The First Family boards Marine One in Edgartown, Massachusetts
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HEY
LOVE THEM! Will miss them
It’s never easy to come back from a vacation–hope our First Family stored up lots of good memories. Said goodbye to our little granddaughter this evening and have come back to the real world with a thud. So glad to have TOD to come to.
I know it was a wonderful visit with your little granddaughter! Welcome back, just the same!
JO’B, I have never felt more exhausted, but I already miss her like crazy. Lost track of everything happening in the news and any grown up thoughts, but it was wonderful. I’m keeping you and your son in my heart for the 29th, if that’s still the date of his follow up procedure.
Yes, Aug. 29 is still the date, and I got a lump in my throat when I read your sweet comment … we both so very much appreciate it.
Nothing more exhausting than grandchildren, I agree! My 3 oldest are 22, 24 and 26 this year, but I remember when they were little and I’d have them for the weekend … I’d keep the older two happily busy and I’d “force” (Ha!) my mother (in her 70s), who lived nearby, to take care of the baby! Exhausting!
But worth every second, of course. So glad you had such an enjoyable time with her! She’ll never forget the love and warmth you give her.
GE JackieG.
Glad to see you’re still in one piece after your whirlwind guest this week!
Saw this article yesterday which might be of interest to you, since your Salsa Festival (not sure of the name of event) is next weekend:
From the article:
“Albert Morales, a former DNC official who was responsible for Hispanic voter engagement, said neither of President Obama’s campaigns had Latino voter directors in those states [NC or PA]. Given Clinton’s current strengths in states such as Colorado, Virginia and Pennsylvania, ‘they’re hiring because they’re [HRC campaign]not having to spend millions of dollars on TV in Colorado or in the Philadelphia market.'”
snip /
… “the campaign’s outreach efforts in Arizona and Georgia are likely to mirror what is underway elsewhere. During the Democratic primary campaign in Nevada, the Clinton campaign focused on organizing Hispanic women, encouraging them to find friends and close relatives to join the campaign and airing a television ad that showed Clinton comforting the daughter of undocumented immigrants.
In Pennsylvania, the campaign is touting her economic message as it mobilizes Puerto Rican transplants who fled the island’s economic woes. Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania are found primarily along the ‘222 corridor’ — a squiggly stretch that runs along a state highway with that number from Bethlehem in the east through northern neighborhoods of Philadelphia and south toward Lancaster. The region has been a magnet for Puerto Ricans seeking manufacturing and farming jobs and a lower cost of living compared with traditional enclaves in New York, New Jersey and Florida.”
Thanks you, Arapaho. It’s the Fiesta Latina. Salsa the Vote is the event we hold on the Sunday before the election as a rally for GOTV. There is a considerable Puerto Rican population is our area, but also Dominican and Mexican and the numbers are growing every day.
Congrats, eyecandi! Glad the Obamas got the restful vacation they deserve! The next few months will be very intense.
Yes, they will, Judith, and just thinking of it makes me tired, but we’ve got many miles to go before November 8 and lots of work to do. Good thing we’re all in this together.
They’re *back*….and they had some ‘uninterrupted’ time! Yeeeaa! 😀 😀
Looking at those pics, couldn’t help but think that to the unassuming and relaxed Obama family, it’s the end of a short vacation together, but to those who surround them, it’s one more day of a “career” experience they’ll never forget. They’ll be talking with their own families about the Obamas, for generations to come.
Prayers to Wendell Pierce and family. His home was hit badly by the floods in LA.
Yes, I was so sorry to hear that. Love the guy!
These #WhiteFAILEDLives need a lot of educate’n …..
#ALL50
#YESWEMUST
Someday, one of these organizations will stop focusing on the vectors (@GOP, @NRA) of the disease focus on it’s cause – a few insatiably greedy #WeaponsProfiteers ….
#ALL50
Thanks NW for this update;
Glad to see the First Family back at the White House. I trust they are ready to run through the tape during the next months.
heads up to those of us “eternal worriers” who were concerned about the strange stuff that appeared on one of the photos of boarding Air Force One:
– well, after some bit of hesitation, I decided to find the website of Joint Andrews Air Force Base. There is an option to contact them.
