that one turn down a speaking engagement, however august, even if the campaign season's afoot.

[Cassander]

I dunno.  Aren't we, as an informed group of internet chatters, supposed to hate it when the dead are used to oppose or support anything?  Would President McCain have inspired the proposal of an article like this? 

That last line is really atrocious, I think.  The first black president is supposed to turn down speaking at the MLK memorial because he's hip-deep in two wars someone else started?  Because there's not world peace?  Who is supposed to take that honor on behalf of the government?  Eric Holder?

[nacho]

Obama's $8 billion effort to kickstart high speed rail development across the nation, beloved by cleantech and transit enthusiasts everywhere, has more or less collapsed. Two weeks ago, Congress voted to strip most of that funding from the budget, leaving only a few projects to continue. RIP, HSR. Slate has a piece up today examining the demise of American high speed rail, in which he hones in on the bungled execution:

"Rather than focus on the few corridors that need high-speed rail lines the most," Oremus writes, "the Obama administration doled out half a billion here and half a billion there, a strategy better-suited to currying political support than to addressing real infrastructure problems."

Indeed, $8 billion dollars is barely enough to complete one single HSR line, let alone the 10+ proposed corridors. Obama's intention was indeed to "curry political support": by bringing jobs and investment to the regions hardest hit by the economic recession. Namely, the rust belt states and Florida, which suffered more deeply from the housing crash than almost anywhere else. The goal was to rustle up private investment to match the public funds, then, to stimulate the economy by building a piece of infrastructure that would also help reduce congestion, wear on highways, and lessen air pollution. And sure, Obama's team assumed (wrongly, as we'll soon see) that they would be rewarded politically for helping to stimulate those areas.