Looking Inside.

Understanding consciousness today may be akin to gazing at the sea from Hellenic shores and predicting a round earth; we can approach the correct answer, but may well be millennia from confirming our theories. As each season passes handfuls of new imaging studies are published that provide sometimes astonishing and counterintuitive glimpses into the mind.

The standard view of consciousness, the one formed by experience rather than study, posits that human consciousness is the driving force behind our navigation of the world. That it is our conscious self that makes decisions, avoids conflicts and pursue goals. That when we sleep at night, our consciousness, and thus our Self, rests, while perhaps unnecessary and irrational- spurious- activity takes hold in the world of our dreams. This consciousness is one that is thoroughly humanized and embraces our belief in the uniqueness of experience and the primacy of the agency of (hu)man.

Yet, to me, it is becoming ever more clear that much of what we usually term as consciousness may be more of an illusion of control that aides evolutionary impulses. In this view, consciousness, rather than being the defining function of the brain, is merely another tool in the arsenal of human biology that allows us to navigate complex and dangerous ecosystems.

To move (somewhat) away from abstraction I’d like to discuss four recent articles which covered various new findings in brain imaging and physiology.

The first indicated that the perception of fatigue may be induced by a potential decrease in energy supply to the brain rather than an actual or impending lack of energy to the muscles. The experiment showed that by rinsing the mouth with sugars cyclists could improve their endurance. It is well known that the brain relies almost exclusively on glucose for metabolism while muscles have many potential sources of energy. How this ties into consciousness may be very interesting. We usually assume that the sensations that our conscious self receives are objective assays of physiology, yet in this case it seems clear that the brain/body senses an impending decrease in brain energy supply and sends the signal to our Self that our muscles are about to give. We, it seems, are fooling ourselves.

A second study, which was in reality a case study, indicated that we see more than we see. A man with two obliterated occipital lobes, the parts of the brain that receive direct visual input from the eyes, was able to navigate an obstacle course without sight, and could recognize the emotions on faces he could not see. He didn’t believe that he could do either of these tasks. His consciousness lost the ability to see, but the organism that he was retained certain of those abilities. There is no doubt that the ability to recognize emotion and avoid obstacles are intricately linked with our conscious perception of the physical world. And a child born blind would be unable to complete either of these tasks. Yet once we are up and running and fully wired as adults it seems that there is a lot that we see that We don’t see. Again, consciousness is the primary intermediate in ‘wiring’ the brain- linking a smile to happiness and a frown to despair, and recognizing that an object with density and hard edges should be avoided by our feet- yet it seems that once our conscious self has completed this wiring, our brain takes over some of these tasks, Us unawares.

When studying consciousness, and defining it the while, many have used attention as a surrogate for consciousness. In this view, when we pay heed to a certain aspect of our environment we are tuning our consciousness in on a given object. A recent study has suggested that attention, or concentration, has a physiologically defined set of parameters in the brain. It turns out that, and again here we return to the prefrontal cortex, when a startling stimulus passes through our field of vision we are biologically drawn to that stimulus. But if we concentrate hard enough we can maintain our attention away from that startling stimulus, this concentration manifests itself as cycling gamma waves in the prefrontal cortex. Two interesting corollaries to this idea include 1) the ability to induce this gamma wave cycling in mice with genetically engineered neurons and 2) the thought that meditation can enhance the conscious ability to concentrate. Whether this latter concept is a conscious induction of concentration or a basal training of consciousness is likely better answered by a Buddhist monk or urban yuppie. As an aside it is interesting to note that the author of a book on the subject, a Ms. Gallagher, said. “Multitasking is a myth, you cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” Given some of the above information and some to follow, I wouldn’t be so certain that multitasking is a myth. Perhaps expending consciousness on a many tasks simultaneously is impossible, but I’m not convinced that attention is the only player in ‘tasking,’ perhaps the main and the most efficacious, but certainly not the only.

The final set of studies that really set me on this particular writing binge involved scanning the brains of musicians during scripted verses improvisational playing. A certain area of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (here we go again), that is involved in planning and self control is deactivated prior to act of improvisation while activity in the medial prefrontal cortex was induced (inducted?). Interestingly activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain is often seen when a person is retelling a first person narrative story. A second study was done contrasting brain activity between improvisational melody and improvisational rhythm in classically trained pianists. Interestingly the same area of the brain, Broca’s area, that is involved in speech production saw a burst of activity in these musicians. Apparently (to me) these musicians already had a developed musical grammar and where creating new sentences according to that defined grammar on the fly. In this set of studies we see that a certain act, musical improvisation, can rely on various mental activities. I’m sure we would ascribe the same level of consciousness to playing a set piece and a improvising a new melody, yet it is clear that that consciousness that is extant is not precisely present in a the execution of the act, but at a different level of control, the level that ‘deactivates’ planning and ‘activates’ narration and personal expression.

