♫ Fight The Glower!!! ♫

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♫ Fight the glowers that be! ♫

Who's going to miss that angry scowl?

Michelle and Melania

Link to video

"Michelle Obama Lets Loose on Race in Graduation Speech"

"The road ahead is not going to be easy... It never is, especially for folks like you and me."

"As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others," she told the class of 2015. "Was I too loud or too emasculating? Or was I too soft? Too much of a mom and not enough of a career woman?"...

"Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover," Obama told the graduates at the historically black Alabama college. "It was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and a machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I'm really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder 'just how are people seeing me?'"...

"We've both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives. The folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety, the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores. The people at formal events who assumed we were the help," Obama said. "And those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country, and I know that these little indignities are obviously nothing compared to what folks across the country are dealing with every single day. Those nagging worries about whether you're going to get stopped or pulled over for absolutely no reason. The fear that your job application will be overlooked because of the way your name sounds." (video at the link)

Michelle Obama goes to the Museum

“You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood. In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”

 

Via Jon Gabriel tweet

Florida Florist

Did you see in the news White House florist was quietly dismissed? Speculation is that the florist's French style did not comport with the first lady's more modern preferences. Wouldn't you love to see those emails?

We have no shortage of flowers here.

“It’s one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala,”

Barack Obama said.  (The Blaze)

“It’s another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress.”

You and your imaginary son again.

Stephen Miller has an hilarious piece on Obama's imaginary son on Ricochet.com. Every other sentence has the word "imaginary." Readers come out of it sticking the word "imaginary" in front of everything.

His imaginary son was shot by an imaginary neighborhood watch guard. But his imaginary son is plucky and resilient and has lived a(n) imaginary hard life in the (imaginary) hood so he keeps bouncing back.

See? Stephen Miller misses a few chances to insert the word "imaginary." But that's only because he's trying so hard to avoid being completely obnoxious. And at this point, I don't.

The piece starts out about Michelle Obama's "wonderfully" publicized visit to Target, hardly disguised at all. Funny, she looks perfectly ordinary to me. And I mean perfectly ordinary. Nothing says perfectly ordinary than a woman wearing a boy's baseball cap. And I mean nothing does. Good grief, she could be anybody. The only woman who even spoke to her was a woman asking for help to reach an item on an upper shelf.

Asked her for help!

Gawl! Doesn't the woman know she is speaking to a queen incognegro?

Oooooh, the indignities one suffers due to the color of one's skin. I'm still trying to process "wonderfully publicized." And where was her security detail? Were they all dressed like plebes too? 

Recommended reading for fun and for mockery.

school lunch snacks

FLOTUS plan to allow only healthy snacks inside public schools across the United States is a smashing success.

Go Out and Play!

By KaBOOM.

$39.00 (29.00 elsewhere for the backpack alone)

What do you get? What's inside? What are the activities?

1) A book by the same title. About activities and games. The ultimate antidote to "Mom! There's nothing to do! 

The book is rated highly on Amazon, 4.5 stars. By four people. One review that I thought had to be put on, too glowing and warm and positive, caused me to check who wrote it. The worst review is a woman who felt misled into thinking there would be more traditional games that she remembered.

Actually, I thought the idea is for a backpack of fun outdoor things. Like a pocket fisherman. Flashlight. Knife. Matches. Bicycle tools. Folded poncho. To change the association of backpack with books. And books are an indoor activity that you must go somewhere sit down and read and doing that is the opposite of go out and play.

I heard that phrase a lot. My tendency was to hang around and be a pest so I was told go out and play quite a lot. The other thing I was told repeatedly, "Stop running in and out." Those two together implied tacitly and received concretely, "Get out and stay out."

That can be the next activity book, "Stop Running In And Out!"

And the third in a series of activity books, "Get Out And Stay Out!"

The book is for adults and seeks to incite community activism. Looking inside, we see a series of suggestions and imperatives: Let's Get Started. Do this, do that, close a street for play. Build a playground. Rally your city to become a playful city USA. To be fair,  some 91 pages of outdoor games.

You can buy a new book for $10.25 or elsewhere for $6.49 + $4.00 shipping while options continue for used copies for 1¢.  

2) Backpack. 

3) Essentials Pack. 2 boxes of large sidewalk chalk, 2 jump ropes,  8.5" ball, frisbee.

