Commentary: My crush on Michelle Obama March 3, 2009

By Jack Cafferty

Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Jack Cafferty is the author of a new book, “Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream,” to be published in March. He provides commentary on CNN’s “The Situation Room” daily from 4 to 7 p.m. ET. You can also visit Jack’s Cafferty File blog.

NEW YORK (CNN) — I think I am developing a crush on America’s first lady. Michelle Obama is more compelling than her husband. He’s good, but she’s utterly fascinating.

Mrs. Obama has blown away the stale air in a White House musty from eight years of the Bushes. It’s like the sun came out and a fresh spring breeze began wafting through the open windows.

It’s the people’s house, and Michelle Obama totally gets it. So much so that she has taken to inviting people in from the streets to see her home. Nice touch — one completely lacking in her recent predecessors.

Watch her when she visits a local school and you see the warmth and affection she instantly triggers in people. Kids are pretty much totally honest with very good BS-detectors. If they sense you’re a phony, forget it. But around the first lady, they want to hug her and laugh with her and tell her stories.

You can see the same qualities these kids recognize in her daughters. She is the consummate mother as evidenced by the poised, polite smiling children she and her husband are raising. I have four daughters, and trust me — they don’t turn out like the Obama children without devoted parents.

New to the Washington neighborhood, Michelle Obama has taken it upon herself to go around and introduce herself to the people in the various agencies of government. When’s the last time a first lady did that? I don’t ever remember it before. And during her visits she listens rather than lectures. And people respond to her.

She was raised on the south side of Chicago by blue-collar parents. She went to Princeton University, and Harvard Law School. But in many ways she’s still a kid from the south side of Chicago, and that’s what makes her special. She knows exactly who she is.

The Obamas bring a humanity and humility to their tasks which sets them far apart from the run-of-the mill phonies who populate Washington. It’s exactly what the doctor ordered for this wounded nation.

Michelle Obama’s unassuming, but dead-on, sense of style has the fashion press gushing all over itself.

Her arms are becoming the stuff of legend. Who appears sleeveless on the cover of Vogue, let alone in front of a joint session of Congress while her husband delivers one of the most important speeches of his life? And the reviews were rave.

Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour magazine gushed, “Oh my god! The first lady has bare arms in Congress in February at night!” If she keeps it up, Seventh Avenue will soon stop making women’s clothes with sleeves.

Ok, I admit it. When it comes to the first lady, I’m smitten.

 Story Highlights

 Jack Cafferty: Michelle Obama is blazing a new path as first lady

 She understands that the White House is the “people’s house,” he says

 Cafferty: She is welcoming all kinds of people and government workers

 He says her sense of style is winning support from the fashion world

When’s the last time the media has fawned over a black woman

Colonix March 1, 2009

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gloves February 28, 2009

Sniplets is a generic text insertion plugin with support for an extensible processing framework. At it’s simplest this means you can dynamically replace text in your posts with text that may be defined elsewhere, or created by some other module. For example, you can use Sniplets to perform syntax highlighting of files, execute custom PHP code, insert data from a database, and perform all manner of other useful tasks within a standard interface. On top of this, Sniplets can be automatically inserted at key points on a page. For example, you can automatically insert text on every RSS post.

Stevie wonder February 26, 2009

tbd

Purple Rain February 25, 2009

TBD

President Barack Obama “big-ups” First Lady Michelle Obama February 24, 2009

“Though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before,” Obama declared to a thunderous round of applause from a packed House.

Last night was pomp and circumstance for the State of the Nation address delivered by President Barak Obama. It was his first presentation to the joint branches of the Congress and the judicial arm of the government. He began his speech: Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress and the First Lady of the United States….and then he began to look for First Lady Michelle Obama in the sea of spectators….and in response to his appreciation of her presence she blew him a kiss and said “I love you”. This is truly a love supreme.

Why Government?

