Oooey gooey diplomacy

Am I seeing things, or did Vlad Putin - Vlad and I are on a first-syllable basis - serve Toaster Strudels when President Obama arrived for breakfast yesterday?

Visual evidence from the New York Times:


Seriously, I think that look on Putin's face pretty much says: You take the strawberry strudel, Mr. Obama, and I'll go nuclear.

Oh, and if you're one of those folks who actually reads the news instead of just scanning the pretty photos, here's the story about their meeting.

One passage about U.S.-Russia diplomacy that I found interesting, if not very surprising:

Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev announced an agreement to open a joint early-warning center to share data on missile launchings. But Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris N. Yeltsin announced the same agreement in 1998. Mr. Clinton then announced it again with President Vladimir V. Putin in 2000. Mr. Putin and President George W. Bush recommitted to it as recently as 2007. And none of them ever actually built the center.

Well, good to know we're moving in the right direction on that front.

On the balls

In her Saturday New York Times column, Maureen Dowd writes:

“Until we have a clear strategy, we’re not going to have a clear exit strategy,” [President Obama] told Jim Lehrer on Friday about Afghanistan, noting that he had ordered a “head-to-toe, soup-to-nuts” review of the mission there....

I think that's a difference between Obama and his predecessor in the White House. W just wanted his review of the situation there to be head-to-nuts.

That's a lot of "Other"

The new government web site Obama promised - the one that will eventually allow people with a lot of time on their hands to track every dollar being spent as part of the stimulus package - was launched yesterday. You can find it at Recovery.gov.

I find it amusing that, at least for the time being, there's a category marked "Other" that represents $8 BILLION. I guess when the dollar amounts get that small, it makes sense to lump them all in together.

I also find it amusing that the site copy tells us that "this is your money." Kind of makes me want to ask for some of it in the form of a check made out to me, instead of however they've seen fit to spend it.

I do not find it amusing that every goddamn TV commercial I've seen for the last three weeks (casual dining and automakers seem to be the worst offenders) is promoting sales and special deals by calling them "stimulus packages." I guess it could be worse - they could be playing off of the conflict in Iraq by declaring "war on high prices" or something.

Fairey warning

It was such a nice story - Shepard Fairey's Hope poster being adopted as the iconic, if unofficial, symbol of the Obama campaign. At least here in L.A., by early November, you couldn't get away from the image, which was fine with me. It also was probably fine with Shepard Fairey, who went from extremely-well-known-among-those-in-the-know to plain old extremely famous in the matter of a few months.

Yesterday's news that the Fairey image is now the subject of at least one lawsuit (with another possibly to come) takes a little bit of the shine off - although on the other hand, it also sort of feels like a big publicity stunt. But there's little doubt that the illustration will be around long after any of us.

Now, clearly, the Fairey design has taken on a life of its own. I recently wrote about one example. And today, happily, I stumbled upon another: Yes, people, you can make your very own Fairey-fied image of yourself. Or anyone else you happen to have in a digital photo.

Just go to the Obamaiconme page, upload your picture, and play around with the color palatte until you get the right mix of blue, red and yellow. You might have to register on the site to actually save your image, which... eh... but even if you skip that, it's a nice time-killer.

To give you a little inspiration, I made two of my own, using photos of my superawesome nephews. Max (he's Face) and Jacob look pretty good, don't they?



These guys would get my vote.

Making short work of the presidency

I thought I'd heard that Obama was 6' 2", but now I'm starting to wonder. Or else maybe Ray LaHood and this Lisa Jackson from the EPA are like 9 feet tall.

No matter his actual height, I was very pleased to read that the new prez is already starting to fix some of the environmental stuff that Bush broke. It's early and these are just baby steps, but they're baby steps in the right direction.