Barack Hussein Obama will become our 44th President today at noon. I’m awfully happy about that. Only time will tell if he’ll be a great or even a good President, but I like our chances.

I used his middle name today –normally a mainstay of conservatives trying to emphasize his differentness — to remind myself of my initial feeling that my fellow Americans were so superficial in their approach to politics that they would vote against a guy simply because he had a foreign sounding name. I did them a disservice by underestimating those fellow Americans. 69,456,000 people cast a vote for Barack Hussein Obama — about 9 million more people than cast a vote for the quintessentially American name of John McCain. So, I’m very happy to have been wrong on this score.

Speaking of Obama and McCain, I am pleased to live in a country where, after a fierce political battle, on the day before the power transition, Obama and McCain had dinner together. This, of course, was a good gesture on Obama’s part. But, in my mind, it was an even better gesture on McCain’s part to accept. It’s easy to be magnanimous in victory. It’s a bit harder to accept such magnanimity in defeat. That McCain was willing to be part of such a gesture speaks of his love for this country and his understanding that our peaceful transitions of power are not common in this world and not to be taken for granted.

I appreciate the symbolism implicit in the fact that a day devoted to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes immediately before the day when the United States swears in its first black President. You’d have to be pretty thick not to see some symbolism in that confluence of events. But, I am not black, and Barack Obama’s race has never inspired much of an emotional response with me. Intellectually, I appreciate how difficult black history has been and that seeing that a black man is able to rise to the highest position in the land is a very powerful thing. But, like I said, this has not inspired a visceral response for me.

Instead, I am excited because Barack Obama seems to be a person with formidable talents: intellectual, oratorical, organizational, and otherwise. My optimism about his Presidency comes from his individual potential and not his skin color. Sure, I love my country a bit more when it’s the sort of country where a black man can succeed rather than the sort of country that holds a person back based on their race. But, at the gut level, Obama’s race has been more or less a matter of indifference for me personally. But then, maybe that’s the sort of thing Dr. King was dreaming of when he imagined that his children would one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Matt Taibbi has another good one – this time he disembowels Thomas Friedman, a guy whose position in the punditocracy I have never understood. I stopped reading Friedman back around the start of the Iraq War when Friedman would write things along the lines of “Invasion of Iraq will be a good thing if the Bush administration does ‘x'” when “x” was something the Bush administration would never, ever do.

Taibbi, among other things, goes after Friedman’s bizarre metaphors:

And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?” Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

Terry Record, the former State Dept. of Health attorney/blogger/former prosecutor/GOP activist who got drunk at a strip club and killed Jimmy Cash is back in jail. Record had been out on bail since May 2007, but violated the conditions of his release by consuming alcohol.

During a hearing this afternoon in Marion Superior Court, Record admitted to the December alcohol violation. He said family-related stress at the time didn’t excuse drinking roughly three alcoholic drinks.

His trial is set for February 9.

Trifles from Anderson flagged a report on a federal study that concluded health insurance reform could create workforce instability. “Making health insurance less dependent on employment could induce workers to retire earlier or change jobs more often.”

It occurred to me when I read that conclusion that ending indentured servitude probably created workforce instability as well. Uncoupling health care from employment seems like an important thing to do. It just creates weird incentives all over the place. Ultimately, I think employees, employers, and the economy generally benefit if we limit the degree to which people are making employment decisions for non-work reasons.