Jacob Philadelphia

Jacob Philadelphia was five years old when he visited the Oval Office and asked if his hair was like mine. That photo became one of our favorites – a reminder of the power of seeing yourself in your leaders.

Today, he's graduating from high school! Check out our recent reunion. pic.twitter.com/gB39hFS3Wp

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 27, 2022

Audibly Gasped

somehow had never seen this photo and audibly gasped at it, so now here it is for you pic.twitter.com/YgT0QXnoKk

— Emmy Bengtson (@EmmyA2) April 15, 2020

The Obamas Watch ‘A Raisin In The Sun’

****

Michael Schulman: Watching The Obamas Watch “A Raisin In The Sun”

On Thursday, the cast of the Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” was told that a “high-level official” would be coming to the show the next night. Who could it be? Kathleen Sebelius had just resigned—maybe she had more time for theatregoing? Word got out on Friday afternoon: the Obamas were coming to Broadway. By seven o’clock that night, Forty-Seventh Street had been partitioned off, and the Barrymore Theatre was swarming with security guys—not an unwelcome sight, after the Times reported that Broadway has had a tough time attracting men. This was not Obama’s first act of Presidential playgoing. In 2009, he and Michelle went on a date night to August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” and the First Lady has brought her daughters to “Memphis” and “The Addams Family.” “A Raisin in the Sun” was more than a safe choice: it was an undeniably poignant one. It premièred in 1959, and made Lorraine Hansberry the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. The story follows a black family in Chicago preparing to move into a big, fancy house, despite resistance from their conservative white neighbors. (Sound familiar?) And its themes are as lofty and as loaded as Obama’s: upward mobility, the pain of progress, and, as Sarah Palin might put it (though Hansberry certainly did not), “that hopey, changey stuff.”

The lights went down, and the door to the street swung open. A stream of people, including the President, the First Lady (in black), and Valerie Jarrett, snaked through to the back of the house and then down the aisle. Ignoring the announcer’s pleas, the audience leaped to its feet—this usually happens at the end of the show—and camera flashes twinkled in the darkened theatre. The Obamas shook some hands and took their seats. It’s not often that a single member of the audience commands more attention than the action onstage, and in the initial minutes there was a jittery energy that distracted from the story. Denzel Washington got his usual entrance applause (and a few catcalls from the balcony). If it took a while to buy him as Walter Lee Younger, it wasn’t because Washington is twenty-four years older than his character: Obama’s Obama-ness somehow increased Denzel’s Denzel-ness. At intermission, the Obamas went backstage to meet the cast, as patrons flooded the bar.

Act Two was sprinkled with unspoken moments of meta-theatre. When Walter asks his son, Travis, what he wants to be when he grows up, the boy says, “Bus driver.” His father urges him to dream bigger, and the words “President of the United States” seemed to waft in the air momentarily. In the end, the Youngers take the house, defying the enmity of the “welcoming committee.” They are the change they’ve been waiting for. At the curtain call, the Obamas joined the audience in a standing ovation, and Denzel Washington tipped his fedora to the President, flashing his matinee-idol grin. Scott Rudin, the powerhouse producer, said, “I pretty much cried the whole time.” Bryce Clyde Jenkins, the thirteen-year-old who plays Travis Younger, was still beaming. “I was in school at 11:08 when my teacher, Miss Bernadette, pulled it up on the computer that the First Lady and the President were coming to the performance tonight,” he said. “I kind of jumped for joy inside myself.” Did he find it hard to concentrate onstage? “No,” Jenkins said. “We have a responsibility to the people who are in the show and the Obamas to put on a good show and treat them like they’re our last audience.”

More here

****

picasso? eat your heart out….

Apologies for this silliness, but I felt an overwhelming need to share……

Does anyone here play Charadium on their iPads/iPhones?

It’s just an online game where you’re given a word that you have to draw, and everyone else has to guess what it is.

So, my word was ‘crook’.

Now, at the best of times I can’t draw, but how do you draw crook?

Shut up, I didn’t think of that.

So I opted for a pic a bit like the one at the top … and cheated just a little by scrawling ‘Romney’ under my, um, art.

😳

Some of the guesses from the ‘players’ just made me – literally – weep:

Slimeball

Slick

Cheat

Tax

Taxes

Rich

Wealthy

Millionaire

Billionaire

Snob

Dick

GOP

Republican

Turd

Flipflop

Fraud

Liar

Creep

…and…

Crook!!!!

I won!!!

I’m honestly not making this up.

My most loved online poll, ever.

chat away

Quarterback Barrett Trotter #14 of the Auburn Tigers holds a sign depicting President Obama during the game against the LSU Tigers, October 22

****

Michael Tomasky (Daily Beast): Hey, suddenly “leading from behind” is looking pretty good, isn’t it? This instantly infamous phrase, spit like rusty nails out of the mouths of neocons and other foreign-policy bigwigs ever since it appeared in that New Yorker article …. described a way of conducting multilateral foreign policy that has achieved electrifying results.

…. a truly multilateral intervention to rid the world of one of its most tyrannical dictators, undertaken with no loss of American life? This is a first. It’s a very big deal….

…. let us note how the Obama record on Libya compares with the neocon record. Libya was the great case of neocon hypocrisy in the Bush years. The neocons were supposed to be different from the Kissingerian realists, right? The neocons cared about spreading democracy and freedom. But all they spread in Libya was more tyranny…..

…. The Republican electorate may eat up potshots at Obama for being weak, but I doubt the broader public is buying it. A president who iced bin Laden and has overseen the ousters of two leading autocrats (and a couple of other minor ones) is not weak. Leading from behind, the sneerers forgot, is still leading.

