People lined up overnight to hear the President speak at the Orange County Fair Grounds. Are they going to call it Obamapalooza?
“This almost looks like tickets are going on sale for U2,” said Orange County Fair CEO Steve Beazley. “A seated president has never made an appearance here. … It’s a pretty historic event.”
“Rock concert atmosphere on Obama ticket line“, OC Register
From 1994 to 2002, I worked for a intelligence and law enforcement software and consulting firm. And I learned a few things, especially post 9/11.
For my current job, I fly, on average, very other week. And the TSA screening process never fails to surprise me with its sheer waste of my time, patience and tax money. I don’t know who to blame: the low-skilled lackeys that operate the screening gauntlet, the mid-level “security experts” who manage the operation, or the policy-level political hacks who want to maintain this illusion of security.
I found a kindred spirit in Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
From The Wilson Quarterly:
In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published an even more influential study, The American Voter. They described “the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate,” noting that “many people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy.” Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work using surveys from 2000 and 2004 found that things haven’t changed much in the past half-century.
David Samuels’ “Invisible Man: How Ralph Ellison explains Barack Obama” in The New Republic is a fascinating exploration of Barack Obama as portrayed in Dreams of my Father:
Obama’s decision to identify with the lineage of his black Kenyan father to the exclusion of his white U.S.-born mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and her parents allows him a measure of release from the cruel racial logic that binds Ellison’s narrator—he comes from outside American society, and therefore he is not entirely bound by the overdetermined racial logic that unites the children of slaves and masters. Yet, while Obama’s rejection of his “white blood” may seem familiar from the writings of African American authors like Malcolm X, it is actually much stranger; Obama’s partial “whiteness” is not the product of an ancient rape by an anonymous slave-master but is instead the color of the mother who raised him. Obama’s embrace of authenticity separates him from Ellison’s profoundly modernist consciousness, and prevents him from seeing the serial absurdities of his own story. Where Invisible Man bubbles with fiery, absurdist humor, the narrator of Dreams rarely cracks a smile. One can only imagine what Ellison would have done with Obama’s straight-faced account of his futile career as a community organizer in Chicago, or with the incredibly juicy character of Dr. Jeremiah Wright—a religious con man who spread racist and anti-Semitic poison while having an alleged sexual affair with a white church secretary and milking his congregation for millions of dollars and a house in a gated community whose residents are overwhelmingly rich and white.
I was asked why I wasn’t keen in actively supporting California’s Prop 8, the “Marriage Protection” proposition, and this is what I wrote:
I don’t know that I’m so much against Prop 8 as I am not for it.
I’m against the government invading our religious and personal lives. I think there are duties that belong to the Church, and duties that belong to the Civil Magistrate. (I think the revisions made to Westminster Confession of Faith 23.3 that appear in the PCA’s standards are wise.)
To be brief, I think Christians allowed (and even mandated) the government to become involved in areas only the church has jurisdiction, and this is most evident in education, marriage, and the family. Where we have tried to instill our values and concerns in society using “the power of the sword” it has only been turned back on us. (Read Neil Postman’s Building a Bridge to the 18th Century for the example of protestants creating the public school system.)
My understanding is that not until the mid-1800s were marriage licenses issued by the state; until then marriages were a church and private matter. My layman’s reading of history is that marriages increasingly became licensed to prohibit inter-racial marriages and to criminalize polygamy (especialy among Mormons). The real invasion by the government in regulating marriages was in income taxes and government social programs.
We continue to tie ourselves tighter to the government as we want more tax deductions for marriage, for children, and so on. We have dined with the devil, and we’re surprised the meal has been poisoned.
