Skip to content

Links for January 21st from 10:27 to 18:57

Links for January 21st from 10:27 to 18:57.

The Obama inauguration & administration:

  • Dday @ Hullabaloo: The Gitmo Trap – Read the whole article.
  • Pam’s House Blend: Obama signs exec orders returning transparency to government – Early memos from Obama are a weight off my chest: White House senior staff pay freeze, prohibition against accepting gifts from lobbyists, reformed hiring practices, transparency, open government, FOIA, limits to executive privilege.
  • Love With No Need to Preempt Grievance – poetry & inspiration.
  • Writing Tools: Obama’s Inauguration Speech Relies on the Rhetoric of Responsibility – “…political rhetoric should be judged not just on its inspirational eloquence, but also on its ability to move an audience, not just to tears, but to action.”
  • Dday: A New Era Of Comity And Bipartisanship (Hullabaloo) – “See, the President said he would bring people together and yet nobody’s working with us to eliminate taxes and destroy government. Obama would be right not to listen to any of this, but he clearly wants to open with a big bipartisan victory. There’s a case to be made that giving Republicans and Blue Dogs some ownership of the stimulus would make it easier to go back to them for other important legislation, like re-regulation of the financial sector. But that assumes that Republicans would take that ownership seriously, that they would even allow themselves to vote for this if they didn’t get essentially the bill George Bush would sign, and that they care about consistency or coherence. They don’t. They care about trench warfare.”
  • The Mahablog: The Morning After – “This was not a soaring, inspirational speech, but a serious one that precisely laid out the values on which Obama intends to build his administration. Let’s hope he is true to his word.”
  • Yahoo! indeed. (Shakesville) – “Actual headline from Yahoo news: Obama to begin workaday task of governing nation. [...] The last eight years have beaten us down and lowered our expectations so much that a headline roughly equivalent to President Takes Job Seriously, Actually Intends to Work is enough of a novelty to be considered a news item.”

Feminist & anti-racist social commentary:

Culture wars:

  • Amanda Marcotte: Atheists in the house, throw your hands in the air, ‘cause you count now (Pandagon) – “If people contextualize this country as being one that has multiple faiths but not that many faithless, people are going to have a hard time seeing the harm and unfairness of all this god talk coming from government institutions and other issues like faith-based funding. People aren’t going to see the harm so long as all references to god and faith are generic enough. But if you can point to a group of people who are still being excluded, no matter how generic the references, then people might have a better idea why the only fair solution to the issue of religious diversity is to keep religion private and make government spaces secular. “Under god” in the Pledge, for instance, may not seem a big deal if you assume that everyone in the room believes in some kind of god. But it’s obviously exclusionary if there’s atheists in the room. That’s why the inclusion of non-believers in the inaugural speech is such a big honking deal.”
  • Pam’s House Blend: Maine: no sponsor for marriage amendment – “Too bad, so sad for the fundies in Maine. It’s time for those folks at the Christian Civic League and the rest to hang it up. The discussion in the state is over whether to open marriage to lesbian or gay couples or to grant separate civil unions. Even the Republicans have no interest in an amendment” to ban same-sex marriage.
  • Pam’s House Blend: CA: KABC-TV deems ad with gay families ‘too controversial’ to air during inauguration – View the ad from GetToKnowUsFirst.org.
  • Pam’s House Blend: Jon Stewart on the inauguration, interview with Gene Robinson – “Start off the morning with this laugh. Stewart’s comments about Dick Cheney (and the accompanying visuals) are hysterical. He also scorches Rick Warren quite nicely.”

Service:

Economic crisis:

Misc science, technology, & science fiction links:

Creative Commons License
The Links for January 21st from 10:27 to 18:57 by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.