Lions for Lambs

I just finished watching an interesting movie. Although I believe it left entirely too much unanswered, it still got a point across. The basic idea of the movie is that "If you don't STAND for something, you might FALL for anything." The premise revolves around the "war on terror." I remember seeing posters for this movie while in Berlin, Germany. I also heard reports of how unappealing it was to a few random Germans. Needless to say I put it out of my head until I got a chance to watch it at a friends house.

According to IMDB "Lions for Lambs begins after two determined students at a West Coast University, Arian and Ernest, follow the inspiration of their idealistic professor, Dr. Malley, and attempt to do something important with their lives. But when the two make the bold decision to join the battle in Afghanistan, Malley is both moved and distraught. Now, as Arian and Ernest fight for survival in the field, they become the string that binds together two disparate stories on opposite sides of America. In California, an anguished Dr. Malley attempts to reach a privileged but disaffected student who is the very opposite of Arian and Ernest. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. the charismatic Presidential hopeful, Senator Jasper Irving, is about to give a bombshell story to a probing TV journalist that may affect Arian and Ernest's fates."

The part that was most interesting to me was Dr. Malley's (portrayed by Robert Redford) intense and highly intelligent conversation with a student, Todd. Todd, a slacker, has attended only 8 classes out of the semester but has aced each of his exams. Malley pushes him to be bold and not waste what he has had the privilege to grow up in. He sees the incredible intelligence and potential in Todd and doesn't want to see him lose sight of it. Their conversation weaves in and out of the other story lines but still drew my closest attention.

It was truly refreshing to see a college student portrayed in such a positive light. Intelligent, well spoken and completely aware. Aware of real issues, not those trumped up by media outlets for increased ratings or politicians for votes. Malley and Todd went back and forth in what seemed to be a battle to best each other's wording of their viewpoints. Malley told Todd of his former students Ernest and Arian and their decision to enlist in the Army. Todd questioned Malley and insisted that he could not be trying to recruit him. He wasn't, only trying to illustrate to Todd that talk is talk and does nothing but truly making a difference requires walking the walk. Malley attempted to inspire Todd not to waste his gift but rather to put it to use. He had already proven his ability to debate while in class analyzing a cities decision to distribute clean syringes to drug addicts in order to reduce the passing of diseases. Todd negated the proposed positives of this idea and claimed it would be just the same as creating a lane for drunk drivers to use on the highways.

With all that is going on in this world, the most prevalent are those that reflect our country in a negative light. I believe our youth is incredibly mis-informed, either by ignorance or the failures of teachers or parents. Like I stated in a previous post, voting for a presidential candidate because one thinks they're cool is preposterous. I wish more young people were like Todd and could stand up for what they believe in, debate truthfully and intelligently, and represent our population as a nation of successful doers rather than the slacktastic generation we have come to be known as. No, I cannot say that I am anywhere near perfect. However, I do the best I can at staying as informed as possible on what is going on with our country and how it is impacting the rest of the world. I believe that if I didn't I have no reason to vote in elections and state opinions as they wouldn't be based on facts, just rubbish. Well, I think I have ranted on for long enough. Regardless, check out "Lions for Lambs" if you into that sort of thing.

What are we supposed to do now?

Well, it has been settled. Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary a few weeks ago. I will admit that I changed my party affiliation in the fall of last year from an Independent to a Democrat so that I could vote in the primary. Obviously that was in vain if you remember the controversy (What? Florida in an election controversy? No...) in which votes in Florida did not count towards the primary because the date of the Florida primary was earlier than was "allowed." Pretty lame in my opinion and yet just another way for our corrupt government to screw with the livelihood of our people.

Well, when it comes down to it, my political beliefs are liberal but in the range of Libetarian and Moderate. Raised in a ridiculously Republican family I grew up around guns, hunting, money and egos where I was told what to do and what to think. Those that know me today are not surprised when I say that that didn't last long once I turned 18 and went off to college. Thank god for personal freedom and the ability for me to form my own beliefs no matter how much is pisses of my family.

Now when it comes to this election I am speechless. On one side with have an ancient war veteran who is a bigger flip-flopper than John Kerry. On the other an intelligent and appealing African American man surrounded by a mysticism due to his great possibility of becoming the first African American President.

Let me say that McCain makes me absolutely SICK. To be honest, in 2004+ McCain began to make appearances on the late night talk shows, including my favorites the Daily Show and Colbert Report. McCain became famous for being a "left-wing" Republican frequently making jabs at GWB. Thoughts and view points were presented to the viewers repeatedly that questioned the validity of GWB's decisions, military (or lack there of) history, etc. In 2006/2007 McCain began stirring and a drastic difference in his interaction with the media began to be more and more obvious. For someone who had the following of so many young people and a great number of "right-wing" Liberals it amazes me to think of how far gone the view points that made him appealing are.

