President Barack Obama announces his appointment of former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Tom Donilon to the the newly-created Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. Having previously served as President Obama’s National Security Advisor, Donilon with chair the commission and Palmisano will be his deputy
President Barack Obama talks to reporters with (L-R) Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, former White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson
Pretty awful LP, but seeing as this season has been so rubbish it’s not really the end of the world – they were never going to win anything any way (nothing meaningful).
Has any other SoS had every last email about anything published to the world. Did we see all of the emails from the Bush SoS (x2)
I find the GOP and the US media would sell their country in any attempt to smear PBO and HRC. What happened to all the patriotism which stopped any discussion on those WMD. The world will be 4 years of hell if any GOPer is elected President & at the minute – from the outside looking in – it sure appears to be a likely event.
For the first time since July, can say that we’re actually getting the rain that I only hear is dousing the LA area.
Started raining around noon in eastern Ventura County, and forecast is for rain through most of the night. 🙂
Downside is that weather.com predicted that the rain would start tonight (instead of early afternoon) so I didn’t move my succulents to covered area — hoping they survive getting waterlogged this afternoon.
Arapaho, I planted a cilantro plant this summer and it did not do well. I thought it was dead. After the first rain, I looked in the back yard and saw this green thingy from afar. Lo and behold, it was my cilantro plant, healthy, green and robust. I immediately picked some and made fresh salsa. 🙂 Rain works wonders.
The Show Is Nonstop #Ham4Ham, the joyous, free sidewalk performances outside Hamilton that are stoking the passions of a new generation of theater lovers: “For the past four months, the best show on Broadway has been spilling out into the streets. It started on the night of Hamilton’s first preview. The much-hyped, history-making show was sold out—except for the tickets that are sold via lottery two hours before showtime to lucky day-of visitors. Hours before the first preview was to begin, more than 700 fans showed up hoping to enter that ticket lottery—a pre-show turnout of the sort that hadn’t been seen since the closing night of Rent….
….Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton’s composer, lyricist, and star, seems to have a special place in his heart for lotteries and against-all-odds stories. His first musical, In the Heights, centered around what happens to the neighborhood of Washington Heights when the owner of a small bodega (played in the show’s original run by Miranda) discovers that he sold a winning lottery ticket worth $96,000. His newest musical tells another improbable success story, about “the founding father without a father” who went from orphaned immigrant to George Washington’s right-hand man. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Miranda responded to this extraordinary turnout of fans hoping for lightning to strike: Caught by surprise and moved by the crowd, he came out the stage doors onto 46th Street to give a short speech to the crowd. The afternoon of the next show, on Tuesday, July 15, Miranda made theater history all over again, inaugurating what could be a new Broadway tradition with the first official #Ham4Ham performance. Now, a couple of times a week, even those Broadway fans who can’t see Hamilton—because they didn’t win the lottery, or because they live far away from New York—get a special show just for them, in person or on the Internet. Lin-Manuel Miranda has already transformed the kinds of performers, the modes of storytelling, and the kinds of music that can make a classic Broadway musical. Now with #Ham4Ham he’s transforming the way that Broadway connects with, and rewards, its fans….continued”
Like Esperanza Spalding performing at President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony (before anyone knew who she was…subsequently winning a grammy in 2011 )
“It was a D.C. lawyer’s dream come true, a Hollywood premiere for a movie based on the novel he wrote in his spare time. But when “The Revenant,” the highly anticipated new film adapted from Michael Punke’s book, had its big opening in L.A. — an evening featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu — the author was nowhere to be seen. He was 10,000 miles away in Nairobi, putting the finishing touches on an international trade agreement enacting a $1.3 trillion trade deal covering GPS devices, semiconductors and touch screens. Punke, 51, may be having the literary moment of a lifetime, more than a decade after his novel was released to high praise but modest sales, but as the deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Switzerland, he’s missing out on a lot of the fun…..
