Hey, @POTUS! This is how you #GimmeFive, FLOTUS-style…
https://t.co/YF8nEtjUIA
— The First Lady (@FLOTUS) May 20, 2015
And her manicure stays perfect, too. Hat tip to valued commentor LAMH36, who I would not dare to deny. :)
***********
Apart from getting energized, what’s on the agenda as we cross the midpoint of the week?
danielx
Title of article in the local Gannett fishwrap: Can we afford another four years of Mike Pence?
No, but given the current political climate we might end up with someone even worse.
ThresherK
Digby, on Sam Seder’s Majority Report, 5/19:
A made-for-TV competition, hermetically sealed from the real world, with single entity ownership of the entire field, where the contestants have already given away whatever bargaining power they had as a price of admission?
Can’t tell if it more resembles the XFL or American Idol.
David Koch
That’s a 51 year old woman proving age is just a number.
Perhaps the most stunning looking FLOTUS Evah!
Baud
I am now ashamed about the shape I’m in.
I blame (Michelle) Obama.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: For what? Your shape or your shame?
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
She’s an Obama, so yes.
Zinsky
Oh come on! What about “Pickles” Bush? Other than the Xanax eyes and the fact she got away with vehicular homicide, what was wrong with her as First Lady?
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Yeah, might as well blame her for everything. She’s got to be guilty of something.
MomSense
Wow! I didn’t think I could admire her even more until this. She’s an impressive woman.
satby
FLOTUS’S guns are the only kind anyone should have, IMHO.
No wonder she rocks the sleeveless look.
ThresherK
@MomSense: When I was in middle school, in the pre-CNN era, I asked my dad if the President made a lot of money. “Yeah, I guess,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want the job”.
Well, the job has only gotten tougher. And the First Lady’s role is even worse: Nothing predefined, but people will blame you for everything the State Dept does, and there’s a much lower ceiling of sticking up for yourself accepted.
(That leaves out the conventions: Female president in my lifetime? I can see it. Single president in my lifetime? Unmarried female president? I don’t know if I’ll live that long.)
I could only imagine having my head screwed on as right as hers must be to do this with such knowingness, effectiveness, and good cheer. If Ayn Rand ever wrote one useful thing in her life, it was something like: Show me a man’s romantic choices and I’ll show you the sum total of his values. (Paraphrasing, but the gendering is original.)
Says something pretty cool about PBO.
gogol's wife
@David Koch:
Definitely. I am going to miss them so much.
MomSense
@ThresherK:
The pressure those two manage every single day is unimaginable. Even their supporters are always telling them what they should do as if any of us could deal for a day with what they face.
i plan to enjoy every day they are in the White House.
MomSense
@satby:
True! I need to step up my workout now that I’m no longer extreme shoveling. I was starting to get some good guns. Guess my too busy too tired excuse is now exposed as complete BS.
WWFLOTUSDO
Iowa Old Lady
Hillary Clinton was in my town yesterday. I didn’t see her, but on Chris Hayes, Robert Costa is standing in front of my favorite restaurant. That’s as close to fame as I can come.
kc
She looks fab. Maybe I should take up jumping rope?
BruceFromOhio
@MomSense: This.
NotMax
@Satby
Classic YMMV.
(Fashion heresy warning.)
Have always considered that her sleeveless shmatas look grotesque.
MattF
Just thinking about how the RW chorus will hate this… teehee.
debbie
@MattF:
Oh, they will. In their eyes, she’s the scary black person looming over them, waiting to take their guns and freedoms. Even worse, she’s a woman.
My favorite moment is when female conservatives slam her for going sleeveless…dressed in their own sleeveless dresses.
Germy Shoemangler
Here’s a Wednesday morning fable from Ambrose Bierce:
Aimai
@gogol’s wife: yup. I wish i could get to a white house tour while they are in office. It just feels more alive and more my house too with them as first family.
MattF
@ThresherK: One may point here to the FOXification of our politics. Truth is that we’ve got a Murdoch/Ailes ticket for the R nom– everyone else, including the would-be official officials of the Republican party, are just actors.
Josie
I just love this woman. Pure class.
Cervantes
Whom.
That is all.
