Obama's E-mail Address Here!

At least according to the New York Times.

The Worst Day Of The Year

Feeling especially blue today? My New Nixon colleague Frank Gannon explains why.

"Sharon Stone Is In Town...A Sense of Family"

We knew the media would be beside themselves today and tomorrow. Allowances must be made, and distinctions as well, between worthy coverage and not so much. The Today Show ran a charming piece by Jamie Gangel about Presidential entertaining; look for President Nixon at the piano during his famous birthday party for Duke Ellington. Gangel warns Sasha and Malia to follow Amy Carter's lead and bring a book to the parties. Unfortunately, the segment was followed by an interview with a society editor, Susan Nixon (no relation), that may have you reaching for the on-air sickness bag.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A New Word For A New Era

Call President Bush's speechwriter: On the Today Show this morning, while interviewing Doris Kearns Goodwin, Natalie Morales said the times we're living in are "monumentous."

Musical Memories That Will Long Endure

I'm glad the PE is confident that the United States will endure, as he said today at his Lincoln Memorial concert. I didn't think we were so pessimistic as to think otherwise. It was an allusion to FDR's 1933 Inaugural Address:

This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

But Mr. Obama's remark didn't come out quite as elegantly. The only other off note in HBO's broadcast of the concert was Garth Brooks' performance of the Isley Brothers' 1959 song "Shout." The rendition was more closely patterned on that of the fictional band Otis Day and the Knights in "Animal House," complete with Brooks and members of the backing choir making like John Belushi and Flounder in the basement of Delta House.

But then there was Bruce Springsteen singing "The Rising" with his acoustic guitar and a gospel choir. U-2 performing "Pride (In The Name Of Love)," about Christ and Martin Luther King, Jr., from the very place most associated with King. Stevie Wonder, Usher, and Shakira together on "Higher Ground." Pete Seeger leading the crowd in "This Land Is Your Land." Will we ever have a Republican inauguration with such musical moments? Hard to imagine.

Emma The Butterfly

At the St. John's Ministry Fair on Sunday

He Answers

"When people ask me questions, I answer," says Jamal Malik (Dev Pastel) in Danny Boyle's wonderful, gritty "Slumdog Millionaire." He's trying to prove to a Mumbai police inspector that he hadn't cheated in the process of coming within one question of winning 20 million rupees ($500,000) on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" The investigation reveals that each pivotal experience in his life -- seeing his mother killed by an anti-Muslim mob, learning an old Indian song from a sadistic Mumbain Fagin, swiping tourists' shoes at the Taj Mahal -- helps him answer one of the questions leading to the grand prize. It's hard to imagine suitable questions lining up quite so conveniently on a quiz show. But the message is that life teaches invaluable lessons, that self-awareness is infinitely enriching, that truth begets salvation.

Jamal goes on the program not to win the money but in the hope that the woman he has loved and lost, Latika (Freida Pinto), will see him on television. The end of the deeply affecting movie has a fairy tale quality, especially when Jamal uses his "phone a friend" option. It's a dark movie, too, thanks to images of poverty and degradation on the city's streets and the struggles of Jamal's brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) to make honorable choices. He makes up for his bad ones in the end, a la "Gran Torino."

But if Salim can't always be trusted, Jamal can. He personifies integrity. Before he goes on the show, he works serving tea in the customer service department of a cellular phone company. While one of the operators goes on break, he persuades Jamal to answer the phones. The only lie I remember him telling in the movie is when he tells a customer calling from Scotland that he's right down the street from her, near the local loch. Which loch?" she asks. Looking at a travel poster on the wall, he says gamely, "Loch Big Ben."

There's some truth for us in the scene, since we're sometimes miffed when we call American Express or VISA and end up talking to someone in India. Jamal's just a fictional character. But I wouldn't mind calling an 800 number and getting him. We should be so lucky.

The Ostrich Policy Never Materialized

Will Ferrell on SNL, before the 2000 election

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan

Whose Violations Of The Constitution?

