These Presidential Debates (Again)

Final debate a lagging indicator of reality

By Tom Curry

National affairs writer

msnbc.com

updated 9:06 p.m. PT, Wed., Oct. 15, 2008          This Blog  is supposed to be about all of the presidential debates in their historical context, so I will rant about it for at least solid 5 minutes of typing, and still fit in as much of the current situation of the United States of America that I know of.          This story that I have linked to this blog is about the most recent debate, and about some of the things that McCain presented against Obama, and also about the various things such as the financial crisis.  This brings me to the historical context, or whats happening in our country now. Our country is in a state of turmoil.  Our economy is in the dumps, yet we are putting hundreds of billions of dollars into the market.  We do not have the money for oil, yet our country consumes 25% of the global yearly oil production.  Somewhere around 45% of our children are only accepted into college, leaving the rest with nowhere to go but the military.  Our military is spread across the Middle East, "protecting" everyone from terrorism.  We are under constant threat of terrorism, so our privacy is broken by the government in order to "catch" terrorists planning another attack.  We do not trust the government because of this, which is why both candidates are running for "change".  They plan on "changing" where our fuel sources come from, somewhat "fixing" our economy.  They plan on "changing" our economic policies, which is supposed to help people pay for college and schooling.  They plan on "changing" schooling policies, getting more kids into college with the money they put back into our pockets, in turn keeping us out of the military.  They plan on taking the United States out of the war in the Middle East as well as possible, letting people live their lives more towards their own standards, and not the governments.  Which still leaves the terrorists to deal with, but there will be terrorists untill the end of time, so are we really ever going to stop them?          All of this is a lot to fix, and both candidates have been fighting with whatever they have during the debates in order to win over the public.  My only message to the candidate voted into office is, Good Night and Good Luck.

The Internet!

The website I shall quote here is youtube, because it is the best example for the topic that I am writing on tonight.  

The McCain-Palin Mob

By Blogger Interrupted

          This series of videos displays peoples mere ignorance of the democratic running presidential candidate, but what it also shows, is the freedom that the internet has given to people to sway political opinion.  The internet has changed democracy in so many levels.  One of the simplest things it has changed is that now everyone can go to the presidential candidates websites (here and here).  Another thing that has changed, is the fact that people can put their own opinions on the internet, and no one can do anything about it.  This video for instance, is about a guy who went to two of the McCain, Palin Rallys, and asked everyone he could find if they thought that Obama was a terrorist.  He can publicise that because we have sites like Youtube now.  The internet has brought upon us an era of free speech and free information, and it affects todays democratic community by letting the populous know of the opinions of any person who wants to put out those opinions.

Reflection of the Newspaper Project

Here is a link to a revised copy of the newspaper.

Reflection:

          Our newspaper project was about the Lincoln Douglas debates. We were supposed to make a newspaper front page telling the story about a specific debate that we were pre-assigned. The debate that we were assigned was the 4^th debate, the one that took place in Charleston.

          My role in this project was, in a sense, the editor in chief. What I did was organize who was doing what story, and then put it in to the paper. Along the way I helped out some people on what to research and helped edit everyones paper.

          The good things that I feel like I accomplished with this project was that I kept everyone on task and punctual with their articles, so we had plenty of relaxing time in the end where some others did not have it. Another good thing was that I was one of the two groups of people that put a newspaper esque background texture, which really pulled the paper together and made it stand out from all of the other papers. The texture also did not hinder the reader in their reading capabilities because of flaws in the texture, like the other paper with a background texture did. I also organized the paper such as a real legitimate paper quite nicely and I feel like it really shows off my talents, as well as flaws, which I will explain in the next paragraph.

          The problems that I had with this project were all based off of me not looking at the final product well enough after “finishing” it. The biggest flaw that I still had in it was a border around a text box that ended up cutting through a pull quote, which is a huge mistake on my part and could have been easily solved if I had just looked over the project one last time. Another thing which isn't much of a flaw is that there was a caption under the first image on the top half of the front page, and I feel like it is a bit too pushed away from the image, and should be pushed more toward the image to more legitimize the paper, as far as looks go.

          I did more than just edit and put the paper together. Another thing that I did for this paper was search for images of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass, and help make headlines for the stories with another member of the group. A lot of the work was really laid back, with resources such as pod casts not needing a lot of attention to understand, it was really easy to do research on the subject. Picture searching was also simple, but it was sometimes a little difficult to find an image someone else did not already find yet. Since there aren't very many pictures of Stephen Douglass on the internet, I ended up as one of the 3 or 4 groups that had the same picture of him, but I did end up with a completely original picture of Abraham Lincoln in my article.

The Candidates Still Acting Like Children

Health Care Spin

– by Lori Robertson

October 14th, 2008

          Really guys? Are we still doing this? On a post on Fact Check today, Lori Robertson claimed that the presidential candidates have misstated the others health care plans, making each of their followers stray even further from knowing the truth, and more towards ignorance.

          The article states, "McCain proposes a market-based system that relies on tax incentives, which one Obama ad falsely characterizes as the "largest middle-class tax increase in history." Obama proposes new subsidies to expand private insurance coverage and some expansion of government insurance, which McCain falsely claims "will rob 50 million employees of their health coverage."

          Each of these acts is a disgrace to each of the presidential nominees, because they are, yet again, robbing the people of their knowlege of the truth.  Every democrat that sees the Obama ad criticising McCain of something he wasn't going to do is going to think that McCain is worse of a person than they already thought he was, and vice versa, but for all of those undecided people out there, they don't know which candidate they are going to vote for yet, and if they get fed false information, they will for sure be thrown in with the crowd voting for the wrong reason.  I almost promise you, that if they keep doign this whole blame game thign throughout the end of the election, which is likely, then I will be very angry.  Already I am torn between each of the two candidates, but that is because they each have different views that I agree and disagree on, and whith all of these false claims I will never be able to make a firm choice.

