Photo taken on my cellphone from the grandstands at the Indiana State Fairgrounds while waiting for Obama to speak. Pretty good seats despite getting here relatively late. Feel like an old hand by now at attending presidential political rallies. Colleen says she feels like a groupie. Again with the rock concert comparisons. Excited, happy crowd anticipating a memorable event. Fan t-shirts and buttons and all everywhere. Should be an upbeat speech after last night’s debate and with the ever-increasing chance that Indiana will go blue this time.

Huge line of people waiting to get in to see Obama at Ball State in Muncie

There’ve been only a couple brief, mild mentions of Senator Obama. Other than that, everything else was directed at squarely the Bush administration and eight years of disastrous policies and unequaled incompetence.

“it took a Clinton to clean things up after the first Bush, and it’ll take a Clinton to clean up after the second Bush.”

…”I don’t mean to pick on dick cheney, but….” (laughter , applause)

“I worked hard to bring about universal health care and I wasn’t successful, but one thing about me I never give up.”

And this was big applause line in this large public high school: “and I will end the unfunded mandate known as ‘no child left behind’” whoa, red meat!

The audience seems to be for the most part middle-aged or beyond. And rather, um, homogeneous — something Colleen noticed since it’s in marked contrast to the demographics of the school district. Lots of union representation, with signs and shirts and all.

Good music selection while waiting, though — lots of upbeat, getting-things-done, bringing-about-change kinda songs. Springsteen, U2, Dixie Chicks, Sheryl Crow, oh, and Mellencamp too, of course

We don’t expect to be converted, but since it’s at the high school in Colleen’s school district and since it’s not often a presidential candidate comes to Indianapolis, Colleen, Christopher and I decided to come see Hillary speak at the Ben Davis High School gym this morning.

Huge line of people outside waiting to get in. And now, with an hour to go before it starts, the gym is completely full.

All the volunteers helping out are teachers, so of course Colleen is stopping to talk with someone she knows every two minutes or so.

(don’t tell anyone, but I’ve got my Obama tshirt on under my jacket)

More later.

(Photo taken with, and posted from, my Treo — let’s see you do that on an iPhone!)

Nothing else I’ve read or heard expresses so well, so succinctly — and so reasonably — the state of race in the US today. And how it relates to just about all of the other significant questions before the country as well — education, health care, jobs, the economy — for all Americans of all colors.

Reading this speech also reaffirmed to me why Obama truly is so different from anybody else I can think of who has ever before run for president. He’s not just spouting platitudes or repeating stock political phrases that have been focus-grouped for their acceptability. He clearly wrote this speech himself. It’s incredibly thoughtful and personal — as Christopher remarked, “it’s a speech he’s been writing all his life.” And it expresses an understanding or a belief, an optimistic belief, in America’s dynamic, progressive history — and its future potential — that’s very close to my own.

He’s also expressing a faith in the American people that they’re ready for someone running for president who’s truly different — and who tells them they need to think seriously about a serious topic, and to see both sides, and all the gray areas in between, of these issues.  As well as to see that it’s possible to love and honor an important mentor in your life, even while you disagree strongly with some of his opinions and with the theatrical way he sometimes expresses them.

I’d encourage everyone to take the time to actually read (or watch) the entire speech, and see if it doesn’t make sense to you. I’m just afraid that all that’s likely to be repeated on the news or in most papers will just be a few, potentially unrepresentative sound bites.

Mark

http://my.barackobama.com/hisownwords

]]> http://www.colleen-n-mark.com/2008/03/18/obama-speech/feed/ 0 http://www.colleen-n-mark.com/2007/06/28/sicko-see-it/ http://www.colleen-n-mark.com/2007/06/28/sicko-see-it/#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2007 02:53:47 +0000 Mark Taber http://www.colleen-n-mark.com/2007/06/28/sicko-see-it/

We saw a sneak preview of Sicko last weekend, and maybe it was the festive atmosphere of seeing it along with a full theater of similarly minded people, but I have to admit it was far more entertaining and funny than I ever thought a documentary about health care could possibly be — even a Michael Moore film.

He has really perfected his own particular genre of gonzo-satiric-documentary making. Techniques like where he plays the faux skeptic and then lets the real people he’s visiting set him straight — letting them make the point that he wanted to make in the first place, of course — “next thing you’ll try to tell me ,” he says with mock surprise to a group of Americans living in France, “is that in France the government will even do my laundry for me if I need it!” And then the next scene is of the government-paid nanny for new mothers doing the family laundry.

Or digging up archive footage of some obscure hearing to satirize the absurdity of the situation he’s exposing — e.g., Bill Frist and various US military officers going on and on and on about how well-cared-for the Al Quaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay are, and how they receive state-of-the-art medical treatment — in contrast to Moore’s 9/11 heroes who can’t get any kind of medical treatment for their conditions.

There are some things I wish he wouldn’t have glossed over or that could have been qualified even a little bit (like the care they received in Cuba almost certainly was for propaganda purposes — which he could have acknowledged without weakening the drama and irony of the scene), but overall it’s a remarkably effective, entertaining and in many ways even universal and non-partisan movie.

After the show, everyone in our group had stories of their own to relate about their experiences with health care insurers. Like my own insurer (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota) that routinely denies every single one of my claims for a particular doctor — even though these visits have been preapproved by the insurer and I have the documentation to prove it — and then just as routinely pays them immediately after I go to the trouble of calling up and inquiring.

And I’m sure there are a lot of other people throughout America, of all stripes and political persuasions, who have similar and certainly much, much worse stories to tell about their health care insurers.

So maybe this will be Moore’s more popular, most universal movie so far. Only the CEOs of health insurance companies, with their multi-million dollar compensation packages and gold-plated headquarters buildings and hospitals — as well as, of course, their bought-and-paid-for politicians who leave Congress to become lobbyists after doing the industry’s bidding — have any cause to not like this movie.

Tags: Sicko, movies, review, Michael Moore

It turned out to be a pleasant and educational experience. The displays were very well presented, with some clever and elegant touches like a display showing limestone being quarried situated in front of a large picture window that looks out on the state capitol building outside (made out of limestone).

Once we got out of the prehistoric geological displays (those first million or so years just seemed to go on forever!) the history of the state moved along at a rapid but still thorough pace.

I was glad to see that some of Indiana history’s more controversial and/or darker parts weren’t glossed over or omitted. It’s all here — information and artifacts on the state that was home to Eugene Debs and Kurt Vonnegut yet that also embraced the Ku Klux Klan and gave birth to the John Birch Society; a state that was named after the dense population of native Americans living here, but that celebrated the general who won the definitive battle against Tecumseh’s confederation.

It honestly made me just a little bit more proud to be a part of this fascinating paradox of a state that I’ve adopted as my home.

A few more photos are here: 200701-indiana-state-museum