Concerned Educators Speak Out Regarding McCain/Palin Campaign Stoking "The Fires of Racism"

Very much worth the read: Concerned Educators Speak Out Regarding McCain/Palin Campaign Stoking "The Fires of Racism"

Snippets:

This statement is signed by research faculty of communication programs from across the nation. We speak as concerned educators and scholars of communication but do not claim to speak for our home institutions.

We wish to express our great concern over unethical communication behavior that threatens to dominate the closing days of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
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It would be misleading, however, to imply that since “both sides do it” there is no qualitative difference worth noting. In recent weeks, the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has engaged in such incendiary mendacity that we must speak out. The purposeful dissemination of messages that a communicator knows to be false and inflammatory is unethical. It is that simple.

Making decisions in a democracy requires an informed electorate. The health of our democracy and our ability to make a good decision about who should lead our nation require the very best in communication practices, not the worst.
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We see an effort to color code the election as between an urban, African-American Obama falsely linked to terms like “terrorist,” “unpatriotic,” and “welfare” versus small town, white, “patriotic” Americans like the mythical Joe the Plumber. “Intended” or not, the message is getting through, as reports have emerged of ugly scenes at some Republican rallies and racists hanging Obama in effigy in Oregon and Ohio. In an echo of McCarthyism, Representative Michelle Bachmann has called for investigations into un-American members of Congress, pointing to Senator Obama as the prime suspect. Speaking to warm up the crowd before a McCain rally, Representative Robin Hayes continued the theme: “Folks, there’s a real America, and liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God.” The official website of the Sacramento County Republican Party compared Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and urged people to “Waterboard Barack Obama.” The October newsletter of the Chaffey Community Republican Women in California depicts Obama on a food stamp surrounded by a watermelon, ribs, and a bucket of fried chicken. The McCain/Palin campaign has not repudiated such actions taken on its behalf, nor has it done enough to respond to reprehensible behavior at rallies.4

The McCain/Palin campaign and its surrogates, of course, will deny explicit racism. But their purposeful repetition of inflammatory false statements is unethical and stokes the fires of racism.

The fact that even now, in 2008, we still have people living in this country who believe that the color of one's skin ought to be a determining factor in evaluating a person's intelligence, integrity, character and ability to hold public office makes me IRATE. I am intolerant of their intolerance!

To Do List.

Clean the bathroom
Organize Anja's room and get rid of a lot of junk
Organize filing system in our bedroom
Replace light fixture in laundry room
Clean basement, ugh
Take out garbage and recycling and compost
Pay bills
Vaccuum
Drop clothes off at Berk's
Enter rest of quotes into quote database
Go pants shopping
Get Anja more socks
Buy stuff to make patio
Buy drinks for people who are making patio
Figure out about transferring money from Euro bank account
Get/make Anja's Halloween costume
Order heating oil
Order balance bars and contact lenses and contact solution
Order fair-trade coffee pods


Reading List
1 issue National Geographic
3 issues Rolling Stone
2 books on combat-related PTSD
anxiety workbook
Bartimäus
The Evolution of Language
Little Brother
Lapham's Quarterly

I need more hours in the day... failing that, more days in the week. Failing that... I guess I just keep slipping further behind. /sigh

Sarah Palin makes me angry.

I know, it's been weeks again since I've written anything. I'm-a-gonna work on it, promise. :)

Anyway, I just came across this article. It's a couple weeks old, but it sums up so much of what's wrong with Palin as a serious political candidate, and how insulting her selection is, to women in this country. Intelligent women, who know they could do a better job than she is doing.

From the article:

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

........

In pronouncing upon a debate, they don't try and determine whether a candidate's responses correspond to existing reality, or whether he or she is capable of talking about subjects such as the deregulation of the financial markets or the devolution of the war in Afghanistan. The criteria are far more vaporous. In this case, it was whether Palin could avoid utterly humiliating herself for 90 minutes, and whether urbane commentators would believe that she had connected to a public that they see as ignorant and sentimental. For the Alaska governor, mission accomplished.

