Forever Changed

President of the United States

How would you spend your last day before you became President?

NBC News and news services

WASHINGTON - On the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama talked with wounded troops at a military hospital and then visited an emergency shelter for homeless teens, grabbing a paint roller to help give the walls a fresh coat of blue. He appealed to the nation he will soon lead to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. through service to others.

"As we honor that legacy, it's not a day just to pause and reflect — it's a day to act," Obama said on King's national holiday. "I ask the American people to turn today's efforts into an ongoing commitment to enriching the lives of others in their communities, their cities, and their country."

Large crowds thronged to the capital city on the eve of Obama's elevation to the presidency. "Tomorrow, we will come together as one people on the same Mall where Dr. King's dream echoes still," Obama said.

A day away from becoming the nation's 44th president, Obama visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center to talk with troops injured in battle.

Then he visited Sasha Bruce House, a shelter for homeless teens in the District of Columbia, chatting with volunteers who were helping to repaint rooms and then pitching in himself.

Obama once was immersed in such work as a community organizer in Chicago.

Pausing to remember winds of change from another time...

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Just like Lincoln, Obama takes the train to Washington

Speaking in Philadelphia

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Speaking in Baltimore

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No Torture: Justice Back in the Justice Department

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Finally, the voice of conscience and law: Obama to issue order to close Gitmo -

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to issue an executive order his first week in office — and perhaps his first day — to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to two presidential transition team advisers.

It's unlikely the detention facility at the Navy base in Cuba will be closed anytime soon. In an interview last weekend, Obama said it would be "a challenge" to close it even within the first 100 days of his administration.

But the order, which one adviser said could be issued as early as Jan. 20, would start the process of deciding what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida and Taliban suspects and potential witnesses who are being held there. Most have not been charged with a crime.

It's baptism by fire for Obama

Lisa Van Dusen |Monday, 12 January, 2009

There must be mornings these days when Barack Obama looks out his window at the Hay Adams, across Lafayette Park to the White House, and thinks, "I should have gone to Disney World."

At a news conference at his transition headquarters Wednesday, where the president-elect unveiled his chief performance officer, the post-announcement Q&A started with an ironic, "Welcome to Washington," from a reporter. Obama responded with an equally ironic, "It's great to be here."

Obama's not entirely new to Washington, but being the change behemoth with the 82-per-cent approval rating draws a whole new kind of welcome wagon. Already, it was that kind of week.

It started with the withdrawal of Bill Richardson as Commerce secretary nominee over a grand jury investigation, segued into the public slamming of former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta as nominee for CIA director by fellow Democrats. Meanwhile, embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was all over everywhere on Capitol Hill without ever leaving home in the form of Roland Burris, his legally appointed senator and human shield.

Anyone who thought winning the toughest nomination campaign and then the toughest election campaign in memory would be the hard part, must be slapping themselves now. There's a very good reason why one of the symptoms of transitionitis is campaign nostalgia: Some days, pre-governing, like governing, truly sucks.

When you come down to earth after a successful election and thud into to the entrenched guerrilla warfare of a government town, there aren't too many days when that schedule blocked out in 15-minute increments stays intact past noon.

As tough as Chicago may be, Washington is arguably tougher in its own way because the stakes are so much higher and the currency of power gets traded in ways that aren't always obvious.

During the nomination and election campaigns, there was always the question of whether Obama, if he won, would be able to govern by the same rules that applied on the road and that generally prevailed from the top of his organization to the street-level volunteers whereby winning wasn't worth it if it meant resorting to old-style tactics.

If there was any doubt, last week proved that not only is he not in Kansas anymore, he's not even in Chicago.

Along with the Burris soap opera, the Panetta panning (the Obama team neglected to inform Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, incoming chairperson of the Senate intelligence committee, of the appointment, which may or may not have helped . . . likely not) and the Richardson implosion, there was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, another Democrat, saying, with a breathtaking dose of denial, "If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him . . . I do not work for Barack Obama." Maybe it's more like Dodge City.

By noon on Wednesday, it must have seemed like excellent timing for a chinwag with the four other living presidents at the White House; an opportunity to commiserate with an exclusive support group of fellow survivors.

The media avail that preceded the lunch may not have been the most awkward Oval Office photo op on record but it was right up there in the top five with Richard Nixon shaking hands with Elvis.

Jimmy Carter was hovering almost out of the shot, looking like he was being timed out, which maybe he was. Then the lights went out just as the president-elect was starting to talk. Thankfully, Bill Clinton broke the tension by observing, apropos of the first floor covering, "I just love that rug." Maybe it's more like a waking nightmare where you can hear late Ronald Reagan-era image guru Mike Deaver laughing from photo-op heaven.

