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So was anyone else wondering how in god’s name did Trey Parker and Matt Stone pull off an Obama themed episode centered around his winning the election just 24 hours later?  Including his acceptance speech.  South Park has always been timely, but this seemed preposterously timely.  IGN got the scoop.

IGN TV: First and foremost, I want to ask you: how did you get this episode finished in time?

Matt Stone: We talked about doing an election episode for a couple of months. Usually we start talking about these things when we start talking about the whole run, about a month ago. So we started talking about what episodes we’d like to do. When we started talking about the election, we were like “That’s on a Tuesday. Wednesday is the next day… We could have a whole episode!”

So we started talking about stories that would be neutral to who won. And that’s when we came up with the whole diamond heist thing. We were going to produce a couple of different shows, but we don’t do the show that far in advance. So as it got closer, in the last few weeks – it was so obvious that Obama was going to win that we just produced the Obama show. We just did it and assumed the polls would be right.

IGN: Is it three weeks that is your typical turnaround?

Stone: Well, really it’s about a week.

IGN: Okay, wow.

Stone: So we didn’t really start in earnest on this show until one week ago. For the speeches we had a blank space in there, with the acceptance and concession speeches in there. That only takes us a couple hours to do. It’s a very easy animation. The main thing was waiting until they gave the speeches so we could get the backdrops and see what it looked like. Then we copied down the speech and put it in there.

What was funny is that we’d written placeholder crap and put it in there. It was “I want to thank my fellow Americans and blah blah blah” and “Change is going to come..” We just wrote some junk to put in there as temp, and it was amazing how much the temporary stuff matched the boilerplate in there. We then took a few things that people would remember, like Obama promising his kids the dog. We copied the words and put that in, but that was easy for us because we do the show so quick. We were here all night, but we usually are on Tuesday finishing the show.

IGN: So you didn’t deliver it late to the network?

Stone: Well, we always deliver it late. [Laughs] We can’t get any later than we do! We’re delivering it right up against the wire every single week. We can’t do it any later or it won’t make the air. Trey and I got home at 10:30 yesterday morning. We’re there for 24 hours. It sucks, I f***ing hate it! It’s physically a challenge and kind of a torment, but it’s really the only way we know how to do the show.

[IGN]

Details are sketchy and few, but according to WLBT 3 in Jackson, MS, schools are not allowing their students to talk about Obama.  At all.  Unless it’s in history class.  The Puckett Attendance School in Puckett, MS, was singled out and they have not commented on the policy.  Though they are the only school mentioned, the article hints that they are not the only Mississippi school doing this.  Strange is one word I would use because I’m hesistant to rush into judgement without having all the details.  [WLBT]

Nuff said.  The United States, for all it’s bluster about equality and what not, still finds it a big deal for an African-American male or a white female to be elected head of state.  It’s not that it isn’t a big deal, it’s that people in this moment still thought it couldn’t or wouldn’t happen.  I’m not exactly sure what that says about our country — how far we’ve come, etc. — but, what I do know is that I find it disheartening that there was doubt about whether or not Barack or Hillary were electable simply because of who they were and not necessarily what they stood for.

Illustration By Patrick Moberg. The better question is could you name each president based soley on their illustration?  Even as a history major I could only name the ones in the beginning, the ones at the end, the more famous ones.  Mostly the ones in the middle were a bit hazy.  Pathetic on my part.

Tuesday was a great night.  So much so that my computer basically said I’m done with you when I woke up Wednesday morning.  Something about a hal.dll file being corrupted.

Anyway, once Jesse Jackson started crying and then Oprah, the floodgates opened.  For real.   It was like the great flood when he promised his two daughters a new puppy.

Damn you Obama for going the new puppy route!  And forcing me to hide my man tears in front of so many people.

The truth is though, the stories that fascinate me the most about politics are not the end results, it is not Wil.I.Am appearing R2D2 holograph style on CNN, or the long protracted ballot recounts or whether John McCain blinks too much.

No, rather what interests me are the long form stories, the anecdotes, the setbacks, the frustrations, the triumphs and the chess-like gambits that are revealed afterward.  It’s the stories of Obama not wanting to run for President because he was worried about the effects on his daughters and wife or how an honorable man like John McCain ended so off course until he redeemed himself with a gracious concession speech.

Many times journalists get embedded with a campaign, but they’re under embargo to write anything until after the election.  And it is when the election is over that the good stuff comes out.  You can see it now with Sarah Palin. MORE »

One of the things I wanted to do after the conventions is creat word clouds of the major speeches to see what words or phrases were used prominently during the Democratic and Republican concentions.  Now that both parties conventions have concluded, I got caught up in MusicFest Northwest and Wired Magazine beat me to the punch.  Still, it’s interesting to see what Wordle can do with any given amount of text.  

