Why Obama doesn't get respect

Booman has an excellent post listing Obama's many accomplishments and asking why he isn't getting the credit he deserves.
Two reasons, I think:
One is Obama's own fault. The White House has not developed a simple narrative line that frames and reinforces the overall direction they are taking and the philosophy of what they have accomplished -- for example 'we're improving the lives of American people' or 'we deliver the results people need' or 'Every day we work on making America a better place to live' or some such phrase. They don't seem to realize that nobody really understood the details of 'Morning in America' or the 'Contract with America' either but they wanted an elevator speech.
The other problem is not Obama's fault. Racism is still a powerful force in American society.
In the overblown criticism dished out daily at Obama, sometimes in the posts and often in the comment sections on some progressive blogs, I detect a racist undercurrent which dismisses or minimizes his achievements, nitpicks his behaviour and mannerisms, and inflates every fault into a hanging offense -- basically, blaming Obama himself for what I think is the blogger's own visceral discomfort with the leadership of an African American man. It's like they're saying "I may have cheered him just like I cheered Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods but now day-to-day I find I just can't bring myself to respect him and of course it can't be because he's black, oh no I'm not a racist, so my lack of respect must be his own fault, not mine."
Here is Booman's list of Obama's accomplishments:

Legislative bills in 2009
January 29: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
February 4: Children’s Health Insurance Reauthorization Act
February 11: DTV Delay Act
February 17: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
March 30: Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009
April 21: Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act
May 20: Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act
May 20: Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009
May 22: Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act of 2009
June 22: Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act
August 6: Cash For Clunkers Extension Act
October 22: Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act
October 28: Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act
October 30: Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act
November 6: Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act of 2009
2010
March 4: Travel Promotion Act
March 18: Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE Act)
March 23: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
March 30: Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010
May 5: Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2010

Booman continues

...his appointments, presidential directives, foreign policy achievements, and even some important symbolic acts.
You might not be too impressed that Obama is the first president to have a Seder in the White House or care that bodies can now be filmed as they arrive home at Dover AFB in Delaware. But you should be impressed that he expanded Pell Grants, strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, cut funding for missile defense, expanded the SCHIP program, improved our vaccination programs, provided funding for stem-cell research, won a credit card bill of rights, filled the Medicare Part D donut hole, improved pay, benefits, and health services for service members and veterans, expanded AmeriCorp, got the FDA to regulate tobacco, and limited the salaries of White House staff.
All of this seems to go unmentioned and unappreciated in most of the liberal blogosphere. And that's the small stuff. Obama has passed the biggest health care bill since 1965, rescued the auto industry, got almost all TARP money paid back, and is on the verge of passing the strongest financial regulations since the 1930's.
He's also reinvigorated the anti-proliferation and nuclear disarmament efforts by working successfully with Russia and China.
In a year and a half, he's already done more than Clinton and Carter combined did in twelve years . . .

Anyone who cannot appreciate what Obama has accomplished, and who continues to obsess about what he hasn't done yet -- immigration reform, or closing Guantanamo, for example -- needs to look very seriously at their own motivation.

Great line of the day

John Cole asks the right question about the American economic outlook:

How do people expect the economy to grow when 3/4 of the nation is too broke to buy anything?

"I can be a good dog!"

Check out Hyperbole and a Half for the funniest post ever written about loving a dog.

Dissed

The Prime Minister has been dissed by a 19-year-old.
Well, at least Harper didn't retaliate with the Shawinigan Handshake, and he didn't get a pie in the face.

Understanding the magnitude of this disaster

For Canadians who want to understand what this year's Prairie floods are going to do to the Saskatchewan economy, here is the summary from a CBC story about farm flood aid:

Normally, about 32 million acres of land are seeded in the spring. This year, heavy rains in the spring made the soil too wet and prevented many farmers from getting out into their fields.
The result was that about 10 million acres of Saskatchewan farmland went unseeded this spring, while another two million acres that were seeded are under water and won't produce a crop.

So a third of farm income in the province will disappear. The damage isn't evenly distributed, either -- while some areas will be able to take a crop off, others will have virtually nothing to harvest:

"I've got some farmers that have e-mailed me that [have] 5,000 or 6,000 acres, that have managed to seed 500 or 600," [Saskatoon commodities analyst Larry Weber] said. "Take a 90 per cent reduction in your wage in a year and see how fast and how far that 10 per cent is going to carry you."

