So, I’m reading this story about an Obama supporter being told to take off his shirt while working at Sams Club. Even as an Obama supporter myself, I would have to agree with that. I seems to me to be quite obvious that you don’t go into work in a t-shirt with a huge picture of Obama on it. This story has gotten enough attention but I was a little curious to see how others out there feel. The dress code doesn’t even allow for such a shirt to be worn. I don’t think this breaks down to race, even though this did happen in Jacksonville, FL. I have been there before and I never seen any employees walking around in t-shirts with former President Bush’s face on it. I’m all for expression of ones ideas and opinions, but rules are rules. Plus it’s a real turn off for those who don’t like Obama. I mean if I walked into some store and saw an employee with a George Bush t-shirt, that would really turn me off and I’d probably never visit that store. Also, its probably best that politics stay out of the work place. Anyways, heres the report, Read the rest of this entry
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Video: Anti-Gay Church Protest At The Inaugural
This is not the first time I have seen this group, theres pictures making fun of them on the internet that are quite funny. Anyways, this church group comes from Kansas and the only thing they really do is anti-gay protesting. The good thing is that people coming to the Inauguration to see Obama stood up to these whackos. The group is extremely hypocritical. They say god hates gays and then say that they are a compassionate group. This is just another sign that we still have a lot of work to do. I really like this video because people are standing up to them which means that we have come a long way. So, heres the video
The Bush Retrospective…
I’m going to start this post with an apology to Sensico, who so humbly invited me to start periodically cross-posting here so long ago, which I then summarily did two posts and then faded back into the limelight. Life gets to be a bitch sometimes. Schedules are looser now though, and I figured I’d announced my no so triumphant return, or my tail between the legs return to Sensico’s blog.
I return with a comment about history, my area of expertise. I returned to Nate Silver’s blog here recently, to find he had done a number crunch on presidential approval ratings leaving office and what that means as historical legacies.
Surprisingly, however, there has historically been fairly little relationship between a President’s popularity at the end of his term and the way that he has tended to be regarded by history. The following chart compares two things: a president’s final net approval rating as measured by Gallup, and the average historical ranking of that president as assigned based on three recent polls of historians. (These were the polls conducted by CSPAN in 1999, by Siena College in 2002, and by the Wall Street Journal in 2005. The chart excludes Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, whose terms ended unnaturally.)
My view on this as a historian is that you can pretty much peg a president’s legacy based on his most pictorially memorable moment. Though Truman was unpopular when leaving office, he is widely remembered for two events; the dropping of the atom bomb and the image of him holding up the newspaper “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Other than that the memories of him are of taking over the legacy of the larger and more charismatic history of FDR, or the New Deal. So you can really pin Truman to New Deal, Ending WWII and a resurgent presidential victory, as far as history goes, even though he left office in a cloud of foreign policy screw ups and minor scandals. Read the rest of this entry
Web Watch: Whitehouse.gov
If you’re anything like me, then you have never bothered to visit the white house website more then twice. But, I wanted to bring whitehouse.gov to peoples attention so that you hopefully visit. It looks cooler for some reason. Now that the transition website is done, we need another Obama site to aggregate to and whitehouse.gov is that site. Click on the Screenshot to goto the site.
