The problem with a smooth talker

I braced myself and watched 2 of Obama's 5 media blitz interviews this morning so I could say something intelligent about this unprecedented commandeering of the media by an American president. I was prepared for the revelation, at last, of the real nitty gritty answers to the urgent questions that have been fomenting so much unrest in America these past weeks. Unfortunately, Obama started his reply to every major topic with "As I have said before" so essentially,
he said nothing on 5 major networks over the course of 3 hours. The problem is he continued to say it with confidence and elegance.

Obama is a master elocutor. I don't think there has ever been a more polished (a.k.a. slippery) American public figure and certainly no politician near his calibre of masterful subterfuge. I hope that college rhetoric classes are already using his speeches as class material and will continue to do so. I even  more fervently hope that none of those students go into politics. The worst thing we could have is a smooth talking president.

The problem with such a verbal spell-weaver is that it takes time to think about and tease out what he is really saying from the pretty way he says it. This makes real-time intelligent responses to his statements impossible for even the most critical thinkers and experienced political analysts. It also means that the vast majority of the American public--whom he serves, NOT the other way around--will never fully understand what he is telling us. And that is simply not fair to the citizenry whose bidding he is supposed to be doing. Americans are entitled to a clear-speaking, comprehensible leader.

Alongside Obama's mollifying tone and reassuring demeanor are complex sentences that, upon scrutiny, play loose and fast with the meaning of the actual words he uses, shifting in a single interview or speech as many as 4 times. I analyzed Obama's 18 minute inaugural speech for an English class and discovered that, completely unnoticed to everyone, in the 61 times he used the word "we" he shifted his meaning of the word subtly but significantly at least 5 times!  (I'll post my complete analysis here a bit later.) That was just his acceptance speech before millions of blindly adoring fans. He wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything on that day and yet he could not help himself from his habitual chicanery. I encourage people to pay attention to Obama's use of the words 'power,' 'truth' and 'promise' in any of his public orations.

So it really does not bode well for us when Obama usurps the airwaves with more words and still less content. I don't know what he really thinks or intends to do about healthcare, Afghanistan, or of most immediate importance, his broken promise to not open an investigation into CIA actions under a former administration. All I definitively know is that Obama loves the spotlight even more than Paris Hilton and that's a very disturbing thought for a Sunday morning.

A mortifying lesson, but still a lesson

Let me set the scene by explaining that my university, UCCS, sells more parking permits than there are parking spots on campus--by a lot. So for those with classes that begin later than 8 am, cruising around and around the lots is inevitable. Couple that with minimum $30 parking violation tickets and you can imagine how tense it is to find parking at 10:30 in the morning.

This term I have a morning class at the Rec Center, which is about a half mile straight uphill from the rest of the campus. So I take part in the great central campus parking spot search every Tuesday and Thursday. Compounding my problem are the dimensions and turn radius of my very full size pickup. I am simply not fast enough or nimble enough to race for a spot being vacated in any of the open air lots. I am stuck carefully winding my way up past oblivious students, visitors and carelessly parked vehicles to the fourth level of the very tight parking structure, where the least desireable spots have not yet filled by midmorning.

All was well this morning when I parked. However when I returned to my pickup at 3 pm and started slowly winding my way down the parking levels I came to a corner where two fullsize pickups were parked tail to tail, leaving a hole for vehicles to get through that was just not wide enough for my pickup to turn into. I was stuck. There was a line of at least ten vehicles behind me, also trying to leave the parking structure. There were no parking police in sight. After two attempts at sawing back and forth to get to an angle that would permit me to fit, I finally rolled down my window and called to the SUV behind me that I couldn't fit through. I was picturing all these cars having to back up a crowding spiral ramp to let me back up out of their way. It was not a happy moment.

Now, as an aside, let me point out that I drove an ambulance in NYC for over ten years. I have taken large vehicles down sidewalks, through construction zones and sometime backwards uphill into busy ambulance bays at hospitals--often at high speeds. I know how to drive and I know the dimensions of my vehicle. I am not a girl in that way.

But here I was facing an insurmountable task, with all the guys in their little tuners honking at me from way up the line. Just then an old lady--I mean a really old lady, like old enough to be my grandmother--got out of her SUV and came to the front of my pickup to guide me through. She was so tiny and slow I was scared I would pin her and crush her. She waved her hands like a little bird, totally useless in terms of signalling whether I needed to go left or right or stop. I actually rubbed the bumper of one pickup once with my driver side door. But, she did it. She stayed calm (serene actually) through the long seconds and minutes of my repositioning back and forth to gain the right angle and then I saw in her eyes that I could make it. I made eye contact with her and got the go-ahead. Yes! I squeezed through, just barely. I thanked the lady wholeheartedly and got down the ramp as quickly as I could. Driving out of the parking structure, I wondered what I had just experienced.

