Category — Personal

One day, in “Somedayland”, the media will elevate the discourse of the candidates.

One day, the candidates will elevate the discourse of the electoral population.

One day, we’ll move beyond whisper campaigns that play off fears and destroying national hope.

One day, politicians will hold themselves to their public promises, and to the ethical standards of most normal people.

One day, my turds could be used as renewable fuel in the Delorians we’ll all fly.

Until then, we’ll have to deal with this bullshit that political candidates and the media throw at each other, for their personal amusement.

(via the Slog: Why is Clinton Still Running? “White Americans.”)

I am so confused. People just went crazy, even monks start kicking in glass, there’s that constant eerie howling noise, things just randomly getting set on fire. It’s almost as bad as the Post-OSU/Michigan riots in Columbus six years ago.

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• Advice for Students: Taking Notes that Work - Lifehack.org
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Originally written: February 24, 2008. Revised: March 12, 2008.

I’m confused, aren’t you?

It seems as though by 2008, we as a human race should have figured things out. Yet, it seems as though what was expected of this era, isn’t so.

Instead, humans have become insane. Insanity, being that we do the same tired things over and over again, only to expect different results.

We seem to have lost sight of what makes us who we are; stopped attributing value to those things that are most tangible to us. Instead, as humans, we seem to have given our identity to someone else to assess; making something that was once tangible to us, intangible to someone who has no proximity.

We as Bozemanites, Americans, and humans are experiencing something of a cultural identity crisis.

As a possible prescription for this ailment, I offer my Manifesto Confundum (in five points).
[Read more →]

“A long Democratic battle doesn’t automatically help the Republicans. In fact, it hurts the Republicans in certain ways. Mr McCain becomes less interesting to the media. Stories about him move off page one and grow smaller. TV coverage becomes spotty and short. There are not yet big and deep and unbridgeable differences between the two Democrats and there is plenty of time to heal most wounds (except, perhaps among the young if Mrs Clinton were to win). Continuing to build a profile and lay the predicate for the short fall campaign against either Democrat becomes the challenge for Mr McCain while the Democrats battle it out.” — Karl Rove

Sens. Hillary “Out of the Republican Playbook” Clinton and Barack “I’m too good to be true” Obama know this. Which is why most of the debates focus on the minutia (e.g. campaign strategies, traditional experience vs. non-traditional experience), and playing up how the Republicans have damaged this nation.

The fact that the DNC finally has a solid and agreed upon platform before going into primaries says a lot. And you see it in the coverage. Television news networks who play this as a “America’s Next Top President” like the gridlock, because it’s tension, drama, and all the glitzy things that reality tv has had that they never could.

I saw this on Tuesday at our watch party. Both on MSNBC and CNN the majority of the clips were not Huckabee/McCain, but rather Clinton/Obama. The networks aren’t going to leave something that has mobilized so many people to vote; it’s already a story they don’t have to sell.

What this means in terms of the “storyline” of the nomination bids, is McCain will get more desperate to get news attention. However, Rove is right when he says that the young Dems will feel extremely wounded if Clinton secures the nomination. On a apathetic, semi-rural college campus of 12,000+, I’ve heard more people interested in elections for once. I’ve also heard from a lot of people who felt betrayed by the 2004 election, that if Clinton secures the DNC bid, they’re jumping ship to McCain. I can’t say I’m far behind.

Karl Rove is master election puppeteer, how else could he get an idiot with a shitty resumé elected? He indeed knows what he’s talking about, and is more right than we’d like to admit.

• Alive! - WSJ.com (via BBC’s Justin Webb which was found via the Slog)

Holly Zadra writes about the LGBT community in February’s Tributary:

“If we don’t pay attention and focus on the right discussions and the right issues, America will create an expiration date for itself,” [Hemsath] continued. “This democratic experiment will come to an unfortunate conclusion. And the hypothesis for liberty and peace and freedom will be nullified because we failed to set that example for ourselves, and we failed to set that example for the rest of the world… The time to change the tone has come. As a society and as a culture, we’ve come to an impasse. We’re 21st Century. We’ve gotten past the Industrial Revolution, Women’s Votes, Civil Rights. Now we’re again trying to find out what it means to be a nation.”
[Read more →]

Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram, finally jumps on to the Obama branding bandwagon.

“Obama is marketing like Apple, Nike or Starbucks. He’s selling an experience. It’s all done with such skill and finesse that as a professional, I am in absolute awe,” says Bierut.

• Obama Wins | New at Pentagram | Pentagram

Armin Vit, a former Pentagram partner, and a bit more adept at the blogging when the subject matter is still timely and people still give a shit about what you have to say, covered this topic in response to a New York Times editorial on the subject.

For each segment of people, the logo changes accordingly, tip-toeing a fine line between cliché and clever, and never crossing to the former’s dark side. The iterations are quickly identifiable and feel genuinely concerned with connecting to the people they are talking to, without pandering. The executions are rather flawless and work perfectly on screen with the detailed gradients and subtle background illustrations. Even the typography is lovingly handled…

• Speak Up › The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo

American national political campaigns prey on the ignorance of the masses to achieve their objectives. In such a geographically diverse, and spread-out nation, cultural experiences are more variant than those of our European counterparts.

Thus when a photo of a trip to Kenya that Obama kept from the public surfaces, one has to wonder how the generally ignorant American would react to such a photo.

Hillary’s campaign had this to say about the photo:

If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.

Eli Sanders of Seattle’s The Stranger weekly had some extremely insightful commentary on this “blunder.”

First he says about Clinton’s response:

“Her release wasn’t helped by the fact that Obama was in Kenya, not Somalia, at the time the turban photo was taken.”

Then Sanders reprints an excerpt from “Turbans: Don’t Link Them to Terrorism” an op-ed he wrote for the Seattle Times immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers:

In SeaTac last week, a man was charged with attacking a turban-wearing Sikh cab driver, calling him a “butcher terrorist.” In Seattle, a man was arrested after he allegedly tried to choke a Sikh, telling him, “You have no right to attack our country.” In Arizona, a man shot a Sikh gas-station owner to death, later explaining to authorities: “I’m a patriot.”

Hundreds of other assaults on Sikhs have been reported across the country, a trend that strikes many as bizarrely misguided.

Yes, Sikhs wear turbans. But they have no connection to the Islamic extremists now wanted by the U.S….

Those seem to be distinctions many are unaware of. John Cooksey, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, recently offered this suggestion for weeding out terrorists: “If I see someone come in and he’s got a diaper on his head and a fanbelt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over and checked.”

Read the rest of Eli Sanders’ post:

• Obama’s Turban | Slog | The Stranger | Seattle’s Only Newspaper