Imrpoving his image?

So I was talking to my mom about politics today - very odd topic for us. She's a staunch Republican and I have no clue what the hell I am...moderate I guess. I'm still formulating my opinions. But anyway, she said something that was pretty interesting...she said: "Voting is a popularity contest these days, especially for young people. It's about the name you know, and how you perceive that name."

So I took a look at this. Maybe that falls into partly why the youth tend to vote Democratic...I mean, Sen. Barack Obama is all about connecting with the people. Sen. Hillary Clinton is an open book - there are no surprises. America has known the ins and outs of her family and history for years.

So what about Sen. John McCain? Doesn't really fit in, huh? He always seemed to me like a robot - you know, one of those military men who got where he is through "loving their country" and "patriotism."
But where was his heart? Where was his sense of family values...or any of his past NOT related to the military?

So I think he got the memo. I think that's what this whole Biography Tour is all about. Stopping at various spots throughout the United States that have mattered most to him throughout his life is a heartfelt way to show America the personal, not political John McCain. And to be honest, it's a damn good idea. Listening to him speak about gaining respect from his father and the importance of his family life growing up, to his days in high school on the junior varsity football team, I finally felt like McCain became a person. Got rid of his robot thing he had going on.

That's what analysts say..that he's using this time to "fix" his image with America before the Democrats can define it for him. And I say, what's wrong with that?

I mean, if my mom's theory holds true at all, the better McCain makes his image, the more votes he's going to get...especially from American youth.


Sen. John McCain speaks in Meridian, MS on Monday - his first stop on his biography tour.


Sen. John McCain speaks in Alexandria, VA on Tuesday - his second stop on his biography tour and the site of his high school.

He went to Annapolis, MD on Wednesday, where he attended the Naval Academy and Pensacola, FL Today. To get more information on those trips and his full biography, click here.

Not so lolcat

Not to be glib and hold forth on the obvious and feed blogger stereotypes but, c’mon, last month marked five years of Operation Quagmire, which means there are people whose entire college or high school years have been marked by this war, which has meant death, disfigurement, lies, the politics of fear, and our bungling about as a nation inciting hatred abroad and spending deficit money on Halliburton. Had enough yet? Bush will not accomplish any mission in Iraq. He has failed and says it’s up to the next president to finish “protecting our way of life,” or whatever is recognizably left of what we once used to proudly refer to with those words. Helluva job Bushie!

Some fifth-anniversary stats:

90,000 Iraqi civilians dead.
4,000 American soldiers dead.
158,000 American troops still occupying Iraq.
$3 trillion wasted.

"Americans are not casualty averse. They are failure averse," Carafano said. "They were unhappy with the lack of progress and spiraling violence. That is why you have seen public support rebound after it was clear the surge was working."

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars. In Vietnam, the U.S. lost on average about 4,850 troops a year from 1963-75. In the Korean war, from 1950-53, the U.S. lost about 12,300 soldiers a year.

A 2006 Duke University study found that it was 100 times as likely that an American knew one of the 292,000 Americans killed in World War II than someone today would know a service member slain in Iraq.

Yeah EDUCATION!!!!
No end in sight.

The $3 trillion we’ve spent on Iraq could have, for example, brought an end to crushing student debt. Projected spending on the war for next year alone would provide scholarships for 21,552,257 college students but we’d have to get Bush and the scared-to-death Congress people, Bush’s vassals, to want to fund education not occupation.

Media coverage on war dwindles

About two a day for five years.

Two mothers, two fathers, two siblings two friends; two soldiers whose trips home from Iraq are marked only by a plastic body bag adorned with a folded American flag as a memory of their service.

Each day since the beginning of the war in Iraq, an average of two families have gotten bad news about someone they care about at war.

That’s the news. The bad news.



So even if you open the paper and see no coverage of the ongoing war, because nothing “newsworthy” happened the previous day, know that at least two people are getting news today. And tomorrow. And the next day.

In five years, more than 4000 families have gotten news, of a very personal sort. In that time, beginning with largely sensationalized news coverage of the first bombings in Baghdad, little by little, the mainstream media’s coverage of the war has dwindled.

We’ve gone from 24-hour, first person coverage to only occasional stories about death toll milestones or major events. It’s clear Americans, and their news organizations, have grown accustomed to the war.



Frankly, there just isn’t much conventional news coverage about the war anymore. There are features, and occasional reports. But where Iraq used to dominate front pages when it was new and fresh, our top papers have to resorted coverage consisting of a couple inches buried on an inside page.

Wars desensitize people over time. While still troubling, the gruesome, bloody photos of the carnage overseas that used to invoke tears or even nausea, shown early on by the media, have become so commonplace, that many people say the images and their stories have lost their newsworthy element.

Maybe it’s not that what’s going on is any less newsworthy, but that we have just come to accept that it’s happening, and feel we no longer need the constant daily reminder. It all comes down to the point of reporting news and reading news.

The question then, from a media standpoint, is whether or not the war, droning on each day in an overwhelmingly unchanging fashion, is in and of itself, enough to be called newsworthy. Or, now-a-days, does something more need to happen to warrant valuable page space.

After all, Interstate-10 is packed with cars every morning, but “Freeways clogged again,” doesn’t make for a very interesting front-page headline, now does it?

