Barack Obama

Dear JCCIC,

On January 20th, while I assume most of you were sitting in doors watching the inauguration from your TVs and heated offices, I was standing outside, in a bush, getting whipped by tree branches, while being groped by unwitting total strangers, clutching a purple ticket that apparently gave me the right to unwittingly grope other perfect strangers while simultaneously yelling the phrase, "Don't Push" to other perfect strangers, so they wouldn't be forced to unwittingly grope the strangers in front of them. I want to thank you for the honor and privilege of being able to hear a cannon fire 21 times while empty security lines waited for us to not come in. You guys are a factory of awesome, a truly fitting bookend to the era of George Bush. Whoever was in charge needs to be fired, rehired again as a barrier for 8 hours (Seriously, they should just stand in one place for 8 hours like we did and pretend to be a wall, as that would be more useful than what they did do), then fired again, and then kidney punched for good measure.

What qualifies me to tell you this? What sort of logistics expertise do I have that allows me to judge you? Well, this one time I went to this convention where 100k people showed up, don't know if you heard about it, it was called the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and it went swimmingly. That is to say, my logistics experience, is limited at best, but I'm not a complete idiot, so I can observe events that I've been to and then report back what happened at them. Basically, I'm not a moron. And that officially makes me a better logistics expert than anyone you have on staff apparently.

Here are some things I would have done, being a non-idiot:

• I would have put signs at regular intervals that said things like "Purple Ticket Holders ONLY" and maybe hung big maps at outer streets that pointed people in the right direction, if they had tickets to other sections or no tickets at all for instance. Maybe I would have had volunteers stand next to said maps who knew where people should go.
• I would have put barriered access points 2-3 blocks out that only let people in who had tickets, so that maybe, 60,000 people who were not in the right area wouldn't have been where they weren't supposed to go.
• I would have had volunteers at every half block there to advise people which direction to go, maybe with megaphones, rather than have confused national guard and police officers who gave up talking once they realized they had no clue what the hell was going on. It was really neat when 40k people converged on one intersection all trying to head in opposite directions. It was pretty hilarious to watch small children crying because they were being crushed, while people in wheel chairs got trapped in the center of the street being honked at by police cars to move, when they couldn't in fact move anywhere.
• I would have had 1 single path to the entry gate that went 1-2 miles. It was done at the DNC and it was awesome. It was like walking through a disney ride line, where it went so fast you barely noticed it was happening. Although the random indiscriminate placement of barriers was funny as I mentioned before, it kind of got in the way of there being any semblance of control. People were randomly walking in multiple directions, around 5 city blocks of buildings. Everyone had their own entry plan, and none of them involved all getting in one line, though all of them involved going in a different direction than the person behind them. At the bottlenecked clusterfuck I was at, I suddenly realized that one of the reason for the trouble was that you built a blockade right in front of the street that headed directly to the gate. One person could squeeze through at a time. Usually, when you are planning an event that has 100k people all trying to get into one gate. you try not to put a barrier in their way of actually getting to it.
• Let more than one person at once wait at security metal detectors. At the DNC, the security tents allowed 10-12 people to wait in each metal detector line. That way, when one person got through, another one could take their turn right away. It's whats called a "line." At the purple entry gate, security would let one person in at a time. Each person would have to walk 30-40 feet to a open security checkpoint, then security would wait again until another space opened up. It was what I like to call "incredibly stupid."

That's basically it. So just to review I would have done 5 things:

• Put up signs, maps and directions
• Had informed volunteers standing and disclosing information
• Created one unified flow of traffic to entrances, far away from entrances
• Put up checkpoints to check credentials
• Let people stand in lines

What's neat about those suggestions is that they are things that have been done AT EVERY MAJOR EVENT SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME.

That's all I got. I know its a lot to take in, but it might make you look like heroes next time you ever throw an event.

In the interim, please deliver the person in charge of planning this to my house, so that I might beat him with a bag of oranges, indiscriminately punch him in the kidneys, then push him into a wall for 8 hours.

Sincerely yours,

Purple Rage

PS I was coming the opposite direction from the Purple Tunnel of Doom, so I didn't even get to experience that special treat.

I apologize for this tangent away from family into politics, but I just couldn't let this slide. Last night I was watching MSNBC's coverage when I saw Tweety Mathews corner a guy from Texas like so (the fun starts at 3:30 in the video) :

I was so annoyed I was basically yelling at the TV, "Tell him, dude. Tell him what Obama did. Just name one thing!" But then I thought to myself, "What a minute, I CAN'T NAME ONE THING." At 6:12 into the video Olbermann does a good job of putting Tweety back in his place, which felt good, however I was still without an answer on what Obama had done.

I have always based my support for Obama on the fact that he's inspirational enough to triple the youth vote and bring in independents, thus shellacking McCain in the general election and giving us a more successful chance of getting more congress critters in the house and senate. It was more a pragmatic decision than one based on who I thought was the more substantial candidate. So I never bothered to learn the details of what he actually did. So this morning I went back and looked on Daily Kos where they were also talking about last night. What I discovered was not only did he sponsor some legislation, he sponsored a metric tonage of legislation.

In Illinois, he sponsored over 800 bills.

On the federal level, in his short time, he passed a decent amount of legistlation, in a bi-partisan manner>. His first year in the U.S. Senate, he authored 152 bills and co-sponsored another 427. Mind you, not many passed with that idiot Republican and limpy Demcratic Senate in his way, but that's a lot of bills. The big ones are:

• the Coburn-Obama Government Transparency Act of 2006 (became law)
• The Lugar-Obama Nuclear Non-proliferation and Conventional Weapons Threat Reduction Act,(became law)
• The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, passed the Senate
• The 2007 Government Ethics Bill,(became law)
• The Protection Against Excessive Executive Compensation Bill,(In committee

More about his record can be found here, here, here, and here.

Finally, to learn details of his entire plan for the country should he become president you can go to his website. You can also download his Blueprint for Change here (WARNING: Large substantial 64 page PDF).

The Obama campaign better make sure all of his surrogates know his record from now on. The dude is substantial. Don't let the media bully America into thinking otherwise.