Bruno Mars on Saturday Night Live

A few observations on this week of Saturday Night Live. The cold open this week again featured a look at a Presidential debate, this one being the second held last week. It was funny in a different way than the first debate parody which we saw earlier in the season.

In this round the folks asking the question became part of the humor, the debate having been held on Long Island made for some easy to mock characters just in the asking of the question. For all the accolades Jay Pharoah gets for his performance on Obama the real star of these skits is Jason Sudekis, his take on Obama while not physically as similar is spot on with his speaking patters. When Sudekis as Romney says " Candy, Candy, Candy just let me make three more points" he is Mitt Romney. Perhaps the standout moment of the skit however, was the wry observation of when a voter asks what they two will do to keep AK-47's out the hands of the wrong people and both the fictitious candidates quickly agreed that the answer to that was " Nothing, Absolutely Nothing."

Tom Hanks as he is often want to do hung around Saturday night and appeared in a couple of skits. It must be nice for both sides, clearly Hanks has an open invitation to show up whenever he feels like it, and what a good day it must be for Lorne Michaels when he walks in the door.

The star of the show was, unequivocally, Mr. Mars. When he came out to do the monologue the first thing that I noticed was how incredibly short he is. This man is tiny, both small and short. He talked a bit about being the host and the musical guest and away the show went.

Mars appeared in a Pandora music skit that showed off his range and an incredible range it is, he sang a few lines of six different singes and did it amazingly well. Mars cannot not be listened to and not make one think of Michael Jackson. He is an amazing singer. His second performance of the night, of a song I have not yet heard, called Crazy Lost Girls, or something like that, was amazing. I assume that it is on a forthcoming album.

Another win was the short called Sad Clown featuring Mars and a return to the tunnel ride at an amusement park that breaks down leaving the amniatronic figures to menace those on the ride. Hanks made a special appearance in this role and it was solid.

There were misses, Weekend update wss subpar, I never find Stefan to be that funny and the Brad Pitt themed commercials did not strike gold.

Still another great week for SNL, they are on a roll.

Barack Obama The Story by David Maraniss

David Maraniss is one of our best biographers publishing today. With a day job working for The Washington Post Maraniss is close to the political action and his biographies have become some of the most well thought of in the last generation. With a biography of Bill Clinton's early years certainly this was well traveled road for the author, so when he stated his book would end as Obama found himself headed to graduate school at Harvard Law we knew this was not to be the typical biography.

This is a fine book. I am not sure if it is a book that The President would be altogether fond of but it is a book that is quite enlightening and indeed some of the personality traits described at length in the book are still very evident in the man we see today.

The President does not even appear in the book until about one hundred pages in as Mr. Maraniss introduces us to the family history of the President. We hear the story of his grandfather in Kenya, and meet his father as he grows up in Africa. At the same time we read of his great grandmothers suicide in nineteen twenties Kansas, how his grandfather was always a dreamer, always looking for his El Dorado. Through their families both Stanley Ann Dunham ( his mother) and Barack Obama Sr. found themselves in a class together at the University of Hawaii.

This book offers some strong insight into the people in the Presidents life. The portrayal of his Mother is quite complimentary, his Grandparents the Dunham's seem to be salt of the earth people. Much of is made of his Grandfather being the quintessential talker and as a man who felt like he had not made as much of himself as he should have. That might well be true but the man Maranniss profiles for me, a man who sold insurance for the last twenty years of his life, a job he disliked, but did it because it had to be done and helped to raise his grandson seems to me the story of a man who put his family first. It could not have been easy.

The story of Obama's African roots is more complex. His father, an incredibly intelligent man was also a very conflicted man, filled with demons. Violence, alcoholism, physical abuse of women, it does not a pretty picture make.

After Obama is born his Mother has her parents help in raising him. Eventually he gets into the exclusive Punahoo High School. Obama was a typical high school student,playing basketball, smoking weed, none of his friends would have identified him as a future President.

In fact one of the odder things about the biography is how uninvolved Obama was in politics. Stories of Bill Clinton being involved in politics from a young age are everywhere, here at my kids school there is a young man who already has a thirst for politics in the extreme. He will run for office someday and we all expect it. How did Obama fly under the radar.

Obama goes to college at Occidental and Columbia. He socially runs more with the international students than the white ones or black ones. His identity is always a concern for him. He feels in between and belonging nowhere. It is in college we see the constant watchfulness for what he calls traps, we also see the caution the willingness to avoid argument and confrontation in a sometime frustrating way.

Much has been made of his Chicago organizing experience. We see this here and it required much more than I knew. It was certainly not an easy job, one, however, gets the sense that at this point Obama's purpose was two fold. He felt the need to do something to connect with his black community and inevitably he had some of the anthropological urges his Mother had as well.

Critics of the President surely have latched onto his great friendships and visitations with his Pakistani friends. Obama certainly has a worldview that is much more expansive than the normal politician.

As a college student he does not appear very likable. His journals and letters written to a couple of girlfriends who cooperated with the book are pretentious and of a nature that would never be elected to be President. I think that the sense of being above it all that often frustrates both is opponents and his own party was readily becoming apparent in this book.


This is a great book. People change and certainly the President has matured. Many people in his life have been there for him, helped him a great deal. The young man we meet in the book however does not seem headed for greatness, he does not seem altogether likable, but of course not many twenty year olds are, perhaps that is th full message of the book.


In reading the book and then looking at the calender at the end of the book at what happened after the story ends in the book, culminating with his being sworn in, is the shocking resume he possessed at this time. He was a state legislator for ten years, ran for Congress and lost, won a Senate seat and three years later ran for President. He might have been the most unqualified man ever to be elected President, certainly in the modern age. It was certainly a confluence of unlikely events that put him into the White House.

