Scrutinizing a snapshot of a Brazilian girl and two presidents at the G8

President Obama is in the middle of the G8 conference, where he and other world leaders are trying to fix the climate, the global economy, and about a million other terrifying problems. And yet, all anyone can talk about is a photo that supposedly shows the U.S. president and French leader Nicolas Sarkozy checking out a young woman’s posterior.

Obama meeting with Pope Benedict XVI on bioethics

VATICAN CITY – President Barack Obama sat down with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on Friday for frank but constructive talks between two men who agree on helping the poor but disagree on abortion and stem cell research.

“It’s a great honor,” Obama said as he greeted the pope, thanking him for this first meeting, which lasted 30 minutes. They sat down at the pontiff’s desk and exchanged pleasantries before reporters and photographers were ushered out of the ornate room.

The pope was heard asking about the Group of Eight summit, the meeting of developed nations that concluded before Obama’s arrival at Vatican City. Obama said it “was very productive.”

After the meeting, the Vatican said the two leaders discussed immigration, the Middle East peace process and aid to developing nations. But the Vatican’s statement also underscored the pair’s deep disagreements on abortion.

“In the course of their cordial exchanges, the conversation turned first of all to questions which are in the interest of all and which constitute a great challenge … such as the defense and promotion of life and the right to abide by one’s conscience,” the statement said.

Even in his gift to the U.S. leader, the pope sought to communicate his beliefs. Benedict gave Obama with a copy of a Vatican document on bioethics that hardened the church’s opposition to using embryos for stem cell research, cloning and in-vitro fertilization.

“Yes, this is what we had talked about,” Obama said, telling the pope he would read it on the flight to Ghana.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com

Don’t Tell Me Words Don’t Matter–Obama’s BEST speech YET!

Sen. Barack Obama gave one of his best speeches ever at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin Founders Day Gala on Feb. 16. This is the last 10 minutes of speech, perhaps the best part.

Open Government by Obama

Posted by Vivek Kundra and Katie Stanton

Innovation in social technology has created unprecedented opportunity to connect you to your government in order to obtain information and services and to participate in policymaking. If you are on Facebook or MySpace, government should be accessible there, too. This is the core of what we call “context-driven government.” Government is only open if it is accessible. So we must bring the important services and issues of public interest into the online communities in which we already work, live, and play and create new communities for mutual engagement. This is why the White House has created communities on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr and why we’ve established the Open Government blog for public engagement. We want to make it easy to see the latest news, photos and videos from the Obama Administration and, more important, to provide a platform for you to comment, ask and answer questions, and engage with us, your family and communities around important issues.

This weekend we’ll do two postings about opportunities and impediments to adopting “Web 2.0 technologies” as they are often called– and creating context-driven government. This one focuses on technology. The next addresses policy.

Innovative technologies like those referenced above are particularly relevant to this discussion because they represent new media tools that improve communication, empower users to create content, enhance information sharing, and promote collaboration. Common examples of are social networks, blogs, and wikis.

How You Can Help

1. Improving dissemination of government information to inform participation: The National Weather Service does a great job of taking complex satellite data and making it widely accessible to people via new and traditional channels. When you wake up, you can reach for your i-Phone, radio or newspaper and know whether it’s going to rain. How can we do this with other important government information, such as Medicaid and Medicare benefits, the state of the power grid or the Federal budget? What are the tools and techniques for democratizing access to government data?