........

It's worth reading the transcript of the encounter, where it becomes clearer how bizarre much of what she said was. Here, for example, is how she responded to Biden's comments about how the middle class has been short-changed during the Bush administration, and how McCain will continue Bush's policies:

Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? ... My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

I mean, seriously. What the fuck. She makes no sense, she tries to rely on charm, and she manages to make an awful lot of people feel both angry and insulted, all at the same time. Ugh.

McCain and Obama on the economy

3 minutes - the difference is striking. Who's working on a plan, and who's just campaigning?




McCain thinks *Obama* needs to admit to his part in these problems?? McCain, who's been in cahoots with the BFEE and the Keating Five, etc., etc., ad nauseum!? *bangs head on wall*

Homeland Security testing *pre*-crime detector?

Link to story on Slashdot

This is so ridiculous. The false positive rate is going to be crazy, there are so many issues with it, in concept... I mean, is it worth screening people for suspicious activity? Sure, they have people do that at airports in more violence-prone parts of the world, and it works. But to have a machine that's supposed to be able to, and isn't somehow going to pick up all the people who are nervous about flying, worried about their kids/spouse/dogs/etc., who are having an affair on their business trip, who have GAD, etc., etc., etc. And as someone stated in the /. comments, if you have a 99.9% false positive rate, you're just going to start waving people through, and basically profiling within the positives. Which can be gotten around, as is also talked about.

In a word... Lame.

700 Billion *MORE* dollars?! Are you kidding?

Three Times is Enemy Action

This week, the Bush administration announced the beginnings of a plan to salvage what remains of the financial markets. At first glance, it appears that the plan will consist mainly of creating a kind of "garbage pit," a fund or group of funds -- cousins of the Resolution Trust that was created during the S&L crisis -- into which those people who have dabbled in bad debts can toss their problems. Only this time the cost to the taxpayers is at least $700 billion... and a big bite out of representative democracy.

Longish, but worth the read, to get a better feel of how we got to where we are... /sigh

EarlG News: Media Announces Bailout Of McCain Campaign

EarlG strikes again!

WASHINGTON, DC -- Acting to avert a possible crisis in the U.S. presidential election, the media today announced a bailout of Sen John McCain's (R-AZ) campaign. Cable news commentators scrambled to prop up the Senator's sagging poll numbers Friday as the fast-disappearing dream of a nail-biting horse-race threatened to bring down America's entire punditry system.

A senior CNN political analyst speaking on condition of anonymity said that the collapse of McCain's campaign could prove disastrous to the pundit industry. "A horse-race is vital to our bottom line," he said. "Without neck-and-neck poll numbers we can't maintain an air of suspense right up to election day, and our ratings will suffer. I could be out of a job by this time next week."

"These are desperate times, and we're going to take unprecedented action to bring the polls back into line with our preferred projections," said another anonymous insider. "We'll be ignoring all of McCain's gaffes on foreign policy matters and covering up his tremendous flip-flops on the economy. Then we'll focus tightly on polls which show the closest possible race between the two candidates."

If the first part of the media's emergency bailout fails to turn things around industry insiders say they could resort to more drastic measures, such as taking more of Michelle Obama's comments out of context to gin up another false controversy about her patriotism, or creating additional rumors about Barack Obama's religion. An anonymous source at Fox News revealed, "At this point nothing is off the table."

Reaction to the announcement was mixed, with many members of the public remaining skeptical. "Isn't the media supposed to tell us what's actually happening in the world, as opposed to cherry-picking stories in order to create a narrative that boosts their ratings and advertising revenue?" asked Bob Jenkins, 52, a mechanic from Harrisburg, Penn.

Despite the media's best efforts, John McCain's campaign has teetered on the brink of collapse ever since he selected a clueless moosehunter as his running mate.

It kills me that the best reporting, at this point, is the satire!! So true...

The hardest part? Your favorite part?

