One fun thing is a small piece of news that you may not have seen: Barack Obama is President of the United States. I was running around Green Lake just before his swearing in and listened to person after person on NPR talk about how this was the most important historical event in their lifetime. Since I was on a long slog, I thought about all of the “most important” historical events in my lifetime: watching the landing on the moon with my parents in front of the television, listening to the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show (again with my parents in front of the television), learning about JFK being assassinated (that was hard to type), Nixon resigning, the six-day war, the hostages in Iran for over a year, the Alaska Lands Bill being signed by Jimmy Carter, Clinton being elected both the first and the second time, and I realized that although they were all major events, they really were less important than Barack Obama becoming our President.

So I will join the chorus. Tuesday was the most important historical event in my lifetime.
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I have re-posted below the Letter to the Editor that we got published (it was a group effort) in the Seattle Times the day before the election.

Posted in Current Events.
By Joel Horn November 3, 2008

Click here to read article.

Joel Horn

…

Once the new rules take the form of law, Democrats can undo them only by three complicated means: through a new regulatory rulemaking that would probably take years; through congressional amendments to underlying laws; or through special, fast-track resolutions of disapproval approved by the House and Senate within a few months after the start of the new congressional session on Jan. 6.

Such a quick congressional rebuke has occurred only once before, in 2001, when a Republican-controlled Congress with President Bush‘s backing blocked a workplace safety regulation completed in the Clinton administration’s final months. But recently, spokesmen for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.)and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said Democrats were prepared to use that regulatory reversal power in consultation with Obama.”

Click here to read article.

Joel Horn

I was in New York last Friday. There was a lot of discussion about the need for government help immediately, not in late January. So it is interesting to see how Obama is trying to both signal that this assistance is on the way and to actually start to put legislation in place prior to January 20th. This article lays out the strategy.

“Mr. Obama aides on Sunday called on the new Congress to pass by the Jan. 20 inauguration legislation that meets Obama’s two-year goal of saving or creating 2.5 million jobs. Democratic congressional leaders said they would get to work when Congress convenes Jan. 6 with bigger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.”

Click here to read article.

Joel Horn

“Putting Barack Obama in charge immediately isn’t impossible. Dick Cheney, obviously, would have to quit as well as Bush. In fact, just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate, but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until Jan. 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama could begin governing.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Joel Horn

Nov. 12, 2008

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating; it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor — he said, “I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.” The French junior minister for human rights said, “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference — the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis –you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see “United States of America” and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early ’90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of the Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote “The Naval War of 1812,” and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election a while longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails– imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes the First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now.

The mind reels. Have a good day.

Joel Horn

“It could take Obama years to undo climate rules finalized more than 60 days before he takes office — the advantage the White House sought by getting them done by Nov. 1. But that strategy doesn’t account for the Congressional Review Act of 1996. 

The law contains a clause determining that any regulation finalized within 60 days of congressional adjournment — Oct. 3, in this case — is considered to have been legally finalized on Jan. 15, 2009. The new Congress then has 60 days to review it and reverse it with a joint resolution that can’t be filibustered in the Senate.”

Joel Horn