Patricia Kayden
@Iowa Old Lady: I assume Secretary Clinton will spend a lot of time in Iowa before the caucus next year. You’ll probably get another chance soon.
divF
I have my regularly scheduled workout at the gym in two hours with my trainer, a sweet, blonde, apple-cheeked young woman who dead lifts 500+ lbs (her power lifting total, bench + squat + dead lift = 1200 lbs). I do whatever she tells me to do.
Meanwhile, I am writing a short talk (6 powerpoint slides) to present to colleagues on one of my projects at 1 PM (it is 5:25 AM here). I slept about 4 hours, and am kinda grumpy and incoherent.
WereBear
I think what makes FLOTUS & POTUS able to manage with such grace is that they have each other. Shared goals, willingness to make each other’s dreams come true, knowledge that they are mutually loved.
That is sadly not common in most “power marriages.” And from my childhood prospective, wondering why Pat Nixon looked so miserable all the time (I now know) it is very rare in Republican marriages.
Iowa Old Lady
@Patricia Kayden: I generally try to avoid the political sideshow that breaks out here in election years. Politicians ambush you in the grocery store and try to shake your hand, and I’m talking about politicians you’d be horrified to have to eat Thanksgiving dinner with.
Germy Shoemangler
Another fable from Ambrose Bierce:
rikyrah
Best First Lady ever!!!
Elizabelle
@Iowa Old Lady:
Tell them you’re Canadian. They won’t be able to get away fast enough.
Elizabelle
@MattF: Good place to pop in this link.
James Fallows: How Fox New is (Still) Hurting the Republicans.
Although FNC is actually hurting all of us.
Here’s link to Bruce Bartlett’s paper, which Fallows discusses, How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics.
Bartlett’s abstract:
And this is good for America exactly how?
Cervantes
@Iowa Old Lady:
Someone once described Des Moines in primary season as “an especially ruthless debutante party.”
Anyhow, I think it’s a good thing the candidates are out there making themselves vulnerable — did I say “vulnerable”? I meant “accessible” — in the presence of news cameras. It’s an opportunity to trail them asking questions they’d rather not address, never mind answer.
And if that trailing and questioning is systematic and relentless, so much the better.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: Of this century, for sure.
Eleanor Roosevelt was pretty swift too.
Michelle Obama is elegant, gracious, intelligent, accomplished and raising two beautiful strong daughters.
Would love to be a fly on the wall and hear what PBO and FLOTUS have to say about the day’s events.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle, quoting Bartlett:
Utter nonsense.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: Was there a 24/7 TV news outlet that catered to conservatives prior to Fox?
bemused
If the Obama family was Republican and white, the rightwing would have them on a pedestal higher than the moon. They have all the qualities most Americans profess to want in a presidential family: intelligence, good work ethics, maturity, physical attractiveness, devotion to the family, have great senses of humor and no unsavory behaviors no matter how hard the rightwing tries to invent some. They are very comfortable relating to people from all walks of life. POTUS and FLOTUS did it the American way, working extremely hard pulling themselves up with their bootstraps from modest beginnings. Staunch Republican voters won’t even acknowledge that the Obamas are basically nice and normal people apart from political differences and are convinced they are the most evil people on earth. Totally unhinged from reality.
MattF
@Cervantes: It’s certainly missing some qualifiers. ‘Conservative tilt’ covers a great deal of territory– and over the long term, includes most news sources, current and historical, that one can think of offhand.
That said, there’s something unique about FOX. Deliberate dishonesty plus partisanship come to mind, but there’s more to it than that.
Germy Shoemangler
@Betty Cracker: I know locally there was a lot of right wing talk radio, at least in New York. Bob Grant, the patron saint of all the loud mouths, was on many hours a day.
In the ’60s, I remember some macho rightwing tv hosts like Joe Pyne. But it wasn’t wall-to-wall, 24/7 the way it is now.
lamh36
Great way to wake up in the morning.
I’ve been pushing off my own weight loss efforts for years. I’ve been trying to Kickstart it for this year before my 40th birthday next year.
Seeing this short video yesterday really got mw motivated to start up again. The last time that happened was over 15 years ago when Oprah was on her weight loss kick. I started and just like that I quit.
FLOTUS has inspired me. Shoot if she ever released a workout video ala Jane Fonda, I’d buy it in a heartbeat!
Have a great morning everyone, I’m off to work.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
That’s one question about the assertion.
