Barack On Their Minds

My mind is clearer now.
At last all too well
I can see where we all soon will be.
If you strip away The myth from the man,
You will see where we all soon will be. Barack!
You’ve started to believe
The things they say of you.
You really do believe
This talk of Change is true.
And all the good you’ve done
Will soon get swept away.
You’ve begun to matter more
Than the things you say.

Listen Barack I don’t like what I see.
All I ask is that you listen to me…

Well, dear Barack, last time somebody entered the Capital city among hosannas, we all know how it all ended.

Time to “do a Sarkozy” then, and launch into 100 days of serial disappointments in the eyes of everybody, just enough to lower expectations thereby making success a tad easier to claim.

How Many People For Obama?

How likely is it going to be, for 1.5million people to gather for President Obama’s inauguration?

Who can say? IMNSHO the crowd will be a bit smaller, but around the same order of magnitude. Check what Clark McPhail, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had to say a few years back to Salon.com:

The counting formula divides the mall into eight panels and measures the square footage of each. For really huge [gatherings], aerial photographs are necessary to determine how much space is occupied […]  A crowd of 500,000, he says, would [fill] all eight panels, stretching from the Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial, or from Third Street to 14th Street […]

It is therefore not too much of a stretch of one’s imagination to think of a million people in the Mall on January 20, 2009.

Does Dick Cheney Understand What He Has Helped Unleash?

From “The Battle for a Country’s Soul” by Jane Mayer, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008

[After 9/11] President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a small handful of trusted advisers sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. […] They turned the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel into a political instrument, which they used to expand their own executive power at the expense of long-standing checks and balances.

From ” Obama inheriting broad covert ops policies“, Associated Press, November 11, 2008

A top aide to Obama said Sunday the new president will use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office […] “There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” said John Podesta, Obama’s transition chief. “I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Benjamin Franklin’s words outside the Federal Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, cited by Jane Mayer, are very topical indeed

A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” replied the Doctor, “if you can keep it.”