But… no wink from Obama.

Sorry, I’m just a bad, bitter man.

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, at this point, I couldn’t give Obama a pass on the passingest day of my life if I had an electrified passing machine.

[And yes, I know that lettuce and broccoli prefer cooler weather and can tolerate partial shade, AND that the cherry tree story was apocryphal and supposedly took place in GW's childhood, and nowhere near the White House (which wasn't even finished during GW's term in office) - but this is supposed to be Barack "57 states" Obama speaking, not someone who has an actual working knowledge of American history and popular myth.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_and_crescent

“I’d like to say a word or two honoring the passing of Phyllis Diller, an empowered comedienne, a woman who boldly overcame her image issues. Now, as I was telling Sasha and Malia, if they had visual issues I’d be OK with their doing something about it. I mean I wouldn’t want them saddled with an ugly face.”

“I heard Tony Scott passed away, under mysterious circumstances, near a bridge, which spanned a road. Now he didn’t make those movies all by himself, and his death may not have occurred all by itself. Not to mention that those bridges and roads, like the one near where Tony Scott was found, remind me of the roads and bridges in Selma which Black folk, like me, have had trouble crossing at one time or other.”

“Scott McKenzie passed on the other day, and apparently he was the guy who wrote that “flowers in your hair” song back in the 1960s and he wrote some songs for The Monkees too. Now I never wore flowers in my hair, but I did play with monkeys as a youth in Indonesia, and Scott’s song, I’m told, was big with white kids back then who dropped out, ran away from home and became part of that San Francisco thing. I never got too into that, I was too busy grooving to Al Green, The Jonzun Krew, and Grandmaster Flash, but if you got into that, well Scott was probably your man.”