I was hoping for more.

Michelle Obama teams up with KaBOOM! through her own initiative Let's Move that shares the same interests, the concern being childhood obesity, considered epidemic. 

I must admit that... I must whisper this... I secretly applaud Michelle Obama's efforts even though I feel in every fiber that it is none of her biz wax. Then I realized she is not talking to me and never was. She is talking to somebody else. Get over myself. She is role model to somebody else. 

To be clear, she just said, "The President and the First Lay of the United States joined millions to remember 911 with service by assembling backpacks with KaBOOM volunteers." 

Honestly, the first thing I thought was Kaboom cleanser. And the second thing I thought was a children's television show called Kaboom. I do not have a problem with Kaboom + 9-11 association even as wisecracks about packing a pressure pot into them, sinister and macabre, pond-bottom level like Joan Rivers, have me falling around laughing.   

Concurrently in the news, poll results show most Americans want to criminalize pre-teens playing unsupervised by 68%. 

Mixed signals here. Go outside, stay outside, read a book of activities, stay active, you are unacceptably fat, do not go to a park unsupervised.

Good luck sorting the conflicting imperatives to go out and play but never unsupervised.  

I get Michelle Obama by realizing she is not talking to me, not about food, gardening, nor this, but she is talking directly to somebody else and that is the odd part, then, unseemly peering like this into a private conversation in a space where kaboom + 9-11 goes unnoticed. But honestly, we did know all that right off. Did we not? Looking back, nobody, and I mean nobody has a Christmas tree with Mao Tse Tung ornament least of all president of United States so that does tell you right off it will be insistently a different space being created a different language spoken with such odd phrases that invite satire in the terrestrial world, as "remember 911 with service by assembling backpacks with kaboom." 

The Michelle and Kerry Show

“Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right,” she explained, sharing a story about her children’s doctor who pulled her aside to talk about her family diet.

“I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard-educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don’t have access to the information I have?” she recalled. (Breitbart)

 

***

 

What was the problem with Palin again?

Cut-up and Paste-up: The First Lady's Praise Non-Praise of America

In another installment, where I take/cut different texts and put it back/paste together, in an attempt to... irritate and confuse you, says the George Costansa, Oppositarian, tyrannous (small t) Magnus in me (small m). I took the fist lady's statements in China, a Jezebel Post called Sorry not Sorry: How to Non-Apologize and ...

And my story isn’t unusual in America. Some of our most famous athletes, like LeBron James, and artists, like the singer Janelle Monae, came from struggling families like mine, as do many business leaders -- like Howard Schultz. He’s the head of a company called Starbucks, which many of you may have heard of. When Mr. Schultz was a boy his father lost his job, leaving their family destitute. But Mr. Schultz worked hard. He got a scholarship to a university, and eventually built the largest coffeehouse company in the world.

Being called out on your shit is the worst. It can be humiliating, frustrating, and hurtful. When it happens, the natural reaction is often to be dismissive, defensive, or to complain that the other party just "doesn't get it/you/jokes". I say, go with that feeling. Because if lots of people are telling you that you're dead wrong, you definitely don't want to stop and examine why that is... 

And then there’s this other guy I know who was raised by a single mother who sometimes struggled to afford food for their family. But like me, this guy got scholarships and loans to attend universities. He became a lawyer and a professor, and then he was a state senator and then a national senator. And then, he became President of the United States. This guy I’m talking about is my husband, Barack Obama. (Applause.)

If you want to issue an effective non-apology, it's not that hard. Actually, it's the easiest and fastest thing to do in a difficult situation. Like Robert Frost said*, fuck a road less traveled — let's take the easy way out!
Since authentic apologies are direct, specific, and truthful, your non-apology should be obscure, unclear, and completely miss the point.
1. Quick tip: if "sorry" is immediately followed by the word "if", "you", or "you're", then you are most likely not apologizing.

But warned that not everything is perfect. "Now of course, living up to these ideals isn’t always easy.  And there have been times in our history where we have fallen short.  Many decades ago, there were actually laws in America that allowed discrimination against black people like me, who are a minority in the United States.  But over time, ordinary citizens decided that those laws were unfair.  So they held peaceful protests and marches.  They called on government officials to change those laws, and they voted to elect new officials who shared their views," she said.