Yes there was embarrassment and panic and grim determination with a cold metallic lump in my throat. But what struck me most was that my rescuer was not one of the young male pickup drivers behind me. They were content to sit on their asses in their air conditioned trucks and just honk at me. It was an ancient crone who was wiser than any of us and fixed the situation for us all. I have no idea why she did that. I have no idea why she was even up there in campus permit parking. I have no idea why I assumed she couldn't help me. But I came face to face with assumptions about what I could do and what she couldn't do and I was wrong about both. So there's a lesson learned.

God, please make Thursday not suck.

America has always allowed vocal dissent--not now?

We need more of the kinds of honest outcry that we saw from Representative Joe Wilson, not less. How dare those in power label it "heckling" and "incivil"?!

America is free-er than other nations because the disenfranchised are allowed to speak their views, loudly sometimes. That is a quintessential American right and it is not ok for the liberals to squelch it because it's not their views being crowed from the rooftops. CONSTITUTIONALISTS: SPEAK UP! YELL OUT! BE HEARD!

I am tired of Obama and his slick greasy-persuasive oratory style. I am sick to death of seeing him on TV everywhere everyday. He hasn't been President for a year yet, but he's usurped the right to appear on 60 Minutes 3 times already. He takes over prime time TV again tonight, on top of his 2 other public speeches this week that forcibly usurped all the TV airwaves. That's not Stalinesque? OBAMA DOES LIE, EVERY SINGLE DAY!

I never knew I could hate a politician this much. I never knew one pretty benign-looking man could do so much damage to the country I love in so short an amount of time. I thought we had better safeguards in place to prevent this. But it's a perfect storm of liberal bullshit coming together. WE MUST PROTECT AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION, by any means necessary.

Why government-provided health care is a bad idea

I recently read two wonderful opinion pieces that speak to the real issues that condemn the concept of "public" health care to failure. Both of them come back to human nature--that which no amount of legislation will alter.

The first is by Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. Mr. Sowell's article, The Great Escape, reflects on how modern culture has created an age in which people take no personal responsibility for consequences of their own actions and behavior. I suspect that the babyboomers who led the brigade of the 80's "me generation" segued into the 90's "don't bring my head down" spoiled brats who saw their problems as everyone else's fault. This extends to my obesity or heart disease or diabetes or crack baby being your fault. If you caused my problem, then by this reasoning, you need to fix it.

Although America already has the best health care in the world, these people want better, even perfect, health without having to change their bad habits. They expect a little blue pill that will magically allow them to eat badly, sit around, smoke, drink and do drugs without health repercussions. And they're just crazy enough to think that government control of the healthcare system will give them this.

The other opinion is a guest column in the Colorado Springs Gazette from MD Gregory Sharp. It's entitled, Insurance Shouldn't Cover Day-to-Day Repairs to Our Health. Dr Sharp draws the analogy between health insurance and a government-subsidized auto policy. If you have great coverage for non-necessities, the impulse is to use it, and often. Since you don't see the costs, it's human nature to be lazy about buying your own routine care. Just let your car get run down and let the government fix it every time something breaks. But this model is unsustainable and only encourages people to rely on government care rather than take personal responsibility for the health of their car (or their body.)

Obama and his nanny state supporters have a fundamental error in their perspective on who should be responsible for a person's well being. If Obama succeeds, we become those useless human blobs from Wall-e. We also become the most taxed citizens in history. We must not let them succeed.

No one wants their kind of "Progress Now Colorado"

This morning I was spammed with a covert smear on the brilliant and reasonable pundit, Michelle Malkin. I am sure the wrong person to have accidentally gotten this email!

This despicable organization is using email lists from other ultra-liberal freaks, uh groups, to secretly malign Michelle Malkin, her book and her reputation. They claim she incites extremists to violence and slanders the President. As you know, slander is a legal term that has very serious ramifications.

The root of this underhanded smear is that they are green with envy that her book is outselling their book. But that gives them no excuse to malign her in a secret email campaign.

So here is my call to you:

• Buy Malkin's book and if you agree with her assessment of the culture of corruption that exists in American politics today, 

• Email the executive director of Progress Now Colorado and tell him you don't want his kind secretly spreading lies about good Americans and promoting more of Obama's socialism. His email is bobby@progressnowcolorado.org

Michelle Malkin's book happens to be on sale right now at amazon.com

Please act today while we still have the Constitutional freedoms that Progress Now Colorado seeks to destroy.

