The Indelible Bonobo Experience

Renaissance Monkey: in-depth expertise in Jack-of-all-trading. I mostly comment on news of interest to me and occasionally engage in debates or troll passive-aggressively. Ask or Submit 2 mah authoritah! ;) !

Link Post

Videographic: The state of the [presidential] race

Mr Romney kicks Mr Gingrich bottom :)

  • economy scores 80% in top voter concerns
  • Obama not seen as guilty for the economy
  • good news will help him

I think Romney will win. Gingrich vs Obama would be fun to watch, but scary in the prospect that the more dim-witted narcissist might just win, like GW before him :)
Posted in obama elections vote 2012 presidential politics usa
Photo Post
newyorker: Barack Obama, Post-Partisan, Meets Washington Gridlock Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps it—“Back from the OVAL”—and often e-mails an index of the President’s handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and their assistants. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question. If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times, early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices. “Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means it’s really hard,” he said. “Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it.” - In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza provides an in-depth look at the first three years of Obama’s Presidency, and through dozens of interviews with White House insiders and hundreds of pages of internal White House memos—which have never been released to the public—with Obama’s handwritten notes, reveals how the President struggles with important decisions:  http://nyr.kr/wXU5Ha the downside of being literate: more time spent in the “decider” cape

newyorker:

Barack Obama, Post-Partisan, Meets Washington Gridlock

Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps it—“Back from the OVAL”—and often e-mails an index of the President’s handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and their assistants. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question.

If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times, early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices. “Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means it’s really hard,” he said. “Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it.”

- In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza provides an in-depth look at the first three years of Obama’s Presidency, and through dozens of interviews with White House insiders and hundreds of pages of internal White House memos—which have never been released to the public—with Obama’s handwritten notes, reveals how the President struggles with important decisions:  http://nyr.kr/wXU5Ha

the downside of being literate: more time spent in the “decider” cape

Posted in obama usa decider president presidential | 99 notes
Quote Post
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
—

H.L. Mencken (via circularfire)

you missed the most often quoted part, especially in the previous decade:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

(via whakatikatika)

Posted in politics democracy mencken presidential president elections | 10 notes