Another is whether there is anything the least bit “conservative” about Fox’s “tilt.”
chrome agnomen
@bemused: i said something like this just the other day; if PBO and family were theirs, the stonemason would be chipping away on mt rushmore as we speak.
Cervantes
@MattF:
I agree.
Kathleen
Wow! She made it look so easy and didn’t even break a sweat. I thought my conditioning class this morning was tough. Need to master the jump rope.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: Ah, a semantics rabbit hole. Carry on, then!
Germy Shoemangler
@Cervantes: I don’t watch enough of them to be an expert, but do they actually promote themselves as conservative? Do they actually come out and say “Here we are with the conservative viewpoint” or do they pretend to be completely non-partisan? “Fair & Balanced; We Report You Decide” is rather coy.
I’m guessing their pretense is that it’s coincidence that their views line up with the right; that it’s simply a matter of those opinions being correct.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
If by “semantics” you are referring to “meaning,” and if “meaning” is not your thing, then feel free to ignore it. As you said, “Carry on, then!”
But the question of how “Fox News” markets itself is objectively an important one.
Also, Bartlett’s assertion did not limit itself to TV, the way your question did.
gogol's wife
@bemused:
Well put.
Germy Shoemangler
@MattF:
Lots and lots of sexy eye candy for their target demographic.
Cervantes
@bemused:
Excuse me, but where and when have most Americans professed to want intelligence in their presidential families, or in their elected officials generally?
Cervantes
@Germy Shoemangler:
With the help of former ABC executives, Rush Limbaugh has been on the air nationally since the days of the Dukakis campaign. And with the help of Roger Ailes, Limbaugh was also on TV for the entirety of the first Clinton Administration.
bemused
I get so tired of Republicans saying we don’t need to fix or improve anything with funding from state or federal budgets. From a local MN blog this am on the issue of funding universal pre-K, a rightwing commenter says to the blogger, “your solution to any “problem” is more money. It’s always with other peoples’ money and not yours.” Of course, that doesn’t make any sense (somehow taxpayer money spent only comes out of his pocket) and this type of commenter says the same thing about any issue.
@chrome agnomen:
Absolutely! R’s would be saying, “Reagan who? Dunno, faintly rings a bell.”
@Cervantes:
They pretend to.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: Supercilious much? I haven’t read the paper, but from the abstract above, it sounds interesting. Fox News Syndrome is a real thing that many of us have seen in our own families, and it has clearly had an impact on politics. I just wondered if you had a good reason for dismissing the paper as “utter nonsense,” and now that I know that you don’t, I’ve got nothing more to say about it.
MomSense
@lamh36:
You can do it!
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
Before Fox, I can’t think of a news source that was considered to be slanted. Opinions were restricted to opinion shows (like MTP, Firing Line), and newspapers (even NYT) made it very clear through their layouts which pieces were facts and which were opinions.
MomSense
@Cervantes:
I think the point is that Republicans have been selling family values and personal responsibility as the cure for everything that ails America (since obviously the government can’t do anything well and shouldn’t anyway). If we ever needed proof that Republicans were just lying and spinning, the treatment of the Obama family is it. The Obamas are the epitome of family values and personal responsibility and the Republicans disrespect and bad mouth them ceaselessly.
Elizabelle
@debbie: You did have the issue of the “liberal” morning paper and the conservative other (sometimes afternoon) one. Bartlett addresses that a bit in his article (which I will finish today).
But Fox toxified the whole environment.
I would say that Fox News Channel is radical rightwing, not merely conservative, as are the GOP politicians who have grown up in the “Reagan was a god” political and media petri dish Fox enables.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Eye of the beholder and all that, right?
Yes.
It’s not the paper I was dismissing. It was one specific assertion, quoted.
But I thought you understood that — why, after all, would you pretend otherwise?
Elizabelle
@MomSense: I think that’s why they had to make the patriarch Kenyan, and thereby ineligible and illegitimate for his office.
The better to keep their addled audience from looking closer at Barack and saying (as Andrew Sullivan did): “hey. Obama actually looks a LOT like his white grandfather Dunham from Kansas.”
ETA: Here’s a photo of Stanley and Toot, from Sullivan’s The Dish.
link: http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/10/his-last-parent/209916/
From when Obama flew to Hawaii on the eve of his election in 2008 to be with his grandmother, who helped raise him, as she lay dying.
