(image by Matt Brunson)
Why not pit these 1st 100 days against the grandaddy “100 Days” of them all?
I hope I can follow through & do all 100.
What I plan is this:
Each literal day of the Obama administration will be compared to the corresponding day of FDR’s 1st term. I don’t have exact data for each of the 1933 days but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere on the internets.
I will (try to) post on the day after the ‘day’ in question.
Meaning, yesterday, for both candidates, was Day 1:
Speechwars.com, says there are three words uttered yesterday that made their presidential inaugural address debut (h/t Marc Ambinder). See what they were after the jump.
[Above: Obama prepares his inaugural speech. Photo by Callie Shell, Time Magazine]
As Steve Clemons points out & I realized when he said it yesterday, there was a factual error in Obama’s inaugural speech:
“Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.”
Wrong number. Find out why after the jump.
An era is ending in presidential politics.
How will an historian in 2109 view that era?
I’ve been thinking it over this past weekend, & here’s my best guess.
President Bush delivers his farewell address tonight.
[How do you think he did? Grade his performance in our webpoll here at the NewsChannel9 main page. I'm taking this poll down late this afternoon. You only get one vote per computer.]
After the jump, clips of three other presidential farewell addresses, so you can compare notes.
[Sure, I'd guess he'd fly a plane. This is from a couple years back when his wax likeness flew to DC. It's one of my favorite pictures ever.]
Above: Sean Hannity, last night, who said:
“Well, one of the other things that I found pretty interesting is, you know, where would Abraham Lincoln be as it relates to Gitmo? Didn’t he put aside civil rights and even shut down press outlets and issues of habeas corpus as it relates to those issues? I think he’d be on a very different side on the Gitmo issue, don’t you think?”
No, I don’t think.
I’m on the side of this week’s Newsweek piece by another conservative, Christopher Hitchens:
[Sky over northwest Missouri, 1970s. Photo by my father.]
Who said it?
[above: Birds in a tree in northwest Missouri, January, 1971. photo by my father.]
Who said it?
Above: October 6th, 1981. The last time all current & former presidents met at the White House.
Read a good account of this encounter here.
It’s happening again today with President Bush, the President-Elect, & the surviving presidents having a White House lunch.
Read more about that here.
& this reminds me of one of my favorite Presidential jokes:
Q: Which 4 U.S. presidents aren’t buried on U.S. soil?
Who said it?
[above: Sky, Chattanooga, August 2nd, 2008, 8:25pm. Photo by my wife.]
Who said it?
Above: not the picture that’s been burning up the web in the last 24 hours of Barack Obama shirtless in Hawaii. That, of course, is Gerry Ford.
You can see the actual photo (which I can’t legally re-post) here.
& read more about the frenzy the photo has caused here.
Now, I saw that photo late yesterday & debated whether or not to do a story on it - I kind of tend to shy away from the tabloid stuff.
But my boss just insisted I do something, saying it’s the ‘water-cooler talk of the internet.’
& it’s true, the reaction to this paparazzo’s pic has been funny - the Huffington Post’s over-the-top headline -
- was particularly laughable, in an avert-your-eyes kinda way.
But, then again, I’m a heterosexual male. They’re male nipples. What’s the big deal?
So I polled several female NewsChannel9 employees about the pic, & was surprised at the answers I got:
..& thus I will be off until Sunday.
In the interim: enjoy President Richard Nixon tickle the ivories, in a composition he wrote. (the sound, inexplicably, cuts off halfway through, & for that I am sorry)
It sort of makes more sense to me now.
From Gawker:
“In 1980, a vacationing Rod Blagojevich camped in front of Richard Nixon’s home, with a friend, until the pariah ex-president emerged and this picture was taken.”
…
