babbling blue

Basically, it seems that President Obama is kicking ass in the pirate department.

(click image for full size)

Ripped off from here, possibly ripped off from here before that.

Yarrr!

Welcome to my part 1 in my 1461 part series* on Barack Obama’s first term!

Some would argue that yesterday was Day 1 of the Obama presidency. That position has some merit, but a) it was only a half day and b) it’s kind of like the first day of school. . . you don’t really do anything of substance. So I’m calling today Day 1.

Has he fixed everything yet? It couldn’t be that hard, right? Let’s check in…

• The Dow regained most of what it lost yesterday. Well, that wasn’t really his doing…
• Hillary Clinton got confirmed as SecState by a vote of 94-2 (the nays were cast by Jim DeMint, R-SC and David Vitter, R-LA).
• Obama ordered a pay freeze for his senior staff
• and tightened rules on lobbyists
• “establish[ed] what he said was a new standard of greater government openness”
• ordered a halt to pending war crimes trials at Gitmo while he reviews the handling of terror suspects (he actually did that last night. . . not bad!)

Sounds like a decent start, I guess. If “fixing our problems” (I’m going to be deliberately vague on this) is a cross-country drive, then President Obama is packing his bags. Hey, that’s important. You need clean clothes and toothpaste for a trip like that. It’s hard to respect a President with dirty, rumpled clothes and bad breath and spinach in his teeth. Tomorrow he’ll probably check the tire pressure and the anti-freeze and blinker fluid. It’ll take awhile before he can actually get on the road, and who knows how bad traffic is going to be? He might even get lost, or go antiquing, or spend too much time at a Waffle House or. . . oh I’m on a tangent.

I like to think that I’m a realistic optimist, or an optimistic realist. My brain is not firing on all cylinders right now (bonus points to me for continuing the automotive metaphor!) for some reason, so I can’t think what the difference might be. But anyway, I have Hope that things are going to Change. I think they will, but it’s going to be a long, slow process (he doesn’t drive a very fast car) and there are going to be problems (it’s not that reliable either). I know that Obama is only human, and there are limits to what he can do. He’s not perfect; he’s going to do some things I disagree with. However, I feel things are going to get better. Really…how can they not?

*Just kidding.

I haven’t been blogging much about politics, or at all really. I have just really lost all my enthusiasm for this election. I was a firm Obama supporter, but I am not any more. I will most likely vote for him in November, but being in Illinois it doesn’t really matter. I still think he’s better than McCain, but . . . well, I was really hoping to not have to choose the candidate that I thought was less bad for the first time since I started voting. Now, that’s how I’m feeling again. Obama has demonstrated himself to be a standard politician in reformer’s clothing, and not even a particularly shrewd one.

At some point Obama started drifting (or some say veering) to the right. That made me nervous. Then he did something that really turned me off. After saying he would vote against it, he turned around and voted for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. I don’t want to go off on a tangent on FISA 2008, but suffice it to say there were a number of bad things in there, not just retro-active telecom immunity. That’s for another post.

Anyway, Obama has been called pragmatic (most recently by Joe Biden, I believe), and some would argue that his vote was politically necessary. I argue that as Americans, our civil liberties are not pawns to be sacrificed on the political chess board. They are the foundation of this country. Voting for the amendments upset a lot of people. There is a group on my.barackobama.com with more than 23,000 voters, created to urge Senator Obama to vote against telecom immunity in FISA.

And now we know his Veep candidate. Joe Biden. Biden has been called a blowhard, a wind bag and a number of other things. While he’s probably not a bad guy, he his enamored with the sound of his own voice and is–as such people often are–inclined to say some pretty stupid things, and get recorded doing it. Biden is known as Credit Card Joe and Senator MBNA because of his support for that wretched bankruptcy law written by the credit card industry, and more. And last but not least, he’s been in the Senate for 35 years. Hardly the symbol of CHANGE that Obama is trying to promote. In many ways, Joe Biden epitomizes the D.C. establishment that so many of us believe is FAILING this country so miserably.

After all that build up, the Biden announcement was a total disappointment. When the press leaked it late Friday, I hoped beyond hope that it was a fake out, and someone better would be announced soon. But I woke up Saturday morning and saw a text message from the Obama campaign that Biden was indeed his running mate. Blah.

So you see, I’m just finding it hard to care. I don’t want to just write bitchy blog posts, but I’m hard pressed for any other material.

If you are in Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa (they can vote?), Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee or Utah then tomorrow is Primary (or caucus) day for you. Please be sure to vote. This is one of the most important (and, in my humble opinion, interesting) elections of our time.

I’d prefer if you voted for Obama, but even if you vote for someone else the important thing is voting. I think it’s a responsibility as well as a right.