I followed the form and sent them a short but very polite note thanking them for their service.
I then asked them to look over that plane one more time. I told them that it is probably nothing to them professionals but for us lay people, this had caused alarm. I thanked them again for taking our concerns seriously.
I can now rest a little easier …. you can never tell the things that keep gnawing at your conscience;
ps:
although Mr. Mark Knoller had included their Twitter account in his tweets, I decided not to use Twitter;
I chose email so as to avoid putting them on blast and exposing them to people who are ready to pounce and make “a scandal” about everything. I know the staff that maintains and operates these planes do the best they can and so many others serve in different capacities to make everything run smoothly
Good night TOD!
Thank you {{{{{NW}}}}} ….. Miss you {{{{{Chips}}}}} ….
Sweet dreams Bobfr, and thanks for all your posts today. Great job!
I always worry about those being one of the nine biblical lepers (Ten Lepers) who did not return to say Thank You;
growing up, I interacted with many people who suffered from (but were being treated for) or had recovered from leprosy (many with lost limbs).
Leprosy is one of those debilitating diseases that leave permanent damage.
Our parents home was within walking distance of our nation’s prominent Leprosy hospital which was run by the catholic church parish I attended.
Click on JKR’s tweet to read an excellent thread on #Voluntourism…
even when black people are minding our own business, these zealots can’t leave us alone;
the punks are itching for a fight … if not worse
They have illustrated what is really the problem: in this country ONLY white lives matter. Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people know this in our very bones.
mentally unfit? fiscally unfit?
Glad to see our First Family safely back! They all look wonderful (as usual) and rested. 🙂
There was an item mentioned in “This Week at Interior” that I thought might interest some of you. The National Park Service has created an African American Civil Rights Grant program with $8 million that will be awarded to document, interpret and preserve the sites and stories related to African American’s struggle to gain equal rights in the 20th century. Deadline for grant applications is October 14, 2016. More info at:
https://www.nps.gov/preservation-grants/civil-rights/
One thing I thought of was another item mentioned yesterday on TOD of the struggle to save the home of Langston Hughes.
What a good idea to highlight this, CD. Here’s the heads-up from the vid to go along with the link you provided.
This week’s @Interior’s recap seemed to cover a wide swath of the country.
Congrats to Rio for a successful olympics, despite 24×7 negative press.
To all the dolt athletes who skipped rio because zika!!!!, ha, ha.
Sigh, you’re calling me names again. I’d be one of those who chose not to go for more than one reason (I was skeptical, okay?), though I’m happy those who went had a good time.
where are the canoooks?
They’re there somewhere – I’m not the one to ask as I wasn’t there!
/whisper… Plus, also too, don’t forget my people are shy of the spotlight. We generally don’t like to push ourselves forward….like some others do. Just saying./
“Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.” – Winston Churchill
Indeed! 😀
Hello VC, AMK is not being fair to the “Canooks.” His mighty India, which is the second most populous country in the world, is not among the top ten countries that won medals at the Rio Olympics. Actually Canada won 22 medals,(4 Gold, 3 Silver, and 15 Bronze), whereas mighty India won only 2 medals: a Silver and a Bronze. Canada was # 20 in the Medals won, while India was #67.
By the way, I really enjoyed watching the women’s soccer match between Brazil and Canada, which earned your team a Bronze medal.
Thanks, Nathk. 😀 😀 It feels good to have a supporter ready to say the things I was/am too *modest* to say. I can hardly wait for Mr. Amk to see this and try to wiggle his way out of your very true observation. 😀
Yo Amk,; yo over here! What you got to say re Olympics now, eh? /smugly smiling … Tis so nice to have friends./ 🙂 🙂 🙂
Olympics? What olympics?
😀 I see I didn’t drop that quietly enough before I took off! 😀
I have to go immediately as I have 20 minutes to get ready to take offspring to the airport downtown. Later you ‘best-form-of-defense-is-attack’-er!
shshsh nath. Don’t give her any ideas.
