The Dear Leader is speaking now...

The Dear Leader

...so there isn't much happening. (10:22 AM) The suits with wires in their ears and unidentified black uniformed men with automatic weapons as well as the local cops have all us peons on lock down. So I am just twiddling my thumbs waiting for the Dear Leader to finish his speech and go home. Hope & change mofo!

The "leader of the free world" creates his own mini-police state everywhere he goes

And so it seems we Ann Arborites must endure another Obama visit this coming Friday. Look for DTX to be closed to take offs/landing whilst the Imperial Barge Air Force One is on the runway. Look for major highways like I-94 between Detroit and Ann Arbor to be closed to traffic and for police/feds/unidentified black uniformed goons to be posted at all the bridges, on/off ramps and on the tops of every tall building along the way. Furthermore, the immediate area around the pres will become a civil liberties free zone  and from which you can/will be barred from regardless of your business for being there. The Big Ø will zip into town in a fast moving multi-SUV motorcade, speak, and then zoom back out to DTX but even so downtown will be on lock-down for 24 hours probably starting around Thursday until the Big Ø leaves.

As you may surmise I've experienced quite a number of presidential/presidential candidate/First Lady/VIP visits to my town over the years and so I know the drill by now.

I guess we're all supposed to feel honored that he and his entourage have deigned to grace us with his presence yet again. Myself, I was hoping that with advent of the modern police state we'd only need to endure the Dear Leader's digital presence on a jumbo-tron screen rather than in person. Less disruptive.

The latest converts to the church of It’s Okay When We Do It

The subset of the lawyerly elite who happened to be Democrats became apoplectic when the Bush administration held POWs at Gitmo (without trials!), used water-boarding (on a few), and did whatever they wanted to in order to prosecute their wars. And now? Well now that they're in power they've pulled an Emily Litella on all that shit.

Since taking office the Obama administration did stop with the water-boarding stuff it's true but they escalated things by starting to do targeted killings of  terrorists some of whom were American citizens,  and Gitmo remains open for business .) It now seems to Obama that the Bush-era executive war powers excesses are somehow okay now that they're the ones doing it. Lawyers that once condemned Bush as a constitution shredding maniac are now writing legal memos justifying the use of the same measures that Bush used and even worse they are presenting them with a straight-faced seriousness that defies understanding. And those of us who opposed all of this when Bush did it (and still oppose it now as well) are ridiculed as isolationists, legal nit-pickers, and worse! Go figure?

Well that was then, and this is now you  see.

Obama's Labor Day speech in Detroit

Well here's Obama at a dreary and cool Motown Labor Day 2011 gathering doing what he does best; giving a speech. And if all of our problems could be solved by reading off the teleprompter we'd be a utopia by now. Obama is gonna need to do a lot more than just orate. Obama's hangers-on, sycophants, handlers, fan-boys, and ass kissers did the man no favor in 2008 when they convinced Obama that his silver tongued oratorical skills would be enough. They are not, not nearly. And which makes the current to-do about his "major speech" on employment policy before a joint session of Congress later this week seem like laughably small potatoes. If only giving another speech would do the trick. But like the one-trick pony he is that's all he knows to do.

Sign of the Times...

Ain't it wonderful to have the POTUS come to town! Fun, fun, fun. Fun that is if you like standing in line for two hours to have some Secret Service goon squeeze your balls and then go sit in the rain for another hour and a half waiting for the Great Man to come and give his speech. Big fun. Hope it was worth it for you guys that attended.

Sign of the Times...

President Obama is speaking at the University of Michigan commencement in Ann Arbor tomorrow. Which means that between the Secret Service and the local cops the whole town is gonna be a no-go zone complete with road closures, checkpoints, snipers on the roof and overhead choppers buzzing around. There were four of them zooming around this afternoon. The racket they make is truly deafening. And all for a short graduation speech. And I hear it may rain too. Hope all this is worth it to you if you plan to attend. But it ain't to me.

Me, I am gonna hang out somewhere else till the Pres blows town. I highly recommend if you care as less about the Great Man's words of wisdom and advice to the new grads as I do you just avoid the thirty mile zone between Ann Arbor and Detroit Metro airport altogether.