By Thursday, the unveiling of his economic stimulus package held out the brief premise of a substantive diversion, until members of the Senate finance committee, again, notably the Democrats, started picking apart the tax cuts in the plan.

This happens in every transition and the only way to avoid a weekis horribilis would be to anticipate every possible exploitable downside or unintended consequence to every major appointment, policy announcement, family decision and public pronouncement, which is impossible in practice but ideal in theory.

Can you even aim for the level of preemptive paranoia required for a zero tolerance policy on unforced errors and still be the guy who eschews the old-style tactics?

Welcome to Washington, Mr. President-elect, where even when it's more like a big high school, hazing runs its course.

Israeli Military does away with more Palestinian enemies of the State

A Short Break From Fishing

I am sitting around my home this morning, celebrating the aftermath of a peaceful Christmas here in upstate New York. All is well here.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, all hell continues to break loose - as the Israeli military bombs the shit out of Gaza, killing over 200, and injuring well over 300 people - men, women, and children. Israeli officials claim they had no choice!

Rarely present in the mainstream conversation about international politics is condemnation of the Israeli policy of violence waged upon the Palestinian people - it is completely absent from American discourse. President-elect Obama, vacationing on a multi-million dollar estate in Hawaii is apparently too busy with other things to comment.

Mr. President, this does not require thought, deliberation, and consideration as how to respond - picture your Hawaii compound destroyed, your two precious daughter dead at your feet, and ask yourself whether you would remain silent! Is this the NEW moral leadership you promised? Is this silence on war crimes your idea of change?

Israel needs to be condemned by the international community. By all of us. With a policy of apartheid, at its most benign, and a policy of genocidal extinction at its most malignant, Israel continues to deny water rights and a homeland to the Palestinian people - the rightful owners of all of Israel - for without the efforts of the United States and the Allies after World War II, there would be no fictitious land of Israel existing on Palestinian land.

No fucking choice????????? Give me a fucking break!

As for the rest of us ... our hearts should weep with the grief of the death of our own children, and our anger and rage should follow in kind.

Happy New Year!

Zachary Marcus

PS - let these images burn into your soul this holiday season ...

President Elect Obama's Thanksgiving Message

Welcome to America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care

It's situation critical
Sun, November 23, 2008 | Lisa Van Dusen | Sun Media

On the morning of last June 19, in the waiting room of the psychiatric ward of King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, Esmin Green slumped from her chair to the floor. She lay there for almost an hour, ignored by other patients and staff, before dying of causes still undetermined.

The hospital's closed circuit security cameras produced a video so disturbing (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA29VwnZ4cE), that when it was released two weeks later it got worldwide attention.

Green was a 49-year-old mother of six. In the days before her death, she lost her job in a day care centre, then lost her apartment: One version of a story that will happen more and more as the economic meltdown trickles down every Main Street.

That the video of Green's death surfaced in the middle of the presidential campaign seemed like a cry for help from a system that works for fewer and fewer people at higher and higher costs.

The United States health care system is a spaghetti junction full of toll booths set up by private insurance companies that provide coverage for care in the form of HMOs (health maintenance organizations), PPOs (preferred provider organizations) and POS (point of service) programs. Most Americans (60%) get health coverage from these companies through their employers.

There are government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid for people without private insurance but roughly 15% of Americans remain uninsured. The ones who are insured interface with doctors and hospitals using a business lexicon of deductibles and co-payments and non-network treatment and paperwork unfathomable in both volume and content.

The system costs more per capita than any other on earth and represents a greater chunk of GDP (15%) than any other UN member except the Marshall Islands. The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation that doesn't have universal health care.

When I moved to the U.S. in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time explaining that the Canadian health care system wasn't a choice-less socialist nightmare of back-alley quacks and deadly wait times to people who couldn't believe universal health care could be so straightforward.

The most rattling culture shock then was getting used to a health care system that had the same creative accounting scandals, advertising schemes and class divides as any other business. The amount of money floating around it -- from liability insurance and personal injury attorneys to $500 bedpan suppliers to fly-by-night providers who post hand-scrawled ads on utility poles -- is staggering.

The horrors of the system chronicled in news accounts about people such as Green and by Michael Moore in the documentary Sicko happen every day and will be happening more and more a the economy worsens.

Money question

But Americans make decisions involving health coverage all the time that you never think of when it all comes down to one card in your wallet: Career choices, personal choices, where to live, what to do on a Saturday afternoon with your kids, whether to go to an emergency room.

