Obama's first 87 days

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Hello, everybody. It is good to see you. Just had an excellent meeting with Prime Minister Rudd and his team. Obviously there are very few countries that are closer than the United States and Australia. And Prime Minister Rudd's government, I think, has shown the kind of vision not just domestically but on the international stage that we greatly admire.
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It's really rather remarkable that we're at this place. Not just because it seemed an impossibility with ballsy Hillary leading the polls, or in Australian when Howard was re-elected and some of us considered getting in a leaky raft and heading for Java.

Obama has been elected, he's reversing some repulsive Bush laws and trying to reverse a major economic meltdown by consulting both sides of congress.

Howard sits smug sipping chamomile in Wollstonecraft while Rudd further buries his asinine legacy in - oh, the glorious irony - a cloak of openness and transparency.

And now Obama and K-Rudd are striking up a chummy rapport that looks scarily like the wide-grinned, smirky good times Howard had with Dubya at Camp David.

But how has Obama gone, now that the symbolic 87 days has been reached (symbolic because no one else cares about it and I get in 13days early)?

Obama has struggled to fashion a clear message - is he pessimistic or optimistic about the recession. Bit of flip-flopping there - and that point, about two months in, was when I first realised that he has spin doctors in his ear. They don't have the sway of Karl Rove et alm - See Obama on every mag cover except the most obvious one: O magazine - but his cards were played a little wildly until he started looking stern yet hopeful when he was asked about the economy.

Obama's face can tell a thousand words. Jon Stewart noted Obama hasn't pulled out his 'shut the **** up' face since his deputy made some major gaffes. Through his first 87 days Obama has kept a look of 'I was made for this job' as much as a look that silently yells 'I'll get you, you kids that left me to clean up your unholy mess'.

I listen to the New Yorker's 'Comment' podcast which observed this week that Obama as had it easy from the Republicans as they squabble over the best stance to take on O's stimulus package. Hilariously, most are happy to say it's irresponsible to spend so much cash when the economy (and debt) is swelling under so many GFC pressures. But spending IS at least half the method to getting out of a rut. That's why men got out and dug useless holes in the great depression, only to fill them in again. (Tax cuts are the other half, which just shifts the source of the money to be spent).

And can they complain about overspending when they just unloaded a 3trillion dollar debt onto the next President.

At least Howard isn't sniping at his replacement from the sidelines.

Costello is doing enough sniping for Rudd to feel he has an impotent opposition in common with Obama too.

Lastly: good speeches. Where are they Obama? It's not West Wing enough for me so far. We have only hjad one HOPE CHALLENGE AMERICAN DREAM oration so far!!

Thankfully, the humour and wit is back in the oval office. Obama is razor sharp and can hild journos at bay in a media scrum without missing a chance to make an awfully risky joke now and then. Rudd has some work ahead to keep up with his new buddy if he is still to become Deputy Sherrif.

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Auden's poem

What a poem.

Auden; September 1, 1939
 sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
 Waves of anger and fear
 Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
 Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night
.Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong.Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trash Important Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now,Who can reach the dead,Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.

Do u enjoy this poem?
What would take u there?  Maybe if u were in there, unravelling his contradictions and sorting the rhetoric from the moral pronouncements. (Those to whom evil is done...)

But what's going on that u were challenging yourself on such brutally obvious standards (love each other or die).

I haven't read this poem before (shock!) And now I find it became an author's-grave-turning hit in the days after sept.11. (Horror!)

I enjoy the poem for the way the simple life of people is put up against the calamity and distress of his predicament - and ours, eternally.

Hang on. Skyscrapers? Is he dead even? Seems he could still be kicking. Ring him! Allege that as a child u were afraid of the night and that in God's eyes we are neither happy nor good. That should put the fire up his conservative dark.

Buckle-blog.blogspot.com

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Latest thoughts on U2 NLOTH

I think they have put the sense of humour back in but maybe its TOO irreverent?

I also can't get the image out of my head that its a shimmery pink ballon covering a rough object. Spherical, but pointy in parts. Like sputnik!
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Schoolgirl, 15, makes small fortune as prostitute | News.com.au

The terms "child prostitution" must not have got enough clicks. This headline is appalling base logic from Australia's biggest news website.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25113466-401,00.html

Up next: pedophile gets hilarious sneak peek at friend's kids
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