President Barack Obama issued a strong plea for action on his health care agenda, using his weekly radio and Internet address to focus on his top domestic priority even while traveling overseas.
Clem's Chronicles: JOBS/OBAMA TRIP/CUBAN SPIES
Happy Friday night folks-here's what's happening in the world.... JOBS-Good news/bad news. The bad news first-payroll reductions(AKA job losses) continued for a 17th straight month. The good news-Bureau of Labor stats show a net job loss of 345 thousand during...
Barack Obama: America's 'first tourist'
by Mark Silva
Our friends and colleagues traveling with President Barack Obama this week have an interesting take on "America's first tourist''all eyes as he entered the Great Pyramid, all ears as he joked about how much an image inside a vault looked like him.
Ed Chen and Julianna Goldman of Bloomberg News, in writing about the president's odyssey from Saudia Arabia to Egypt and from Buchenwald and Dresden to Paris and Normandy, paint a picture of an American tourist-in-chief wearing white slacks, Navy blue polo shirt and walking shoes as he gazes at the Great Pyramid in Giza and walking down a long slope toward the Great Sphinx"Pretty neat, huh?''
Were it not for the entourage attached to the president's visit, Obama said, "I'd get on a camel.''
As Obama concludes his fourth trip abroad as presidenttraveling around Europe and Turkey a while back, going to Mexico and to Canada and now Cairo for his address to the Muslim worldhe has quickly amassed a portfolio of sightseeingserving as a contrast to his predecessor, who tended to be all-business on most of these trips (though we did get to see Bethlehem with President George W. Bush on one of our journeys to Israel with him.)
"Barack Obama is both America's first tourist and an universal ambassador," Allan Lichtman, a political history professor at American University in Washington, tells Bloomberg. He's "a persuader who is attempting to restore a foreign policy of diplomacy, positive example, and the speaking of the truth."
'"Obama, a self-described "student of history," was particularly enthusiastic about visiting the pyramids,'' they write. "While inside a small underground tomb at Giza, he pointed to a figure on a wall covered with hieroglyphics and said:
"Hey that looks like me. Look at those ears!"
"By paying homage to his host nation's cultural shrines and institutionssuch as Obama's visit... to the Sultan Hassan mosque in Cairo, one of the largest in the Muslim world, or the refurbished Church of Our Lady in Dresden, Germany, yesterdaythe president shows he is attuned to others' national sensibilities,'' Chen and Goldman write.
"Obama's excursions reinforce a key message: the importance of acknowledging and respecting cultural diversity and local history," says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, tells them.
See their report on Obama, America's first tourist.
Proposition 8 Foes Make Odd Couple
David Boies and Theodore Olson might be one of those couples that make outsiders do a double-take. The two top attorneys were on opposite sides in the Bush vs. Gore case, which decided the 2000 presidential election. Now they've joined forces to challenge the validity of Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure passed by California voters that prohibits same-sex marriages in the state.
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