Together these studies provide many interesting inroads into the meaning and nature of consciousness. Alternatively we see that: Our conscious mind is not the sole arbiter of objective information from other parts of the body but rather may sometimes be privy only to filtered information deemed adequate of conscious analysis; The brain filters and analyzes information unconsciously, garnering perhaps many things in an image or scene that we are unaware of, and when our conscious ability to recognize that image or scene is obliterated our unconscious mind still moves forward; Attention is a definable and physiological phenomenon that is amenable to study and modification, and that attention does not eliminate ‘extrinsic’ information but rather pushes it into the non-attended-to parts of brain function; Our conscious mind can act as a gateway to unleashing aspects of our unconscious mind, in the form of self expression and improvisation.

As a coda I would like to introduce the idea of dreams as the antithesis of consciousness, which is not to say the opposite. Dreams, sometimes remembered transiently or longer but often not, are sometimes thought to be the arbiter of importance of memory, combing through our minds to remove unneeded, nascent information while solidifying certain data that were repeatedly stimulated. Interestingly, there are drugs that agonize inhibitory neurotransmitters to produce amnesia and sleep (you may know Ambien). These drugs can have the unwanted effect of producing a waking sleep that includes people doing all kinds of untoward (and sometimes entirely quotidian) activities that are never registered to their memories. These drugs lead to an increase in stage II sleep but may entirely eliminate or significantly decrease REM sleep. A question: are these users of Ambien conscious during their woken sleep if it escapes entirely the purview of their memory. And what is to be made of the lack of REM sleep and the inability to remember entire, seemingly (to the outsider) conscious episodes of life.

A clear, defining expose on consciousness is yet impossible, but we can, using current technology, start to foment an image of our active mind through inference and experimentation, much as our forebears looked at the changing night sky and triangulated a planetary earth.

Natural Born Killers?

Riffing off the recent spate of publications regarding the dig of Homo floresiensis. The existence of an alternative hominid, or perhaps I should say another alternative hominid, in the path of sapient manifest destiny weighs heavily on our species own judgments of self.

We ought to consider the implications that the conquest of our ecological niche, at the expense of alternative homonid existence, has on our affection for foreign species, primate or otherwise. It is by now almost certain that Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis were contiguous in time and place over most of Europe extending to the Caucasus. It is now, to me, not unlikely that a similar interaction took place in Indonesia with our now deceased, diminutive friends. As research in this field of study progresses it will become ever more clear that neanderthalensis and floresiensis were sentient by any definition of the word and human by many definitions of the word. Art was in the domain of the Neaderthal, tools in the arsenal of the Floresian. Yet, historical reconstruction neglected, the interactions of modern sapiens with semi-intelligent or intelligent non-sapiens primates did not result in the preservation of those other species. Was there cultural transmission? Was there despair at the extinction of those other hominids? Was it a willed extinction? None of these questions can be answered, but we must face the reality that we prevailed, and are prevailing, in the niche that primates occupy on this earth.

But what to make of this? I will refrain from here waxing (wrong)philosophical about the necessity of a genetic ‘mean streak’, an evolutionary obliviousness. But there are a lot of people immune from reason, and maybe we have to conclude that maybe that’s what got us here in the first place.

Standing against followers in his own party

Among the exchanges in the final presidential debate on Wednesday was one that illuminates a recurring asymmetry in how people align within our two-party politics. McCain challenged Obama to describe an instance where he stood up to the Democratic leadership:

MCCAIN: You have to tell me one time when you have stood up with the leaders of your party on one single major issue.

OBAMA: First of all, in terms of standing up to the leaders of my party, the first major bill that I voted on in the Senate was in support of tort reform, which wasn't very popular with trial lawyers, a major constituency in the Democratic Party...I support charter schools and pay for performance for teachers. Doesn't make me popular with the teachers union. I support clean coal technology. Doesn't make me popular with environmentalists. So I've got a history of reaching across the aisle.

