Norweigan citizens whose daughter borrowed money from Obama

The Norwegian newspaper VG has reported a truly amazing story about a newly-wed trying to get to Norway to be with her husband, and the stranger who helped pay an unexpected luggage surcharge. The blog “Leisha’s Random Thoughts” has translated the story.

It was 1988, and Mary Andersen was at the Miami airport checking in for a long flight to Norway to be with her husband when the airline representative informed her that she wouldn’t be able to check her luggage without paying a 100 surcharge:

When it was finally Mary’s turn, she got the message that would crush her bubbling feeling of happiness.

-You’ll have to pay a 103 dollar surcharge if you want to bring both those suitcases to Norway, the man behind the counter said.

Mary had no money. Her new husband had travelled ahead of her to Norway, and she had no one else to call.

-I was completely desperate and tried to think which of my things I could manage without. But I had already made such a careful selection of my most prized possessions, says Mary.

As tears streamed down her face, she heard a “gentle and friendly voice” behind her saying, “That’s okay, I’ll pay for her.”
Mary turned around to see a tall man whom she had never seen before.

-He had a gentle and kind voice that was still firm and decisive. The first thing I thought was, Who is this man?

Although this happened 20 years ago, Mary still remembers the authority that radiated from the man.

-He was nicely dressed, fashionably dressed with brown leather shoes, a cotton shirt open at the throat and khaki pants, says Mary.

She was thrilled to be able to bring both her suitcases to Norway and assured the stranger that he would get his money back. The man wrote his name and address on a piece of paper that he gave to Mary. She thanked him repeatedly. When she finally walked off towards the security checkpoint, he waved goodbye to her.

Who was the man?

Barack Obama.

Twenty years later, she is thrilled that the friendly stranger at the airport may be the next President and has voted for him already and donated 100 dollars to his campaign:

-He was my knight in shining armor, says Mary, smiling.

She paid the 103 dollars back to Obama the day after she arrived in Norway. At that time he had just finished his job as a poorly paid community worker* in Chicago, and had started his law studies at prestigious Harvard university.

Mary even convinced her parents to vote for him:

In the spring of 2006 Mary’s parents had heard that Obama was considering a run for president, but that he had still not decided. They chose to write a letter in which they told him that he would receive their votes. At the same time, they thanked Obama for helping their daughter 18 years earlier.

And Obama replied:

In a letter to Mary’s parents dated May 4th, 2006 and stamped ‘United States Senate, Washington DC’, Barack Obama writes:

‘I want to thank you for the lovely things you wrote about me and for reminding me of what happened at Miami airport. I’m happy I could help back then, and I’m delighted to hear that your daughter is happy in Norway. Please send her my best wishes. Sincerely, Barack Obama, United States Senator’.

The parents sent the letter on to Mary.

Mary says that when her friends and associates talk about the election, especially when race relations is the heated subject, she relates the story of the kind man who helped out a stranger-in-need over twenty years ago, years before he had even thought about running for high office.

Truly a wonderful story, and something that needs to be passed along in the maelstorm of fear-and-smear politics we are being subjected to right now.

UPDATE: Thanks for the recommends, folks! Also, remember this was 1988, when 100 dollars was quite a bit of money, compared to today’s value.

By the way, this would be the perfect antidote to the Smear E-mails going around. If anyone has a good long email chain list, shoot it out, and let it be passed along.

Chicago Tribune
Kathleen Parker
September 26, 2008
WASHINGTON

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin.

To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.

Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.

Kathleen Parker Bio | Recent columns

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)

And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).

Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity:

“Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Will Sarah Palin still be in the race a month from now or will she have imploded for incompetence?

It was only a matter of time before we would hear that John McCain’s campaign aides find out what they got in their so-called Alaska maverick, moose hunter, mother of five (or four) children. Most Americans already knew what McCain is just now learning: Sarah Palin is a dumb ambitious woman who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Or, McCain already knew she is severely limited in abilities but didn’t care so long as she was a right-winged female. McCain is notoriously labeled a misogynist of the first order so it’s not likely he cared whether Palin was very competent. He must have thought she would be competent enough to conduct a press conference or to give an interview. Inasmuch as she has failed miserably on both of these fronts, McCain has a lot to cuss about. Palin didn’t pass the minimum standard of political intelligence.

According to Ed Schulz, the well-known radio commentator, “Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is ‘clueless’.”

In an article in the conservative National Review, Kathleen Parker writes that Palin is so incompetent that she should step down.  Her interviews with Sean Hannity on Fox news, Charles Gibson of ABC news, and especially Katie Couric of CBS news, Palin’s performance was horrendous.   Parker said she is “Clearly Out Of Her League.”  The Boston Globe said Palin’s honeymoon is over.  A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey suggests that 49 percent of voters believe Sarah Palin lacks the leadership qualities required in a president.  This bad news comes after she helped John McCain get a significant bounce in the polls following her being named to the ticket and after the Republican convention.  Now, it’s all downhill Sarah.