Reviewing a posthumous book by Peter Rodman -- Kissinger aide, Nixon Center scholar, and Pentagon official under George W. Bush -- former Sen. Gary Hart takes issue with a surprising turn that Rodman took:

Rodman succumbs to the fantasy that the much-maligned permanent government, frustrated at being systematically marginalized by the Nixon-Kissinger duo, colluded to bring down the Nixon presidency. Other presidents may have been "rogues and miscreants," but Rodman finds "in­triguing" the theory that "the demise of Nixon was due to no less than the revolt of the bureaucracy whose power he had striven so assiduously to break in every sphere."

This kind of nonsense seriously under­mines an otherwise worthwhile and instructive book and, by implication, excuses many troublesome abuses in the current administration. It is one thing to insist on presidential authority in foreign policy. It is quite another to casually accept violations of the Constitution in executing that policy.

Fantasy and nonsense? Pretty harsh language, senator. Here's what we know. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Thomas Moorer, who was worried about Richard Nixon's foreign policy initiatives toward China and the Soviet Union, received and poured over documents stolen from the White House by a Navy yeoman. At the FBI, the powerful federal police agency, several officials and agents, worried because President Nixon had appointed an acting director from outside the agency, responded by illegally giving government secrets to reporters in order to undermine an elected President. Thanks to a suggestion from a book editor to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, these Nixon-hunting FBI officials were gathered together under the name of a pornographic movie. But it was more than lawbreaker W. Mark Felt, which means it was, technically, an FBI conspiracy to damage or destroy the President in order to protect the agency's prerogatives and perhaps keep its own embarrassing secrets under wraps.

Secret, extra-constitutional moves against Mr. Nixon by the military and FBI are certainly not the whole story of Watergate, but they're a part of it that has been neglected so far. Too bad Gary Hart wants to cover it up with name-calling.

"O God Of Our Many Understandings"

Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson's prayer at the beginning of today's inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial:

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace. Amen.

The photo above wasn't easy to find. No sign of Bishop Robinson so far at the New York Times or MSNBC. The first openly gay bishop, praying from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the official commencement of Presidential inaugural festivities, is a big story. But HBO didn't broadcast the prayer or even an excerpt in its concert coverage. Fox News reports that HBO, having bought the rights to the event, won't release the video and audio of +Gene's prayer.

Why are the media virtually muzzling him? (The Rev. Susan Russell recaps some print and on-line coverage here.) Perhaps it's because the only Christians the secular media want to lift up are the ones with whom they disagree or who are easily parodied or discounted. Whatever you think about +Gene or the controversies in the Episcopal Church over gay and lesbian people, a progressive Christian with a gentle spirit and a prayer-full of inoffensive and practical advice for us and the President-elect -- a pastor who could give faith a good name in a faith-skeptical elite culture -- evidently doesn't fit the media profile.

Many criticized Bishop Robinson for choosing not to mention Christ and invoking the "God of many understandings." It's a difficult call for anyone praying in a public setting outside of church who wants to be true to his or her faith tradition without being offensive to those who don't share it. How many thousands of Jews, Muslims, Hindi, and Buddhists were listening from the Washington mall, how many tens of millions watching on television? No one praying in such a setting wants to exclude anyone.

Of course the bishop could have injected a Christian element his prayer by speaking of God's forgiving, redeeming, sanctifying work. That he chose not to was a little disappointing. Yet what will Pastor Rick Warren choose to do on Tuesday? He faces the same challenge Bishop Robinson did: Honoring his beliefs without leaving out any faithful persons. In Southern Baptist style, will Pastor Rick use his national prayer as an altar call to those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and savior, or will he find a way to include a grace note about those who believe but aren't Christians?

As for videos such as this, which accuses +Gene of being satanic for honoring other faiths, I'd say this: If there is a being called Satan (which I definitely don't rule out), and if that being wanted people to think a certain way about Christians in order ultimately to destroy the faith, he would cause such videos to be produced and identified as Christian.