Cervantes
@debbie:
“Considered to be” is one thing, whereas think about this:
That’s from MattF above.
PurpleGirl
@David Koch: There hasn’t been such a stunner since Jacqueline Kennedy. Michelle Obama as a natural grace and innate style that whatever she wears looks great. I love her.
Elizabelle
@MomSense:
PS: there’s an even better picture of Barack’s grandfather Stanley Dunham, but this link came up quickest. It’s in the Dish archives somewhere ….
[As might be, I think, a photo of hound that looks strikingly like Mitch McConnell. Have always been looking for that image again. It was perfect.]
debbie
@MattF:
Parading opinion as fact?
Elizabelle
The last great Republican first lady was Betty Ford.
She was the last of the wise Republican spouses (Laura Bush seemed plenty smart, but also kind of detached), and met the challenges of her day as well as she could. Betty Ford did a lot of good.
Elizabelle
@debbie: I think you could even say “parading an alternate universe, which does not exist”, more than mere opinion. Opinion, at some level, is sometimes attached to observed facts.
Fox Viewers are sitting at home watching the news version of Game of Thrones, passing itself off as “news”, and they apparently prefer the imagined world to the real one.
bemused
@MomSense:
Damn right!
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
You could, indeed, and there’s nothing “conservative” about that.
Cervantes
@MomSense:
Nothing controversial in what you say there, I agree.
I was just wondering why we should think that “most Americans” consider anyone’s intelligence (to be a plus, I mean) when they vote.
bemused
@Elizabelle:
Betty Ford is the only Republican first lady I would like to have met. When I read that before they left the White House, she said she always wanted to dance on this Cabinet table and did, I knew this was someone who was probably fun to know.
debbie
@Elizabelle:
Wasn’t Willie Horton Fox’s first big break (in the 1988 election, two years after they started)? That story hit the most primal fear of conservative-leaning people, and Fox has run with it ever since.
Elizabelle
@Cervantes: Agreed.
And it’s ridiculous for other news outlets — which should (and maybe do) — know better to pretend Fox News is a news organization. It is no more real than “The West Wing”, which everyone agrees was a political fiction. And more intelligently written and presented, at that.
But not fact. And not news.
Cervantes
@debbie:
“Fox News” did not exist until late 1996.
Elizabelle
I wish I could send you all some of Northern Virginia’s spectacular weather today. It’s cool enough for a sweater, breezy, sunny and clear.
Terrific day to be out on the deck with coffee and y’all.
NotMax
@debbie
The FOX news channel premiered in the mid-90s.
Elizabelle
Well well. NYTimes news alert:
debbie
@NotMax:
Guess it just seems like forever.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
Yet again.
Second verse, same as the first.
bemused
@Cervantes:
You assume intelligence means the same thing to rightwingers than non-rightwingers. Foxbots truly believe they are much smarter than everyone else. I and probably many other liberals have been told by Foxbots to watch Fox to “get a clue”. Powerline’s Hinderaker enthused about George W Bush back in the day, “A man of extraordinary brilliance approaching genus”.
Cervantes
@bemused:
David Kennerly took a photo. The Smithsonian has it.
bemused
@Cervantes:
Yes and it would have been wonderful to have video, sigh. One can only imagine the horror if Michele Obama did something like this. I don’t remember if there was any negative press on Betty Ford for dancing on that table.
Cervantes
@bemused:
No, I wasn’t assuming that. Your statement referred to “most Americans,” and that’s what I asked about.
All completely ridiculous, I agree.
Pity Obama. Talking to such people with a straight face is not easy.
Elizabelle
@Cervantes:
@bemused: Love it. Had not known about that.
Happened to be in California when Betty Ford died, and was so tempted to head down to Palm Springs area and pay my respects.
Now I wish that I had. Oh well.
bemused
@Elizabelle:
I just read that the picture didn’t surface until 16 years so that may be why not many people remember it. When Betty Ford died, it was written about which is when I learned about it. I do wonder if she would have received criticism if that photo had been in the public at the time it was taken.
In an interview with the Fords long after, Jerry Ford learned she did this for the first time and said to Betty, You didn’t tell me! Betty replies, Jerry there are a lot things I didn’t tell you. Gotta love her.
bemused
@Cervantes:
Yes, I often am impressed with Obama’s patience dealing with idiots. Almost anyone would have a hard time not rolling one’s eyes. Patience, another great quality I like to see in a President.
