Christmas greetings from the '08 presidential campaigns

For whatever reason most of the contenders in the 2008 race decided to put out holiday (i.e. Christmas) campaign ads.

Mike Huckabee starts off the bunch:


Rudy Giuliani tries to be funny and challenges Huckabee to a red-sweater-off:


Rudy Giuliani tries to be funny again, but verges on the unsettling:


McCain recalls some fond Christmas memories as a POW:


Ron Paul's ad brings in some song:


And the Democrats follow suit. John Edwards with a more sympathetic message:


Hillary Clinton focuses on her issues:


And Barack Obama brings out his family, though it comes off as a little awkward:


John Edwards wins the battle of the holiday ads, imo. Second place to Mitt Romney for not running a Christmas ad (although many will say that this is to avoid drawing attention to his Mormon faith). And as much as I don't personally like Senator Clinton, it's great to see universal Pre-K brought into a campaign ad.

1. Presidental hopefuls exposed by Christmas ads
2. Analysis: Christmas campaign ads

7 'medical myths'

There should be more things like this in the news. The BBC recently had a story yesterday addressing 7 common myths:

• Drink at least eight glasses of water a day


• We use only 10% of our brains


• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death


• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight


• Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser


• Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals


• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy

(All of these are false. I'd never heard the mobile phone one before, and I already knew the one ones about our brains and shaving.)

1. 'Medical myths' exposed as untrue

Night of the Meek

The best Christmas story ever told: The Twilight Zone's "Night of the Meek":

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3


There's also a remake from the 80's Twilight Zone, but the Twilight Zone without Rod Sterling is like Zelda without Shigeru Miyamoto.

Kozol on C-SPAN2

The United States has ripped apart every single thing that was represented by the famous court decision Brown vs. Board of Education. [...] Ever since the early 1990s, the Supreme Court, in virtually its present make-up, except for former Justice Rehnquist, has ripped the guts out of Brown vs. Board of Education; all of the enforcement mechanisms in Brown were taken away and indeed the U.S. Supreme Court has gone so far as not simply to end legally mandating school integration [...], its also made it almost impossible to run voluntary school integration programs. It's prohibited some states from doing this—so that we're now at the extraordinary moment when a typical black child in the United States is more likely to go to a segregated public school than at any time since 1968, ironically, the year when Dr. King died.

Four recycled essays

The fall semester is over, and I may as well give a few essays a chance to see the light of day. I'll point out, though, that all of these were written in a very short period of time—the first three more so than the last. While I'm not all that fond of any of these, I think that they are all informative. The fourth essay, I would say, is hands down the most insightful, with interesting discussions about multiculturalism, poststructuralism, and the history of literature in the educational system.

(Sorry in advance for the barrage of pop-ups from these links.. you'll get redirected to a PDF eventually. Use a pop-up blocker or, better yet, Firefox)

1. Chocolate in a Global Context (GEOG 100)
2. Realism and the Depiction of Domesticity in American Literature^* (ENGL 322: Post-Civil War American Literature)
3. The Military Industrial Complex in the United States (HIST 129: Post-Civil War American History)
4. The Shifting Canon of "American Literature" (ENGL 322)

* Essay cites course's anthology. William E. Cain's American Literature Vol. 2.

--
i. Two recycled essays

A collage

Let me ask:

Why did she measure its solitude to the hour?
The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper—
the sky above Walden's pond.

“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” hardly seems a reason,
nor does Talent.

Did the sea of her singing open its caverns
th’oo de bresh of angel’s wings?
or did the song of her singing
appear only while he watched his woods fill with snow?

—the man in the black coat that
turned and writhed in fever,
with a grave, meticulous ball beside the sea. . .
Jesus
he was a handsome man
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision
     or you had a vision or he had a vision to found out Eternity
past midnight in clear rime. . .


Before you answer, allow me to remind you:

Sugar is not a vegetable;
bonsais are inedible;
rivers are damp and
parrot-brilliant patches, indelible.


(A silly late-night poem for ENGL 322.)

Youtube "Debates"

I've been meaning to post this for a while. There was an excellent editorial in the LA Times about the CNN-Youtube Republican debates—namely about how far off the mark they are from genuine questioning by "us" when a handful of clips are carefully selected from thousands and relatively insignificant issues are given undue emphasis.

Here it is in full:

By Tim Rutten

The United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We've got a pretty good fix concerning what's on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center's most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday's debate.

HERE'S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their 401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1. By contrast, just 6% of the survey's national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn't changed in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February (from 16% to 33%).

