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President Obama’s “controversial” speech to American schoolchildren has already happened today. People are still angry with his brainwashing the American youth.  And it’s understandable why those people are angry (even though the type of person who is angry about this speech is no doubt the same type of person that gets angry because Christianity is not taught in science class). 

In an attempt to help reduce the worries, the White House has released a draft of the speech. After giving it a quick perusal, I’m shocked by just how, well, Republican, the ideology of the speech is. 

“At the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world,” Obama said. “And none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities.”

Ahem, no one can help you, except yourself.  It’s time to take responsibility for your education and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.  This advice is at it’s very core un-liberal. 

“I expect great things from each of you,” he said. “So don’t let us down — don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.” Not that any conservative would admit that. Socialism, nazis, Obamayouth, blah blah blah.

Big pimpin’ from the college years.  Good thing I’ll never be president and photos from my college years will never be used in any sort of way.

No surprise that it’s Barack Obama. I’m not even sure you could make the case for anybody else, unless you throw in the doppelganger that is Tina Fey/Sarah Palin. And even then you’re only thinking about that decision for a millisecond.

Still, this one was about as close a contest as the smallpox versus Native Americans game at Fort Pitt in 1763.

Washout!

Time got Shep Fairey to design the cover, based upon his now iconic Obama poster. In fact it looks like Shep worked really long hours to alter the image.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing you can’t get arrested for stealing your own work.

It’s unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama’s face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn’t sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

Time also put together stories on: the runners-up; fond farewells; people who mattered; pictures of the year.

The alternate is what? He hire stupid people? This is something I will never understand about American culture – the notion that intelligence is not valued at all.  There is no arguing this point.  As a society there is no value placed on intelligent, capable people.  As evidence by Alec MacGillis’s WP report.

“All told, of Obama’s top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

“While Obama’s picks have been lauded for their ethnic and ideological mix, they lack diversity in one regard: They are almost exclusively products of the nation’s elite institutions and generally share a more intellectual outlook than is often the norm in government.”

The problem with this is the tone is somehow negative.  It’s seething with disgust that President-elect Obama would dare hire intelligent, smart, erudite, capable people.  I fail to see what the downside is, except there are critics.

“The Ivy-laced network taking hold in Washington is drawing scorn from many conservatives, who have in recent decades decried the leftward drift of academia and cast themselves as defenders of regular Americans against highbrow snobbery,” the article goes on to say.  And that would be all fine and good, except we just had eight years of loyalist driven, regular Americans running the country into the ground – six feet under the ground.

I’m sorry but it’s time for Joe Six Pack to take a freaking hike and let the adults who know what they’re doing roll up their sleeves and get America back on track.

“Obama, who wrote a literary memoir at age 33, represents the opposite approach. In a country where politicians often wrap their learning in folksy charm to avoid seeming elitist, his candidacy represented a forthright assertion of intellectual prowess, as he turned his oratory and cerebral demeanor into campaign assets.”

And this is why Obama gives me hope.  Not for a brighter future immediately, but for a subtle shift that education, intelligence and learning will become important in this country.  That teachers will be valued and paid accordingly, that the intelligensia will not be a source of derision but will be looked upon to lead the way.

Matt at Unlikely Words has created a time capsule of sorts for the 2008 election.  He’s rounded up just about everything dating back to the speculation of who would even run for the presidency.  It’s pretty impressive.

I wanted to create something to look at a couple years from now to remember the election and hopefully present a good representation of what both sides of America were feeling on that day as evidenced by the response in the press and on the blogs. I didn’t capture everything, though I’ve certainly tried. I want to consume all of this information, have it put on a microchip in my brain. Until that’s possible, I just read a lot. I don’t know how many of these links will work in a year or 5 years, (when this doc might be helpful to show younger people who may not have ever remembered having a president who isn’t black), but here’s what I’ve got.

“Included are lots of videos, links to articles, reactions from the author’s friends, and even Facebook status messages as the election results rolled in, covering a nice cross-section of citizens from top politicians to the big media, to blogs, to normal people celebrating on the streets. However, I have a feeling that due to linkrot, much of this may not even be available online,” so says Jason Kottke.

Which will probably be true in a year or five years time.  But you can’t blame Matt for trying to put something like this together.

That’s a big if.  But still.  I’ve been advocating to get rid of this for several years now and more importantly I think we should condensce our time zones from four to two in the United States.  I don’t have any hope that this will actually happen, but one can dream can’t he.  DST is utterly pointless in this non-railroad economy we live in.  [Green Daily]

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 »