Isn't it funny how the pain and misery causers, the one percent, like LeBron James and Starbucks Howard Schultz, millionaresandbillionares, not paying their fair-share, are also, at the same time, an inspiration, what America represents for the first lady. I want to tell her to stop shifting scripts, at home, and abroad. Is that too much to ask?

The First Lady Goes To China, On Taxpayer Dime, without Free Press to Watch

"First lady Michelle Obama, her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and her mother touched down Thursday in China for what’s being touted as a weeklong feel-good tourist event, amid increasing murmurs back home about U.S. taxpayers having to foot the bill."

Mrs. Obama is supposed to use her visit for soft diplomacy only, and shy from the more controversial topics that plague U.S.-China relations, namely human rights and economics. No reporters accompanied the family on the trip.

“The nature of her visit is really quite different,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters ahead of the trip. “What the first lady really brings is the power of her own story, the power of American values.”

The White House also announced that Mrs. Obama wouldn’t field any questions from journalists she encountered in Beijing, which rankled some members of the press and the private sector, given her trip — complete with an entourage of about 70 — was still being paid for with tax dollars.

Any chance the first lady will bring up income inequality to the Chinese?

NYT: "There was little consensus on why the decline might be happening, but many theories"

"Federal health authorities on Tuesday reported a 43 percent drop in the obesity rate among 2- to 5-year-old children over the past decade, the first broad decline in an epidemic that often leads to lifelong struggles with weight and higher risks for cancer, heart disease and stroke."

The drop emerged from a major federal health survey that experts say is the gold standard for evidence on what Americans weigh."

“This is the first time we’ve seen any indication of any significant decrease in any group,” said Cynthia L. Ogden, a researcher for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the lead author of the report, which will be published in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, on Wednesday. “It was exciting.”

She cautioned that these very young children make up a tiny fraction of the American population and that the figures for the broader society had remained flat, and had even increased for women over 60. A third of adults and 17 percent of youths are obese, the federal survey found. Still, the lower obesity rates in the very young bode well for the future, researchers said.

Another possible explanation is that some combination of state, local and federal policies aimed at reducing obesity is starting to make a difference. Michelle Obama, the first lady, has led a push to change young children’s eating and exercise habits and 10,000 child care centers across the country have signed on. The news announcement from the C.D.C. included a remark from Mrs. Obama: “I am thrilled at the progress we’ve made over the last few years in obesity rates among our youngest Americans.”

While I gladly receive the good news, I'm also skeptical and I have good reasons supporting my skepticism. Just before the 2012 election, the job number were manipulated to help Obama's re-election. Now, there is a midterm election coming up and the administration is under some pressure from democrats made vulnerable by the ObamaCare disaster. Along comes news that child obesity, the first lady's pet project, is producing results? Like the church lady used to say “Well, isn't that special?”... 'Back-off, vulnerable democrats; we've ended an epidemic.'

This administration cannot be trusted. They have spin, manipulated and outright lied too often.

Gallup: "Fewer Americans Think Obama Respected on World Stage"

"For the first time, more Americans think President Barack Obama is not respected by other world leaders than believe he is. Americans' opinions have shifted dramatically in the past year, after being relatively stable from 2010 to 2013."

The results are based on Gallup's annual World Affairs poll, conducted Feb. 6-9. Although opinions about a president's perceived world standing often track with his job approval rating, a majority of Americans still thought world leaders respected Obama in 2010 and 2011, when his job approval was similar to what it is now...

Though the current data represent a personal low for Obama, they are not the lowest Gallup has measured since the question was first asked in 1994. That was reached in 2007, when 21% of Americans thought world leaders respected President George W. Bush...

Democrats and independents are mainly responsible for the slide in Obama's ratings. Independents now, by a wide margin, believe world leaders do not respect Obama.

The words "for the first time" reminded me of Michelle Obama's 2008 campaign trail statement "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country..." You might say Michelle was feeling respected in her adult lifetime. But, at what cost has that pride and respect come?

Gallup via Drudge

I can See Chicago From My House

"First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website."

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company."

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni."

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998."

George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract."

Daily Caller

Oh, and @FLOTUS and that Princeton classmate thing....total coincidence. Nothing to see here, move along.
— Carl Gustav (@CaptYonah) October 26, 2013