In late July 2008, presidential-candidate Barack Obama during a tour of the western world displayed the ability to perform/transform a crowd — he easily tossed a three-point basketball shot before a speech in a gym to US troops in Kuwait.
You can see the event here.
A watershed moment for me in regards to Obama — a Stephen Colbert “truthiness” wink of time in which reality sucked up all regard for truth.
An alarm sounded in the vast reaches of my tiny-weeny brain — this guy is way-too cool for any school.

(Illustration found here).

And just a short space later, he proved it by sucking up Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into his administration — Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Summers as director of the White House US National Economic Council.
Both guys pure financial assholes — leading fuckheads involved with the massive Wall Street meltdown.
Most-likely already the way-most disappointing president in US history, Obama is now bordering on asshole himself.

Fast forward to yesterday — Obama held a press conference to bolster US public confidence in the NSA snooping. Probably only a guy living a rock would feel batter.
From the UK’s Guardian:

After weeks in which the Obama and senior intelligence officials have insisted that the privacy of US citizens was sufficiently protected, the president announced a series of measures aimed at containing the controversy prompted by the Guardian’s revelations.
At a White House press conference – his first full question-and-answer session in three months – Obama said that revelations about the National Security Agency’s activities had led Americans to question their trust in government and damaged the country’s reputation abroad.
But he made it clear that the programs themselves would remain in place.
…
Nothing Obama announced is likely to materially alter the NSA’s ongoing mass collection of phone data and surveillance of internet communications in the short term. Neither did the president exhibit much appetite for significantly altering the surveillance capabilities of the US intelligence community, saying at one point the aim might be to “jigger slightly” the balance between the intelligence and “the incremental encroachment on privacy”.
But the announcement, made shortly before the president departed for his vacation, represents a significant climbdown for the White House, which for two months has maintained that it has struck the right balance between privacy and security.

All bullshit, of course. Also yesterday and also from the Guardian:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.
The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information.
Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans.”

Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel has a good post up (also from yesterday) on Obama’s bullshit with his concluding point:

Ultimately, details of these violations will come out, and are on their way out in some form already.
If this press conference was designed solely to make us feel better, wouldn’t Obama have been better advised to come clean about these violations than to pretend they don’t exist?

Change is really the same old shit.