2. Enhancing public participation in government activities: New social technologies like this blog are making it possible to participate in government in new ways. With the right tools, there are opportunities to bring government decision-making to the people. What are the best technological strategies – in the public or private sector – for empowering government officials and the public to work together to:

a. Gather information and data to inform a policy – Regulations.gov collects public comment on agency rulemakings.

b. Generate ideas and innovations – TSA’s Idea Factory generates ideas from 40,000 employees.

c. Analyze data and underlying assumptions — The NASA Clickworkers project invites the public to sift through images of Mars.

d. Solicit expertise – The Peer-to-Patent project taps the expertise of distributed scientists and technologists to inform the patent examination process.

e. Draft policy statements – The Open Government blog will be starting a collaborative drafting process beginning next week.

f. Resolve disputes – The Morris K. Udall Foundation, a government agency, work with citizens to engage in environmental dispute resolution.

g. Distribute grants and funds – DefenseSolutions.gov allows entrepreneurs in industry and academia a way to get innovative solutions funded.

h. Engage in collective action to address a problem – The Department of Transportation is funding an online bus stop design competition.

Share with us your ideas, examples and stories for the best innovations that could connect government and the public over at the OSTP blog as usual.

Vivek Kundra is Chief Information Officer, Katie Stanton is Director of Citizen Participation

Ideas Online, Yes, but Some Not So Presidential

WASHINGTON — On Jan. 21, his first full day in office, President Obama promised to open up the government, ordering officials to use modern technologies like Internet message boards and blogs to give all Americans a bigger voice in public policy.

Beth Noveck, a New York Law School professor, is President Obama’s deputy chief technology officer for open government.

Well, the people have spoken. But many of them are not sticking to the topics at hand.

The White House made its first major entree into government by the people last month when it set up an online forum to ask ordinary people for their ideas on how to carry out the president’s open-government pledge. It got an earful — on legalizing marijuana, revealing U.F.O. secrets and verifying Mr. Obama’s birth certificate to prove he was really born in the United States and thus eligible to be president.

“Please, as fellow human beings of this great planet Earth, disclose all known information on space/UFO’s because the world needs to know,” wrote sprinter5160 on the site, whitehouse.gov/open, which attracted thousands of similar comments on fringe topics.

While it was not exactly what administration officials had in mind, they noted that democracy can be a bit messy.

“Even for people who want to talk about U.F.O.’s or the Kennedy assassination, we have created a forum for people to have a conversation with each other, and potentially to go off and organize and develop this further,” said Beth Simone Noveck, a New York Law School professor who is Mr. Obama’s deputy chief technology officer for open government.

Most of the suggestions were closely related to the topic at hand, like publishing a list of everyone who meets with the president, using computer graphics to track how rapidly agencies respond to Freedom of Information Act requests and installing webcams to monitor federal offices. The administration’s goal is to devise regulations that would tell federal agencies how to make their operations more open to the public.

Undeterred by some of the wilder suggestions, the White House proceeded Monday with the third phase of the process — asking people to collaborate online to draft language that could be used to create the final rules.

The experience so far shows just how hard it is to allow all voices to be heard and still have a coherent discussion. When millions of Internet users are invited to discuss every regulation, how can any real work get done? On the other hand, why bother opening up the government if views that are outside the mainstream — as defined by the usual collection of lobbyists and think tank scholars — are summarily dismissed?

The responsibility for sorting it all out falls to Ms. Noveck. She has permitted any proposal that was not abusive or repetitive onto the brainstorming site, just as the Obama transition team did not stop visitors to its Change.Gov site last fall from voting marijuana legalization as their top concern for the president-elect.

She argues that the experience of collaborative Web sites like Wikipedia proves that groups of users can police sites to keep small groups from spoiling things for everyone else. During the public brainstorming about rules for open government, the White House asked visitors to vote on the best ideas by clicking a thumbs-up or thumbs-down button, much as people vote on the most interesting news articles on sites like Digg.

The visitors advanced more than 3,900 ideas, which in turn spawned 11,000 comments that received 210,000 thumb votes.

The result? Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s true place of birth. (Among the technical ideas that got a lot of support was a proposal to have the federal government press states and cities to follow open-government principles and a call for a central Internet site for all requests to the president and Congress, modeled after a site for petitions to the British prime minister.)