 What was especially disastrous in the three interviews she gave was Palin’s absolute lack of knowledge of what’s going on in the world, and in the lower forty-eight states.   Palin reminds us of someone who suffers from:

• No knowledge of politics, economics, international affairs, governmental policies, and even John McCain’s record.
• A lack of understanding of the way government functions.  She made nonsensical statements that McCain had to back away from.  For example, she repeatedly talked about “not blinking” when making grave policy decisions that might determine the fate of nations in conflict.  She said the war is won in Iraq, and she talked about supporting Israel without regard for what the policies included or what the United States interests were.  Her understanding is downright pedestrian.
• No analytical ability and she doesn’t have enough of a knowledge base to engage in comparative analysis (for example, she can’t discuss the merits of Policy A versus Policy B).
• No curiosity about the world.  When Katie Couric asked Palin why she got a passport only last year, her response was that she didn’t have the kind of parents who would give her a passport and a back pack after college graduation, and send them out to see the world.  She added that she had to work.  Palin was trying to shift the topic to the “elites” who have the money to send their children abroad.  That is ridiculous.  It has little to do with money and more with a curious mind and a desire to expand one’s personal horizons.  Most young people who go abroad after college pay their own way.  Why else did they publish travel guides on London or Paris on $10 a day?  Palin’s excuse is a non-excuse.  Her limited world view comes from her.
• Palin relies on religious orthodoxy and conservative principles to explain the world.  A lot of discussion on her membership in a conservative church in which one of the ministers who preaches there believes in expelling witches from people.  He prayed for Palin’s political rise.  (YouTube video) 
• Her religious teachings are substitues for facts, general and specialized knowledge on which her public policy positions are based.  Take Palin’s views  opposing abortions and contraceptives is a good example of how they infiltrate her public policy positions.  Under her mayoralty of the town of Wasilla, her administration’s policy was to bill rape victims for the forensic kits used on them.  Can you believe it?  This would be consistent with her anti-abortion stance because the kit includes an abortion pill given to rape victims.  Palin is on record for being opposed to abortion for rape and incest victims.  How cruel to have a woman who has been raped pay for her own legal examination!

It is easy to see how Palin’s attendance at five or six colleges fragmented her learning.   She doesn’t appear to have learned any specific area of competence in college.   Nor did she learn how to engage in a deeper type of understanding–analysis–that she can use in her work.  That is why her responses in all the interviews came off as rote learning in which someone had fed her information and told her to repeat it if asked a question in that general area.  The consequence was she spilled out buzz words and phrases that were not  relevant to the questions.   She was so bad that she elicited sympathy from a lot of people who felt sorry for her even though she doesn’t feel sorry for herself.  They know she’s not qualified, but she doesn’t know any such thing.

Many in the blogosphere world feel she should step down.  It would have spared her Party and herself the embarrassment if she had not accepted McCain’s offer of the Vice Presidential nomination.  Many women ask why did she take on this enormous task when she has a special needs infant, and a pregnant teenage daughter?  It is a question worthy of being asked because it is not only a matter of figuring out how to give time to her special needs children.  It has to do with how does she meet the challenges of raising a Down Syndrome baby with all the emotional, physical and psychological challenges he will have.  Ditto for her teenage daughter who is pregnant by an eighteen year old boy whose MySpace page was littered with expletives, and he stated clearly that he doesn’t want any (expletive) children.  Obviously, her ambition had something to do with her accepting the nomination. 

Once Palin allowed her name to be put in the ring, she started trying to swim with the sharks.  The national press corps is filled with pyrannas.  The political high stakes in which she is operating are the most lethal in the world.  Palin is not equipped to use her small town (Wasilla, pop. 6-8,000 people) and small state (pop. 800,000) in the shark pools of Washington, DC.  She is being eaten alive, and she hasn’t even had her first debate with Senator Joe Biden who has been in the Senate for over thirty years. 

Rumors are floating that Palin will try to find a way out of the debates.  That is not possible without showing that she really is incompetent.  And, if she admits she is unprepared to lead the United States, she needs to step down right now.

New York Times
September 17, 2008
Moo
By Timothy Egan

People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.

What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.

Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!

Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.

Palin’s Alaska is a cultural cousin to this kind of capitalism. The state may seem like a rugged arena for risky free-marketers. In truth, it’s a strange mix of socialized projects and who-you-know hiring practices.

Let’s start with those cows. A few years ago, I met Harvey Baskin, one of the last of Alaska’s taxpayer-subsidized dairy farmers, at his farm outside Anchorage. The state had spent more than $120 million to create farms where none existed before. The epic project was a miserable failure.

“You want to know how to lose money in a hurry?” Harvey told me, while kicking rock-hard clumps of frozen manure. “Become a farmer with the state of Alaska as your partner. This is what you call negative farming.”

That lesson was lost on Palin. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.

This is Heckuva-Job-Brownie government, Far North version.

On a larger scale, consider the proposal to build a 1,715-mile natural gas pipeline, which Palin touts as one of her most significant achievements. Private companies complained they couldn’t build it without government help. That’s where Palin came to the rescue, ensuring that the state would back the project to the tune of $500 million.

