President Obama, the Father-in-Chief.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

For Obama, one of the most welcome byproducts of gaining the highest office in the land at the age of 47 was that he could finally differentiate himself from his own absentee father, Barack Obama Sr., and become the child-centric parent he had always longed to be. This hands-on dad, who helped coach Sasha’s grammar school basketball team, puts a high premium on both connecting with and providing direction to his girls. 

As Obama has often said, the president “lives above the store” and has no commute. No longer has his hectic travel schedule required constant separations from his two girls. Malia was a summer baby — born on the Fourth of July in 1998 — and for the first three months of her life, Obama was glad to help his wife, Michelle, by changing diapers and rocking Malia to sleep. But once fall came, the state senator and part-time law professor had to be away from the family’s Chicago home at least half the week. And by early 2007, when he was both a U.S. senator and a full-time presidential candidate, Obama was forced to hand off just about all of the parenting responsibilities to Michelle. 

He was eager to reconnect with his family. Soon after being inaugurated, Obama established what New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor has called “an unusual rule for a president.” As he informed all his aides, he vowed to have dinner with his family five nights a week. That left just two nights a week for out-of-town fundraisers or dinners with fellow politicians. 

At 6:30, Obama and his wife sit down with the girls for a family dinner without any outsiders — not even Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson, who typically retreats to her own “home” on the third floor of the White House. 

The evening meal, observed Obama’s former body-man Reggie Love, was treated “like a meeting in the Situation Room. There’s a hard stop before that dinner.” While aides sometimes call him back to work at 8:30 or 9, they rarely dare to go upstairs to bother him during the sacred dinner hour. 

On most days, Obama also eats breakfast with his daughters. And as part of his commitment to his girls, Obama has been reluctant to visit Camp David, since various school activities typically require the youngsters to be in Washington. In sharp contrast to his own neglectful father, this president with the perfect attendance record at his daughters’ parent-teacher conferences has emerged as a model father. 

Out of his own feelings of loss and alienation, which he described in “Dreams from My Father,” has come a road map for personal and social transformation. “I am a black man who grew up without a father, and I know the cost that I paid for that,” the president told a panel on Overcoming Poverty at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit held at Georgetown University in 2015. “And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off.”

There are very few traits that I find as admirable as a man who prioritizes being a good father. 

Much like our President I am also the product of a broken homes and an absentee father, and I can admit that when I became a dad it was all consuming for me, and quickly made almost everything else seem insignificant by comparison.

There is no job more important in my opinion, not even the job of President of the United States.

So recognizing that the President feels the same way, only makes me admire him that much more.

Forget raising money to help a victim of cancer, or of the Boston Bombing. The real money is in refusing to serve pizza at gay weddings.

Courtesy of NewNowNext: 

According to GoFundMe’s Most Raised page, the fund benefiting Memories Pizza is the second highest-funded project in the website’s history, raising more money than funds for a woman dying from a rare cancer, victims disfigured by the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and a disabled man brutally beaten outside his home.

I first read this post yesterday, and since then the Most Raised page has removed Memories Pizza's account from their list. However if you click the link above, and compare the top earners to Memories Pizza's GoFundMe page, it will still demonstrate that they have indeed raised more money than everybody else except an account for a young girl dying of cancer.

And that includes more money than two victims of the Boston Bombing, the family of a priest killed in a car accident, and a woman dying of a rare form of cancer.

Maybe it's just me but it seems that if closing your store after a few threatening phone calls, makes you a bigger victim in the eyes of the eyes of the public than losing your limbs or dying of cancer, then there is something truly fucked up about this country.

Oh and by the way Memories Pizza is reopening. Which must be a snap when you have  $842,000 for remodeling, advertising, and of course security to keep teh gays out.

Editorial cartoonist reminds us, What Sandy Hook taught us about teachers.

What is posted below was written by the Sun Sentinel's editorial cartoonist, Chan Lowe. I thought it was so elegant that I am going to reprint it here in its entirety.

Courtesy of the Sun-Sentinel:

As the nation wades into parallel and interconnected discussions about gun rights, mental illness and the culture of violence in this country, we should also be considering a topic no less related to the Connecticut school tragedy: Are we doing right by our teachers? 

Never has the dedication of the people who practice the teaching profession been spotlighted in the way it has over the past few days. We were shown, in dramatic terms, to what lengths teachers are willing to go to fulfill the crucial mandate they have been given: the education and welfare of the most precious members of our society. Yet they are so often treated with disdain. 

Teaching is a calling. Not everyone has the will or the stamina to do it well. It takes love, pride, and an almost sacred commitment that can’t be explained in words. In America, teachers have traditionally been underpaid, because in America’s early communities, “schoolmarms” were always spinsters who were not expected to support families. 

In other countries, the teaching profession is considered so noble that it is well paid in comparison to many other professions, as it should be. In this country, politicians—acting as proxies for taxpayers—haggle with, lowball, denigrate and harass teachers as if their demands for job security and decent pay are unreasonable and selfish. 

Let’s talk, then, about receiving proper remuneration for the value of one’s work. A hedge fund CEO manipulates money for his investors. While he’s busy “creating wealth,” making himself and his clients richer, it could be argued that he is contributing nothing of lasting value to society. 

A teacher invests in the future, student by student, and his or her legacy consists of the product of those students’ fertile minds. Occasionally, teachers are even called upon to throw themselves into harm’s way to protect the lives of their charges as if they were their own children—and last week six of them demonstrated most profoundly that they do not shrink from the task. About this, no one can argue. 

So, who deserves to be paid more, and what does the reality tell us about our priorities?

(P.S. If you would like to leave a comment for Chan Lowe directly to thank him for this, just click the link at the top to do so.)