Trinker

With rumors swirling around the Internet that ex-Weatherman William Ayers “ghost” wrote Obama’s “DREAM memoirs, and based the book on Homers “Odyssey”. It occurs to me that the pictures of President elect Obama body surfing and pictures of him in his bathing suit walking on the beach, may be an attempt by Obama handlers to depict him as a “he man” who will lead from strength!

In the following paragraphs I attempt to show the pictures of Obama “shirtless” are no isolated incident, but an attempt to show masculinity and power by his “team and the co-operating media.

In Russian Vladimir Putin’s case, his shirtless pictures were a demonstration of the physical prowess of a man who is a black belt in karate, and a spy who worked covertly on the KGB for years before he became President of Russia.

Despite some incredulous reactions to Putin allowing himself to be photographed topless on blogs.”Wilderness Putin,” has been getting a lot of thumbs up in Russia as well. Many bloggers are calling him “sexy”!

The reactions should come as no surprise. Like any good politician, part of Putin’s popularity is based on his image. Compared to the Russian and Soviet leaders who came before him, Putin is leading the charge for the young and healthy generation.

At the end of the Soviet era, it was hard to keep up with which 70-year-old, visibly sick leader was in charge. After Leonid Brezhnev died, neither of the next two successors lasted more than 15 months before dying – leading to the joke of a guard demanding to see someone’s ticket to be allowed in to a Soviet leader’s funeral, to which he responds that he has season tickets. Source:Pravda

Now,Obama’s physique has been well-exposed; photographers snapped him body surfing in Hawaii during the campaign. He was on the November cover of Men’s Health and detailed his workouts for the magazine: 45 minutes, six days a week, alternating between weights and “cardio”.

Obama is apparently now the world’s biggest celebrity, just after Angelina and Brad Pitt. I guess some would say they’re neck and neck right now.

The celebrity description is appropriate, even as Obama faces a plummeting economy and two wars upon entering office. He’s seen as often on “Access Hollywood” as on the nightly news, and appears in “Us Weekly” with the regularity of a Jennifer Aniston.This is understandable when you consider that the media chose him as their messiah long ago!

When John F. Kennedy was pictured shirtless, there were media accounts fretting about the threshold we had crossed as a country, but nothing Obama does will ever get a negative spin in the Media.

Vladimir Putin. The black-belt-in-judo, non-smoking, rarely-drinking, cool and collected leader. While his popularity is certainly tied to his image – leading to everything from Putinka brand vodka to the girl-band pop song “Like Putin” (whose singers look for a man who is “like Putin/full of strength/like Putin/who won’t drink) – Putin’s image is, in turn, mirrored by his era.

This is an era in which Russia is getting stronger, reasserting itself internationally, becoming more stable at home and growing economically. And if it’s the image of a shirtless, machete-wielding president which best represents the man who can do all that and enjoy approval ratings at about 70 percent, maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

Is it such a stretch to think that the Obama “string pullers” are entering the image enhancement stage to reassure those who did vote for him, that he is physically fit to fight the problems our country faces? If so, look forward to more “puff” pictures of President Obama as his term in office turns ugly due to the decisions he must make that will not please all the special interest groups that put him in the Oval Office.

And the Left leaning Media took the bait! The following “Swoon” article illustrates the media’s messianic opinion of the President elect.
“A paparazzi picture of a buff and shirtless Barack Obama Monday prompted a decidedly un-presidential reaction on the Web.
“Dang, my President is SMOKIN’ HOT. Who else has such a fine leader? France? Great Britain? Eat your heart out, Sarkozy,” wrote one commenter on The Huffington Post, one of a select few outlets to receive the images Monday.
Peter Moore, the editor of Men’s Health magazine who interviewed Obama on his workout habits for a November cover story, told Politico his nearly seven-day-a-week regimen seems to have paid off. “No love handles to speak of on the sides. You see the definitions in his arms. He’s a dude. Wow.”

Well, when I look at the pictures of Obama and compare his physique with that of Putin. It leaves me wondering what they see that is so “hot”?
Posted by BILL at Monday, December 29, 2008

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —Ronald Reagan

As the appointments to Obama insider positions progresses, it has become apparent that to be considered you have to be a fellow alumni of the President elects University-Harvard. Todays news includes the appointment of Harvard’s professor of Environmental Policy, Dr. John Holdren. Obama in making the appointment said, John Holdern is “one of the most passionate and persistent voices about the growing threat climate change”.

This is not an exaggerated statement as this excerpt from a speech that Holdern gave on June 6, 2007 at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth University illustrates.

“Even if we are not running out of energy per se, however, running out of cheap energy is already stressful for society. And we are also running out of some other energy-related “resources” that matter a great deal.

We are running out of environment, in the sense of the capacity of the atmosphere and waters and biota of the Earth to absorb, without intolerable consequences,( he does not mention what they are) the impacts of mobilizing energy in the quantities and in the ways characterizing today’s energy use and that which is ahead in the “business as usual” future.

We are running out of societal will to make the investments in improved technologies of energy supply and use, and to devise the policies to promote the use of these technologies, that will be needed to get us through.Bloggers note: We need more persuavive propaganda to convince the public that Carbon Credits are the way to go!

And we are running out of time for a smooth transition to the more sustainable energy system the world is going to need.Just what energy system will maintain our way of life?
This last dimension of the problem is the one most under-rated by policy makers and the public, who generally fail to grasp both the huge momentum associated with the scale and long turnover time of the world’s existing energy system and the rate at which the problems with it are growing”.

This a politician, not a Climate scientist talking. And worse than that, he is an Internationalist. He is not a man committed to the betterment of Americans, but the World!

Why so? Because Holdren says that a poll of scientists says that climate change is caused by human activity, that is to be held as the same as a scientific ‘proof?’

There is no doubt in my mind that climate change is happening, and it is obvious that a big part of it is a result of making big carbon molecules into smaller ones, it is less than obvious about what can and should be done about it.

Reality is; there has never in the entire history of human-kind been a better time to live on the planet. How is that all bad?

The issue that is most clear to me though, is that all of the alternative energy proposals are not as carbon neutral as their proponents claim.Nor as economically feasible!

One rarely hears about the consequences of, as an example; less intensive farming on a global scale. Is that because it will result in the death of perhaps billions of humans as a result of starvation?

This is bad science, and Holden isn’t as much a scientist as he is a politician. An argument that is based on the belief that sceptics are Republicans and therefore stupid isn’t much of an argument. He will fit well with all the other left of center politicians that make up most of Obama Cabinet and close advisers.

We can look forward to the European type of socialism from the Obama administration, and that will be a CHANGE we do not want to live with!