Fausta’s Blog

… and it’s “for free,” too:
WhiteHouse.gov: Anywhere

One feature that stands out is live video streaming. Now anyone with this app can watch the President’s public events at the White House, frequent web chats with Administration officials, and other events like key speeches and press briefings in real time.

Heck, I have an iPod touch and I’m already paying for it with my tax dollars (but it’s “for free!”) so might as well get it, right?

Yeah. I did.

Today I could have watched the “Streaming live: First Lady Michelle Obama Surprises White House Tour Visitors”, had I looked it up on time (the “surprise” ended a while ago) and been interested in the first place.

But hey! There’s the photo section, featuring items such as “Glass of Water Under the Podium”, and Obama’s “Folded Hands” (not to be confused with the praying hands).

I knew you’d get excited over those.

Back to my favorite iPod app, the Virtual Zippo Lighter:

… says Michelle Obama’s Mirror’s Blog about the gown:

Evening. Naeem Kahn – Indian born American based designer. Oh, how clever of Lady M! “The dress is entirely handmade, requiring three weeks of work by 40 people, completed in Naeem Kahn’s family workshop in India.” So that’s another 40 jobs created or saved right there.

As you know, I have severely criticized Michelle Obama’s poor (too rich?) fashion choices and her posture.

Last night, however, Michelle Obama finally wore a beautiful dress, that fit her perfectly, was exactly proportioned for her, and the color was exactly right for her. She did not over acessorize with jewelry, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. Best yet, she managed to carry herself with the right poise and posture as the photo shows.

The Anchoress says it’s Beautiful and Well Played Mrs. O.

Let’s hope Mrs. O gives up the silly cardigans and the ridiculous ammo belts.

In other Obama news, guess who’s interviewing the Obamas for Christmas. I’m sorely tempted to take up golf instead.

But then, there’s always tango.

This just in:
The Washington Post reports that

Chicago Out of Running to Host 2016 Olympics
COPENHAGEN, Oct. 2 – Chicago was eliminated after the first round of voting on contenders to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, leaving Rio, Madrid and Tokyo to contend for the bid.

Chicago was hoping to become the first U.S. city to host the Summer Games since Atlanta in 1996 and the first to host any Olympics since Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Games in 2002.

Drudge’s headline:

WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND
THE EGO HAS LANDED

The WSJ: Chicago Eliminated for 2016 Olympics; Rio, Madrid Remain

The city of Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting for the 2016 Summer Games, in a blow to President Barack Obama.

President Obama lent the full force of the White House to the effort and flew to Copenhagen overnight to deliver a 7-minute speech to the IOC Friday morning. In addition, Michelle Obama spent much of this week in Copenhagen personally lobbying IOC members.

Tokyo was eliminated in the second round of voting. Its elimination was not unexpected, since the IOC was unlikely too return the Games to Asia so soon after Beijing. Tokyo’s bid received high technical marks in an evaluation, but lacked widespread public support during the bid process.

Madrid and Rio remain. The winner must receive 51% of the 100-plus votes.

Chicago’s boosters spent $48 million on the four-year campaign but, as always faced the obstacle of geographical loyalty. More than 40% of the IOC is European, and with competition from Rio, the U.S. could not count on support of members from South America, who were trying to bring the Olympics to their continent for the first time. Chicago2016’s budget also relied on some $4.8 billion in funding from the private sector, while other candidate cities had promises of billions of dollars of financial guarantees.

I wonder how Obama, Michelle and Oprah are going to spin this one while they wipe the egg off their faces.

(My bet is that Rio will get it. We’ll see.)

Here’s a photo from last evening: POTUS, FLOTUS, TOTUS,

Snark, and more snark,

I’m sure that Obama will be a lot more persuasive with the Iranians.

Update
International Olympic Committee staffed by racists, which just named Rio as the host.

CNN announcer flips out,

The Anchoress asks, Did the IOC recognise a weak horse?

Oh, wait.

create a controversy by posing with the Obamas:

Pictures of Spanish PM’s daughters get thumbs up from goths

Spanish prime minister tries to stop publication of pictures of daughters at White House wearing black clothes and high boots

Via Larwyn, from Don Surber

UPDATE, Sunday 27 Sept.
Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please bookmark and visit often.

These are not the Goths we knew.

By MOTUS, Michelle Obama’s Mirror’s Blog, and then The Daily Mirror calls Carla Bruni The New Jackie O.

Glad to hear Carla’s left her nude days behind.

First there was the TOTUS: Barack Obama’s Teleprompter’s Blog.

Now there’s also the MOTUS: Michelle Obama’s Mirror’s Blog

More at Gateway Pundit and Pundit and Pundette.

Via – who else! – Larwyn.

