Thursday, April 30, 2009

Obama, Lost, Unusuals

Last night, I watched three things: President Obama's press conference, the one-hundredth episode of Lost, and the Unusuals. Here are my reactions:

1. I liked some of the things that President Obama was saying. He said that signing the Freedom of Choice Act is not a priority for him, since he wants to focus more on reducing the number of abortions. Rather than encouraging anger over this issue, his goal is to work on what both sides can agree upon, and he said that he's working with groups from both the pro-choice camp and also the pro-life camp. Obama also stated that pro-choicers are wrong to treat abortion solely as an issue of "women's freedom." He's not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, but at least this is something!

Obama also stated that he's willing to find common ground with Republicans on health care. For example, he said that he agrees with Senator Mitch McConnell that the cost of medical malpractice insurance should be reduced. Is this tort reform? If so, then Obama is courageously bucking his own party!

2. Lost was pretty gut-wrenching. For one, young Eloise Hawking in 1975 shoots her son from the future, Daniel Faraday. Also, Sawyer and Juliet were found out by the Dharma Initiative.

I wonder why Eloise couldn't have simply told Daniel not to point a gun at Richard Alpert in 1975, since that's what incited young Eloise to shoot Daniel. Also, while the theme of Lost for quite some time has been that you can't change the past ("What happened, happened"), it turns out that Faraday now says that you can. He was focusing on the constants and not the variables! Now, Faraday wants to prevent the electromagnetic overload (or something like that) that brought the Oceanic plane to the island in the first place. So can Hurley now rewrite Empire Strikes Back?

3. I liked the Unusuals because it looked at the Christian cop, who was once a criminal. He was trying to get a new start on life, yet he was willing to go to jail for what he did. Fortunately, a cop who found out about his criminal past is allowing him to make his new beginning, even though he will still be watching him.