Obama 06.19.09

i'm just joking ... i know where my bread is buttered ...

no place for empathy on the bench? i understand what you're feeling ...

FOX? you get AIG

i'm not the salesman-in-chief ... come'on people, work with me here ...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"that looks like me ... look at those ears"

a priest, a scholar and a judge




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Obama in Cairo, June 4, 2009

"... There is so much fear, so much mistrust. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world.

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples – a belief that isn’t new; that isn’t black or white or brown; that isn’t Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today.

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.

The Holy Koran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.”

The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”

The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God’s peace be upon you."


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KOKO Taylor, September 28, 1928 – June 3, 2009

Koko Taylor


Chicago Tribune: ... Growing up on a sharecropper's farm outside Memphis, young Cora and her three brothers and two sisters slept on pallets in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity. By the time she was 11, both her parents had died. She picked cotton to survive, and moved to Chicago in the early '50s to be with her future husband, Robert "Pops" Taylor, who died in 1989. She found a job working as a domestic, scrubbing floors for rich families.

... on weekends would attend the blues clubs on Chicago’s burgeoning South Side scene, the heyday of Chess Records and such stalwarts as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. She would occasionally sit in and caught the ear of Dixon, who approached her...

"I didn't know Willie Dixon from Adam's house cat," Taylor recalled in an interview with the Tribune. "But he says to me, 'I love the way you sound' and, 'We got plenty of men out here singing the blues, but the world needs a woman like you with your voice to sing the blues.' ”

Eduardo Galeano: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

GRITtv : Eduardo Galeano the author most recently of Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, published by Nation Books has spent a lifetime reflecting on the lives — political, cultural, and historical — of the people of the Americas. Back in April Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy of Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America.

"Impunity is the daughter of oblivion. ... we are afraid of thinking, feeling, remembering ... the owners are the owners of a great factory of fear ... fear of words, fear of memory, fear of the Other one ...
every year chemical pesticides kill three million farmers, every day workplace accidents kill no fewer than ten thousand workers, every minute poverty kills no fewer than ten children ...

to recover human history from the point of view of the invisibles"



also: Democracy Now interview: John Berger: "To publish the work of Galeano is to publish the enemy -- the enemy of lies, indifference, forgetfulness ... his tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness, furious."

Frankie Manning: Never Stop Swinging

"I just danced"

Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought

Science Daily: "The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that."