…or something:

Michelle Obama Says Women Are “Crushed” by Health-Care System

Michelle Obama said women are being “crushed by the current structure of our health care” because they often are responsible for taking care of family illnesses, arranging checkups and monitoring follow-up care.

“Women are the ones to do it,” she said to an audience of 140 people, including representatives from groups such as the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the National Council of Negro Women. “Mothers are the ones that do it. And many women find themselves doing the same thing for their spouses.”

Well, heck, yeah.

When you are a parent you schedule your children’s check-ups, and you get them there; you talk to the doctor during and after the check-up. When they are sick you have to take the kids to the doctor, you make sure they’re taking the medicines, you take care of them until they are well. And when your spouse is sick, you do the same thing.

It doesn’t stop when the kids are adults, either. If your adult child is ill, you better make sure to check they are taken care of; you get there and do it if necessary. When your adult children or your spouse need to go to a physician for a second opinion, you better be there and listen and ask questions. I even know former spouses of either gender who help their exes.

It has nothing at all with gender. Men take care of their sick children and their sick wives every day. It’s called commitment, Michelle. It’s done out of love.

And it is a r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y that you have taken on voluntarily.

As to her statement, “It is holding women and families back,” the answer is No. It is part of being human. It fulfills you as a human being.

What is she proposing, that the nanny state take over your duties as a responsible parent? As a spouse?

And, by the way, Gateway Pundit points out,

Michelle forgot to mention that women actually have a better survival rate under our current system.
You’d think that might be worth mentioning?

The breast cancer survival rate is much greater here in the United States than in countries with socialized medicine.

In fact, women with breast cancer have a 14 percent higher survival rate in the United States than in Europe. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Breast cancer mortality is also 9 percent higher in Canada than in the US. Less than 25 percent of U.S. women die from breast cancer. In Britain, it’s 46 percent; France, 35 percent; Germany, 31 percent; Canada, 28 percent; Australia, 28 percent, and New Zealand, 46 percent.

This healthcare propaganda amounts to more cowbell:

the Obama administration’s efforts to promote the Democrats’ health care plan (whatever it is). Personal appeals by the President are the “cowbell.”

That is, as opposed to the real cowbell they rang at the vegetable market.

The cowbells will be ringing louder for a long time.

(And, as Don Surber put it, “With her husband is doing 5 Sunday TV shows and Letterman, Michelle Obama prepares to campaign for Obamacare on “What Not To Wear” on TLC.” Thank you Larwyn.)

UPDATE
But healthcare is just a women’s issue, so I’ll manage.

And more,
Tale of Two Obamas: Who’s Telling the Truth About Sasha’s Meningitis?

WaPo goes snarky on the First Lady

“I’ve never seen so many people so excited about fruits and vegetables!”
Too bad she didn’t see all the people so excited about traffic jams:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out,

You mean the hoi polloi couldn’t get in?

and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

In a scene redolent Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon, while Marie Antoinette would dress in a sheperdess costume and pretend she was a peasant,

The first lady picked up a straw basket and headed for the “Farm at Sunnyside” tent, where she loaded up with organic Asian pears, cherry tomatoes, multicolored potatoes, free-range eggs and, yes, two bunches of Tuscan kale. She left the produce with an aide, who paid the cashier as Obama made her way back to the limousine.

And the produce were pricey:

Obama, in her brief speech to the vendors and patrons, handled the affordability issue by pointing out that people who pay with food stamps would get double the coupon value at the market. Even then, though, it’s hard to imagine somebody using food stamps to buy what the market offered: $19 bison steak from Gunpowder Bison, organic dandelion greens for $12 per pound from Blueberry Hill Vegetables, the Piedmont Reserve cheese from Everson Dairy at $29 a pound. Rounding out the potential shopping cart: $4 for a piece of “walnut dacquoise” from the Praline Bakery, $9 for a jumbo crab cake at Chris’s Marketplace, $8 for a loaf of cranberry-walnut bread and $32 for a bolt of yarn.

The first lady said the market would particularly appeal to federal employees in nearby buildings to “pick up some good stuff for dinner.” Yet even they might think twice about spending $3 for a pint of potatoes when potatoes are on sale for 40 cents a pound at Giant. They could get nearly five dozen eggs at Giant for the $5 Obama spent for her dozen.

At $5 for a dozen, those eggs better come from the goose that laid gold.

Dana Milbank says it all,

And she spoke of her own culinary efforts: “There are times when putting together a healthy meal is harder than you might imagine.”

Particularly when it involves a soundstage, an interpreter for the deaf, three TV satellite trucks and the closing of part of downtown Washington.

Still, I want to know what shoes she wore.

