Some behind the scenes pictures from Election Night.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/

I've seen some of the pics before. Very nice. What a great looking family hu?

Poor guy sure is walking into a world of shit isn't he? At least we know that he is organized, and strategic, and smart... but where to begin.

Btw, just off the wall, I heard more than one person say that when they saw Obama he was taller than they expected. I don't necessarily see him as being that tall. Anyone know?


TIS

He's only 6'1".

That is a good point.

Much love to all my fellow half castes out there!!

Which is weird, because watching FOX NEWS after that press conference, alot of those pundits needled him for it, but not necessarily got outraged or trashed him for it.

Either way, smooth move by the Obama folks to kill a buzz-kill before it could gestate.

You just know the Republicans are waiting anxioulsy for whatever Obama's first move is, so they can criticize it. Did you hear Joe Scarborough's phony outrage when Obama picked Emanuel for his chief of staff? Per Joe, "it's like a slap in the face." I don't know Emanuel real well, but figure if Scarborough is pissed, it's gotta be a good move.


TIS

The "mutts like me" remark was epic!

It shows how at ease Obama is when talking about race; how it shouldn't be a subject where we have to walk on egg shells when discussing it.

Well he said that Emanuel is the GOP version of Tom DeLay, which is interesting.

The theory behind Emanuel is good: OBama having a psychopath Jew Enforcer to kick the ass of the useless/incompetent/pathetic Pelosi & Reid leadership in Congress, because to quote Pat Buchanan, "he knows where all the bodies are buried."

His Nancy Reagan remark disappointed me a bit, not because I thought he has any mean-spirited feelings about the former first lady, but because I thought it lacked the discretion, decorum and judgment he had shown on the trail.

Plus, just when he's talking about being a unifier, he doesn't need to be perceived as taking a gratuitous swipe at someone like Nancy Reagan.

This was taken care of appropriately. He similarly put his foot in his mouth when he made the remark about people clinging to their guns and bibles. That remark reflected generalizations that I thought he was above. Anyway, this will disappear if he does the job we elected him to do.

Notice how during the course of his campaign, Obama has off-cuff joked less and kept to his disciplined answers to all the issues....like his Iranian answer yesterday.

I saw on the news that folks in Kenya are also very excited about Obama due to his roots there.

They were in a maternity ward and all the boys born recently were called Barack and all the girls Michelle.

If this is happening all over Kenya it is going to be a very confusing place a couple of generations down the line with everyone having the same name

Hey Republicans. If Obama screws up, you can call him Obuma.

That same phenomenon is occuring with blacks in America as well.

I mean better Barack than Fiddy (50 Cent) or Terrell (Owens) and so forth.

Interesting article on one of Obama's grand schemes for America in the 21st Century when he's inagurated:

Obama: world's first tech revolutionary

The most significant cabinet decision by President-elect Barack Obama will be the creation of a Chief Technology Officer. This is unprecedented and will, more than any other cabinet position, define his presidency and launch the transformation of government from its current nature to what’s known as the 2.0 world.

America’s CTO will not only assume the job of cyber-protection for the government against terrorists, hackers and criminals. But it will revolutionize governance itself and here are the main goals:

1. The CTO will be responsible for enhancing and financially supporting technology of all kinds: environmental, scientific, engineering, medical. This will include massive funding for green (US$150 billion in 10 years), biotech, computer tech and pure scientific research but will also involve incentives to universities to step up engineering graduates annually from 60,000 a year to double that number within half a generation.

2. America’s CTO will be responsible for making the government more transparent, accessible, responsive. Like the Internet-savvy Obama election machine, this President-elect wants to stream meetings live which are held between cabinet ministers and business CEOs or their organizations; he wants to post on government websites legislation for five days to solicit public comments; he wants to provide other interactive policy sites, chat rooms and forums so that citizens can participate in governance and he wants to streamline or convert government departments and their websites into efficient service-providers.

