Month: December 2009

Obama and his Telepromter

squashed:

jgh writes,

Since when do politicians not read from Teleprompters? Obama has written many of his own speeches. I’m unsure of what this talking point is supposed to be about.

Can somebody help?

I think it’s mostly the logical paradox of a man who these folks a priori distrust and despise (for an assortment of reasons that are left as an exercise for the reader) being quite capable of delivering a speech, more or less on demand, that’s as good as anyone’s heard out of an American politician in quite some time. So he’s merely a speech reader, likely a secret illegal immigrant from Kenya, and etc… That he (on several occasions) largely wrote the speech, or when that devil the teleprompter is on occasion non-functional and said speech was delivered entirely from memory never seems to enter into these calculations. After all, these are the same people that think Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s books based on the joint use of “crazy” words like “ontological” or some-such.

What bothers me most, though, is that these same folks are the ones systematically referring to W. Bush as a tragically misunderstood genius…who, on teleprompter, mind you, gave us such quotes as:

put food on your family

vulcanize society

make the pie higher! make the pie higher!

just to name a few. So, if Bush presumably couldn’t reliably read a speech properly, and definitely couldn’t give a canned one “off the cuff” either, then exactly where on the intellect scale does he rank relative to Obama, the putative “reader”?

And, going beyond that, how do you square the “he’s only reading” canard with Obama’s own, oft-criticized press conferences (which the press finds soooooo boring, natch), in which he departs on a 30 minute disputation about policy concerns relevant to some sub-issue of the question? No teleprompting there. Secret earpiece, no doubt.That or an ancient form of Kenyan mind-control that makes us think he’s answering at length. Again, square this with Bush’s press conference performance which generally involved a chuckle, a reference to the nickname of the questioner, and the odd personal attack on a blind man for wearing sunglasses.

All this before you even begin to consider that running for President requires, absolutely requires the candidate to give innumerable speeches off-prompter, every day, with YouTube lurking in the wings 100% of the time. But we won’t consider that either, apparently.

The reductions in Medicare Republicans are now decrying are more equitable, better targeted, and not even half as large as the ones many of those same Republicans endorsed in the ‘90s.

Jonathan Cohn,
writing for The New Republic, and creating a little koan for us all to recite. Also, keep in mind that John McCain himself pushed cuts in the neighborhood of $1.3 trillion just ~8 months ago during the campaign. And is now all worked up over revisions that total $487 billion (mostly from dumping the idiotic and wasteful Medicare Advantage program by which the government pays insurance companies to provide Medicare benefits…at higher cost than, uh, Medicare). Unconscionable. And they will be allowed to do it. And then go back on it. Again and again.

    Annals of Scientific Publication

    It’s not every day one gets to write a paper that includes such excerpts as:

    [the] structure would be assembled in space near the sun by an army of robots and built out of space-based materials

    while talking about small black holes, Dyson spheres, and the possibility of re-purposing SETI as a means of detecting the telltale gravitational waves of and/or the gamma emissions from poorly collimated exhaust of ships built to these theoretical specifications. But, when you do touch on all that, you generally get to include this line:

    In the epilogue, we discuss possible philosophical ramifications of this observation.

    Science!

    Incidentally, in the 23rd century, Scotty frequently raged about this part of the paper:

    A microscopic particle of ordinary matter which drifted into the antimatter would cause an explosion, scattering the antimatter into contact with the ship, and destroying everything for millions of miles around.

    while (typically and completely) ignoring this part:

    Any electromagnetic force which held the antimatter in would also drive normal matter in.

    Best to stay the hell away from the Engineering deck, then. Somewhere on the order of millions of miles away. Good to know. <hand_gestures> Good. to. know! </hand_gestures>