Family Night for Obamas Miffs Some in Moscow, and for good reason:

The decision to brush off the Russians on one of his two nights here miffed some in the Moscow government who did not understand why he would not devote the scarce time to his hosts. Mr. Obama had dinner with President Dmitri A. Medvedev on Monday and lunch with him on Tuesday.

What we have here is a failure to communicate: Pres. Obama’s foreign host, be it Sarkozy, Dmitri Medvedev, or whoever the next dignitary may be, naively considers the office and duties of head of state to be the top priority during state visits. They simply don’t understand that the endless self-promotion and apology tours are mere background opportunities for Obama to showcase himself as above all such mundane concerns:

The first family enjoyed a relaxed evening at the O2 Lounge, the super-chic, super-pricey rooftop club at the new Ritz-Carlton, although no doubt the Secret Service first cleared the place of most if not all of the swaggering tycoons and leggy models who flock to such Moscow venues.

They could not ask for a more scenic vista. The glass-enclosed O2 offers a panoramic view of Moscow, including Red Square and the Kremlin, all the more striking as the lingering summer sun sets after 10 p.m. The club is “a place to see and be seen,” as its Web site says — that is, unless you are a visiting president who after a day and a half of blinis, beluga and bilats (the diplo term for “bilateral meetings”) just wants to hang out with the clan.

And what better place for the O’s to hang out than the O2, which might even have been named after him? I wonder if Spike Lee’s lawyer is listening.

And why shouldn’t Obama regard these state visits as simple background for himself? The NYTimes certainly doesn’t mind:

Mr. Obama has seemed tired here, several times fumbling the pronunciation of Mr. Medvedev’s name and Mr. Putin’s title. Beginning a speech here, he mistakenly said he first met his wife in school instead of at the law firm where they actually met. And he misstated his younger daughter’s age.

As Erik says,

With Barack Obama, what do we get? “Mr. Obama has seemed tired.” No, not “he was (is) clueless”, not “he was (is) unprepared”, not even “he was tired” that day, no, “Mr. Obama has seemed tired.”

Can You Imagine the Uproar If George W. Bush Had Gotten the Age of His Daughters Wrong?!

But Erik, back then the press was not blinded by The Light^tm enough to realize that b-s’ing people with hockey player names and the such was not proof of your mental agility when compared with your forgetting important family details such as where you actually first met the Mrs and your daughter’s age.

CNN is equally besotted, Obama girls take Russia by storm, and so is Stylist, exclaiming Michelle Obama’s Style for Russia Trip – What a Fashionable First Family!

The Russians, on the other hand, having lived with centuries’ worth of narcissistic egotists passing as heads of state, were underwhelmed by Obama:

Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

Buy young Kirill a beer!

The Times, however, can’t make out why the tepid reception, deploring,

Even Michelle Obama, who typically enjoys admiring coverage in the local news media when she travels, has not had her every move chronicled here.

As Daniel Drezner put it,

Seriously? Seriously?! The President of the United States visits a staunchly nationalist country that has significant conflicts with Washington, and the charm offensive didn’t take? Well, blow me down!!

Ralph Peters is nowhere near as sanguine as the NYT and CNN about Obama’s Russian trip: DESPERATE DEAL
OBAMA’S MOSCOW GIVEAWAY

He agreed to trim our nuclear-warhead arsenal by one-third and — even more dangerously — to cut the systems that deliver the nuclear payloads. In fact, the Russians don’t care much about our warhead numbers (which will be chopped to a figure “between 1,500 and 1,675″). What they really wanted — and got — was a US cave-in regarding limits on our nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles that could leave us with as few as 500 such systems, if the Russians continue to get their way as the final details are negotiated.

Moscow knows we aren’t going to start a nuclear war with Russia. Putin (forget poor “President” Dmitry Medvedev) wants to gut our conventional capabilities to stage globe-spanning military operations. He wants to cut us down to Russia’s size.

Our problem is that many nuclear-delivery systems — such as bombers or subs — are “dual-use”: A B-2 bomber can launch nukes, but it’s employed more frequently to deliver conventional ordnance.

Putin sought to cripple our ability to respond to international crises. Obama, meanwhile, was out for “deliverables” — deals that could be signed in front of the cameras. Each man got what he wanted.

And that’s enough to give anyone nightmares.

Special thanks to Maria (who knows Russia well) for the links.

UPDATE
The Obamafication of Great Power Arms Control
Welcome, Anchoress readers. Please visit often.

Update 2
Miss Obama’s peacenik T-shirt sends a message to G8 leaders

She wore a grey T-shirt to visit the Colosseum in Rome with mother Michelle and sister Sasha, seven, and then appeared to have whipped it off to reveal a mottled white and grey top also bearing the CND logo.

The symbol, designed for the CND in 1958, is now widely used as to signify peace and is also an international sign for anti-war protesters.