In fact, he wasn’t even allowed to talk about “The Revenant” for this article. Federal ethics rules prohibit him from doing any side work — even a little promotional campaign — that might enrich him and potentially abuse his high-ranking office in the process. “Oh, he wishes he could talk about it,” said Tim Punke, who in addition to working for a Seattle lumber company has become his brother’s de facto spokesman. “Can you imagine having your book turned into a movie, having Leonardo DiCaprio in it?” Of course, if the book goes on to sell a bajillion copies, Michael Punke is allowed to cash the checks. He just can’t do anything to push it along. “It’s kind of bittersweet,” said Traci Punke, Michael’s wife, who flew to the premiere with their two kids from their home in Geneva. “He’s so grateful that it just happened, that it came to the big screen, that he can’t complain. But he’s obviously disappointed.” Granted, Michael Punke has nothing to complain about. It’s not as if he’s been mauled by a bear, left for dead by his compatriots and sent traipsing through hostile Indian country like Hugh Glass, the early-19th-century protagonist of “The Revenant.” It’s a gripping story, historical fiction blending the lonely terror of “Castaway,” the driving vengeance of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and the landscape of a classic old Western the kind of tale that you can imagine being scrawled under flickering candlelight in a remote cabin with the help of stiff bourbon…continued”
This lines up with that HRC tweet I posted upthread:
“CHARLESTON, S.C. — As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court. “They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.” When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters. After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout “You lie!” at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.
CBC chair Butterfield: “It’s more than a political motive — it has a smell of racism." https://t.co/v69r446KZi
….“Our president, the president of the United States, has been disrespected from Day 1,” Carol Richardson, 61, said on Wednesday as she colored a customer’s hair at Ultra Beauty Salon in Hollywood, S.C., a mostly black town near Charleston. “The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.” Reflecting on the Supreme Court vacancy, Bakari Sellers, a former state representative from Denmark, S.C., likened the Senate treatment of the president to the 18th century constitutional compromise that counted black men as equivalent to three-fifths of a person. “I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,” Mr. Sellers said. “It’s infuriating….continued”
The US media promotes any and all displays of utter stupid by the GOP and RWNJs. Giving air space to the conspiracy theories about Scalia’s death is my Number 1 example.
Some years ago when my mother died the law stated that there must be an autopsy – because she died within 24 hours of an operation. Because of this, on the day she died I had to wait for hours at the hospital as the police had to be called & they had to interview the doctors, nurses and myself (fortunately we were allowed to send my father home). The following day we received a call from whoever it was (I can’t remember) in charge of autopsies. After checking all the evidence, they saw no reason not to certify a natural causes death & unless the family wanted an autopsy – it was no longer required. Of course we declined the offer – as did the family of Scalia. That the media allows idiots to see this as the great conspiracy is disgusting. Such pundits should be laughed of the stage – not encouraged.
More and more the media is making the US a laughing stock on the world scene. The only thing people see with great relief is the fact that BHO is still the president of the United States. Come January – who knows what may be.
… because I have no doubt that if there’s anyway he can do it, he’ll go to Iran before completing his Presidency. It would be the ultimate FU to the @GOP, for sure.
Doing my floating in & out of TOD, apologies if this has been posted already. Not the best video quality, but, HEY!, it’s POTUS, and more fun with Ellen:
OK, one more drop-by, quick visit. We all know the madness in SCOTUS & a dude called Clarence (we could make a whole little song about him, be it blues, country, rock, damn any genre). Article at link below made me just … !! …..!! But, I’m sticking to my reporting (story) below, just sayin’:
“Today at 1:59pm EDT, I saw official looking people holding some white-tighty-no-openings-kinda-jackets (aka NOPE!) on the ready, right on the steps of The Court. [As an aside: please let’s give peace & understanding to that NOPE! acronym, even though some letters are misfits, okay? No child left behind and all. Oh speaking of no child … NOPE! recently rescued JEB’s ! — it’s his non-effective placebo after all. See they’re 4 in above paragraph messing with those damn party pooper full-stops, totally liberated from JEB.]
[Back to the report (story)] MSM is calling it “Breaking News: Affirmative Action.” On the very steps of The Court? Hold on … now MSM is flashing BREAKING NEWS [Geez. we’re in screaming mode now … hold on to your Hazmats] …. NOPE! is now in Formation with Bey Berets who’re in full Superbowl-How-Dare-They-OMG-it’s-Black-Panthers-Not-MJ-gear.
