Who Is The Real Michelle Obama? 
Alarms are being sounded over First Lady Michelle Obama forays into the policy realm, as she made the first of what are promised to be more federal agency visits. Mrs. Obama has touted Obama Administration policies recently at both the Housing & Urban Development and Education Departments.
First Lady historian Myra Gutin told The New York Times she is disappointed:
“She went to some lengths to say she was going to be first mom in chief …I don’t think we ever really imagined her edging toward public policy like this.”
A different view was expressed in November, when The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century author Dr. Myra Gutin looked ahead:
“I think she could be active the way Hillary Clinton wasâ€
But as First Lady historian Myra Gutin cautioned the Washington Times last June:
 “There is a real disconnect between what we know and what people are really like. The media doesn’t always match what a person is. “
We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For 
Springfield Illinois is getting a jump in the Barack Obama commemoration/memorializing sweepstakes, as a sculpture commemorating a 100 year-old riot contains a figure looking remarkably like Obama.
 The 1908 Springfield riots featured lynchings and destruction of black neighborhoods, and the shock of this in Lincoln’s hometown in a Northern state helped launch the NAACP.
Memorial Sculptor Preston Jackson was coy with the Chicago Tribune:
“That could be him…But I have a nephew that looks just like him.â€
We’re Jacket-less To Serve You Better! 
The American people know two things about recent Bush Administration talking points:Â whatever they say will get endless media replication, and down the road be found to be a lie.
We are now at stage two in the battle over Andrew Card’s stirring defense of White House decorum. The former George W. Bush Chief of Staff was saddened to see a jacket-less Barack Obama in the Oval Office, and Huffington Post has now surfaced photos of Bush among a parade of Presidents in shirtsleeves, often with ties.
Because If We Can’t Laugh About Differences Over Torture… 
Light-hearted jibes about torture were in the house Sunday at DC’s Alfalfa Club dinner.
The annual gathering of Washington’s great and good is of course a temple of good natured joshing amongst the elite, the very pinnacle of our treasured bipartisanship. Thus Barack Obama found himself making light of the founding purpose of this entirely white until the 1970s dinner, honoring Robert E. Lee.
The sparkling event was brightened even more by the podium styling of “Jumping” Joe Lieberman, who the Washington Post reports wow’d them with topical laughs.
Lieberman’s rib-tickler sprang from Dick Cheney’s mysterious back-injury-while-moving-offices. “I had no idea waterboards were so heavy,” quipped the Nutmeg State Senator.
Lasting Impressions 
The departing administration’s list of presidential gifts from foreigners is itself a delight, revealing some gifters’ self images, or at least how they’d like to be seen.
Famed Bush poodle Tony Blair presented the President with a classic dog whistle, a Wedgwood bowl inscribed with the words ‘‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’.’ This was a slogan of the 18th Century British abolitionist movement organized by Christian evangelical heartthrob William Wilberforce, engraved by Wedgwood at the time on bowls. medallions and tchotskies to promote the cause.
It’s an almost too perfect replication of the two men’s publicly presented self image, believing Christians setting out to do right in the world for the benighted swarthies, a reminder of sunlit days when caring whites could run the abolitionist movement before all those colored people got involved.
Bonus Fun Fact:Â Wedgwood ended the year filing for bankruptcy.
