Out and about – UPDATED

Busy day today, and I won’t be blogging much, but a few quick links:

My latest at Pajamas Media I dare to tell a joke about Obama and suggest humorous banter is essential to a healthy presidency:

[Comedy writers are]… doing Obama no favors by holding him exempt from ridicule. Suffering ridicule is part of the job of being president; it comes with the nuclear football, and quite possibly that is why. The American presidency is already a grave and heavy office; without humorous chucking back and forth — between the president and the press or between him and the satirists — it would seem unbearably ponderous and remote, inaccessible to the citizenry, and inexpressibly lonely for the president.
[…]
Lately humor in America has almost outsmarted itself, becoming too ironic by half — so much so that this week the New Yorker caused something of a brouhaha by printing a satirical cover of Senator and Mrs. Obama so heavy with irony that the Obama campaign, and many in the press, took to the airways to explain it. In an effort spanning three news cycles, ardent reporters and Democrats reassured the blue states that the magazine cover was not labeling Obama a radical Muslim and his wife a militant proponent of black liberation theology; it was making fun of people who think those things! Then — not exactly in one syllable words, but very nearly — some, like Andrea Mitchell, explained the thing to the unsophisticated rubes in the red states: “This. Is. What. You. Think. And. We. Are. Laughing. At. You. Get. It. Cornpones?”

I think you’ll enjoy this one – I had fun writing it – so as Glenn would say, read it all! (Also, read John F. Cullinan at NRO who writes on the same topic but notes some sinister extensions we need to watch out for, here in the US.)

Obama does seem a little testy.

NOTE what is happening in Germany:

The price of European emission permits is rising so rapidly that German companies are threatening to leave the country. Thousands of jobs could be lost. And the environment may, in the end, be no better off.

They sat silently through two lectures, but then they couldn’t control their anger any longer. The civil servants from the Environment Ministry, the Environment Agency and the German Emissions Trading Authority made it sound easy for industry to take up carbon trading. It was just too much for the managers to tolerate.

“If that’s the shape the trading will take, we will simply move our cement operation to Ukraine,” a cement factory manager shouted into the lecture hall. “Then there won’t be any trading here, nothing will be produced here anymore — the lights will simply go out here.”

What hath Gore wrought? I’m so glad President Bush was smart enough to stay off that bandwagon.

The Pelosi and the SUV. Nothing to add that isn’t being said here and here.

Deacon Greg noticed a good bit of oratory at Tony Snow’s funeral.

There is some EXCELLENT READING in this weeks Inside Catholic Digest, so you might want to print it out and enjoy it on the porch (yeah, I’m in there, too).

Finally, all kidding aside, I pray for Obama’s safety as he travels, and Pope Benedict’s too, just as I always pray for the safety of the president. Lots of nuts out there, and we live in serious times.

UPDATE – Joel Stein – who I once wanted to adopt for a week – riffs brilliantly on Obama