“This is Obama’s Madisonian moment,” said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University and the author of “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about Internet collaboration. Just as James Madison, the nation’s fourth president, argued during the drafting of the Constitution that the government must protect the minority against the tyranny of the majority, Mr. Shirky said that government must also prevent small groups of loudmouths from hijacking the public debate.

“The first thing that happens when my mom and dad log into the system and they find it’s populated by U.F.O. people and birth-certificate people, they simply are not going to participate,” he said.

The White House tried to screen out some of the more unusual comments in the second phase of the process. Ms. Noveck summarized the most significant ideas, then invited comments on them at blog.ostp.gov. Visitors could flag off-topic comments, which were then shunted to a separate part of the site. That reduced the birth-certificate and U.F.O. comments to a relative trickle.

On Monday, the White House began Phase 3 of its project using yet another format: a wiki, an online tool that allows a group of people to collectively create and edit documents. Visitors will be able to submit and edit drafts of the open-government rules, similar to how people contribute to Wikipedia, the user-created online encyclopedia.

Ultimately, of course, “this is not policy by referendum,” said Ms. Noveck. The Office of Management and Budget will consider the public comments and the views of agency officials and White House staff and then put together its own formal draft of the open-government rules. After soliciting another round of public comment, the final rules will become effective and will govern the actions of federal agencies.

To some, the bumps in the process simply represent growing pains for a new and promising approach to government.

“The U.F.O. thing is healthy,” said Micah L. Sifry, the editor of TechPresident.com, a blog on politics and the Internet. “It’s weird there are some groups of people obsessed with it, but it’s a democracy, and you can’t make them go away.”

As people get used to this kind of participation, he said, “the mischief will be much less noticeable.”

Ms. Noveck has some confidence that the effort will result in better government because she has built something like this before. As a professor, she worked with the United States Patent Office to test a system that invited the public to help evaluate patent applications. Companies that apply for a lot of patents, like I.B.M. and General Electric, participated in the optional program because the public comments helped patent examiners consider their applications more quickly.

But then, I.B.M. never tried to patent a U.F.O.

Barack Obama in New York City

Barack speaks at a fundraiser in New York on July 9, 2008.

Over 24,000 people joined Barack in Washington Square Park,New York.

Obama Kills Fly Like a SWAT!

Obama Kills Fly Like a Ninja !!!!!!!!!!!

Barack Obama-Dreams of My Father

I have bought this books beside others 2 books. Here are some vidoes on his book from you tube.

Excerpts from Books on Tape and Printed Book

Barack Obama discusses his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”
To view the entire program visit booktv.org.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Dreams From my Father,1995 Obama tells us the Races will always remain Menacing, Alien and Apart. Obama tells us Black Leaders Blame AIDS on Whites all the time.

Epilogue of “Dreams of my Father” where Barack speaks about his marriage to Michelle and mentions the sad death of her father, his brother’s story,
and a happy moment with his mother.

Obama on 911 Terror Attacks

Obama, McCain Visit 9/11 Site

Obama Warns not to challenge Official
Egypt, Cairo June 4th 2009 US President Barack Obama Speech, defends the official 9/11 story. These are not opinions to be debated, these are facts to be dealt with
9/11 Story

McCain, Obama remember 9/11 :: Part 1

McCain, Obama remember 9/11 :: Part 2

“911 Loose Change” vs “CHANGE WE NEED”

In search of Truth…….what is going on…… Here is a conspiracy Theories about 911. No body knows…what is 911…….Is USA, the only and only super power of world, is so week….no body can belief…..CIA knows car number of each car moving in every part of world…How can they not able to ACT over these act of terrors to whole USA….Big mistry……….:)
Real challenge for security agenies of whole world…If USA,the only super power of the world, is not Safe, who can be safe…..
Consider this theory as compared to Obama election slogan that is “CHANGE WE NEED”
Has the change really there in USA…..Time will decide better…..

For anyone who still has doubts about 911, weigh out the facts and the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the reality that the events of 911 were one big set-up.