Obama. What can I say. Yes I am a registered Democrat but something about this guy doesn't seem right. Could it be his complete lack of experience to run a country? Could it be the fact that he tends to promise things that are highly unlikely to be followed through with? Hmm. Not to mention his speaking style completely freaks me out. I'm sorry but someone who has hardly any experience working in the Senate has no grounds to be the President of the United States of America, the strongest nation in the world. I do think it is amazing for an African American to be in this situation and am proud that it has finally come to that point in our history, but someone shouldn't be voted President just because of that. Same reasoning behind why I do not believe Hillary should be voted President just because she is a woman. That should have NO grounds what-so-ever to be voted President.

I have quite a few friends who are completely gung ho for Obama, but why? He is appealing to the masses, especially the young ones. It is these young ones (who I am one of) who rarely have any concept what-so-ever about politics and what is needed for our country. This bothers me greatly. Young people will tend to vote for the person they feel the most appealing regardless of how good of an option they are. I really think this issue has to do with the lack of coverage of politics and government in secondary and post secondary schools. I am sick and tired of hearing young people answer why they are going to vote for Obama with, "Oh, I think he is cool." Come on. That's like saying Dwight Schrute from The Office should be President because he is funny.

At this point I really don't know what we are supposed to do. It worries me now to think about what is going to happen. Not only because I believe we are screwed regardless who is voted but more recently the concept that Obama could win the popular vote but not the electorates to become President. Sound familiar? Hello 2004 sham of an election!

Early End to the Presidential Election

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Attorney Douchebag

Well, if you haven't heard yet you need to crawl out from under that rock and read a newspaper or turn on the television, preferably not Fox News because the time has come, Gonzales has resigned!

The news came early this week and has brightened the eyes of most Democrats who have been avidly pushing for his resignation since he was appointed. Remember that whole fiasco over the firing of 9 U.S. attorneys? You know what I am talking about...when asked questions about the incident he responded by stating, "I do not recall." Let me remind you he responded like this more than 70 times while under oath. LIAR!

USA Today reports, "Gonzales, who entered the Bush orbit when he served as the then-Texas governor's general counsel in the 1990s, never understood that being the president's lawyer and confidant are utterly different from being the nation's top law enforcement officer.

Bush's combative, bitter acceptance of Gonzales' resignation showed that the president didn't grasp the distinction either. Nor did Bush seem to understand what has long been clear, even to the president's Republican allies on Capitol Hill: His amiable friend wasn't just excessively loyal — he was in over his head in a sensitive job..."

Even before he became attorney general, Gonzales seemed more interested in justifying the administration's aggressive use of executive powers than in applying the law. As White House counsel, his legal opinions stretched the Constitution to provide a rationale for abandoning the Geneva Conventions, holding terror suspects indefinitely without charges, and stripping Congress and the courts of any right to review the administration's acts. Shockingly, he tried to get his predecessor, John Ashcroft, to sign off on legally questionable intelligence-gathering methods while seriously ill in a hospital."

Good bye Alberto Gonzalez. It's time to board the train with all of the other Bush-league minions who have since left the administration. Good riddance. For more on the article referenced above check out USA Today.

LiveSTRONG Challenge

I am personally a huge fan of Lance Armstrong and what he has accomplished as an athlete for himself, the sport of cycling and the fight against cancer. Today, the Lance Armstrong Foundation provides information and support for millions of cancer patients and survivors across the globe. Furthermore their goal is to unite people to pursue an agenda focused on prevention, access to screening and care, improvements of the quality of life of cancer survivors and investment in research. It is truly an extraordinary organization.

Each year they hold an event called the LIVESTRONG Challenge. The LIVESTRONG Challenge is the LAF's signature fundraising event. This series of walking, running and cycling events takes place in cities across the country, enabling anyone to support the LAF's mission to inspire and empower people affected by cancer. Choose your Challenge - walk, run, ride or volunteer; then choose your city: Portland, Austin or Philadelphia. You can become an individual LAF fundraiser or create a team of family, friends and/or co-workers. LAF will provide support through Challenge mentor programs, online Challenge tools and Challenge message boards where you can connect to fellow participants. If you can't participate, consider making a donation to an existing participant. Unite in the fight against cancer. Register today for the LIVESTRONG Challenge. Together we will make a difference. Check out the LAF website and educate yourself. See what you can do to help out, even if all you do is buy some merchandise, like some LIVESTRONG bracelets. Every little bit helps.