Obama’s response came Tuesday night: “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves, that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.” In contrast, when Ronald Regan took office in 1981, said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” My question to the opposing pundits is why not support the government’s involvement? When a child requires discipline do you as a parent let the child go astray or offer a corrective framework as a preventive action for future results?

The bullet points are…

The president’s agenda as defined in his address to Congress may have been the most ambitious plan in a generation, can be summarized by four major bullet points:

1. restore financial stability by:
   
   1. stimulating consumer consumption
      
   2. offering tax breaks to the “middle”
      
   3. putting America back to work
      
   4. offering homeowner assistance
      
   5. cutting the budget in half by 2011
      
2. strengthen education
   
3. promote energy independence
   
4. health care reform
   

So what evidence of action does President Obama have to draw upon?

President Obama has signed into law a “ginormous”* $787 billion economic plan, an expansion of children’s health insurance coverage and pay equity legislation and it has been about 30 days since he has taken office. Folks it is time individually for us to step up our game! For those that say he is spewing out rhetoric, I say to them it is matched by unequal accomplishment. What contributions have I made to society today? (as I scratch my head) J

*As of this writing the word ginormous just missed the cut to making it into the latest edition of the lexicon! I will be pushing hard the next go round!!

The State of the Union

The State of the Union is an annual address presented before a joint session of Congress and held in the House of Representatives chamber at the U.S. Capitol. In recent years, newly inaugurated presidents have delivered speeches to joint sessions of Congress only weeks into their respective terms, but these are not officially considered State of the Union addresses. The address is most frequently used to outline the president’s legislative proposals for the upcoming year.

Since the address is made in the Capitol and during a joint session of Congress, the President must first be invited by Congress to both enter the House of Representatives Chamber and then actually address the joint session. This invitation is customary in form as the speech is now a traditional part of the American political and national schedule.

Delivery of the Speech

A formal invitation is made for each State of the Union Address. The Sergeant at Arms of the United States House of Representatives ceremoniously announces the presence of the President, who then enters the chamber to a standing ovation.

Sitting near the front of the chamber are the Justices of the Supreme Court, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and members of the President’s Cabinet. Customarily, one cabinet member (the designated survivor) does not attend, in order to provide continuity in the line of succession in the event that a catastrophe disables the President, the Vice President, and other succeeding officers gathered in the House chamber. Additionally, since the September 11, 2001 attacks, a few members of Congress have been asked to relocate to undisclosed locations for the duration of the speech.

After greeting attendees, the President hands copies of the address to the Vice President of the United States, who is present in his capacity as President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, both of whom sit behind the President for the duration of the speech. Once the chamber settles down from the President’s arrival, the Speaker officially presents the President to the joint session of Congress. The President then delivers the speech from the podium at the front of the House Chamber. Since the 1982 address, it has also become common for the President to honor special guests sitting in the gallery, such as everyday Americans or visiting heads of state.

State of the Union speeches usually last a little over an hour, partly because of the large amounts of applause that occur from the audience throughout. The applause is often political in tone, with many portions of the speech being applauded only by members of the President’s own party. As non-political officeholders, members of the Supreme Court or the Joint Chiefs of Staff rarely applaud in order to retain the appearance of political impartiality.

Opposition Response

Since 1966, the speech has been followed on television by a response or rebuttal by a member of the political party opposing the President’s party. The response is typically broadcast from a studio with no audience. Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana delivered the response last night. His delivery was juvenile in tone, lacked leadership confidence and weak on substance. At one point he inferred he was a pre-existing condition. You got to be kidding me? Who vetted his speech, his HMO? Yeah, you got it – the republican virus of the last 8 years….ooops, sorry your claim has been denied.

When his Indian parents immigrated to the U.S. and arrived in Baton Rouge, La., Jindal’s mother was four-and-a-half months pregnant with him. “I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a ‘pre-existing condition,’” Jindal quipped. Unable to afford the delivery, his father worked out an installment plan to pay the doctor.