Indecision 2010

Yesterday, Wednesday October 27, President Obama appeared on John Stewart's The Daily Show.

Over the nearly 30-minute show, Obama seemed uncomfortable with even the mild criticism that Stewart offered. More significant still, throughout the entire show, Obama was on the defensive. Rarely, did he say anything that sounded path-breaking or new. "Yes we can, but..." was Obama's new and not very impressive slogan.

Obama's arguments - mostly excuses - were pretty weak. For example, he stated that the rising unemployment figures over the last two years took place mainly in the first few months after he came into office. "Most of the jobs that we lost were lost before the economic policies that we put into place had any effect." Looking at the unemployment graph provided by the United States Labor Department, that statement is not very convincing. Rather, it seems that Obama's economic policies have had little or no success in stemming rising unemployment.

Despite being on the defensive - or maybe because of it - Obama came off sounding very arrogant. "We have made a lot of progress over the last 18 months that, from a historical perspective, ranks up there with any legislative session we've seen in history." But, as with his excuses, the boasts fell short of convincing.

The word I heard most often from Obama was "fair"... "in fairness", "to be fair", "here's what I think is fair", and so on. In my experience, one of the most insightful lines from Shakespeare is: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." On last night's The Daily Show, I think the President did protest too much. I think that whenever he  used the word "fair", it meant two things: (1) that most of what he had just been saying was unfair (2) that what he was about to say would be very unfair.

Good News

We don't often see such good news on the world front. The 33 miners trapped underground for more than two months deep underground have all been rescued.

I am very happy for the miners, for the people of Chile, and for all the concerned people of the world. Today a great victory was achieved.