Friends Don't Let Friends Go Back to the 80's

Have you seen the department store ads and fashion magazines recently? They're trumpeting a return to the 80's in clothing, hair and make-up. Even the music of the 80's is having a weird renaissance. What gives? It hasn't been so long that we can't remember how awful that decade was. Here's a list to jog your memory and help you avoid a terrible mistake:

1. Boy George
2. Neon green leggings, lace fingerless gloves, skinny checkerboard ties, white plastic stilettos
   
3. Hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, Leona Helmsley
   
4. Political correctness, Jane Fonda
   
5. Miami Vice pastel blazers with padded shoulders and pushed up sleeves
6. Mullets, big frizzy perms, shaved sides of your head, side ponytails
   
7. Wham's Wake me up before you go-go, Hall and Oates' Maneater, Duran Duran anything
   
8. 3.5" floppy disks, brick cell phones,
   
9. the Yugo
   
10. Cyndi Lauper

So don't let this happen to you or anyone you know.

Mozilla's great community service project

What a brilliant idea! Use the power of the web to connect schools, libraries, organizations, people with great ideas about how computers could benefit them to all the tech heads roaming the web--able and willing to help.

September 14-21, 2009 is Mozilla Service Week.

From the folks who bring us Firefox and Thunderbird for free, here's some of their own words about what this week can be:

Mozilla believes everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they're online. By utilizing our community's talents for writing, designing, programming, developing, and all-around technical know-how, we believe we can make the Web a better place for everyone.

It's not just for ubergeeks either. Anyone who uses a computer can help someone who doesn't. From Mozilla Service Week FAQ:

I'd really like to help and make a difference, but I don't have many technical skills. What can I do?
The Internet makes people's lives better in the largest but also in the smallest of ways. You don't have to code or design – we know you have lots of skills that could help people. For example, you could show someone how to use Skype, how to shop online, how to register for a webmail account, or get email on their phone. All of these things might seem small, but they could make a big difference in someone's online world. Every action counts!

As someone who's helped wire an elementary school, hooked new parents in the US to grandparents in India via webcam and skype, and had a blast watching my 91-year old father learn his way around both Macs and PCs, I can securely say: Do it! Get involved! You will reap so much more than you give.

...and the hidden bonus is that, in one week, you could expand your community from a few blocks to an entire planet; what could be cooler than that?

Be afraid of Obama, be very afraid

I don't know if Barry Noreen was intentionally trying to be provocative in his opinion column on Friday, but it is clear that he does not grasp the difference between this week's upcoming Presidential address to impressionable school children and those of previous presidents.

When the previous presidents addressed schoolchildren, their topics were clear and appropriate for underage audiences. Bush I spoke on the importance of resisting peer pressure to use illegal drugs. Bush II spoke to a single school group on the importance of being able to read and do math. Neither dictated that their message be broadcast into every school in the US. That forcible reach is indeed reminiscent of Hitler's manipulations of innocent children. It is right for adults to feel uneasy about this. And actually, Mr. Noreen, there is a huge difference between kids watching this kind of TV message in the classroom or at home with their parents.

As we all now know, President Obama's original set of "lessons" for our children included such topics as "what can you do to help President Obama." If that is not an intent to indoctrinate, I don't know what is. And even though Obama's handlers have backed off that extreme lesson plan, it sent a clear signal to parents that cannot be dismissed. This president's intentions with his speech are not as innocent as his predecessors. Parents should be concerned about what is being "taught" to their children when they themselves are not present. Until they are old enough to make their own reasoned choices, our children should reflect beliefs and attitudes learned at home, not from their teacher and definitely not from any celebrity, however much power he has.

Obama has shown his propensity to meddle in industries outside of Washington politics. He has his fingers in the control of banking, auto-making and, if we let him, healthcare. But he crosses another line altogether when he reaches--without prior consent--past the parents to our children. This breaks the sanctity of parents as the teachers of moral values to their own children. It is an inappropriate intrusion by government.

Furthermore, unlike virtually every other politician in American history, Obama has never left 'campaign mode.' His insistence on constantly putting his face and his opinions in front of everyone is not appropriate behavior for an elected official. It is certainly not appropriate to target young children with his "I'm smart, I'm cool, don't you want to be like me?" message. It apparently works on the liberals in our society, who have lifted  him (inapproriately) to celebrity status. It is not ok to influence school children with this kind of marketing pressure.

So, Mr. Noreen, yes it is easy to see who's afraid: it is every reasonable, thinking adult in American society.