It’s likely that about 27% of Americans thought G W Bush was brilliant and most other Americans groaned in embarrassment at some of the dopey stuff Bush would say, imo.
rikyrah
@bemused:
You are absolutely on the money.
They killed me, in 2012, trying to say that Mitt Romney was a self-made man.
The only self-made man running for President in 2008 or 2012 was Barack Hussein Obama II.
Valdivia
@Elizabelle:
such a relief after the last couple of days. nothing like an open window when having to work in front of the computer all day…
Elizabelle
C-Span will cover this; says “Awaiting.” Sigh. Might get me inside, off the deck.’
NY Times:
bemused
@rikyrah:
Rightwingers always rewrite history and make over people to fit their own images and beliefs. They make heroes out of those regurgitate their views and demagogue those who don’t. There’s nothing in between for them.
Elizabelle
@bemused: Amuses me that Ronald Reagan’s spawn left them so little to work with, politically.
Nancy’s kids are both practically socialists. Why would that be?
Cervantes
@rikyrah:
Herman Cain’s father was a janitor and his mother was a cleaning woman.
Of course, one might say he wasn’t a man, but that’s rather an ideosyncratic objection.
bemused
@Elizabelle:
It would be interesting to hear how Ron Jr and Patti would answer that question but doubt they would be very revealing in respect to their parents. I wonder if they would say more when Nancy is no longer living.
Elizabelle
MSNBC has PBO commencement at the Coast Guard on now, but it’s still the opening pleasantries …
Elizabelle
@bemused: I hope they will say “why no, we have no issue whatsoever with reverting DCA’s name back to Washington National Airport.”
There is no goddamn reason — other than Congressional Republicans’ in your face — that that the capitol city’s airport was named after Ronald Reagan. Let the name change back after Nancy passes.
Cervantes
@bemused:
There wasn’t. She did it the day they left the White House in ’77, so the negatives were hurriedly stuffed away somewhere amidst all the rest of the packing — and only saw publication some two decades later.
Elizabelle
Here’s C-Span link to PBO speech on climate change, happening now. MSNBC cut away. They’ve got commercials.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?326155-2/president-obama-commencement-address-us-coast-guard-academy&live
bemused
@Elizabelle:
Agree. If those name everything in sight after Reagan groups had their way, every denomination of coin and currency would have his face on them and I really hate that stadiums, etc are named after corporations. It’s way out of control.
Elizabelle
@bemused: Interesting. Totally unscientific poll by the Washington Post today, but as of now, 75% of those polled don’t call the airport “Reagan”. (24% do, and that doesn’t even match crazification factor.)
64% call it “National” (as I do, pointedly) and 11% call it “DCA.”
I don’t see it being that hard to change the name back, once Mrs. Reagan has passed.
Washington is both descriptive (it serves the city and region) and honors the nation’s first president, whose home Mount Vernon is about 10 miles from the airport.
ETA: the linky: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/05/20/reagan-or-national-what-do-you-call-these-things-in-the-d-c-area/?hpid=z4
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
Surely, you jest.
MomSense
@Elizabelle:
I am late getting back but just wanted to add that Stanley Dunham is buried at Punchbowl. After Pearl Harbor he enlisted and then fought in Patton’s army in WWII. A white Republican grandson of such a veteran would be celebrated. Madelyn Dunham worked in a bomber assembly line during WWII and then worked her way up to VP of a small bank in Hawaii–but someone who went to the Dunham’s church was a communist so Stanley and Madelyn must have been communists, too. How many bank VPs do you know who are communists?
Elizabelle
@Cervantes: Yeah. I was doing the Green Lantern thing when I typed that. (Before I even knew the concept, as DougJ’s later thread illuminated for us….)
It will be a struggle. But one worth having.
The WaPost’s Express (throwaway version distributed free near Metro, etc.) touched on National Airport/DCA’s name a few months ago. It had this slippery sentence that young people won’t remember that it had a different name before and won’t care. I do not think that is true.
I think that was to stop a publisher or bigwig advertiser from complaining.
Elizabelle
@MomSense: Yup. But, as we said, alternate universe.
And a shabby one.
Bobby Thomson
Every time I try to load a Ballloon Juice page now this video starts playing on You Tube.