Little bit of political comedy here:

The Presidential Race of Senatorial Significance

          In class, we have been talking a lot about the senatorial race between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.  I was assigned in the past week to help fellow students write the frontpage of a (unofficial) newspaper about the 4th debate that Lincoln and Douglas had.  This debate took place in Charleston Illinois, and the area was really "negrophobic," or didn't like black people, which really matters with this debate because Lincoln was trying to bring about the end to slavery, even though he claimed the entire process to take over 100 years, and Douglas, who was really for slavery and keeping the United States segregated, claimed to be for a popular vote method, where Illinois would decide with the people whether they want to keep slavery or not.

          Lincoln, who claimed to "...say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife." This really is almost a turning point for a lot of people in America, because a lot of those "Average Joes" out there think that Lincoln was a revolutionary who was completely for equality and was completely against slavery in its entirety.  He was still a revolutionary in his own right just by saying slavery is wrong, but he still was not as high and mighty as everybody nowadays thinks he was.

          This blog is 

also supposed to be about this years presidential elections, and as I am a little unaware as to how to transition between the two subjects, so this will be my transition.  

          

       This presidential race has turned out to be one of the most important 

races in years.  With the war on terror and the financial crisis going on, it gets even bigger with the first African American running for president.  My views at tthe moment on this presidential race are really open minded.  I do not have a preference, being independant party, and judge candidates based solely off of what their views are.

        I think that John McCain does have more experience than Obama in a lot of catagories, such as war and how politics should be ran, and how they have been running.  But I also think that Obama knows a little more about the lower things in political eyes such as tax cuts for the less wealthy and better education.  Each presidential candidate has good views on some things, but what they lack good views in, the other makes up for it.  This is the biggest reason why I am undecided on this specific presidential election at the moment, and that is what I think of this election.

Transcript for Lincoln Douglas Debate

The Economic Crisis

This coming election day will be a great turning point for at least one group of people, this blog post will be talking about one of those groups.  The group that I am talking about is the middle to lower class. According to American Fact Finder,  about 60% of all households in America earn between $10,000 to $75,000 a year on average.  According to The Washington Post, Obama plans to raise the bracket for high end earners in the United States, making anyone earning $250,000 a year "would pay 6.2 percent in payroll taxes on their entire income."  

What does this mean to the middle and lower class?  What this means is someone else will be paying more so they won't have to.  It is an easy way to level out the ratio between poor and rich in this country, and we need that in a time like this.

OBAMA TAX PLAN RAISES BIG BRACKET

By CHARLES HURT Bureau Chief

June 14, 2008

Schools Now Becoming More Segregated Than Ever

          Whether you know it or not, we are all still segregated in this country. If you can remember, the civil rights movement was fraught with segregation in almost every industry out there, including education. Within the next few paragraphs I will take you, the reader, on a journey through segregation in schools during the civil war, and segregation in schools now.

What Happened Then

          One of the biggest cases back in the civil rights movement was of brown vs education, which changed the educational community forever. It all started because the northern supreme court came up with the though of actually making the schools interracial. This is a quote from the first few lines of the court papers “Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.”(1)

          One revolutionary person that you may know of is a girl

 called Ruby Bridges. She was the first black girl to attend an all white school. The school she attended was William Frantz Elementary, New Orleans, and the white population had a huge reaction to this. “Sure enough, people shouted and shook their fist when we got out of the car, but to me it wasn't any noisier than Mardi Gras, I held my mother's hand and followed the marshals through the crowd, up the steps into the school.” says Bridges, in March of the year 2000. She then goes on to talk about what happened that day and the next day.

What's Happening Now

          After all of that, we still have problems with racial segregation in schools today, and you could say a big part of it is still based off of racial stereotypes retaining from long ago. According to a recent story from the American Broadcasting Corporation, “Kathleen Brose's 14-year-old daughter was turned away from her neighborhood school in Seattle after the district effectively issued a stark decree: no more white students allowed.”(3) According to the census taken on factfinder.cencus.gov, the white population takes up about 73.9% of the population of the United States of America(4) (with a 0.1 margin of error) and according to a classmate, Jonathan Aguila's blog, "...If you look at the data you would notice that this is mainly because it is based on where you live ... from what I see it is fixed on what is the dominant ethnic group in the state or city."(5). This information is really conflicting with the methods that schools have been undertaking recently. What I am talking about is the fact that schools and colleges alike are undertaking the “Equal Opportunity” method, which is to take in minority students as the majority of their student population.

          In conclusion, I believe that this system is futile, because of two reasons. The first is the fact that they are leaving out the majority of the population, and second, it is becoming segregated yet again, which is against the 14^th amendment and against what America now stands for.

For more information on Ruby Bridges, find the Ruby Bridges: Through My Eyes documentary at your nearest movie store, or at RubyBridges.com

Citations:

• United States Supreme Court. "FindLaw | Cases and Codes."FindLaw: Cases and Codes. 17 May 1954. 2 Oct. 2008 <http://laws.findlaw.com/us/347/483.html>.
  
• Bridges, Ruby. "Ruby Bridges."Ruby Bridges . 30 Sep. 2008 .
  
• (3) "ABC News: Debate Over Segregation in Schools to Hit Supreme Court Today." ABC News: Online news, breaking news, feature stories and more. 1 Oct. 2008 .
• (4) U.S. Cencus Bureau, ed. "United States by State -M0201, Percent of the Total Population Who Are White Alone: 2006." U.S. Cencus Bureau. 2 Oct. 2008 .
  
• (5)Aguila, Jonathan. "jonathan."jonathan. 2 Oct. 2008. 2 Oct. 2008 .