Just looking through their gallery you notice that both Barack Obama and John McCain’s names were mentioned quite a bit; Republicans loved to mention country and America, though POW was notably absent.  As for Democrats they seemed like like future, hope, and promise; surprisingly change was not prominent.  Again, neith of these facts are that surprising, given the campaigns they’ve built.  But it’s interesting nonetheless.  

Barack Obama

John McCain

Wordle is an online application created by IBM’s senior software engineer Jonathan Feinberg. Using text entered by its users, it creates visually appealing “word clouds” that show you the frequency at which words occur within that text. The more often a word occurs, the bigger it appears in the cloud.

Wired has word clouds for all the major speeches including Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, and others.

Faux News aired the first of two presidential documentaries on Monday night called “Character and Conduct.” I haven’t seen the Barack Obama documentary. However, the guys over at 23/6 have condensed the video into a 60-second clip and obviously skewed it to show Faux’s bias. The “documentary pretends really hard that it’s not full of stereotypes and insinuations! Couldn’t stomach it Monday evening? We’ve got it for you in a minute.”

Sometimes all we have in this world is comedy sketches.  It’s the only time people can speak the truth and get away with it and not have to justify themselves or pretend to be biases.  Look at John Stewart.  An ongoing subplot for 2008’s general election will be media coverage of the two candidates.

Will it be even?  Probably not.  Journalists love spending time with John McCain on his straight talk express and they love raking Barack Obama over the coals.  I’m not saying it has anything to do with race, well, shit, yes I am.

For a good two months we had to listen to Obama justify his relationship with his pastor Rev. Wright, while McCain’s pastor “problems” were largely ignored and swept under the rug.  But the media is loathsome to do stuff like this.  Bring up 15 or 20 year old events and report them as if they were relevant to today.

So in that tradition, we’ve got John McCain calling his wife Cindy a c*nt 16 years ago.  Relevant to this election?  Absolutely not.  Perfect fodder to lampoon the media and drive home the point that John McCain used the worst word possible (though not to British soccer football fans) once?  Absolutely.

After the jump, because of ah, seedy language.  MORE »

An interesting piece published in the Willamette Week about the early career and meteoric rise of Sen. Barack Obama told through the eyes of a rising reporter coming up and working in the same district. It’s interesting because, in many ways, when we hear the media is being easier on Sen. Obama than Sen. Clinton most people tend to not agree with that assessment.

However, this article leads me to believe that may be the case. For the record, I am supporting Sen. Obama. It’s never easy to watch Sen. Clinton sabotage her own chances, but her campaign has been poorly run and if you can’t run a Democratic primary campaign how are you gonna run a country?

Anyway, to wit:

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his 2004 U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.

I called Kelley last week, and he recalled the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

But that’s not all.

During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law—including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates, including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago Tribune report.

Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets—to appear on the ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living within the district—to knock off all the other Democratic contenders. He won the seat unopposed.

“A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career,” wrote Tribune political reporters David Jackson and Ray Long. “The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.”

Read the entire profile. It’s worth it, if for nothing more than a different perspective on potentially the next President of the United States.

If Barack Obama is elected President then after watching this video, where he appeared of Ellen, should we begin to ask if he’s the best Presidential dancer ever?  Dude’s got moves.  Texas and Ohio, you know what to do.

After the jump, Obama walks a day in the shoes of a homecare worker.  Video produced by the SEIU. MORE »

On his radio show, Limbaugh played a skit, “Barack the Magic Negro.” It was performed by Paul Shanklin impersonating Al Sharpton. The parody of “Puff the Magic Dragon” has that racist “black face” tinge to it. But again, this territory is nothing new for Rush.

We didn’t particularly care for him, well ever, but then he disparaged Donovan McNabb (yeah we’re fellow Cuse grads) for being an African-American quarterback not smart enough to play the position; he started binging on OCs and blamed that on his maid or whomever, after years spent advocating for tougher penalties for drug addicts; and if the standard set by Don Imus getting fired for calling the Rutger’s Basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” then it’s time someone drags Rush Limbaugh out behind the shed and put some buckshot into his belly. Okay, so that’s a wee-bit extreme (we don’t actually think he should be shot, it’s just… sometimes there’s no other way to describe the utter loathing of him).  But seriously, how has he not been fired yet?

This hate monger has no business having a voice heard by millions. And it’s not that I’m irate because he attacked “Saint Obama,” truth be told I’m not sure how I feel about Barack Obama yet, but still. This kind of joking has no place in our society and a line needs to be drawn. At some point Limbaugh needs to be held accountable for his actions and that time is now.