In a little-noticed blog post published on the White House website in September, President Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform Norm Eisen announced that the administration no longer wanted federally-registered lobbyists appointed to agency advisory boards and commissions.
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that the move “may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama,” resulting in “hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists” being ejected from federal advisory panels.
Not surprisingly, lobby groups, corporations, and other K Street influencers are up in arms.
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"For the president’s sake, let’s hope that this Thanksgiving, supporters can stop the whinging long enough to be thankful for the progress they’ve made. By any objective measure, Obama has had a successful first year. He inherited an economy on the brink of depression; 10 months later, the economy is recovering, even if the job market is lagging. His economic plan has helped avert a series of disasters—from the automobile, housing, and financial industries going out of business to state and local government going into default. He has signed new laws on national service, equal pay, hate crimes, and many other overdue concerns; made real strides on energy; and launched a quiet revolution in education.
Not least, Obama’s top legislative priority, health reform, is now almost close enough to smell the Rose Garden. After six presidents have tried, health reform may be just six weeks away from finally happening."
Not least, Obama’s top legislative priority, health reform, is now almost close enough to smell the Rose Garden. After six presidents have tried, health reform may be just six weeks away from finally happening."
"This is why you should be president."
"I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land."
“For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe,” Avedon said later, adding that the white wine helped things along. “Then there was the inevitable drop … she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone.” And he clicked his shutter once more. “I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.” The resultant final frame is among the most famous portraits ever made—one that is, as the photographer Vik Muniz neatly put it, “a picture of Norma Jean, not Marilyn.”
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.
Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.
Last week Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The honor sent the little-selling title shooting up 500 spots on Amazon.com’s sales list and immediately thrust Ms. Colvin, 70, back into the cultural conversation.
“Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all,” Ms. Colvin said in an animated interview at a diner near her apartment in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. “Maybe by telling my story — something I was afraid to do for a long time — kids will have a better understanding about what the civil rights movement was about.”
“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
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