[Commercial break, MSM is rushed away in an Whambulence, could only make out a few words: Brain…Surgery…Carson..Nooooh.]
Meanwhile, Bey Berets & NOPE! hook up with Fabulous Citizen who joins in Formation and all dance/sing & distract Clarence long enough to wrap him up in karma-gauze, and drop him into his designated [Cess]Pool. Bey Berets & NOPE! & Fabulous Citizen could not Sing in Harmony ‘cos of that Coke can b’ness. Pepsi would have made a Max outta that! Oh, and Ginni is happily skipping all the way to the C-Pool, cuppa tea bags & all on her …. whatever.”
The Obama Diary 
Thanks a traaaaaaaaaaazillion Nerdy!!!!
GE, Chips! Thanks Nerdy 🙂
Helloooooooooooo LP!
Hey there! So sorry to hear about your boy 😦 WTH happened?
I have so many boys in my life now LP – do you mean my fighting dogs or my limping Rooney?
2 month injury to Rooney 😦
Pretty awful LP, but seeing as this season has been so rubbish it’s not really the end of the world – they were never going to win anything any way (nothing meaningful).
I’m in the same state of mind as a coping mechanism after Carolina lost the SuperBowl….
chief mischief maker.
Meeeeeeeeee???? 😇
getting into trouble with boyz. getting boyz into trouble. so, yeah, YOU.
😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆
Perfect 🙂
OMG – that is FABULOUS! Now we know why the Prez will “skip.” And Scalia probably will have his “last laugh,” if you get my drift.
I’ve been busy of late but I saw this and thought this would be something of interest:
great tweet.
Thanks, Desi!
Great news, Nerdy. Thank you!
Sad to hear GOD retired his twitter account….at least Aaron Rodgers got to thank him after his playoff hiatus and two *hail marys 😀 😀
Interesting article considering the PBO news today and the opening of 110 commercial flights/day announced yesterday:
This is a hilarious backstory on some of the things a SOS has to deal with “diplomatically”
U.G.K & Houston’s finest:
Has any other SoS had every last email about anything published to the world. Did we see all of the emails from the Bush SoS (x2)
I find the GOP and the US media would sell their country in any attempt to smear PBO and HRC. What happened to all the patriotism which stopped any discussion on those WMD. The world will be 4 years of hell if any GOPer is elected President & at the minute – from the outside looking in – it sure appears to be a likely event.
I once met Huey Newton at UCSC. He was a soft spoken guy working on his PhD.
Huge downpour right now in SF. How you SoCal TODers are getting some of this!!
We are getting rain also Meta. It started around 5:00.
Great! It’s a good soaking here…..maybe more tomorrow, too.
I hope so Meta.
GE COS.
For the first time since July, can say that we’re actually getting the rain that I only hear is dousing the LA area.
Started raining around noon in eastern Ventura County, and forecast is for rain through most of the night. 🙂
Downside is that weather.com predicted that the rain would start tonight (instead of early afternoon) so I didn’t move my succulents to covered area — hoping they survive getting waterlogged this afternoon.
Arapaho, I planted a cilantro plant this summer and it did not do well. I thought it was dead. After the first rain, I looked in the back yard and saw this green thingy from afar. Lo and behold, it was my cilantro plant, healthy, green and robust. I immediately picked some and made fresh salsa. 🙂 Rain works wonders.
egg.sack.lee
I literally just starting singing to myself, “I love the nightlight!” (Yes, you read that right.)
Thus forevermore proving my nightlife is a little different than oh I dunno maybe yours. 🙂
you want me to getouttahere, dontcha?
I’m probably the very least of your worries. Ha!
This is really cool 😎 😎
The Show Is Nonstop #Ham4Ham, the joyous, free sidewalk performances outside Hamilton that are stoking the passions of a new generation of theater lovers: “For the past four months, the best show on Broadway has been spilling out into the streets. It started on the night of Hamilton’s first preview. The much-hyped, history-making show was sold out—except for the tickets that are sold via lottery two hours before showtime to lucky day-of visitors. Hours before the first preview was to begin, more than 700 fans showed up hoping to enter that ticket lottery—a pre-show turnout of the sort that hadn’t been seen since the closing night of Rent….
….Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton’s composer, lyricist, and star, seems to have a special place in his heart for lotteries and against-all-odds stories. His first musical, In the Heights, centered around what happens to the neighborhood of Washington Heights when the owner of a small bodega (played in the show’s original run by Miranda) discovers that he sold a winning lottery ticket worth $96,000. His newest musical tells another improbable success story, about “the founding father without a father” who went from orphaned immigrant to George Washington’s right-hand man. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Miranda responded to this extraordinary turnout of fans hoping for lightning to strike: Caught by surprise and moved by the crowd, he came out the stage doors onto 46th Street to give a short speech to the crowd. The afternoon of the next show, on Tuesday, July 15, Miranda made theater history all over again, inaugurating what could be a new Broadway tradition with the first official #Ham4Ham performance. Now, a couple of times a week, even those Broadway fans who can’t see Hamilton—because they didn’t win the lottery, or because they live far away from New York—get a special show just for them, in person or on the Internet. Lin-Manuel Miranda has already transformed the kinds of performers, the modes of storytelling, and the kinds of music that can make a classic Broadway musical. Now with #Ham4Ham he’s transforming the way that Broadway connects with, and rewards, its fans….continued”
Like Esperanza Spalding performing at President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony (before anyone knew who she was…subsequently winning a grammy in 2011 )
…he is always ahead of the game!
Not often a genius is such a warm and generous human being too!
Ha, brilliant!!
United States Navy among the military services to commemorate Black History Month:
YEAH…
can’t believe POTUS is going to CUBA!!!
This is fantastic.
“It was a D.C. lawyer’s dream come true, a Hollywood premiere for a movie based on the novel he wrote in his spare time. But when “The Revenant,” the highly anticipated new film adapted from Michael Punke’s book, had its big opening in L.A. — an evening featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu — the author was nowhere to be seen. He was 10,000 miles away in Nairobi, putting the finishing touches on an international trade agreement enacting a $1.3 trillion trade deal covering GPS devices, semiconductors and touch screens. Punke, 51, may be having the literary moment of a lifetime, more than a decade after his novel was released to high praise but modest sales, but as the deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Switzerland, he’s missing out on a lot of the fun…..
In fact, he wasn’t even allowed to talk about “The Revenant” for this article. Federal ethics rules prohibit him from doing any side work — even a little promotional campaign — that might enrich him and potentially abuse his high-ranking office in the process. “Oh, he wishes he could talk about it,” said Tim Punke, who in addition to working for a Seattle lumber company has become his brother’s de facto spokesman. “Can you imagine having your book turned into a movie, having Leonardo DiCaprio in it?” Of course, if the book goes on to sell a bajillion copies, Michael Punke is allowed to cash the checks. He just can’t do anything to push it along. “It’s kind of bittersweet,” said Traci Punke, Michael’s wife, who flew to the premiere with their two kids from their home in Geneva. “He’s so grateful that it just happened, that it came to the big screen, that he can’t complain. But he’s obviously disappointed.” Granted, Michael Punke has nothing to complain about. It’s not as if he’s been mauled by a bear, left for dead by his compatriots and sent traipsing through hostile Indian country like Hugh Glass, the early-19th-century protagonist of “The Revenant.” It’s a gripping story, historical fiction blending the lonely terror of “Castaway,” the driving vengeance of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and the landscape of a classic old Western the kind of tale that you can imagine being scrawled under flickering candlelight in a remote cabin with the help of stiff bourbon…continued”
I think Harry Lennix from ‘The Blacklist’ would be perfect….this is all hypothetical of course:
Will Smith does have the ears for the job! LOL
This lines up with that HRC tweet I posted upthread:
“CHARLESTON, S.C. — As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court. “They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.” When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters. After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout “You lie!” at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.
….“Our president, the president of the United States, has been disrespected from Day 1,” Carol Richardson, 61, said on Wednesday as she colored a customer’s hair at Ultra Beauty Salon in Hollywood, S.C., a mostly black town near Charleston. “The words that have been said, the things the Republicans have done they’d have never have done to another president. Let’s talk like it is, it’s because of his skin color.” Reflecting on the Supreme Court vacancy, Bakari Sellers, a former state representative from Denmark, S.C., likened the Senate treatment of the president to the 18th century constitutional compromise that counted black men as equivalent to three-fifths of a person. “I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,” Mr. Sellers said. “It’s infuriating….continued”
So true.
The US media promotes any and all displays of utter stupid by the GOP and RWNJs. Giving air space to the conspiracy theories about Scalia’s death is my Number 1 example.
Some years ago when my mother died the law stated that there must be an autopsy – because she died within 24 hours of an operation. Because of this, on the day she died I had to wait for hours at the hospital as the police had to be called & they had to interview the doctors, nurses and myself (fortunately we were allowed to send my father home). The following day we received a call from whoever it was (I can’t remember) in charge of autopsies. After checking all the evidence, they saw no reason not to certify a natural causes death & unless the family wanted an autopsy – it was no longer required. Of course we declined the offer – as did the family of Scalia. That the media allows idiots to see this as the great conspiracy is disgusting. Such pundits should be laughed of the stage – not encouraged.
More and more the media is making the US a laughing stock on the world scene. The only thing people see with great relief is the fact that BHO is still the president of the United States. Come January – who knows what may be.
My calendar is marked for those two days. I will be taking that Monday off…
And we even have a revamped U.S. Embassy there where he can stay, if need be!
I’ll say good night by posting this, once again ….
… because I have no doubt that if there’s anyway he can do it, he’ll go to Iran before completing his Presidency. It would be the ultimate FU to the @GOP, for sure.
Yes WE Can ….
You know, Bob, if he could find way to go to Cuba that would be absolutely historic and the right thing to do.
I keep reading POTUS FLOTUS not attending Scalia’s funeral. Why should they attend Scalia’s funeral? I don’t think he should.
I read PBO is going to pay his respects when Scalia is lying in state.
Doing my floating in & out of TOD, apologies if this has been posted already. Not the best video quality, but, HEY!, it’s POTUS, and more fun with Ellen:
Thanks, Gazelle! 😀
OK, one more drop-by, quick visit. We all know the madness in SCOTUS & a dude called Clarence (we could make a whole little song about him, be it blues, country, rock, damn any genre). Article at link below made me just … !! …..!! But, I’m sticking to my reporting (story) below, just sayin’:
“Today at 1:59pm EDT, I saw official looking people holding some white-tighty-no-openings-kinda-jackets (aka NOPE!) on the ready, right on the steps of The Court. [As an aside: please let’s give peace & understanding to that NOPE! acronym, even though some letters are misfits, okay? No child left behind and all. Oh speaking of no child … NOPE! recently rescued JEB’s ! — it’s his non-effective placebo after all. See they’re 4 in above paragraph messing with those damn party pooper full-stops, totally liberated from JEB.]
[Back to the report (story)] MSM is calling it “Breaking News: Affirmative Action.” On the very steps of The Court? Hold on … now MSM is flashing BREAKING NEWS [Geez. we’re in screaming mode now … hold on to your Hazmats] …. NOPE! is now in Formation with Bey Berets who’re in full Superbowl-How-Dare-They-OMG-it’s-Black-Panthers-Not-MJ-gear.
[Commercial break, MSM is rushed away in an Whambulence, could only make out a few words: Brain…Surgery…Carson..Nooooh.]
Meanwhile, Bey Berets & NOPE! hook up with Fabulous Citizen who joins in Formation and all dance/sing & distract Clarence long enough to wrap him up in karma-gauze, and drop him into his designated [Cess]Pool. Bey Berets & NOPE! & Fabulous Citizen could not Sing in Harmony ‘cos of that Coke can b’ness. Pepsi would have made a Max outta that! Oh, and Ginni is happily skipping all the way to the C-Pool, cuppa tea bags & all on her …. whatever.”
Peace & Much Laughter!
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/02/11/clarence-thomas-race-issue-jim-crow-georgia.html
Morning all! Good little read from Mr. Krugman…
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/my-unicorn-problem/?_r=0
Morning!
http://theobamadiary.com/2016/02/18/early-bird-chat-667/