Top Secret Cheney

I read the following article from the Economist the other day about our lovely Vice President. It shows how screwed up this country and our political system is. Enjoy!

BEFORE the first American war against Saddam Hussein, when Dick Cheney was secretary of defence, he had to brief King Hassan of Morocco about the brewing Operation Desert Storm. As the meeting was about to start, the king placed a small silver box in his translator's hand and briefly spoke with him in Arabic. Mr Cheney asked what the ritual meant. The king replied that the box contained a fragment of the Koran and he was swearing his translator to secrecy on pain of death. Mr Cheney says he thought: “Damn, I need one of those.”

The vice-president is famously fond of secrecy. He stores his papers in man-sized safes and labels even unclassified memos “Treated As: Top Secret”, a designation his office appears to have invented, according to a recent Washington Post series for which Mr Cheney refused to be interviewed. Even with friendly journalists, such as Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, he is clam-like. Mr Hayes spent nearly 30 hours in one-on-one interviews with Mr Cheney for his new book, “Cheney: the Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice-President”, yet many of his queries were rebuffed. Mr Hayes asked: “Can you briefly describe what kinds of qualities you are looking for [in a new CIA director]?” Mr Cheney replied: “Probably not.” “I waited for him to continue,” writes Mr Hayes, “but he said nothing.”

Despite the difficulty of prising information out of its subject, the book is worth a read. It breezes through Mr Cheney's early life. He grew up in a Wyoming town so remote that he sometimes travelled nearly 400 miles (640km) to play high-school football. He rode a bicycle drunkenly down the stairs at Yale, and was kicked out for poor grades. He found himself, in his early 20s, alone in a cell after his second arrest for drunk driving, wondering what to do with his life. Then, after a brief academic career, he moved to Washington, DC, and found that he was really good at bureaucratic infighting. By his mid-30s he was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. Few men have risen so high with so much anonymity, noted the New York Times. Revealingly, he refused to accept the cabinet status that had previously come with the job. His Secret Service codename was Backseat.

By the time George Bush junior came to pick him as his running mate, Mr Cheney had been the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, secretary of defence under Mr Bush's father and CEO of a large oil-services firm, Halliburton. His gravitas and long experience inside the Beltway neatly complemented Mr Bush's shortcomings in both areas. It was only two days after the Supreme Court declared that Mr Bush had won the election of 2000 that late-night comedians started joking that the vice-president would be his nominal boss's boss. This remains a popular view. The Guardian, a British newspaper, wrote this week that there is a growing consensus in America that it is Mr Cheney who calls the shots in the White House.

Yet it is an exaggeration. As the Post put it, Mr “Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore.” (He did, though, take charge for two hours on July 21st when Mr Bush was sedated for a colonoscopy.) Where the two disagree, Mr Bush's views prevail, as they have on issues from gay marriage (Mr Cheney opposed Mr Bush's support for a constitutional amendment banning it) to sacking Donald Rumsfeld (Mr Cheney wanted his old mentor kept on at the Pentagon).

Working the levers
What makes Mr Cheney so powerful is that Mr Bush usually heeds his advice. Unlike most vice-presidents, he has no further political ambitions, so Mr Bush trusts him to say what he thinks, not what will appeal to future voters. Unlike his boss, Mr Cheney has a love of detail and a deep understanding of how the levers of power work, so he is adept, as the Post puts it, at serving up Mr Bush's menu of choices. Some critics think there is something inherently sinister about a vice-president wielding such influence. It is certainly unusual: countless former veeps have complained of the utter uselessness and frivolity of the position, or that it is not worth a bucket of warm spit (a remark ascribed to John Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice-president.) But there is no obvious reason why it is worse for a president to take advice from his deputy than, for example, from his wife.

The real beef with Mr Cheney is that so much of his advice has turned out badly. Toppling the Iraqi regime with only a vague plan as to what to put in its place has been the defining foul-up of the presidency. To Mr Hayes, Mr Cheney admits that it was a mistake to install a proconsul rather than putting Iraqis in charge of their own country from the very outset. But he makes no such concession about holding terrorist suspects in legal limbo at Guantánamo Bay or sanctioning torture to extract potentially life-saving information. Such things repel even America's allies, and Mr Cheney's quiet hand in them helps explain why his approval rating is even lower than Mr Bush's.