So, I recently started doing a thing with Anja, right before she goes to sleep at night. I ask her what the hardest part of her day was, and what her favorite part was. It's both a neat way to get insights into the way that she sees her life (that is, she surprises me sometimes with her answers!), and a good way to get her in the habit of looking at both the negative and positive things that are going on... she's recently started doing the same thing to me, which is awesome. Sometimes, my 'real' answers aren't 5-year-old appropriate, so I modify them or come up with alternatives, but it does get *me* thinking, too... And apparently, this idea is a little bit contagious, so I'm going to put it on here and make it even more viral, hehe. :)

Yesterday's hardest thing: getting very emotional after leaving John's AS assessment, and the negative repercussions of that for the next 20 minutes

Yesterday's favorite thing: toss-up between lunch with John at this kick-ass bar in Middletown, where you could just kind of forget the world, and the time we spent together after Anja went to bed :)


Here's the link to the bar we went to... the site describes it as:

"Saving the Ales" since 1994, Eli Cannon's Tap Room is committed to diversity. Thirty-Six (36) REAL ALES on tap rotating constantly to ensure freshness and revolutionary selection.

The atmosphere is easy: Irish / English Pub / American Trailer Park Fusion
Barber chairs, theater seats, leather couches and chairs are just a few of the vehicles to chill on.

This is probably the best bar I've been to in the U.S., in terms of feeling instantly comfortable there and enjoying the food and drink and atmosphere. Willi Brew pub may have better food, that'll have to wait to see. It does make me wish that Middletown weren't quite so far away... it's a bit harder to stumble home from there, hehe :D

Focus on the positive.

A good friend had suggested to me recently that I make an attempt to focus on the positive and fun things that are still going on, and post about them here... so I thought I'd have a try at that.

Saturday John and Rob went to play paintball, and Anja and I met my dad for lunch at Beach Pond, at the border of CT/RI on 165. We were sitting next to the pond and a couple guys came down to launch a canoe for some fishing... Anja, of course, is chatting them up, asking questions, offering to help push them into the water in the canoe (man, was that cute to watch her try!). One guy was really nice and friendly, and ended up offering her (and us!) some buffalo jerkey from... Montana, I think? It was pretty tasty, although I wish we could have tried the peppered one he said he had. Had a nice lunch with dad and then took a very tired Anja home... we both napped for about 2 hours. :)

Yesterday was good, too... John went to Home Despot and got the stuff to build a woodshed so that we can stockpile our cord of wood for ongoing fires during the winter. I'm really impressed with how well it came out... I helped a bit and so did Rob, and it's done! Now to stack all the wood into it tomorrow night. :) We ended up having bbq dinner with Rob and Toni and Mike and Amy, and it was excellent. Thanks for sharing, guys! Bacon-wrapped chicken with honey-soy marinade, and grilled garlic. YUM. We all hung out around the fire until way, way too late... Toni and I probably went to bed around 1:30. I'm very glad to have you guys living upstairs! :D

"Uncertainty is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom."

"In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.”

"Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.”

"The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers."

-Deepak Chopra

I think I need to read more of his stuff, these days...

Going Vagabondish...

No, not me, John.

The big thing that's going on right now is that John quit his job (he's been wanting and needing to do that for awhile) and he's taking off for a couple months, going to travel around, figure out what he wants out of life/relationships/etc... this is kind of a very exciting and terribly scary thing, all wrapped up in one long trip.

We are trying to go into it with as few expectations as possible, and as much flexibility as can be given. It looks like it will be feasible for it to be at least two months, maybe more if possible and he wants to...

Where he will end up in terms of life and our relationship, and where I will wind up in terms of the same, is up in the air right now. He needs to figure out what he wants to do with his life, what drives him, what would make him feel happy and satisfied, and where/how/if I fit into that picture.

So, if you're out there reading and you've been wondering what's up with me, that's a huge part of what's going on. I'm about to leap into single parenting, and running the household entirely by myself for awhile. Not to mention figuring out my own emotional state, needs, desires, etc. There's so much too this, but it's too much to commit all to writing right now. Suffice it to say that I'm sick of talking about it, but I can't think about anything else, lately...