No shoes thrown at Obama (Salon barf alert)

President Obama was more than halfway through his speech at Cairo University Thursday morning when, suddenly, he was interrupted by a shout from the audience. Security in the Egyptian capital was tight, and security around the hall where he spoke was even tighter, but it seemed -- for a moment -- like somehow something had gone wrong.

Until, that is, Obama acknowledged the interruption with a smile and a "thank you." What the person in the audience had yelled, it turned out, was a hearty, "Barack Obama, we love you!" -- in English. The adoration, the campus setting: it was like Obama was back on the campaign trail before an adoring college crowd in Iowa or New Hampshire, circa October 2007. The difference between this president's welcome from the Muslim world and the last president's farewell to it couldn't have played out much more to the White House's liking if aides had planned it.

That brief interruption was about the only thing about the speech that advisors didn't script carefully ahead of time. The administration encouraged people around the world to sign up for text messages of the address, available in English, Arabic, Urdu or Persian. U.S. cellphones couldn't subscribe, due to a legal prohibition against spending State Department public diplomacy funds on projects that reach a domestic audience, but the White House sent English tidbits out on Twitter and Facebook (where more than 2,000 people gave a virtual thumbs-up to the speech's closing lines), and posted a slick video on its official Web site about American Muslims serving in government...

Barack took Brian Williams out for a burger date. I wonder if they shared an ice cream soda.

Easily Amazed? Brian Williams Finds It 'Unbelievable' to Watch Obama Eat M&Ms Inside the White House (News Busters June 2, 2009 By Tim Graham)

NBC anchor Brian Williams has never been shy about how amazed he is by Barack Obama. But it is really "unbelievable" to be in the White House hallway while Obama walks by munching on M&Ms? In a brief Monday Washington Post article by Howard Kurtz promoting NBC’s latest Inside the White House special with the candy-munching president, Williams couldn’t keep the gush in check:
"There's stuff we've never seen of how the White House operates," he says. "We were pretty stunned at how much we were able to record and how natural events seemed to be."
He recalls "walking through the West Wing and Secretary Clinton drops by to see the president. To be in the hallway when the president walks by with a handful of M&Ms, popping them in his mouth as he goes to visit his chief of staff -- it was unbelievable. I don't think the expression 'took up residence' is hyperbolic." He also spent time with Michelle Obama and went out for burgers with the president.

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