"Independents' assessments of how the military effort is going remain far closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom support the war. Unless we're going to believe that the self-selecting YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters, it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex -- and highly relevant concerns -- for an issue that served its ratings interests -- immigration -- or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun control, which doesn't even show up in surveys of voters' concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.

CNN: Corrupt News Network

"..." 14

"If people did not sometimes do stupid things, nothing intelligent would get done."

—Wittgenstein

Translation: If not for our failures, abuses, and misuses, we would have little need for "intelligent" endeavors. The problems that these endeavors are to solve are of our own creation.

The rising cost of college

CINCINNATI (AP) — Two college students say the high cost of tuition led them to rob a bank.

The men pleaded guilty to two charges of aggravated robbery and six charges of kidnapping. They face 20 years in prison when sentenced Dec. 27.

Andrew Butler, 20, a student at the University of Toledo, told Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Steve Martin on Monday that tuition increases outpaced his scholarships and financial aid.

Christopher Avery, 22, a student at the University of Cincinnati, said he couldn't pay for summer classes after an internship at a grocery store fell through.

"I was strapped for cash," Avery said. "I thought I had nothing to lose."

...

1. 2 Students Convicted in Bank Robbery
2. Hard way to learn lessons
3. Tuition Bandits
4. Tuition Rises at More Than Twice the Rate of Inflation