To some, the vice-president has become a caricature: a cartoon recently depicted him showing the Devil how to wield his pitchfork. More seriously, the Democrats' most-cited reason for not impeaching Mr Bush (as anti-war protesters on Capitol Hill this week were demanding) is that Mr Cheney would then become president. Mr Cheney, though, appears to care little about his critics. “Don't you think your book will have to be a hatchet job in order to have any credibility?” he asked Mr Hayes. What worries him much more is that Americans do not understand that “the alternative [to fighting in Iraq] is not peace.” The war on terror, he says, will go on “for decades”, and “the terrorists are betting that they can run out the clock on the Bush-Cheney administration and that it will be easier for them in the future.” A precipitate withdrawal might make that true, but Mr Cheney deserves his share of the blame for the state of Iraq today.

Arms Deal

Like every week day I woke up and got ready to work by watching the Today Show. They covered a story on how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were headed to Saudi Arabia to offer them an arms deal for support of the Iraq War and to show that the U.S. remains committeed to the region despite its problems in Iraq and the growing strength of Iran.

There is a bunch more to this story here, but seriously, do you need anymore to make any judgement of your own?

Should our country be offering arms deals to anyone, at all? Hmm, wasn't this type of action what aided the build up of Iraq and ultimately to two wars? Thanks Bush senior. I just don't understand why our country would do something like this with all that has happened to us since 9/11. DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. It also makes me increasingly sick to my stomach. Any one else have any thoughts?

Pencil Puppet Politics

Is the whole presidential campaign boring you like it is me? I mean I am personally counting the days until the end of Bush's term but the current candidates have been unbearably lackluster as of yet, which has done nothing to my sense of hope. I guess I should come out and inform you that I am a fairly liberal minded person but probably should be classified more as a moderate. I am also a registered Independent. However, I grew up in an entirely Republican family...who I now describe as fascist Republicans. Hah, it doesn't make them very happy. :)

Alright now that that is over with...so I was checking the political news on Yahoo! tonight found an interesting story titled "Pencil Puppet Politics." The article was on a guy named James Kotecki, a recent Georgetown graduate, political junkie, and former Congressional page that is basically at the same place I am at regarding the 2008 campaign...bored and pissed off. (Check out the article by going to http://potw.news.yahoo.com/ and search out "James Kotecki.") It is a pretty decent read and includes some funny clips.

The Economist describes James as "probably the world's foremost expert on YouTube videos posted by presidential candidates. He aggregates and responds to them here. He has, hilariously, been inviting candidates for interviews in his dorm room."

You have to check out his blog, which includes a great number of posts regarding his various appearances in media ranging from radio to television to print to the internet. Check out a few clips from his YouTube page below:

Live Earth

Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.

Live Earth will reach this worldwide audience through an unprecedented global media architecture covering all media platforms - TV, radio, Internet and wireless channels.

Live Earth marks the beginning of a multi-year campaign led by the Alliance for Climate Protection, The Climate Group and other international organizations to drive individuals, corporations and governments to take action to solve global warming. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore is the Chair of the Alliance and Partner of Live Earth.

Live Earth was founded by Kevin Wall, the Worldwide Executive Producer of Live 8, an event that brought together one of the largest audiences in history to combat poverty. Wall formed a partnership with Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection to ensure that Live Earth inspires behavioral changes long after 7/7/07.

Live Earth will stage official concerts at Giants Stadium in New York; Wembley Stadium in London; Aussie Stadium in Sydney; Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro; Maropeng at the Cradle of Humankind in Johannesburg; Makuhari Messe in Tokyo; the Steps of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai; and HSH Nordbank Arena in Hamburg.

Live Earth concerts will be broadcast to a live worldwide audience by MSN at www.LiveEarth.MSN.com. It will also be broadcast on XM Satellite Radio on channels 40-46.

With support from the U.S. Green Building Council, creators of the LEED Green Building Rating System, Live Earth will implement new Green Event Guidelines. All Live Earth venues will be designed and constructed by a team of sustainability engineers who will address the environmental and energy management challenges of each concert site, as well as the operations of sponsors, partners and other Live Earth affiliates. Each venue will not only be designed to maintain a minimum environmental impact, but will showcase the latest state-of-the-art energy efficiency, on-site power generation, and sustainable facilities management practices.

Live Earth is a project of the SOS campaign , which is using a powerful multimedia platform - films, television, radio, Internet, books, wireless and others - to move people to combat the climate crisis.

Educate yourself! Visit their website at http://www.liveearth.org/.

Sicko

Now this movie looks not only controversial but pretty damn interesting. What Republican would like to join me in seeing it?