The Canadian system has been strained in the past decade and we're a lot less self-righteous about it now, but when Canadians talk about the merits of changing it, the bottom line isn't so much the bottom line as a consensus on the value of fairness.

U.S. polls conducted before the economy dwarfed all other issues showed that most Americans share that view.

Fifteen years ago, when the Clintons tried to overhaul the U.S. health care system, resistance from the insurance lobby proved fatal.

Now, even the health insurers are admitting that change is needed (last week, two insurance lobby groups agreed to cover sick people as well as healthy ones, if they really have to) and that health care is becoming a huge economic problem.

New presidents can only focus on so many priorities and Barack Obama is a new president at a time when the things that need fixing seem outnumbered only by the obstacles to fixing them. But his reported choice of former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who wrote the book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, means this is a priority.

While the economy, energy, education and climate change need fixing, people aren't dying in classrooms or in gas stations because of a system that seems based on the very un-American idea that some lives are worth more than others.

Economy -- Of the People, By the People - President Elect Barack Obama's Weekly Address

Cartoons of the Week

"You have a new partner in the White House"

More than 600 climate change leaders from across the country and around the world convened in Los Angeles today for the opening sessions of the Global Climate Summit, a 2-day event arranged by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to break gridlock on the issue ahead of next month's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland. Here are President Elect Obama's remarks:

On Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State

Keeping us sane...

60 Minutes interview with President Elect Obama, and our new First Lady, Michelle Obama

Middle East factions await new president's first move

Sunday, 16 November, 2008 | Lisa Van Dusen

Not long after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, former Finnish president and international peace negotiator Martti Ahtisaari, whose job demands that he choose his words carefully, described the failure of the international community to resolve the Middle East conflict as a "disgrace."

More optimistically, he added that "if the political will is there, we can solve anything," and that he hoped the new president-elect of the United States would use his first year in office to reach a permanent solution to the Israeli- Palestinian problem.

Having negotiated peace agreements in Northern Ireland (as a member of the troika that included former U.S. Senate majority leader George Mitchell and Canadian General John de Chastelain), Kosovo, Indonesia and Namibia, among others, Ahtisaari, who got a bite of the Middle East on a UN fact-finding mission into a controversial siege of the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, knows something about what's missing from a room when nothing works.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who has spent the past 18 months as envoy for the Quartet on the Middle East (the group of four powers -- the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- that oversees peace efforts) also said last week it was important that the Barack Obama administration "grips this issue from day one" and makes the Middle East an urgent priority.

That Day 1 exhortation holds a caution not to repeat the mistake of the past administration's hands-off approach.

There are three weeks between the inauguration on Jan. 20 and election day in Israel on Feb. 10. Elections on either side are always about the peace process, whether it's moribund, alive and well or on life support.

While Obama will be warned not to touch the tinderbox until after the vote or risk being accused of interference, players on both sides will be watching for a sign as to whether he'll be more like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or something in between.

Polls show Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who took over the Kadima party when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigned amid corruption allegations, in a dead heat with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party, who has made a career of selling security over peace.

Both leaders have nuanced their positions in the past week, with Livni, who as chief Israeli negotiator supports the Annapolis process begun last year, hardening her line by warning Thursday that Israel doesn't need any "dramatic" interventions in the peace process from Obama when he takes office in January.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has softened his position that the Annapolis process should be shelved in favour of rebuilding the Palestinian economy, saying after meeting with Blair last week that he would continue peace talks with the Palestinians as well.

That was one day after Netanyahu's spokesperson said following a meeting of Israeli, Palestinian and international negotiators at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt that there would be "no point" in continuing with Annapolis.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, are still on board. At least Fatah, which controls the West Bank, is. Palestinian President and Fatah Leader Mahmoud Abbas said at Yasser Arafat's memorial service last week that he won't agree to a peace deal without a massive release of Palestinian prisoners even as Hamas was accusing Abbas of rounding up their own usual suspects in the West Bank to force them back to bilateral Palestinian talks in Cairo.

With everything else a president-elect has on his plate, it's easy to see how the Israel-Palestinian file can be a slippery slope to that sad pantheon of former presidents, prime ministers, envoys, negotiators and chairpersons who've come and gone while the same issues sit unresolved on the table.

What Obama brings to that table, aside from enormous leverage and possibly that political will Ahtisaari called for, is a mandate for change, a fresh pair of eyes and the common sense to see the craziness.

There's also a line from his campaign speech that works well for this puzzle: "The real gamble is having the same old folks doing the same old things again and expecting a different result."

President Elect Obama's Saturday Web/Radio Address