Send this chart to Donald Trump to let him know that the United States is still GREAT, and winning all the time. The U.S. Received 51 more medals than China, and 65 more medals than Russia. Moreover, the U.S. Received more Gold medals than those received by China and Russia combined.
G’Night gentle people. Sweet [day/night] dreams!
no need for #namecalling.
Oops! Sorry I left you out of the
‘gentle’group. Wasn’t thinking. Too sleepy. G/night Amk, I iz off o bed now. Toodle-di-doo.beebs
The Rio Games brought first medals for Fiji, Jordan and Kosovo – and all three opened their accounts with gold, Fiji in the first Olympic rugby sevens competition.
Competitors from Bahrain, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Vietnam and Tajikistan, too, won their first Olympic titles.
Booman’s post on Saturday is very topical here. Fortunately most of the Berniebros have gone & his blog is readable again
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/8/20/125835/309
How the GOP Wants to Lead Failure
Taken as a whole, the Republican Party has, ever since its takeover by the conservative movement, done more than any foreign ideologues can ever hope to do to erode faith in the goodness of the American establishment. They’ve done this partly by being very bad at governing, but my focus here is on their messaging. During much of the latter Bush Era, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, and they had a friendly Supreme Court. They ought to have been able to argue that under their leadership the federal government was finally functioning as it should. But, even if this had been plausible based on their record, they could never have done it because their whole machine is geared to deride the tyrannical inefficiency of government. What they did instead was to blame their own failures on the very institutions they controlled, and on the media for never giving them a fair shake.
There’s even fallout on the left, because most people do not understand that the GOP has the power through intransigence and obstruction to make good institutions fail. During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Congress was a hive of action and productivity, with important and useful hearings occurring with such frequency that it was hard to keep up on CSPAN. During the last six years, CSPAN might as well not have not existed because there was nothing of any consequence or benefit to the nation occurring in Congress.
8/16/2016
Is Donald Trump Rigging the Election?: A Theory with Circumstantial Evidence
Let us say, and why not, that Donald Trump is not merely a blithering madman. In fact, let us say, just for a moment, a thought experiment, if you will, that the real reason that Trump is campaigning for president the way he has isn’t merely ego and bluster and neediness. Let us entertain the notion that what’s really going on is that Trump has already set in motion the rigging of the 2016 presidential election. If we do that, then everything he is currently saying and doing makes perverse sense. The big con, then, isn’t Trump running for president in order to do something else that’s more lucrative (like start a TV network). No, the grift is that he’s running as if he’s going to win because he knows he’s going to win.
Rikyrah, I actually think PA would be a very difficult state to hack for two reasons–1) the system is a hodgepodge of different voter recording systems, none of which connect to any central data base or to each other; and 2) the counties that set up the systems would have to be complicit in the process and the vote rich areas for Dems are controlled by local Dem governance. We also have a Democratic governor and a Dem Secretary of State.
Over and above all of that we usually have a very efficient poll watcher system in place during presidential election years. Each D poll watcher has a list of Democratic voters and checks them off during the day, so at the end of the day we have a pretty accurate idea of the number of Dem votes that should be recorded in that polling place. The last poll watcher–the most critical of all–stays in for the count, which must have at least one official counter from each party. The last poll watcher is there for the absentee and provisional ballot tallies and for the read out from the voting machines. If the readouts don’t tally with the information the poll watcher has in hand, he/she can begin the complaint process. Each polling place tally is then collected together by the county, where Dems and Rs put together the total, taking into account all complaints, and send them to the Secretary of State. The final count per county is confirmed that week by a bipartisan group of Dems and Republicans and it is that final count that determines the electoral college vote.
Also should add add that states with a single voting system, like Diebold, are more at risk, in my opinion, because there is a common code. The crazy quilt that makes up PA voting systems is a nightmare compared to the single system states.