And let’s not talk about voodoo infrastructure without one more mention of the bridge that Palin has yet to tell the truth about. The plan was to get American taxpayers to pay for a span that would be 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, and about 20 feet short of the Golden Gate — all to serve a tiny airport with a half-dozen or so flights a day and a perfectly good five-minute ferry. Until it was laughed out of Congress, Palin backed it — big time, as the current vice president would say.

Why build it? Because it’s Alaska, where people are used to paying no state taxes and getting the rest of us to buck up for things they can’t afford. Alaska, where the first thing a visitor sees upon landing in Anchorage is the sign welcoming you to Ted Stevens International Airport. Stevens, of course, is the 84-year-old Republican senator indicted on multiple felony charges. He may still win re-election thanks to Palin’s popularity at the top of the ballot.

Alaskans will get $231 per person in federal earmarks — 10 times more than people in Barack Obama’s home state. That’s this year, with Palin as governor.

If Palin were a true reformer, she would tell Congress thanks, but no thanks to that other bridge to nowhere.

Yes, there is another one — a proposal to connect Anchorage to an empty peninsula, speeding the commute to Palin’s hometown by a few minutes. It could cost up to $2 billion. The official name is Don Young’s Way, after the congressman who got the federal bridge earmarks. Of late, he’s spent more $1 million in legal fees fending off corruption investigations. Oh, and Young’s son-in-law has a stake in the property at one end of the bridge.

Some of these projects might be fully explained should Palin ever open herself up to questions. This week she sat down for her second interview — with Sean Hannity of Fox, who has shown sufficient “deference” to Palin, as the campaign requested.

One question: When Palin says “government has got to get out of the way” of the private sector, as she proclaimed this week, does that apply to dairy farms, bridges and gas pipelines in her state? I didn’t think so.

John McCain and Karl Rove

John McCain tries to be slick. But he’s not slick enough to outwit Barack Obama and his large contingent of Chicago ward politicians who advise him. They’ve got McCain’s number because they are the origina slicksters.  Remember Mayor Richard Daley?  His son, who is now mayor, learned the tricks of the trade at his father’s feet.  So did a lot of the other politicians who are part of Obama’s inner circle.  Karl Rove’s protege who manages McCain’s campaign has met his match. 

McCain announced today that he was suspending his campaign and heading to Washington where he will devote all of his precious time to solving the crisis in the American economy. You see, McCain has personal familiarity with the people who brought down the economy. They are his drinking buddies, and he helped to change the laws of the banking industry along with his buddy Senator Graham that  allowed his buddies to loot  the economy  and empty the national treasury.   He has an inside track with his buddies. They will be able to tell him what the weak spots are, and that’s how he thinks he can gain the upper hand of leadership. He must be smoking some of Colombia’s best weed.  Puh-leez.

McCain must think Obama just fell off the turnip truck, as the saying goes. The Rove school of politics that McCain is following by announcing he is shutting down his campaign is supposed to throw Obamaoff his game.  Obama is leading in the polls.   Americans say they have more trust in him being able to fix the economy than McCain (how right they are).    Obama is set to go into the debate with a lot of momentum.   The breaking story is that Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, earned $20,000 her month for No Work done for Freddie Mac.  McCain definitely wants to get ahead of that story because the link between his campaign manager and the looting of Freddie Mac is at the heart of the FBI investigation of how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were destroyed. 

Add to that, the back story of the debate will be a lot of comparisons the media will draw between Obama and James Meredith, who was the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1961. Journalists are set to do side stories on how much progress has been made since those dark days when President Kennedy brought out the National Guard to protect this lone black student from the hordes of white Ku Klux Klansmen and others who tried to attack him.

By bowing out of the race and trying to get Obama to do the same, McCain is trying to  shift the content and tone of the campaign race.  Remember how he changed the momentum when he picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate. For two weeks the media talked and wrote about Palin, Palin, Palin.  McCain is in trouble and he doesn’t see how he is going to get out of it.  This is his Hail Mary pass.  Obama has him on the run.  The thing to do is keep him on the defensive.  Obama needs to take his place in front of the lectern at Ole Miss.  If McCain doesn’t show, then the American people know he is a coward who is afraid to face his own role in the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression. 

McCain must be held accountable for his role in deregulating everything that is nailed down.  His buddies got big money from (1) Bush’s tax cuts; (2) a bogus War in Iraq where they got more money from big contracts and: (3) they want to steal our children’s tuition, food money, clothes allowance, our grocery money, and our last dollars we are holding onto to pay an inflated mortgage.  And this man named McCain doesn’t know how many homes or cars he owns?  We bet he doesn’t.  He doesn’t know we can’t get loans to buy a car either.  You know what?  He doesn’t care either.

September, 14 2008
By Tim Wise

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their fuckin’ ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office–since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s–while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.
White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.

White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do–like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor–and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college–you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a “second look.”

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a “light” burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.