A pep talk from Barack Obama.

Courtesy of CNBC: 

When the going gets rough, a pep talk from former president Barack Obama may come in handy.

A day after president Donald Trump's downcast speech on terrorism and political adversaries during the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), Obama discussed the power of optimism at the inaugural Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Goalkeepers" event.

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"Your response has to be to reject cynicism and reject pessimism and push forward, with a certain infectious and relentless optimism," he says. "Not blind optimism, not one that ignores the scale and scope of our challenges, but that hard-earned optimism, that's rooted in the stories of very real progress that have occurred throughout human history." 

"We have to reject the notion that we're suddenly gripped by forces that we cannot control," Obama says. "We've got to embrace the longer and more optimistic view of history and the part that we play in it." But how can anyone be optimistic under those conditions, you may ask? Obama wants you to consider this: "By just about every measure, America is better — and the world is better — than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago or even 10 years ago." 

"I know that statement doesn't jibe with the steady stream of bad news and cynicism that we're fed through television and Twitter," Obama says. 

"Each new generation stands on the successes of the previous generation," he says, bending "that arc of history in the direction of more freedom and more opportunity and more justice." 

"I have great faith in you," he says, "and I'm certain that if you keep pushing forward, then America and the world are going to be just fine."

Look I know this is supposed to make us feel better, and it is SO nice to hear such optimism again, but really all it is doing is making me miss our former President more than ever. 

However of course he is right, we desperately need to maintain a positive outlook and work for the kind of progress that his administration worked so hard to achieve.

So I am going to do my part, and keep pushing those progressive values in the hope that all of this will eventually blow over and we will once again get back on the right track to a better tomorrow.

You know what, I guess I DO feel better.

Arguably the most powerful nerd in the world enters the gun control debate in a major way.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast: 

It was reported Monday that Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and incredibly wealthy guy, and with his wife, Melinda, have given $1 million to Initiative 594 in Washington state. The ballot initiative, if passed by voters on November 4 (and it currently enjoys overwhelming support), will require universal background checks for all firearm purchases in the state. 

Gates is only the latest Washington billionaire to give to the effort, with original Amazon investor Nick Hanauer providing crucial early funding, and more recently upping his overall donation to $1.4 million. Additionally, Gates’s Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has provided $500,000 for the cause. 

But Gates’s fame brings more attention and further legitimizes the initiative in a way that almost nobody else could. Once the Gates Foundation made it a priority to combat malaria around the world in 2000, it brought down deaths due to the insect-borne disease by 20 percent in 11 years, saving the lives of 1 million African children in the process. 

Gates has the ability to grab headlines and make an issue go viral with the constant media coverage he receives, and the financial ability, if he wins, to fund similar efforts around the country. His involvement could be the answer to the public health crisis that makes American children 93 percent of those murdered in the 26 high-income countries around the world.

You know I have been looking for some good news on the gun control issue, and this could really be it. 

If Gates really decides to take this on it could be a game changer.

And I truly hope that he does.

Ungrateful former Defense Secretary Robert Gates write book attacking President Obama and Vice President Biden.

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:  

President Barack Obama lacked belief in his administration's policy toward the war in Afghanistan and was skeptical it would even succeed, his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, writes in a memoir to be published next week. 

Gates, who served as Pentagon chief from 2006 to 2011 under Obama and his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, mixes strong praise with scathing criticism for Obama and his administration, the Los Angeles Times reported. 

Obama doubted his own policy after he decided to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan early in his first term, Gates wrote. The president became “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” a stance that Gates says led him to consider resigning in September 2009. 

According to the Washington Post, Gates wrote that Obama "doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out." 

"I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission," Gates writes.

Apparently that is supposed to be taken as a criticism, that the President did not have faith in the possibility of eradicating al-Qaeda. Which just about everybody who is not some neo-con dimwit would agree is impossible.

And no the war WASN'T President Obama's and who could blame him for not wanting to continue fighting what he realized was an endless war that would, and could, never achieve victory?

Gates also did not agree with Obama when it came to the Bin Laden mission: 

In one example of those differences, Gates called Obama’s decision to order the Bin Laden raid, despite doubts about whether the Al Qaeda founder was at the compound in Abbottabad, “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House.” 

Gates had favored using heavy bombers to obliterate the compound. The option was less risky because it did not involve putting troops on the ground, but might have left doubts about whether Bin Laden was in fact killed.

Gates was also served as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense from 2006 until the end of his last term, and never even came close to killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden. Yet this failure has the audacity to express criticism at the President's successful plan for taking him out?

Fuck him!

Now you might think that the Obama administration would be firing back and attempting to destroy Gates credibility, but you would be wrong:

Obama "deeply appreciates" Gates' service as defense secretary, NSC spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement, and "welcomes differences of view among his national security team, which broaden his options and enhance our policies."

Yeah even when he is being stabbed in the back by somebody who he gave a job to against the wishes of those on the Left who did not trust ANYBODY who served with  George W. Bush has the class to respond politely instead of kicking his ungrateful ass all over the place.

No instead of defending himself, Obama is more concerned with how his friend Joe Biden has been portrayed: 

The White House is coming to Joe Biden's defense after ex Defense Secretary Robert Gates blasted the vice president for being "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades" in his new memoir. 

But Obama came out to defend his No. 2, praising Biden as "one of the leading statesmen of his time" and assuring the public that the President "relies on his good counsel every day." 

"The President disagrees with Secretary Gates' assessment," National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden said Tuesday in a statement. 

You know I believe that instead of this book making me think less of Barack Obama, it is actually making me feel prouder than ever that I supported him through two different campaigns. And continue to do so today.

“That’s the closest I’ve come to getting into a fist fight with a head of state”. Yet another reason to love Jimmy Carter.

Courtesy of Times Live:  

“The first time I came here to Cape Town I almost got in a fight with the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, because he was refusing to let Aids be treated,” Carter told the Sunday Times newspaper. 

He said at the time, then-health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was standing with Mbeki. 

“That’s the closest I’ve come to getting into a fist fight with a head of state”. 

Carter said he and Bill Gates senior were trying to convince Mbeki to at least provide antiretroviral treatment to pregnant women with Aids, “but Mbeki was against that”.

Well over eighty years old and still willing to knock a mofo out if he does not help prevent AIDS.

I will ALWAYS be a fan of Jimmy Carter's.

He was the first presidential candidate for whom voted. Sadly he lost to Ronald Reagan, a loss that still pisses me off to this day.

Christian Logic.

I cannot imagine wanting to go to a place that would deny entrance to the best and brightest among us based solely on their skepticism, yet open wide the doors to murderers, thieves, and evil dictators based solely on a death bed conversion.

It is the kind of logic demonstrated by an ego-maniacal despot, determined to surround himself with fawning sycophants, rather than a loving God accepting the very attribute which defines human beings as human.

Or have I missed something?