Practice what you preach

Here's an email I received a few days ago supposedly directly from Joe Biden. And he even knows my name! *fake sarcastic gasp*

Mehak -- 

The McCain campaign is on the ropes, and sadly it's no surprise they're responding with attacks and outright lies.

I've heard some pretty unspeakable things in the past few days -- deeply offensive smears that we'll hear over and over again until Election Day.

John McCain and Governor Palin are setting a new low in presidential politics with their dishonorable campaign.

Barack and I are out there every day fighting back. But we need your help.

Make a donation of $5 or more right now to show John McCain and Governor Palin that when they attack us with lies and smears, it literally makes our campaign stronger.

After last night's debate, it's clear why John McCain doesn't want to talk about the issues facing ordinary Americans -- especially the economy, which his own advisers admit he can't talk about without losing.

Barack won last night by offering clear plans to rebuild our economy from the bottom up, lower healthcare costs, and end the war in Iraq responsibly.

McCain tried to push more of the same disastrous Bush administration policies -- more tax cuts for the wealthy and giant corporations, deregulating the healthcare industry and taxing employer-based healthcare plans, and continuing to spend $10 billion a month in Iraq.

So what's left for the McCain campaign? Negative attacks and lies.

And it's even worse from some of the well-funded outside groups supporting McCain, whose sole purpose is tearing Barack down with smears.

Instead of focusing on the issues that really matter, our opponents are doing everything they can to encourage this toxic atmosphere.

We cannot stand by and let them get away with it.

We need to increase the cost of these desperate tactics for McCain's campaign. Please make a donation of $5 or more right now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/costofnegativity

Thanks for your support,
Joe

So, let me get this straight. Joe Biden, Obama's running mate, is emailing me smears, slurs and accusations against McCain with a FORM letter asking me to give them money to stop McCain from using smears and slurs.

What happened to the American dream?

Screw college, I want to learn something

There's this place at the corner of my mind where I want to care about what's going on around me. Where I want to understand what that funny haired man is blabbering about. I haven't felt that tug in a long time and I don't know what to do with it anymore.

I thought, ever since I graduated, that there was nothing left to learn, in the academic sphere anyway. Or, rather, nothing left worth learning. Now, I find myself wanting to learn, just for the sake of knowing more, but there's nothing. I want these people to teach me something new, tell me something I don't already know, but they don't. They tell me everything I've heard before. 

They give me long sets of numbers to memorize --the value of this, the rate of that--but they never tell me what the numbers mean, where they come from, why they are what they are. Isn't that what matters in the end? Knowing WHY rather than WHAT? But, in this world, it's all about the whats, isn't it? Who has the highest pay, who has the highest grade, who accomplishes the most, weighs the least...

And so my mind wanders. I go to class for the physical exercise I get walking there. I take the tests like a robot. Is that what our universities are producing? Breathing robots, number spewers that can't make educated decisions about the things that really matter to them? Is that really what I'm paying for? It doesn't seem right.  

And people on the street complain when people in the big house screw up. What else are they supposed to do going to institutes of higher education that don't even educate them? Don't teach them applications, only numbers. Lots of numbers.

It's a bird, it's a plane...no! It's Superbama!

At least that's what it felt like when  I went to go see Obama at Michigan State today. Don't ask me why I went. It was mainly because I felt I needed the exercise (that is, after all, why I go to class) and there's no exercise like walking straight down Grand River in the rain and getting splashed on by cars. In all seriousness, though, I went because I had heard he was a great orator and...I wanted to judge for myself. What I found was a little more than I had bargained for. 

The line, I expected. The hustle and bustle, I expected. The $2.00 bottles of pop...eh, chalk it up to capitalism. But what was with the metal detectors? And the frisking. Isn't that a little extreme? Plus they stole my water bottle. They didn't even steal the bottle on the plane (just made me dump out the liquid). But, for Mr. Obama, the whole bottle's gotta go. So much for his environmental initiatives. 

Those are still individualized complaints though. Specific to me. What really got to me was the way the whole thing was set up. It was a "get more voters" fest with undertones of a party. With "change" signs everywhere. There was music. And dancing. Like a "pre-show". Want to know what the "during-show" was? People were climbing on the porter potties to catch a glimpse of him. And one fell down (a potty, not a person). While someone was in it. Needless to say, I didn't stick around for the "post-show". 

I don't think people would have been more rowdy if Obama were 50-cent rapping away on that platform. When did presidential campaigning turn into a concert with the singer's lyrics focusing on issues he doesn't even support in reality (see bottle rant above)? I guess it was around the same time people started caring more about the VP's daughter's pregnancy status than the VP's leadership abilities...