I guess this is what vacation is like now as president. Obama and his friends and family are expected to stay in Kailua for 10 days. He has no public events planned.
NYT: Mr. Obama, joined by his wife and two daughters, did not wave to the cameras as he ran up the steps to a United 767 plane. Several friends from Chicago also are spending the holidays with the Obama family in Hawaii, where they have rented beachfront houses in Kailua, but they are traveling separately.
A handful of reporters, staff and Secret Service agents were aboard the nine-hour flight for Honolulu.
Hawaii is prepping for Obama's visit:
Pearl Harbor Elementary School third-grade teacher Dawn Kadota and student Anthony Toloumu assembled a lei of some 3,300 paper pledges sent to the school by students from 18 schools statewide. The lei will be presented to President-elect Barack Obama.
And so, when many small pieces of inspiration come together at once, it reminds us that all is not lost, and there is hope for a better Hawai'i, America and the world.
That's the encouraging conclusion of an effort started early last month when Dawn Kadota's third-grade students at Pearl Harbor Elementary School were discussing President-elect Barack Obama's Nov. 4 victory speech.
Obama asked everyone to "summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other," Kadota recalled.
And that's when student Anthony Toloumu, 8, asked the four-word question that kick started what would evolve into Hawai'i's Keiki Yes We Can! Project.
"What can we do?" Toloumu wanted to know.
That's when the discussion shifted into overdrive. It was decided that students could pledge to help make Hawai'i, America and the world a better place, each in his or her own small way.
Joshua Garcia, 8, for example, "pledged to not litter or do other bad things that could be harmful to the environment."
Kailua preps
HA: As workers cut grass, brought in poinsettias and cleaned the beach yesterday at the upscale Kailua enclave where Barack Obama will arrive this afternoon to spend the holidays with family, neighbors and those who frequent the stretch of shoreline were abuzz over the prospect of catching a glimpse of the president-elect.
"We're very, very excited. It's amazing," said Richard Myerscough, 43, of Vancouver, British Columbia, who is vacationing with family in a home two doors down from the compound the Obamas are renting. Myerscough, who was enjoying the beach fronting his rental yesterday despite overcast skies and brownish, murky water from recent rain, added that he and his family will give Obama his space.
"We're certainly going to give him his peace and quiet," he said.
Linda Friend, of Melbourne, Australia, who was walking on the beach in front of the Obama vacation home yesterday, said she is also looking forward to seeing the president-elect in person.
"There is definitely a buzz in the air" about his visit, said Friend, who is staying with family in Kailua. "I'm probably going to look for him," she added, with a laugh. Obama and his family are scheduled to arrive in Honolulu today about 3:25 p.m. They will spend their 10-day break in the Islands in a sprawling, beachfront property on the far-end Kailuana Place, which apparently will be cut off to all but local traffic during his visit.
I guess Obama will be making some news tomorrow morning on Meet the Press. He's also announcing Eric Shinseki at a press conference tomorrow, marking Pearl Harbor Day. Shinseki is the first Asian American to be a 4-star General. He served 38 years in the Army. He grew up in Hawaii and his parents were Japanese. His parents were treated by the US government as enemy aliens (see video below).
Shinseki is famous for disagreeing with Bush on the number of troops to send to Iraq, which apparently infuriated Bush and Shinseki retired a correct man.
Reuters: Barack Obama has selected retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, who clashed with the Bush administration over the number of troops needed in Iraq, to be the next secretary of veterans affairs.
Obama's announcement was made in a television interview taped on Saturday that is to be aired in full on Sunday.
Shinseki famously clashed with the administration of President George W. Bush over how many troops would be needed in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion.
Obama was to name Shinseki for the veterans' post at a news conference on Sunday that coincides with the anniversary of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Shinseki disagreed with Bush:
Shinseki is famous for his remarks to the U.S. Senate Armed Services committee before the war in Iraq in which he said "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would probably be required for post-war Iraq. Then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz publicly disagreed with his estimate.[2]
PBS interview on Shinseki's view of the Iraq War. The incompetent Donald Rumsfeld insulted Shinseki:
In the tensions existing between the Pentagon and the military, Shinseki seemed a particular target. Explain.
Shinseki's last, say, year and a half in office was a series of apparently calculated and intentional insults from the civilian leadership, especially Donald Rumsfeld. The episode that got the most public attention was when Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's successor as chief of staff, about a year and a half before his term was up. Usually this announcement is made right at the last minute to avoid turning the incumbent into a lame duck.
Three weeks before the war, Shinseki testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Describe what happened.
Shinseki has been, through his career, a real by-the-book guy. So he would not go out of his way to make public disagreements that were clearly going on inside the Pentagon. But in the hearing where Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan was sort of drawing him out on what he expected the troop levels to be, Shinseki finally said, based on his own past experience, that he thought it would be several hundred thousand troops. This became a real arcane term about, what did several hundred thousand mean? But let's say 300,000 and up. His real level, internally, had been in the 400,000 range.
Several days later, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, appeared before a different committee. [He] went out of his way essentially to slap Shinseki in the face, to say there had been some recent estimates that had been wildly off the mark -- using the term, "wildly off the mark." Then he went on to say that it was almost impossible to imagine that it would be harder, and take more troops, to occupy Iraq than it had taken to conquer them; whereas that point, that it would be harder to occupy than conquer, was in fact the central theme the Army had been advancing before the war.
Was this public rebuke surprising?
The public rebuke of Shinseki by Wolfowitz was probably the most direct public dressing-down of a military officer, a four-star general, by a civilian superior since Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur, 50 years ago. This public confrontation between Wolfowitz and Shinseki must have reflected the really deep disagreements going on within the Pentagon then, and a sign of the civilian leadership's impatience with what they viewed as the lack of cooperation from the uniformed military.
A couple of days later, Paul Wolfowitz was testifying before another congressional committee. He went out of his way, in a gesture that everyone involved recognized as being directly addressed to Shinseki, to say, "Let me address some of the ideas that have been floating around recently." He went on to say there had been suggestions of the levels of troops that might be required that were, quote, "wildly off the mark."
This was not the way that generals and Pentagon superiors talked to each other.
