WTF Has Obama Done So Far?

http://tomwatson.typepad.com/

I had prepared myself for bad news yesterday, so I wasn't shocked when the tide of red began to sweep the map. Still it was a blow when my own congressional district chose a woman who does not represent my values.

I've heard a lot of people say that the election of all these conservative candidates is a backlash against the President and the Democratic-controlled Congress.

I just don't get it. A backlash against what, precisely?

Significantly expanding Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college?

Signing financial reform law establishing a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to look out for the interests of everyday Americans?

Signing financial reform law prohibiting banks from engaging in proprietary trading (trading the bank's own money to turn a profit, often in conflict with their customers' interests)?

Cutting prescription drug cost for medicare recipients by 50%?

Signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, restoring basic protections against pay discrimination for women and other workers?

Providing travel expenses to families of fallen soldiers to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover AFB?

Provided the Department of Veterans Affairs with more than $1.4 billion to improve services to America's Veterans?

Signing the Children's Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, which provides health care to 11 million kids -- 4 million of whom were previously uninsured?

Or maybe it's something else?* God knows they've accomplished a lot in just two short years, after 8 years of an administration that screwed our environment, turned a surplus into a deficit, and sent our troops into wars that shouldn't have been started in the first place.

I am angry today. But unlike Sharron Angle, I don't intend to "resort to Second Amendment remedies." Instead, I take comfort in the fact that at least she and some of the other more obvious wackos didn't win. Still, Michele Bachmann is reelected. And that woman scares the shit out of me. You probably saw the footage of her interview with Chris Matthews. Here Matthews reflects on the interview. Shades of Joe McCarthy! I want to know WTF Minnesota voters are thinking. Seriously?

*Check this out for more examples:
http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com

Parody of Paranoia

No way is any daughter of mine going to school to listen
to that dangerous Negro socialist president!

I'm inspired to share a little bit of brilliance I discovered today with you.

My children went off to school today with my blessing. I was excited that the President would be speaking to schoolchildren throughout the country.

I've been absorbed with some projects and fun things recently, so I hadn't realized just how controversial this simple act was becoming. Some friends' Facebook posts alerted me to the madness. I particularly liked this one by Mary C. Curtis at Politics Daily. She quotes a couple of sentences from Ronald Reagan's 1986 address to schoolchildren:

"We got inflation down, interest rates down, and our economy created over one and a half million new jobs just last year alone. The poor are now increasingly able to dig themselves out of poverty, and that's been good economic news."

What-ever.

Wheaton College Economics professor John Miller noted in a 2004 article on Ronald Reagan's Legacy:

Reagan's economic legacy endures. Government continues to turn its back on social spending for the poor in favor of ineffectual tax giveaways for the rich, at same time that it finds unlimited monies for military adventures. Lopsided economic growth showers benefits on stock investors while doing precious little for workers or-not an entirely separate group-the poor. And today's Depression-level inequality is not mitigated as much as it once was by the tax code.

I found a really interesting article entitled The Ghost of Ronald Reagan: How We Remember the Real Legacy of the Conservative Icon. Here are a few choice morsels:

Through the skillful use of imagery, code words and political action, the Reagan administrations--in both California when he was governor and then in Washington--managed to thwart and even reverse Black aspirations and goals in the United States and in Africa.
...
...political observers were noting the Obama's run to White House depended largely on the votes of the so-called Reagan Democrats. Those formerly reliable blue-collar Democratic voters, threatened by social change and Black gains, switched to Reagan in 1980 and continue to vote against their own economic and sociopolitical factors.
...
Conservatives have had such a monopoly on his image that few Americans today remember that while running for governor in California in 1966, Reagan promised to dismantle the Fair Housing Act, saying, "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so."
...
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu characterized the Reagan legacy as "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian."

We all know that some of the parents who are freaking out are against Obama at least in part because they aren't comfortable with a black man as president. I'd suggest that a significant part of the fear people have about Obama's speech is that they worry he'll do what Reagan did - inspire young people to get involved in governance.

I certainly hope so.

But I promised you a little bit of brilliance. And my post title refers to a parody. Without further ado, here 'tis.

CNN aired a clip showing a Tammy Faye Baker-like conservative mother crying her eyes out over the prospect of the President speaking to her child and countless other innocents.



Then another woman did an awesome parody.





I especially love reading the comments. Some people don't get that it's a parody. After watching the original clip, I get that. The fearmongers and fearful verge on hysteria.

In the Facebook posting of this, one of my friends labeled it "Hysterically funny." Another friend commented soberly "we laugh these people off at our own peril."

Yup.