After all that, it’s official! Got this in the mail today.

Woo! Just as the financial markets crumble around us. The timing is remarkable.

Bye bye Bush.

Currently listening to:

Now get up and dance!

Here’s Bill O’Reilly trying to make his case for “traditional” America.

And Jon Stewart says ““The tradition in America is a progression of individual freedoms. You know what the tradition of America would say? Gay marriage is the next step in the progression. That’s the tradition of America. Your idea of tradition is a mythological Ozzie and Harriet thing.”

O’Reilly calling the clearly non-panda soft toy a panda at the end of it encapsulates what he is…a pathological liar. If you say it with enough confidence, it becomes true. Like how he tells Jon Stewart he is “wandering’ when Stewart was clearly not. “You are wandering”, O’Reilly repeats, as if repeating that statement makes it true.

So, as always, prices of computers fall significantly just 2 months after you buy it. My brother just told me that the Asus Eee Box that I bought in Sept is now $288 on Amazon, instead of $350 that I paid for it.

I’m still incredibly happy with this toy I bought. I use it solely on my TV to surf the web and stream online videos. It hooks up to my Plasma TV and Bose speakers so the effect of stream is just great (vs. just watching on a tiny computer screen with computer speakers). Although I note that the audio hook-up is NOT digital and the video hook up is NOT HDMI, both of which would have made this toy sooo sweet. But for what it is, it’s a great tool for your flatscreen TV. It is SO silent too and boots up really quickly.

I know some of you out there might find this review useful and may be thinking of getting something like this. My full review here in Sept. If you click on the links below to buy this, it makes no difference to you, but I think (I don’t even know!) I get a tiny commission off it. So just click on it if you were thinking of getting it anyway. I also got the cheap wireless keyboard/mouse combination, both of which work really perfectly in front of my TV. My only quibble is that there is no off-button on the mouse/keyboard, and in just 2 months, the battery in my mouse (2 AA batteries) has already died. I’m not sure if it’s from the cheap batteries that they provided in the box. Or if it really sucks batteries while it’s not being used. For now, I have done the ghetto thing and popped 1 battery out when it’s in the drawer unused just so it turns off.

I miss my niece Star! Her mummy sent us these 2 videos today.

This is her a year ago at 13 months. I remember watching this video and just cracking up laughing. I don’t know how a 1 year old could make that face…but she did!

And here she is now at just over 2 years old…singing The Killers. She’s like a wind-up doll, she’ll only sing when she runs around in circles.

Boy do I love her!!!

The Obamas met up with the Bushes at the White House today, a tradition during the transition period, an important significance of democracy in America, where power is transferred and ….DAAAAMN MICHELLE, HONEY! I LOVE THAT DRESS!!!

(And oh, Mrs Bush, erm. wow. really?)

Finally, you say, a break from Obamamania on kelchan.com!

On to other news, Mahathir Mohamad is now known as a blogger. http://www.chedet.com/

This was written up in the New York Times today:

For 22 years, Mr. Mahathir was the most powerful person in this land, and his thoughts were commands as he reshaped the country in his own image.

But he has become an irritant and a spoiler five years after stepping down, turning against his handpicked successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and falling victim to the press controls he perfected as prime minister.

“Where is the press freedom?” he asked two years ago, apparently surprised at being suddenly ignored. “Broadcast what I have to say! What I say is not even accurately published in the press!”

This May, though, he discovered the power of the Internet. Like many other inconvenient critics, he joined what seemed to be a political wave of the future, creating his own blog — www.chedet.com — where he vents in English and Malay several times a week.

Now the question is: will the other MM start a blog someday?

Lee Kuan Yew, blogger.

Everyone’s a blogger these days.

In continuation of Obamarama, I started to read The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage). This was my Christmas present from my mother-in-law last Christmas. I don’t know why it took me so long to pick it up, but the time is ripe to do so.

Just reading the prologue affirms why he appealed to me in the first place – his positions on issues is in line with mine. But more importantly, I am already impressed by the sound wisdom reflected in the prologue – a deep understanding of his strengths and weaknesses and the weaknesses of his strengths. An intellectual for president! What audacity! Now that’s a Change from the last 8 years! Let’s hope that during his term, he will revisit these words over and over again to remind him of what he intended to do.

Extract:
This book grows directly out of those conversations on the campaign trail. Not only did my encounters with voters confirm the fundamental decency of the American people, they also reminded me that at the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the marble slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in the hearts and minds of most Americans–and can inspire us to pride, duty, and sacrifice.

I recognize the risks of talking this way. In an era of globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars, we don’t even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to bring those ideals about. Most of us are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits. We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance. Even the standard high school history textbook notes the degree to which, from its very inception, the reality of American life has strayed from its myths. In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals or common values might seem hopelessly naive, if not downright dangerous–an attempt to gloss over serious differences over policy and performance or, worse, a means of muffling the complaints of those who feel ill served by our current institutional arrangements.

My argument, however, is that we have no choice. You don’t need a poll to know that the vast majority of Americans–Republican, Democrat, and independent–are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. Whether we’re from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor, and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a continuous menu of false or cramped choices. Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense– correctly–that the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we don’t change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited. Perhaps more than any other time in our recent history, we need a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.

That’s the topic of this book: how we might begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life. This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do it. I don’t. Although I discuss in each chapter a number of our most pressing policy challenges, and suggest in broad strokes the path I believe we should follow, my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete. I offer no unifying theory of American government, nor do these pages provide a manifesto for action, complete with charts and graphs, timetables and ten-point plans.

Instead what I offer is something more modest: personal reflections on those values and ideals that have led me to public life, some thoughts on the ways that our current political discourse unnecessarily divides us, and my own best assessment–based on my experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian and skeptic–of the ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common good.

Let me be more specific about how the book is organized. Chapter One takes stock of our recent political history and tries to explain some of the sources for today’s bitter partisanship. In Chapter Two, I discuss those common values that might serve as the foundation for a new political consensus. Chapter Three explores the Constitution not just as a source of individual rights, but also as a means of organizing a democratic conversation around our collective future. In Chapter Four, I try to convey some of the institutional forces–money, media, interest groups, and the legislative process–that stifle even the best-intentioned politician. And in the remaining five chapters, I suggest how we might move beyond our divisions to effectively tackle concrete problems: the growing economic insecurity of many American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores.

I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of these issues to be insufficiently balanced. To this accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a Democrat, after all; my views on most topics correspond more closely to the editorial pages of the New York Times than those of the Wall Street Journal. I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody’s religious beliefs–including my own–on nonbelievers. Furthermore, I am a prisoner of my own biography: I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives.

But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers. I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book–namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

Recently, one of the reporters covering Capitol Hill stopped me on the way to my office and mentioned that she had enjoyed reading my first book. “I wonder,” she said, “if you can be that interesting in the next one you write.” By which she meant, I wonder if you can be honest now that you are a U.S. senator.

I wonder, too, sometimes. I hope writing this book helps me answer the question.

Just when I was accepting CNN’s “magic map” with John King as something positive (it really does help you understand better), they bring out the completely bizarre hologram.

Talk about over-the-top, ridiculous, distracting, unnecessary.

Beam me up, Scotty.