We were living in BC during the early 80s, when 35,000 forest industry jobs disappeared in six months. The impact was horrendous throughout the province -- whole towns disappeared.
I'm afraid the Prairie flood of 2010 is going to be a similar disaster, far beyond even our usual "next year country" stiff upper lip.

Whose streets?

I am hoping Dawg was right -- that Canadians are recognizing the extent to which police were out of control in Toronto during the G20 protests. Or, at least, more Canadians are asking what happened.
There are now 60,000 members on Facebook calling for a G20 inquiry.
Today we had these articles in the Globe and Mail:
Thugs, hooligans and other citizenry
MPs wade into G20 security swamp
Ontario Ombudsman to probe G20 Law
And this in the Montreal Gazette:
We need a G20 probe: Arrest record shows police were out of control in Toronto
The video above I found posted in the comments of a Macleans story. And here's the photo now being used in the Vancouver Sun:

Shut the F**k Up!

I'm getting the impression that some people have now adopted the Conservative Motto about police behaviour at the G20 protests.
They seem to think the issue should just go away.
Shorter Christie Blatchford and Macleans magazine:

I just can't stand hearing any more about this mess so why don't you all just shut up! SHUT UP!

But we won't.

Saddest story yet

To protest the way the police treated the G20 demonstrators, a Toronto man gives back the Bravery Citation he had received from Toronto police:

...Norman avoided downtown that weekend but he, like everyone else, knew what was going on. “The air was full of people talking about what had happened to their friends.” A thousand arrests, people being stopped for no good reason, ID demanded, and so on. . . "they were arresting people two miles away. And then we heard the premier saying that no new powers were given to the police. If that’s the case, what protection do I have now? And what the hell can I do about that?”
The question was not rhetorical.
“I can give this back.”

Others in Toronto were also upset at what they saw. Paul Pritchard, the person who recorded the Dziekanski tasering has a summer job as a waiter in Toronto:

Armed with his camera, he arrived by bike at Queen’s Park in time to see a man bowled over by a police horse. In his view, a young, peaceful crowd of protesters was under assault.
“I got up right on the front line. The guy beside me got shot with a rubber bullet. I was half expecting to get stomped, or beaten. I thought my camera was going to get broken for sure.”
He slipped the memory card from his camera, hiding it in the side band of his boxers. People were crying. Some jeered, others taunted. He only ever saw one item thrown, possibly a stick, the culprit immediately called down by other demonstrators.
On the other side, he saw, “Anger. Hostility. Using force. Using intimidation. You could see it in their eyes.”

Worst yet

The worst G20 story yet:

As Sarah began pleading with them to give her father a little time and space to get up because he is an amputee, they began kicking and hitting him. One of the police officers used his knee to press Pruyn’s head down so hard on the ground, said Pruyn in an interview this July 4 with Niagara At Large, that his head was still hurting a week later.
Accusing him of resisting arrest, they pulled his walking sticks away from him, tied his hands behind his back and ripped off his prosthetic leg. Then they told him to get up and hop, and when he said he couldn’t, they dragged him across the pavement, tearing skin off his elbows , with his hands still tied behind his back. His glasses were knocked off as they continued to accuse him of resisting arrest and of being a “spitter,” something he said he did not do. They took him to a warehouse and locked him in a steel-mesh cage where his nightmare continued for another 27 hours.

This story is going viral.

"Arrest orgy" is what it was

Reading story after story after story after story after story about experiences during the G20 protests, one common thread strikes me -- they all include cruel, contemptuous, crude, or incompetent behaviour by the police.
At Macleans magazine, Adam Radwanski attributes police swagger to the lack of meaningful oversight:

. . . the message from governments to police, even before the saga over the provincial regulation, was that politicians preferred a no-questions-asked approach to security [and created in police] the sense that they had free rein to do as they saw fit, whatever part of downtown Toronto they happened to be in.