GM JackieG…i am so thankful to you…for imparting your detailed knowledge of PA voting systems…you are such an important resource…i want to post your comments on my FB page…
as the GOP uses voter suppression to remain in power it becomes so important for each of know the details of how are votes are counted…i always thought that we needed one system for everyone…but now i am not so sure…
thanks Jackie
ps…so glad that you had a wonderful time with your grandbabie…these are times that you cannot get back….smile
Pf, it was an amazing experience and I was amazed at how much growth takes place in a short time at that age–she’ll be 4 on Sept. 4. The PA voting system is as convoluted as it gets with each county doing its own thing and none of it coordinated. Our machines are ‘dumb’ in the sense that they do not connect to anything. It also makes sense to get to know the people at your Voter Registration Office because if you have a good relationship with them, they will listen to and respect your opinion if you encounter problems on election day.
It also makes sense to get to know the people at your Voter Registration Office because if you have a good relationship with them, they will listen to and respect your opinion if you encounter problems on election day.
*********
Great Point….
my daughter was recently voted to be vice chair of the Abington-Rutlege Democratic Committee in Montgomery County….i am so proud of her….our goal it empower our community…we are planning a block party/back to school night…will tell you how it goes…
Congratulations to your daughter! The block party sounds like a great idea. Please do let us know.
Ha!
Good morning TOD!
#Erdogan’s infatuation with #DAESH brings even more misery to the Turkish people ….
Wishing you all a fine day …. {{{{{{Chips}}}}}} …..
Colin Powell is whining that the Clinton campaign is trying to ” pin it on him ” over the use of private e-mails.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…….this is the same man who actually LIED to the UN for the Bush Admin. about Iraq having WMD’s. They NEVER got approval from the UN to invade Iraq and it was deemed an ‘ ILLIGAL WAR’.
Just sit down Mr. Powell.
Hillary is tougher than all of these guys.
Though I am grateful for his endorsement, twice, of PBO in 2004 and 2008, Mr. Powell could never sustain what HRC has received these past 20 years. I remember how quickly he shot down any prospect of running for office after the first media attack on his family. You need resilience to run for office. Ask one PBO or one strong woman, HRC.
Well when she said that, I though the same thing as Colin Powell. So is is not a stretch to know she should have responded differently.
Bottom line is she made a bad call on the emails. However, she already apologized for it and said she learned from it. That was enough because in the larger scale of things, Trump is not an option. She should have kept it moving and left Colin Powell out of it.
Good Morning Everybody.
LIVE NOW: Sec’y John Kerry Holds Joint News Conference With Kenyan Counterpart in Nairobi – http://abcnews.go.com/live?stream=1
Morning everyone. Must be Monday. This is how you know he is NOT serious… ( among others)
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/292166-report-trump-discussed-continuing-apprentice-from-white#.V7ppT2MdSE9.twitter
Good morning df!!
Bob! I can’t stop laughing.
Good Morning to you and to all TODVille!
Morning, Bobfr:) Have a stupendous day!
By Timothy Cama – 08/19/16 04:51 PM EDT
A bipartisan quartet of former high-level Interior Department officials is supporting the Obama administration in its federal court fight defending a regulation on hydraulic fracking.
The officials — who served under presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — said a Wyoming judge was wrong in June when he struck down Interior’s fracking regulation and ruled that the department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) does not have authority to regulate the process at all.
“Congress has enacted broad organic statutes that govern mineral leasing and federal land management, and authorize the Bureau of Land Management to regulate oil and gas drilling activities on the public lands,” the former officials wrote in a brief to the Denver-based 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The federal judges are hearing an appeal by Obama lawyers and environmental groups seeking to reverse the Wyoming judge’s decision.
“Under these statutes, the BLM has for decades specified operational requirements for lessees engaged in oil and gas drilling activities. The hydraulic fracturing rules are simply the latest manifestation of this well-established authority,” they said.
The Struggle Continues….
Thank you Matthew Gertz for asking this. I have been wondering for several weeks when DT will put his stocks and businesses into a blind trust like all other presidential contenders have done, once they become the nominee. And more importantly, how he is going to do it considering the complexity of his business dealings, holdings, etc.
New post.
https://theobamadiary.com/2016/08/22/early-bird-chat-826/
🙂 🙂
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/southside-with-you-parker-sawyers-on-how-he-became-the-perfect-young-barack-obama.html