Barack Obama on Jimmy Fallon

Barack Obama appeared on Jimmy Fallon the other night at a special show broadcast from the University of North Carolina. From an entertainment point of view the show was a huge success. Fallon at his best, played a solid monologue, then did one of his songs he is known for, one of his creation called Walk of Shame, a song well placed at a college campus.

Dave Matthews joined in and then of course played later in the show. The heart of the show however was the appearance of The President. Fallon in his normal role of cheerleader was visibly excited. Obama took part in the regular feature " Slow Jamming the News." It was funny and The President used the opportunity to skewer Republicans over their stance on his student loan bill.

Playing to the choir at a college campus Obama was clearly trying to raise interest and excitement in the youth vote. It works. Still some would wonder, myself included, if it is correct for a President to appear in a comedy skit so irrelevant and then to use it for political purposes. This was a far cry from Richard Nixon saying " Sock it to Me" and Bill Clinton was not The President when he appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show.

Funny Yes. Worth Watching Yes. Questionable as to if this is something a sitting President should be doing? Yes.

Suicide of a Superpower by Pat Buchanan

I like Pat Buchanan. I am sure I am not supposed to. Yet I do. He is clearly a Conservative and I am not. Yet when reviewing his positions they are in some cases very similar to mine. I do not go party line on issues and find that in issues I feel conservative on Buchanan mirrors me.

I did not read all of this book. The first 75 pages were enough to make clear what Buchanan was selling. Culture divergence, wars, entitlement spending is killing us. I think anyone looking at Washington would have to agree.

For me the most important chapter was the solutions section. First we must find that while Obama is certainly not a racist he is, besides being ill prepared to b

e President, not one who understands middle America. He could not stand up for Unions yet he does not understand the frustrations of the average frustrates white man or black man,

The national debt is fueled by welfare and warfare. We will always argue about what we should do with those who need help. Easier however is to realize our military is a giant boondoggle. We borrow money from Japan to protect Japan. We do the same for Europe. We borrow money from China to send foreign aid to countries that then vote with China against us at the U N. We have 700 to 1000 bases in 130 countries. How is this justifiable. It is a colossal waste.

The troops we have in Europe serve what purpose exactly? Do we really think the Russians are invading?

Most important to me, and to people who would like me to stop harping on it is Economic nationalism. Buchanan lays out the simple reason that a tariff is needed. It has to be set up in such a way to force companies to make things here. This is still the biggest market in the world. Germany, China, and everyone else might make noise but no one will leave this market. And should they start a trade war they will miss our imports much more than we will miss our exports. We can make what we buy but as my friend Brad says who would China sell all fheir crappy Walmart merchandise to?

For some reason being seen as Pro American is seen as being lowbrow and simplistic. I do not think so. Only a person who hates himself can not love his country. I surely do not believe in.my country right or wrong but there is a reason we are hurting in this country. It all starts with the cultural divide. Pat is right about that too.

This is all unlikely to gain any traction. Both the right and left worship at the alter of free trade. It is however, nice to see someone articulating an idea that puts America first. Even if it is old crazy Pat Buchanan

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Having finished this book last night at 2:30 in the morning after a bout of insomnia I can attest that the Edmund Morris three volume set on the life of Theodore Roosevelt might be the best I have read. Of course Dumas Malone's Jefferson set is not one I have tackled yet and Robert Car's LBJ set has not been finished. That set, too, is a wonder.

Truman and TR have long been my two favorite Presidents and this book did nothing to change that. Morris certainly took his time between volumes.

Teddy Roosevelt had a life of adventure long before he became President yet he was very young when thrust into the Presidency upon the death of McKinley by an assassin's bullet. In 1908 Roosevelt chose not to run for another term as President considering the 7 years he had served by the end of his elected term to be close enough to the two term limit that President's had traditionally self imposed on them.

Things changed when Roosevelt's handpicked successor William Howard Taft did not follow the course that T R thought he had defined.

This, the third book in the series tells the story of Roosevelt's life after the Presidency. His trip to Africa, his tour of Europe as the Leader of the World even after he had relinquished his Presidency. The election of 1912 brought the split and the formation of the progressive Bull Moose party. If Republicans had picked the right horse we would not have Woodrow Wilson as President and certainly would have been more prepared for World War I and perhaps involved earlier. The what if's of what this might have meant to History are intriguing. Perhaps the Bolshevik's would not have succeeded in Russia if the war had not become so desperate for them with America's earlier entry. We will never know.

The story of his trip to South America has been well documented in other books and was a story that could and has easily merited full volumes. Roosevelt was a factor in the election of 1916.

Much of the later book tells of his development of his children, their development, and eventual part in World War I.

Roosevelt disagreed with Wilson's approach to World War I both before and after the United States entering. It was an assumed fact that Roosevelt would be the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1920. It did not happen as Roosevelt's health deteriorated quickly. It was, again, a great loss to the world.

I cannot be impartial. When reading biographies of people in history we know how they end. They die. The world moves on. Reading this book I did feel a sadness when he died, the same thing happened to me at the end of the Truman bio. No matter how great the LBJ biography series by Robert Caro is, and it is wonderful, I do not see myself having the same feeling when the fourth book is published and we come to the end of LBJ.

T R was a force of life. He was not perfect. He was a man. He was a leader of great ability. Most people and even most Presidents have nothing like the influence he had on this country. When Obama was elected the pundits spoke of perhaps a new FDR, with big business, The Supreme Court, and the Republicans all in the boat together perhaps what we really need is another T R.