Boris at Galloping Beaver provides a deeper analysis. He calls it an "arrest orgy" and he thinks the growing backlash may eventually impact Canadian police the way Somaila affected Canada's armed forces:

With our police, where is a critical look at things such as the influence of new offensive technology such as Tasers, the universal provision of body armour, tactical clothing as work dress, and their cumulative effects on police self-perception and attitudes? Are their certain mindsets that have popularised and hardened within police departments? Does public outcry and investigation over their less than honorable actions actually serve to reinforce organizational insularity and promote further brutality? We saw them close ranks around Dziekanski foursome, and it seems as if the police may have used the G8/20 as a venue through which to hit back at "us" whom they may view as unappreciative and condescending.
...
Where the torture and murder of Shidane Arone may have been a catalyst of an overhaul of the armed forces, the death of Robert Dziekanski and the arrest orgy in Toronto may prove catalysts for an overhaul of Canadian policing. These events are symptoms of larger problems.

Today we finally found out that 16 people are still in jail a week after the G20 ended -- including a street medic who is apparently going to be charged with carrying a concealed weapon for carrying bandage shears.
And a woman from Peterborough has been charged with obstructing police and wearing a disguise with intent to commit an indictable offence -- she came to the protests dressed as a clown.

You're a grand old flag

One of the best production numbers ever filmed

Toronto Pride

I hadn't realized that the Pride Parade originated as a protest following the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids. I would imagine the people involved in those first marches would never have believed that, just 30 years later, a million happy people now celebrate gay pride.

If you bought a car from IKEA

This is what you would get

plus instructions.
(From Mr Jam)
Oh, and that reminds me:

Hold your own hearings!

Notwithstanding that 35.000 people have now joined the Facebook group Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20, the recent Angus Reid poll now being trumpeted by the press would indicate that a government inquiry just ain't gonna happen:

When asked about the reaction of the police in Toronto to the demonstrations, two-thirds of Canadians (66%) and three-in-four Torontonians (73%) believe it was justified.

So there we are -- everything was the protesters' own fault!
Or, at least, that's what the Harper Conservatives and the McGinty Liberals would dearly like everyone to conclude.
Nobody died. Nobody's grandmother was tased. No cabinet minister's daughter was pepper-sprayed or arrested. Clouds of tear gas did not sicken thousands. There are no visuals of people being knocked off their feet by water hoses.
Instead, the visuals were of burning police cars and broken windows -- not exactly images which will enrage the general public about what police did, as opposed to what protesters did. And even though there is still a trickle of news stories about how confusing everything was, there are no editorials demanding explanations of how a billion dollars was spent, and why Toronto police chief Bill Blair has repeatedly lied about summit events.
So regardless of Elizabeth May and the Canada Day protests, the likelihood at this time that the Harper Conservatives or the McGinty Liberals would ever order a public inquiry into police actions during the G20 protests is zero.
If the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Amnesty International and Greenpeace and labour unions and student groups want to have an inquiry into police actions during the G20 protests, they are going to have to do it themselves.
Its been done before. It needs to be done again.
There are already some G20 stories written down already, if reporters happened to hear them, and there are already lots and lots of videos and photos already posted all over the place -- one of the most noticeable things about the crowd shots during the whole G20 weekend was how many people were photographing everything they were seeing.
Even without subpoena powers and a government budget, a narrative can be written about what went wrong during these protests -- hearings can be held, stories assembled, videos and photos pulled together, a timeline constructed,and the locations and participants documented. This will prove that police disappeared on Saturday when the cars were being burned and windows broken, only to re-appear later to pursue and arrest ordinary protesters and passers-by.
And may even help us figure out, why?
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the CCLA has already issued a preliminary report of their observations during the summit

. . . after 5PM on Saturday, the constitutional protection against arbitrary detention and unreasonable searches had effectively been suspended across downtown Toronto.

Who are you going to believe?

Christie Blatchford and Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, or your lying eyes?
Here's what Blair says happened last Friday during the repatriation ceremony of a soldier killed in Afghanistan:

“The Black Bloc was here and they charged up the thing [laneway], as a matter of fact the repatriation was kind of interrupted,” Chief Blair said.
“My public order guys ran through the lines that we had to close off the alley that they were trying to get up [to Grosvenor] with". . . he had to tell Sgt. MacNeil’s escort, “Sorry, it’s over, get out of here because it’s too dangerous.”

Thanks to Dave at Galloping Beaver, we now have photographic confirmation of these horrendous events. Here's a photo of the wild crowd that ruined this ceremony:

Here is a video of how disruptive they were: