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Perhaps it was the stress of propping up the most powerful Man in the World, but whatever it was, it was too much. On Monday night, the Teleprompter, barely 2, died in action at a White House while serving at the side of Barack Obama:
The fragile, overused speech aid was little more than 2 years old. No immediate cause of death and no autopsy were announced.
The passing of the celebrated speech-giving helper happened suddenly and unexpectedly. The president was looking right at the teleprompter, giving remarks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. He was rigorously defending his economic stimulus package, which has been rigorously criticized recently for being like many political speeches, not very stimulating.
While the Teleprompter was a key member of the administration, his passing was barely noted even by the president himself:
But all that came to a crashing and dramatic end Monday night. As the president launched into his 11 minutes of stimulating remarks, according to eyewitnesses, the old teleprompter simply expired, came loose, fell silently as if in movie slow motion before the stunned eyes of watchers and smashed into many pieces on the hard floor.
“Oh, goodness!” Obama exclaimed. “Sorry about that, guys.” The heartless audience of mayors, urban policy wonks and administration crowd-packers laughed out loud at the sudden death.
As if it was a mere machine, the 47-year-old president displayed no sign of concern or compassion whatsoever for his departed friend. He simply continued his speech with the surviving teleprompter on the other side.
The teleprompter’s remains were removed later by janitorial personnel for private burial. An official period of mourning was not announced. Not even a moment of silence. That’s the Chicago way.
John Fund, who writes the Political Diary for the Wall Street Journal online, writes that people misunderstand when they think that Sarah Palin’s decision to leave her role as governor of Alaska was a recent one. He contends that the people who hated her and what she stands for turned her job into a quagmire. In driving her from office they made it clear that she was not one of them:
She made many mistakes after being thrust into the national spotlight last year, but hasn’t merited the sneering contempt visited upon her by national reporters. She simply was not their kind of feminist — and they disdained the politically incorrect life choices she had made.
What kind of “sneering contempt,” you say? The kind that David Kahane writes about in National Review Online:
Did Sarah stand for “family values”? Flay her unwed-mother daughter. Did she represent probity in a notoriously corrupt, one-family state? Spread rumors about FBI investigations. Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live. Above all, don’t let her motivate the half of the country that doesn’t want His Serene Highness to bankrupt the nation, align with banana-republic Communist dictators, unilaterally dismantle our missile defenses, and set foot in more mosques than churches since he has become president. We’ve got a suicide cult to run here.
And that’s why Sarah had to go. Whether she understood it or not, she threatened us right down to our most fundamental, meretricious, elitist, sneering, snobbish, insecure, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders bones. She was, after all, a “normal” American, the kind of person (or so I’m told) you meet in flyover country. The kind that worries first about home and hearth and believes in things like motherhood and love of country the way it is, not the way she wants to remake it.
So, Fund writes, because she was so controversially “normal,” her critics relentlessly attacked her and paralyzed her in her role as Alaska governor. But the message they sent is not a good one, he says:
In helping to convince Sarah Palin that her road forward in national politics would demand even more sacrifices and pain than exacted from most politicians, the media did nothing to encourage women or people of modest means to participate in politics. By sidestepping her critics, Sarah Palin is now moving to another playing field where she has more control over the rules of the game. Her friends say her critics may call her a “quitter” now, but they should wait and see what new role she decides to fill. She may wind up having the last laugh.
From Michael Ramirez at Investor’s Business Daily
Put this in the keeping-up-with-the-times category. Repressed countries like Iran can’t let technology get away from them. By all means, let’s “dialogue.” From the BBC America:
 Facebook says it is investigating reports of the ban
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Iran’s government has blocked access to social networking site Facebook ahead of June’s presidential elections, according to Iran’s ILNA news agency.
ILNA suggested the move was aimed at stopping supporters of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi from using the site for his campaign.
Facebook, which claims to have 175m users worldwide, expressed its disappointment over the reported ban.
So far there has been no comment from the authorities in Tehran.
‘Access not possible’
“Access to the Facebook site was prohibited several days ahead of the presidential elections,” ILNA reported.
 Mr Mousavi was Iran’s prime minister when the post was abolished in 1989
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It said that “according to certain Internet surfers, the site was banned because supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi were using Facebook to better disseminate the candidate’s positions”.
CNN staff in Tehran reported that people attempting to visit the site received a message in Farsi that said: “Access to this site is not possible.”
Facebook expressed disappointment that its site was apparently blocked in Iran “at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source of information about election candidates and their positions”.
Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister, is seen as one of the leading challengers to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 12 June elections.
His page on Facebook has more than 5,000 supporters.
Porter Goss, who served as director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, wrote Saturday in the Washington Post about the current political climate concerning perceived torture by U.S. interrogators dealing with al-Qaeda suspects:
A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:
- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
- We understood what the CIA was doing.
- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.
Related to that, in the video below, Liz Cheney absolutely destroys MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell as O’Donnell tries to feed more slop about the whole torture debate. Watch as Cheney uses sound argument to head off hysterical bluster.