Full post here

****

Jill Lawrence (Atlantic): The Republicans aiming for the White House might be well-advised to pack it in on foreign policy for a while and cede the field to President Obama…..

…. In a world ever more complicated, dangerous and economically fragile, he can make a strong argument that he deserves re-election based on his record as commander in chief…..

…. Obama has an unmatched record of targeting and killing terrorists and helping others to do so ….. What’s more, whether it’s killing terrorists or navigating the Arab Spring, Obama has been for the most part quiet and judicious and has avoided igniting anti-American sentiment across the globe….

…. Obama has taken enormous incoming for saying that pre-1967 borders with land swaps should be the foundation for Mideast peace talks … yet he recently intervened to help rescue six Israelis during an attack on their embassy in Cairo and opposed the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Obama deserved a “badge of honor” for his stand at the U.N. and told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama is as much a friend to Israel as Bush and other presidents.

…. in looking at him as commander in chief and leader of the free world, the GOP would prefer that people ignore what’s been going on in the real world. It brings to mind the old Marx Brothers joke: “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Full article here

****

Taking a break from dictator-toppling:

President Obama leaves Joint Base Andrews outside Washington after playing golf, October 22

****

Michael Williams (The Guardian): President Obama’s latest foreign intervention in Libya reflects an evolution of the American way of war and the crystallisation of the “Obama Doctrine”. Gone are the “shock and awe”, trillion-dollar campaigns of the Bush era – right on cue, the president has followed Thursday’s news of Muammar Gaddafi’s death with Friday’s announcement of the final pullout of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. In this age of austerity and public fatigue with foreign exploits, the Obama White House has diligently combined military force, technology, intelligence assets and patience to rack up an unassailable list of “wins” for the president on foreign affairs.

The success and strength of the the president’s doctrine lies in the fact that it is not doctrinaire. The Obama Doctrine is based upon the very pragmatic concept that the United States should defend primary and secondary interests when it can, but that there is no hard-and-fast rule on intervention. There is no “off limits” zone à la the Monroe Doctrine, no Truman-esque hard line such as the containment of the USSR that led to the Vietnam war. The Obama Doctrine is also a far cry from the Bush Doctrine’s “you’re either with us or you’re against us” mentality, which held that democracy promotion could be achieved via direct regime change – so saddling the US with $1tn of debt and an unwinnable war in Iraq.

The Bush Doctrine played right into Osama bin Laden’s hands; the Obama Doctrine killed Bin Laden…..

Full article here

****

BobCesca.com – Thanks Marlz

****

wavegate

I promise, I’m not making this up – edp4bho let me know about the latest Fox/Teabagger outrage (even Brian ‘serious journalist’ Williams ‘reported’ it): the President held his right hand up for .23 seconds during the ‘family’ photo at the United Nations this week (he was jokingly gesturing towards the photographers, asking them if they had enough photos yet), obscuring the face of the man beside him for, well, .23 seconds.

Honest, this is actually being reported as news!

Well, true, it’s right up there with invading Iraq on false pretenses.

Actually, I love this stuff – it shows just how desperate the President’s opponents are. I mean, is that all they’ve got? 😆

***

Were there any wave-less photos? Um….

….. and dozens more.

🙄

historic successes, historic delays

ruby

President Barack Obama, Ruby Bridges, and representatives of the Norman Rockwell Museum view Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” hanging in a West Wing hallway near the Oval Office, July 15, 2011. Bridges is the girl portrayed in the painting. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

AOL (2010): When Ruby Bridges arrived for her first day at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans 50 years ago, she thought it was Mardi Gras. People lined the streets, shouting and throwing things – just like a Carnival parade. But these people weren’t celebrating.

At 6 years old, Bridges had been unwittingly thrust onto the grand stage of American history. Her parents had volunteered her to be the first black child to attend an all-white school in the South. Local law enforcement refused to protect her from the unruly mobs that surrounded her school, so every day she was escorted by four federal marshals – the scene immortalized by Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With.”

That first day, all the parents had rushed into the building and taken their kids out — effectively boycotting the school. The school didn’t quite know what to do; Ruby was told to just sit in the principal’s office until it was time to go home.

“I remember thinking, ‘This school is easy,'” Bridges told AOL News.

Since then, Bridges grew up, raised four sons and worked as a travel agent before returning to a career as an educational activist that she had started at such a young age. But while her educational career eventually subsided into a normal New Orleans childhood – albeit one charged by forced integration – those exceptional first days in school had shaped her for life.

Full article here

cover story

Des Moines Register: Better Homes and Gardens will feature First Lady Michelle Obama on the cover of its August issue — the first public figure to grace the magazine’s cover in 48 years.

Obama will be the focus of an article on healty eating for children. The issue will hit newsstands July 19.

Editors from the magazine, which is owned by Des Moines-based Meredith Corp., and the first lady co-hosted a picnic in May for D.C. fifth-graders. The magazine features photos of the picnic and an interview with Obama about her efforts to promote healthful habits.

More here

Thanks COS

night everyone

President Obama speaks to a crowd gathered inside a hangar at Muniz Air National Guard Base, shortly after his arrival in San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 14

****

Text of President’s remarks today here

Video at C-Span here – thanks Doris 😉

****

****

****

If you have even 10 spare dollars please consider donating to Obama/Biden 2012. You can donate directly at the Organizing For America site (here) or through The Obama Diary page at OFA (here) – just $320 to go before this little blog reaches its $2,000 target. Thank you again to everyone who’s donated, hugely appreciated 😉

***

Bonus pic …. an oldie but a goldie: