Showing posts with label president-elect barack obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label president-elect barack obama. Show all posts

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Will Smith Playing Barack Obama Is A No Brainer!

Hollywood film star Will Smith has staked his claim to play Barack Obama in a movie about his rise to become US President and America’s first black leader. And personally, we know Keri Washington wants to play Michelle baaaadly, but our vote is Kimberly Elise -- hands down!

Smith has staked his claim to play the role, even before Barack Obama has been inaugurated as president.

Speaking at the premiere of his new film Seven Pounds at the Empire, Leicester Square, in London, Smith laughed about reports that the US President-elect had indicated that he would like the actor to play him if his life story were ever to be made into a movie.

“If I am ordered by my commander in chief to star in a film about him, I will do my duty as an American," he said, beaming.

Smith, best known for the Men in Black films and Independence Day, says however that he had no desire to move into the White House for real.

"If we were in the White House I don't know if that would exactly be a good thing. The Obamas are much more prepared to be in the White House than the Smiths.

"It's a whole lot more fun to be a movie star. That's a difficult job being President with a whole lot of lives on the line with every decision you make. In my job I just bring joy. I don't bring bad news. I think I'll stay in my position for quite some time." Smith said the “world had changed forever” with the election of Barack Obama.

He said he would be an "eyewitness to history" when he attends the impending inauguration of US President-elect Barack Obama.


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Monday, January 5, 2009

Obama Girls Start That Awkward New Kids At School Thing Today!

Today, Michelle Obama accompanied daughters Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10, to Sidwell Friends school Monday morning while dad did his whole president-elect thing. Sasha is attending classes at the Bethesda, Md., elementary-school campus, where she is in second grade. Malia is in fifth grade at the middle school campus in the District of Columbia.

Sidwell is a private Quaker school. The campus in northwest Washington has grades 5-12 and the Bethesda campus is for kindergarten through fourth grade. Wonder how many black children attend that school?

Sasha (clearly the character in the family) carried a Trans by JanSport pink, magenta and gray backpack and wore bluejeans and a brown jacket with a hood and her hair was pulled into two braided ponytails.Mama bear wore a long maroon overcoat, cinched at the waist, and slate gray pants.

Security was relatively low key. But there were reports that after dropping the kids off, Michelle was planning to track down Ann Coulter (see below post) and give him a much needed beatdown behing the exclusive campus around three o'clock!

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Sunday, December 21, 2008

Jeremy Wright Gets Thrown Under The Bus And Rick Warren Gets Center Stage? Barack, Me No Likey!


No Prior Convictions

By

Erin Aubry Kaplan


It’s always depressing, at least momentarily, to be reminded that hope has its limits. Or that it can be qualified and moderated, sculpted like limestone, to a point where it no longer resembles hope but something just slightly above the status quo.

President-elect Obama has chosen Pastor Rick Warren to preside over next month’s inauguration, an event as eagerly anticipated as anything in modern American history.

That’s partly because there’s been so little to celebrate on a national scale for so long, folks are already putting on their dancing shoes and ready to see the whole event as a template for a better, more enlightened nation.

It’s a coming-out party for a country that wandered away from its better nature for too many years and suffered in a desert of its own making, a country that’s been wounded badly by culture wars, but not killed by them. Not yet.

This inauguration is not just a message to the world that America is back, it’s a reintroduction to ourselves.
So the invocation and who does it is critical. Invocations are not just for the religious, by the way, but for all of us whose stake in this still-evolving democracy feels spiritual and always has. Of course, I don’t expect that whoever’s delivering the blessing will wear a cloth that covers everybody’s religious beliefs, to say nothing of the secular beliefs. It’s not possible in this case that one can or even should represent the many.

But that one who holds the brief power of the pulpit on Jan. 20 will nonetheless reflect something about all of us, spiritually, politically and otherwise.

Obama knows this very well. Which is why his choice of Warren, the supposedly moderate evangelical pastor from Orange County, is such a letdown. It’s not just that Warren vigorously supported Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative that just passed in California and opened up new rifts among gays, straights, blacks and other groups, rifts that are still deepening. It’s also the fact that during the campaign, Warren felt entitled to call the presidential candidates into account at his own place of worship.

The debate that he hosted at Saddleback church was really an Oprah interview, during which Warren was perfectly comfortable grilling Obama and McCain about their views on abortion and other “moral” issues that were far more about the mostly white church base than about an American base—a narrow reflection indeed.

Certainly Warren is only one symbol of the kind of faith-based power that’s ruled America for the last decade, but that’s the point—he’s a look backward, not forward. It’s not that he doesn’t have a constituency, but it’s very clear that that constituency as a guiding force should be retired, or at least minimized.

Obama’s already shown that he’s a master of compromise and soother of ruffled feathers when it comes to appointments, but he’s also shown that he can tip that compromise into capitulation. Or at least it looks that way.

I can’t help but think now about Obama’s former pastor and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright. He was chased off the scene by his alleged racial divisiveness, a chase that Obama himself sanctioned in the end. Clearly that was more a political move than a move based on a real conviction that Wright’s scripture-based social critiques of America were wrong.

But now that the politics have paid off and Obama’s got the office he was running for, he can put forward who he wants to; he can articulate his own values without fear of retribution. That he chooses to put forward a very divisive Warren instead of someone one else—not Wright necessarily, but someone—says something about his values I’m not sure I like.

ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Among her many projects, Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Feeling Uninspired? Check Out President-Elect Barack Obama's Pictorial Journey

Folks Who Get It: Eric Holder, Obama's Choice for Attorney General And First African American Cabinet Pick

He's President-elect Obama's top choice to serve as the nation's top lawyer, but Washington attorney Eric H. Holder Jr. is no stranger to the Justice Department -- or to making history.

During his career he has faced controversy -- his involvement in a widely-questioned 11th-hour Clinton pardon and the Elian Gonzalez saga, which occurred during his tenure as the department's second-in-command -- but he also has gained a reputation for having a moderate approach to law enforcement issues and a true dedication to public service.

Holder, 57, met Obama at a 2004 dinner party welcoming the junior U.S. senator from Illinois to Washington, where he was headed to Capitol Hill as the nation's only black senator.

Holder recalled the meeting in a cover story in The American Lawyer earlier this year, saying that he and Obama sat next to each other and "just clicked" after discussing their foreign-born fathers, Ivy League educations and zeal for civil service. Additionally, Holder told The American Lawyer, "I think we share a worldview. ... [Obama] is not defined by his race. He's proud of it, cognizant of the pernicious effect that race has had in our history, but not defined by it."

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