ASCII Einstein

                    .+~                :xx++::
                   :`. -          .!!X!~"?!`~!~!. :-:.
                  <             .!!!H":.~ ::+!~~!!!~ `%X.
                  '             ~~!M!!>!!X?!!!!!!!!!!...!~.
                              <!:!MM!~:XM!!!!!!.:!..~ !.  `<
                  <: `   :~ .:<~!!M!XXHM!!!X!XXHtMMHHHX!  ~ ~
                ~~~~<' ~!!!:!!!!!XM!!M!!!XHMMMRMSXXX!!!!!!:  <`
                  `<  <::!!!!!X!X?M!!M!!XMMMMXXMMMM??!!!!!?!:~<
               : '~~~<!!!XMMH!!XMXMXHHXXXXM!!!!MMMMSXXXX!!!!!!!~
            :    ::`~!!!MMMMXXXtMMMMMMMMMMMHX!!!!!!HMMMMMX!!!!!: ~
               '~:~!!!!!MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMXXX!!!M??MMMM!!X!!i:
               <~<!!!!!XMMMMMMMMMMMM8M8MMMMM8MMMMMXX!!!!!!!!X!?t?!:
               ~:~~!!!!?MMMMMM@M@RMRRR$@@MMRMRMMMMMMXSX!!!XMMMX<?X!
             :XX <!!XHMMMM88MM88BR$M$$$$8@8RN88MMMMMMMMHXX?MMMMMX!!!
           .:X! <XMSM8M@@$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$B8R$8MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX!X
          :!?! !?XMMMMM8$$$$8$$$$$$$$$$$$$$BBR$$MMM@MMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!X
        ~<!!~ <!!XMMMB$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$MMR$8MR$MMMMMMMMMMMMM!?!:
        :~~~ !:X!XMM8$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$RR$$MMMMR8NMMMMMMMMMMMMM<!`-
    ~:<!:~`~':!:HMM8N$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$8MRMM8R$MRMMMMMMMMRMMMX!
  !X!``~~   :~XM?SMM$B$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$BR$$MMM$@R$M$MMMMMM$MMMMX?L
 X~.      : `!!!MM#$RR$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$R$$$$$R$M$MMRRRM8MMMMMMM$$MMMM!?:
 ! ~ <~  !! !!~`` :!!MR$$$$$$$$$$RMM!?!??RR?#R8$M$MMMRM$RMMMM8MM$MMM!M!:>
: ' >!~ '!!  !   .!XMM8$$$$$@$$$R888HMM!!XXHWX$8$RM$MR5$8MMMMR$$@MMM!!!< ~
!  ' !  ~!! :!:XXHXMMMR$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$8$$$$8$$$MMR$M$$$MMMMMM$$$MMM!!!!
 ~<!!!  !!! !!HMMMMMMMM$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$MMM$M$$MM8MMMR$$MMXX!!!!/:`
  ~!!!  !!! !XMMMMMMMMMMR$$$$$$$$$$$$R$RRR$$$$$$$MMMM$RM$MM8MM$$$M8MMMX!!!!:
  !~ ~  !!~ XMMM%!!!XMMX?M$$$$$$$$B$MMSXXXH?MR$$8MMMM$$@$8$M$B$$$$B$MMMX!!!!
  ~!    !! 'XMM?~~!!!MMMX!M$$$$$$MRMMM?!%MMMH!R$MMMMMM$$$MM$8$$$$$$MR@M!!!!!
  <>    !!  !Mf x@#"~!t?M~!$$$$$RMMM?Xb@!~`??MS$M@MMM@RMRMMM$$$$$$RMMMMM!!!!
  !    '!~ <!!:!?M   !@!M<XM$$R5M$8MMM$! -XXXMMRMBMMM$RMMM@$R$BR$MMMMX??!X!!
  !    '!  !!X!!!?::xH!HM:MM$RM8M$RHMMMX...XMMMMM$RMMRRMMMMMMM8MMMMMMMMX!!X!
  !     ~  !!?:::!!!MXMR~!MMMRMM8MMMMMS!!M?XXMMMMM$$M$M$RMMMM8$RMMMMMMMM%X!!
  ~     ~  !~~X!!XHMMM?~ XM$MMMMRMMMMMM@MMMMMMMMMM$8@MMMMMMMMRMMMMM?!MMM%HX!
           !!!!XSMMXXMM .MMMMMMMM$$$BB8MMM@MMMMMMMR$RMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMXX!?H!XX
           XHXMMMMMMMM!.XMMMMMMMMMR$$$8M$$$$$M@88MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!XMMMXX!!!XM
      ~   <!MMMMMMMMRM:XMMMMMMMMMM8R$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$NMMMMMMMM?!MM!M8MXX!!/t!M
      '   ~HMMMMMMMMM~!MM8@8MMM!MM$$8$$$$$$$$$$$$$$8MMMMMMM!!XMMMM$8MR!MX!MM
          'MMMMMMMMMM'MM$$$$$MMXMXM$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$RMMMMMMM!!MMM$$$$MMMMM<!M
          'MMMMMMMMM!'MM$$$$$RMMMMMM$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$MMM!MMMX!!MM$$$$$M$$M$M!M
           !MMMMMM$M! !MR$$$RMM8$8MXM8$$$$$$$$$$$$NMMM!MMM!!!?MRR$$RXM$$MR!M
           !M?XMM$$M.< !MMMMMMSUSRMXM$8R$$$$$$$$$$#$MM!MMM!X!t8$M$MMMHMRMMX$
    ,-,   '!!!MM$RMSMX:.?!XMHRR$RM88$$$8M$$$$$R$$$$8MM!MMXMH!M$$RMMMMRNMMX!$
   -'`    '!!!MMMMMMMMMM8$RMM8MBMRRMR8RMMM$$$$8$8$$$MMXMMMMM!MR$MM!M?MMMMMM$
          'XX!MMMMMMM@RMM$MM@$$BM$$$M8MMMMR$$$$@$$$$MM!MMMMXX$MRM!XH!!??XMMM
          `!!!M?MHMMM$RMMMR@$$$$MR@MMMM8MMMM$$$$$$$WMM!MMMM!M$RMM!!.MM!%M?~!
           !!!!!!MMMMBMM$$RRMMMR8MMMMMRMMMMM8$$$$$$$MM?MMMM!f#RM~    `~!!!~!
           ~!!HX!!~!?MM?MMM??MM?MMMMMMMMMRMMMM$$$$$MMM!MMMM!!
           '!!!MX!:`~~`~~!~~!!!!XM!!!?!?MMMM8$$$$$MMMMXMMM!!
            !!~M@MX.. <!!X!!!!XHMHX!!``!XMMMB$MM$$B$M!MMM!!
            !!!?MRMM!:!XHMHMMMMMMMM!  X!SMMX$$MM$$$RMXMMM~
             !M!MMMM>!XMMMMMMMMXMM!!:!MM$MMMBRM$$$$8MMMM~
             `?H!M$R>'MMMM?MMM!MM6!X!XM$$$MM$MM$$$$MX$f
              `MXM$8X MMMMMMM!!MM!!!!XM$$$MM$MM$$$RX@"
               ~M?$MM !MMMMXM!!MM!!!XMMM$$$8$XM$$RM!`
                !XMMM !MMMMXX!XM!!!HMMMM$$$$RH$$M!~
                'M?MM `?MMXMM!XM!XMMMMM$$$$$RM$$#
                 `>MMk ~MMHM!XM!XMMM$$$$$$BRM$M"
                  ~`?M. !M?MXM!X$$@M$$$$$$RMM#
                    `!M  !!MM!X8$$$RM$$$$MM#`
                      !% `~~~X8$$$$8M$$RR#`
                       !!x:xH$$$$$$$R$R*`
                        ~!?MMMMRRRM@M#`       -Sushil-
                         `~???MMM?M"`
                             ``~~

From http://www.chris.com/ASCII/art/html/einstein.html