3. Extend broadband access to all Americans, up from the 23% which now can tap into the Internet and its vast store of information or services. The U.S. ranks 15th in the world in this regard, according to the OECD.

4. The CTO will interface and lobby for more open immigration policies to attract more of the world’s brainpower to its government-funded research projects.

5. Obama’s America will earmark money to upgrade and computerize the country’s education system.

6. His plans include cleaning up the patent protection and copyright processes to end frivolous and vexatious litigation as well as “trolling” or tweaking existing protections to create new, invasive ones.

America will dominate innovation

It’s an ambitious agenda and very much on the mind of Obama’s generation of younger people who got out of the vote and will want to continue to have a say during governance, as was the case during the campaign.
At the same time as transforming government through transparency and access and interactivity, the Obama ambition is to foster America’s greatest strength which is innovation and invention.

This is not going to be a government which broadcasts and delegates power, but Obama’s post-politics platform is going to be a Manhattan-project designed to truly bring about government by the people and for the people.

It’s ambitious and will only succeed if the CTO is an inspired choice and the normal governmental impediments are removed with the help of Congress.
One touted to be a potential candidate is Lawrence Lessig, a brilliant digital age scholar who I have met at conferences in the U.S. He is founder of Stanford University’s Center for the Internet and Society. He believes the creation of a CTO is inspired.

“I do think the CTO could be a critically important position, from deciding how to make government more efficient and transparent through technology, to helping advance public policy questions like those surrounding global warming,” he said in a recent interview with an American periodical.

A cabinet-level CTO position would be more lofty and powerful than the presidential science advisor and may be the most important economic and business initiative undertaken by the Obama Team. It could, if successful, insure that the United States will remain the world’s pre-eminent high-tech nation.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/francis/archive/2008/11/07/second-thoughts.aspx

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All sounds good to me!

I was just reading about this RR. It sounds like a great plan, with so many possibilties. Heck, due to outstanding staff, planning and coordination, the internet paid for his entire campaign. This is probably an example of one of the many possible changes coming. Like JFK was the first "tv" President (more or less), Obama will become the first internet President.
Although I couldn't list for you columns of ideas, I see this idea only the beginning of what "could" be. A new generation is on the rise. The torch has been passed.


TIS

Lot of optimistic people here... I don't share your enthusiasm TIS/RRA. He has been talking, talking, talking... he should pause for a while, accomplish some things and then make more promises.

Yea, perhaps it's not good to be overly optimistic. It's just that we've had 8 years of sheer hell and it's hard with this talk of change that we so badly want not to be optimistic. I keep telling myself it'll take at least a full term to dig out of the tanked economy on top of the mess Bush has left us with. God know what other disasters Obama will find that we don't know about. Any "forward" sign IS encouraging and that's a good feeling.


TIS

And do what exactly now? He aint President for another 2 months.

I just think President-Elect Obama has some potentially good ideas, like his "America 2.0" goal approach, or how apparently he has NO plans to raise the corporate capital gains tax for 2009 and maybe 2010 too (that'll piss the liberals off).

Another is that he wants to also have the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) back off on raiding medical marijuana farms, and instead re-direct those resources and manpower to the Mexican border to combat that epidemic stemming from the border towns in Mexican being run de facto by the drug cartels....which I think is a good pragmatic approach.

Also, as reported on Fox News, Obama apparently is NOT in favor of reimposing the "Fairness Doctrine" at the FCC, which if the Liberals in Congress get their way, would force for example FOX NEWS programs to have an "equal" dissent voice (i.e. Liberal) .

From his campaign website:

[i]Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters. He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible. That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets. [i]

Wouldn't it be something if President Obama becomes the best friend for the Right-Winger shitheads like Limbaugh and Hannity?

Obama Positions Himself to Quickly Reverse Bush Actions on Environmental, Social Issues

By Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 9, 2008

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse the president on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

Are you suggesting that a liberal equates a socialist? Liberalism has nothing to do with economical issues, or if it remotely does, it surely goes against socialism per se (Protecting individual rights as opposed to that of society). The fact that many liberals happen to be in favor of socialism doesn't make it okay to refer to all liberals as socialists.

