You might be asking yourself: why, Mike, would you post something about the NBA when you should be talking about Obama’s speech in Cairo? Well, the good writers of the internet beat me to it. Plus, my NBA post sucked anyway. Double Plus, the speech speaks for itself. You just know it’s good. I just needed to write something.
But now, onto that amazing Cairo speech. Isn’t it great to have a president that makes America look good? I’m still getting used to this.
Editorial, New York Times
When President Bush spoke in the months and years after Sept. 11, 2001, we often — chillingly — felt as if we didn’t recognize the United States. His vision was of a country racked with fear and bent on vengeance, one that imposed invidious choices on the world and on itself. When we listened to President Obama speak in Cairo on Thursday, we recognized the United States.
Racists Crying Racism
BarbinMD, Daily Kos
Keeping them Honest
Paul Krugman, New York Times
Health reform will fail unless we get serious cost control — and we won’t get that kind of control unless we fundamentally change the way the insurance industry, in particular, behaves. So let me offer Congress two pieces of advice:
1) Don’t trust the insurance industry.
2) Don’t trust the insurance industry.
Official Jobless Rate Hits 9.4%
Meteor Blades, Daily Kos
The number of unemployed, according to the household survey, rose 787,000, meaning 14.5 million Americans are officially out of work. The director of a highly respected quarterly survey of Corporate Financial Officers said Thursday that 4 million more jobs might be lost before the end of 2009, which would jack up the official rate of unemployment into the neighborhood of 12%. Since the recession began in December 2007, the number of unemployed Americans has risen by 7.0 million.
Minority Report a l’Obama
Matt Taibbi
Everywhere I go I keep hearing people say, “How come Obama is letting X happen or Y happen, how come he’s letting his underlings do Z? It seems so unlike him!” It reminds me of the way people view leaders in Russia. Going back centuries, Russian peasants wrote impassioned letters to the Tsar, sure he was completely unaware that his Grand Dukes were all thieves and his okhranka agents were rapists and torturers. Now that Obama’s on the scene a lot of Americans are demonstrating a similar public desire to believe in the good king. Obama seems so decent and intelligent, it’s hard to imagine that his act is just a big sales job, that he’s really just a smooth-talking shill for a bunch of Wall Street bankers and Pentagon generals. So people tend to scramble for the exculpatory explanation: he’s being tricked, he’s unaware, his hands are tied, and so on.
