‘obama’s new york’

comic relief

Boston Herald: The MIT economics whiz who crafted President Obama’s national health-care overhaul now plans to explain the complex and controversial plan to the masses — in one long comic book.

Jonathan Gruber, a nationally recognized health economist who devised the economic underpinnings of Obamacare (Gruber hates the term), said his three comic-loving kids encouraged him to use the hip format of the graphic novel to tell the story of the complicated plan to 300 million Americans.

“I’m going to use the facts to tell the story,” said Gruber. “I’m the narrator guiding the reader through the law……”

Hill and Wang plan to release Gruber’s book, tentatively titled “Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How it Works” this fall.

It’s an unusual venture for Gruber, a brilliant Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic and a key architect of Romneycare, who spent much of the last decade telling national leaders why the American health-care system is broken, and how to fix it.

More here

the mubarak dictatorship is all obama’s fault, you know

The Atlantic

Here’s President Obama putting Mubarak in to power in 1981 when he was a student at Columbia University

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;-)

You want smilies?

You shall have smilies:

More options here

😉

dude!

Vice President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood walk to a train at Union Station in Washington, Feb. 8, heading to Philadelphia, and an event to tout plans to improve the nation’s infrastructure. Information here

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PS Any excuse for reposting this:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican member of the Cabinet, feigns being a blocking back for President Barack Obama as he arrives backstage to meet with GOP House leaders before speaking to their issues conference at the Renaissance Baltimore Harbor Place Hotel in Baltimore, Md., Jan. 29, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

😆

happy birthday, let’s move!

USA Today: First lady Michelle Obama today marks the first anniversary of her Let’s Move! campaign aimed at ending obesity within a generation. Today, she’ll meet with reporters at the White House who have covered the effort; tomorrow morning, look for her on NBC’s Today show and on ABC’s Live with Regis &  Kelly.

The White House is heralding a host of accomplishments over the past year, since the first lady launched the national campaign…

* Passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a groundbreaking piece of legislation, was signed into law so all kids have healthier food in school …

* Three of the largest food service providers have committed to improving the food they provide to schools to meet recommended levels of fat, sugar and whole grains over the next five years, and to double the fruits and vegetables they serve over the next 10 years.

* More and more families are seeing food and beverage packages with clear calorie information on grocery store shelves through a commitment from the American Beverage Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute to place clear calorie information on beverage and food packaging.

* A coalition of the Fruit and Vegetable Alliance, the Food, Family and Farming Foundation and the United Fresh Produce Association has committed over the next three years to put 6,000 salad bars in schools across the country, making fresh vegetables a more accessible choice for children.

* Let’s Move! is working towards the goal of 1 million Americans earning the Presidential Active Lifestyle Award (PALA) by September 2011. Organizations across the country are helping meet the goal: the National Football League (NFL) alone is signing up 200,000 kids.

* Teaming up with Let’s Move!, Disney, the National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) are spreading the word through public service announcements (PSAs) airing nationwide, through this outreach, kids are inspired by their favorite actors and athletes to play sports and get active.

Visit the Let’s Move website here

 

from the archives….

“An Intimate Conversation with Michelle and Barack Obama” was conducted in 1996 for a book about American marriages …. the interview took place only four years after they married and two years before their oldest daughter Malia was born.

ABC and The New Yorker (extracts):

Michelle Obama: “It was strange, that excitement over this first-year student,” then-32-year-old Michelle recalls when describing the buzz about a new summer associate at the law firm Sidley and Austin. “So smart, so good-looking, so intelligent, everyone was talking about Barack. I’m more of the skeptical kind, I was thinking, ‘Yeah, he’s probably an idiot, whatever.’

…then on the first day, he showed up late. He was late because it’d been raining! And then he walked into the office and we got along right away because he was charming and very good-looking, at least I found him good-looking. I think we were attracted to one another because we didn’t take ourselves too seriously, like some others did. He liked my dry humor and my sarcastic comments. I thought he was a good man, interesting, and I was fascinated by his personal story, so different from mine… our relationship was first a friendship. It took off from there.”

…Barack has helped me loosen up and feel comfortable with taking risks, not doing things the traditional way and sort of testing it out, because that is how he grew up. I’m more traditional; he’s the one in the couple that, I think, is the less traditional individual. You can probably tell from the photographs — he’s just more out there, more flamboyant. I’m more, like, “Well, let’s wait and see. What did that look like? How much does it weigh?

….There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.

When you are involved in politics, your life is an open book, and people can come in who don’t necessarily have good intent. I’m pretty private, and like to surround myself with people that I trust and love. In politics you’ve got to open yourself to a lot of different people. There is a possibility that our futures will go that way, even though I want to have kids and travel, spend time with family, and like spending time with friends. But we are going to be busy people doing lots of stuff. And it’ll be interesting to see what life has to offer.”

Barack Obama: “All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background—very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life.

Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her.

And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.”

(Lovely blog post on the top photo here)

is it that time already?

Created by ‘Drunken Irishman’, heroically posted on a site overrun by Professional Lefties 😐