Not that anything is wrong with socialism. In fact I hear Sweden is the place to live.

In US, there is no real Left part that way.

I was refering to traditional liberal economical interpretation that because people on top of social-economical scale have MORE money, they can afford to pay MORE taxes.

American Liberals are different from Liberals in Europe, Asia, etc....likewise with American Conservatives to their counter-parts elsewhere.

God, Europe is just fucking Obamaphile at the moment. Remember when they blamed America for everything, including late trash pick-ups and ass-pimples?

Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics (NERD)

• He was known as "O'Bomber" at high school for his skill at basketball

• His name means "one who is blessed" in Swahili

• His favourite meal is wife Michelle's shrimp linguini

• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father

• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed

• He has read every Harry Potter book

• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali

• He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can't stand ice cream

• His favourite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars

• He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in Indonesia

• He can speak Spanish

• While on the campaign trail he refused to watch CNN and had sports channels on instead

• His favourite drink is black forest berry iced tea

• He promised Michelle he would quit smoking before running for president – he didn't

• He kept a pet ape called Tata while in Indonesia (BADASS)

• He can bench press an impressive 200lbs

• He was known as Barry until university when he asked to be addressed by his full name

• His favourite book is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

• He visited Wokingham, Berks, in 1996 for the stag party of his half-sister's fiancé, but left when a stripper arrived

• His desk in his Senate office once belonged to Robert Kennedy

• He and Michelle made $4.2 million (£2.7 million) last year, with much coming from sales of his books

• His favourite films are Casablanca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Where GODFATHER?)

• He carries a tiny Madonna and child statue and a bracelet belonging to a soldier in Iraq for good luck

• He applied to appear in a black pin-up calendar while at Harvard but was rejected by the all-female committee.

• His favourite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees

• He took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date

• He enjoys playing Scrabble and poker

• He doesn't drink coffee and rarely drinks alcohol

• He would have liked to have been an architect if he were not a politician

• As a teenager he took drugs including marijuana and cocaine

• His daughters' ambitions are to go to Yale before becoming an actress (Malia, 10) and to sing and dance (Sasha, 7)

• He hates the youth trend for trousers which sag beneath the backside

• He repaid his student loan only four years ago after signing his book deal

• His house in Chicago has four fire places

• Daughter Malia's godmother is Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita

• He says his worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry

• He uses an Apple Mac laptop

• He drives a Ford Escape Hybrid, having ditched his gas-guzzling Chrysler 300 SUV

• He wears $1,500 (£952) Hart Schaffner Marx suits

• He owns four identical pairs of black size 11 shoes

• He has his hair cut once a week by his Chicago barber, Zariff, who charges $21 (£13)

• His favourite fictional television programmes are Mash and The Wire

• He was given the code name "Renegade" by his Secret Service handlers

• He was nicknamed "Bear" by his late grandmother

• He plans to install a basketball court in the White House grounds

• His favourite artist is Pablo Picasso

• His speciality as a cook is chilli

• He has said many of his friends in Indonesia were "street urchins"

• He keeps on his desk a carving of a wooden hand holding an egg, a Kenyan symbol of the fragility of life

• His late father was a senior economist for the Kenyan government

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopi...t-not-know.html

Well you see, that may be called a liberal by nowadays right wingers, to taint the name of a liberal, but that doesn't make it a liberal. Liberal has a literal meaning and I appreciate it if you stick with it. But of course members of DNC in the US are more of a social democrat than pure liberals, or if any liberal gets on their raft is to protect his civil rights. Call them democrats, but not liberals. Thank you!

Libertarians ring a bell?

I meant a communist/socialist party. Left is a loose term, mostly relative to the "right"

Actually there's a socialist party. They also had a candidate. He came on The Colbert Report before the election. Colbert asked him if he was mad how Obama is called a socialist.

communist is almost a pejorative, as in "commie bastard" lol