The answer, it seems, based on the recent performance of the news media, is that Americans know the war is going on now, so news occurs only when something changes. We’ve come to accept the war as the status quo; it’s no longer news.

We accept that two people die a day, so now it’s only news when an explosion kills fifty of more. But what of the two? Why are there deaths not newsworthy?



It’s because we accept that two more will die tomorrow. Don’t forget, the unavoidable side effect of acceptance is complacency. And with complacency comes inaction.

We say “war” but what we mean is “two bodies a day.” When we stop hearing about two bodies a day, we think of war like we think of traffic on Interstate-10, a necessary evil.

That’s not a place this country wants to be.

War, unlike traffic, is not supposed to happen each day. Therefore, for everyday there is a war, news is being made. Let’s not, as a culture or as a news media, deny that two deaths a day is not normal, but is most definitely newsworthy, and should remain in the front of our minds for each day it occurs.

The nature of the news we read about in magazines and newspapers, see on CNN and hear about during presidential debates has changed greatly since 2003.



But tomorrow, two more families will get news in the same way two families did on the first day of the war. To them, tomorrow’s news is by far, the biggest of the entire war, if not their entire lives.

And worst of all, it may not even hit

Obama, Dave Matthews come to Indiana University

Aiming to get students to register to vote, Barack Obama is sponsoring a free Dave Matthews Concert at Indiana University.


According to students there, the unplanned concert comes as a huge surprise and is another step in Obama's campaign to target students.
"He may be trying to buy our votes, but for Dave, I don't really care," said an IU student.
As can be seen below, Obama has sponsored concerts before.

Jimmy Peanut and Hanoi Jane join Obama

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama received two more high-profile endorsements this week. One, at least at this point, is technically unofficial and mostly irrelevant anyway. The second however could come to bite Obama in the butt. (If you're in to that sort of thing.)

Let's start with the non-controversial one.

Former peanut farmer and president of the United States Jimmy Carter made an announcement earlier in the week that went as far as words can go to throw support at a candidate without actually endorsing them. In an interview with the Nigerian newspaper This Day he said on behalf of himself and his wife:

"We are very interested in the primaries. Don’t forget that Obama won in my state of Georgia. My town, which is home to 625 people, is for Obama, my children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama. As a superdelegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for but I leave you to make that guess."

Though off the record, I have it from a reliable authority that Carter's mailman is pro-Obama, too. And his barber, his dogsitter, his acupuncturist, his hangnail, and his two cats, Goobers and Jelly.

And get this. According to Ben Smith at Politico, Carter was in Nigeria apparently for a Guinea Worm Eradication Awards dinner.

Dinner?! Seriously, what kind of food do you serve at a banquet honoring the eradication of a parasite that lives in your body for a year and can grow up to three feet in length before exiting painfully through a blister or open wound? Spaghetti Marinara? Pigs in a blanket?

Now that I got you good and hungry, let's move on to the other endorsement, the one that might fester in Obama's craw like a Guinea Worm in an enflamed digestive tract. (Okay I'll stop.)

I'm talking of course about good ol' girl Jane Fonda, who gave her unofficial endorsement of Obama outside a Los Angeles restaurant. As reported by the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Malcolm:

"Fonda was eating out last night and exited the restaurant, ignoring as celebrities often do the assembled press contingent.

But a video camera was rolling as she approached the street and someone, perhaps just trying to get her to turn around for a picture, shouted out at her back, “Who are you going to vote for?”

There was a moment of silence. Then, the actress did turn around toward the cameras, paused and with a smile said simply, “Obama!” Then she got into a car and drove away."

Here's some video.

This is bad news for Barack. If some of you need a reminder why—or were not born before 1972—here's a brief history on Hanoi Jane.

Jane Fonda has been pissing people off her entire life, WAY before she used the "C"word on the Today show. She's so good at it that she can piss off one group of people, and then a couple decades later, turn around and piss off the people who were originally supporting her pissing off the first group.

In the late 60's, the Workout Queen endorsed the Alcatraz Island occupation, which was supposed to raise awareness for Native American rights. Then she married Ted Turner. But that wasn't what pissed people off. It was when she accompanied her husband to a Atlanta Braves baseball game—a team that Turner still owns and which plays its home games in a stadium in his name—where she was seen doing the "Tomahawk Chop," an ignorant little gesture that would seem at least a little bit distasteful for a supporter of Native American civil rights.

Anyway, a few years after her Alcatraz moment, Jolly Jane somehow found her way to Hanoi, Vietnam where she was seen talking to a group of Viet Cong and resting her buns on an NVA anti-aircraft gun—a gun that shoots down the planes of her home country. The year was 1972, right smack dab in the middle of a violent, unpopular war; a war in which a soldier by the name of John McCain was being brutally tortured not too far away.

You see what I'm getting at? 

Somewhere, Hillary Clinton is clapping her hands in delight while sweating her way through Jane Fonda's Light Aerobics and Stress Reduction video.

It's probably a smart move for Mrs. Clinton to be working out. 

I heard that Ivan Drago is itching for a rematch.

And to learn more about Guinea Worm and how to eradicate it, please visit the Carter Center website.