Hoob-a-joob

If you still need another reason to visit New Orleans, the opening of the Southern Food And Beverage Museum ought to seal the deal...

How about these excerpts from William Finnegan's 2004 New Yorker profile of Illinois senatorial candidate Barack Obama:

"[Representative] Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “OBAMA” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ”

As for Obama's supposed elitism: “He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” David Axelrod, a longtime friend who is now Obama’s media adviser, said. “After Harvard, Obama could have done anything he wanted.” What he wanted was to practice civil-rights law in Chicago, and he did, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation for a small public-interest firm."

The same article includes this remark from a Republican Illinois state senate colleague of Obama's: " “I knew from the day he walked into this chamber that he was destined for great things,” he said. “In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.” Indeed...

Somewhat less insightful was conservative pundit George Will, who wrote that millionaire Jack Ryan, Obama's first Republican opponent, "keeps in moral and physical trim by going to Mass and the gym each morning." Ryan dropped out of the race after the records of his divorce became public, records which disclosed allegations by Ryan's wife that he had pressured her into going to sex clubs with the intent of having sex in public. Daily Mass is fine and all, but in this case daily Confession might have made more sense. (Obama went on to easily defeat Ryan's replacement, right-wing African-American crank Alan Keyes, who hastily moved from Maryland to Illinois to make the race)...

Will somebody please once-and-for-all explain to me just exactly, precisely, indubitably what this man (Paul Sanchez) is singing about? I don't get it...



Citizen K. Read: Louisiana Power & Light, John Dufresne