The list is not short for lack of further content. Obama was not popular with civil libertarians when he voted to legalize illegal wiretapping and give immunity to the enabling phone companies. His support for faith-based initiatives does not please secularists. His promise to violate Pakistani sovereignty under certain conditions does not encourage those who oppose invasions (though few such people seem to be around anymore).

In these cases Obama is not crossing the Democratic Party leadership. He's crossing major constituencies of his party's loyal base. That's the asymmetry. Over the summer, Republican social conservatives harangued the McCain campaign for not throwing meat to the bible-thumpers. And now the civilized wing of the Republican party is pushing back against McCain's new eclecticism and Palin's airheadedness. Conservative constituencies stay loud and make demands upon their leaders. The Democratic hordes stay complacent and docile, talking every four years about how this election, this time, is too important to demand more than a lesser evil. It's truly difficult to find mainstream critiques of Obama from his left.

This pattern has stayed true for at least the last 12 years. The long-term implications are difficult to foretell, but the short-term effects will start to take the shape of a string of disappointments, starting within Obama's first 100 days.

The Allure of Mystery

Obama has been consistently labeled as dangerous and unknown by the McCain campaign. They, I believe, seek to play on the Bradley effect and hope that a phrase like “thief in the night” and constant bombardment of xenophobic associations will arise subconsciously in November 4th.

This may work.

But to me, examined with full conscious intent, this only heightens my anticipation of a potential Obama presidency. You see I have recently been wary that rather than a van guard politician bringing youth and change to a nation, Obama was in fact what he so often seems: a gifted, if bland, politician recently converted to rank and file Washington politics. But the more I am told of Ayers the more I see potential in Obama. Ayers is interesting not as someone who founded the Weather Underground (of which I know exceedingly little), but rather as a leftist academic who attempts to achieve change in a huge urban education system. If Obama indeed is influenced by these views (rather than those of, say, say the republican president of Northwestern), then I think there is a great potential for significant and monumental change in this country.

And we have recently been given abundant verdict on the failure of our current, in a very large sense, direction.

Race effects

As the election approaches I'll be interested to see whether the Bradley effect, the gap between poll numbers and actual election results in races where one candidate is black, is in play. The gap has been a factor in a striking number of major races, especially through the 1980s and '90s, but has not been as clearly at work in more recent elections (though a number of those featured black Republicans, cases where many other weird effects are probably at work).

The Bradley effect is an index of the extent of subjective racism or overt prejudice, but also the degree to which prejudice is masked by political correctness--the result is race-anxious voters who don't want their anxiety to be known. If the Bradley effect is negligible this year on the way to an Obama win, it will be taken by a lot of people as one more sign that we are indeed a colorblind nation. The thing is that this elides over the objective component of racism, or "systematic" or "institutional" racism, in the admittedly tired vernacular of the left. I've written up some of my thoughts on the objective side of racism and the Obama campaign, and what I'll be particularly interested to see is how a possible Obama win will be integrated into the liberal narrative on race in America. It's a narrative that's been in flux--when Stephen Colbert chose colorblindness ('I don't see race. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police call me sir'...) as one of his tropes, he presumed a similar relationship to reality as he found with truthiness. But, especially as Obama went from a player in the primaries to the Democratic nominee, it feels like liberals really believe we're all judging each other according only to the content of our characters.

What's difficult to tell is whether the lack of a Bradley effect signifies more the eclipse of subjective racism, or the consolidated triumph of the ideology behind political correctness. If one is concerned about maintaining the appearance of a non-racist these days, it's much more important to observe PC strictures than it is to actually do or say anything that ameliorates racial inequality or anything like that. Similarly, Don Imus' nappy-headed ho comment arguably constituted, in the popular perception and as a matter of near-consensus, a greater violation of the American idea of racial harmony than did the racialized patterns of suffering left by Hurricane Katrina or the persecution of the Jena 6. In other words, in America these days racially-tinged gaffes are taken as truer indications of racism (or its absence) than any phenomena or patterns that require statistics or insight, rather than just one's ears, to notice.

One of the additional ironies of the Bradley effect is that it's measurement is made complicated by the fact that blacks are typically under-represented by traditional polling means, because of a relative deficit of stable addresses, phone lines, etc. It's almost like the continuing effects of objective racism make it harder to develop measures that might convince people that racism is behind us.

Top Lines of the Debate - A few are skewed ramblings!

by Nick Casady

M: Bailout - Let's call it a rescue!!!

M: Senator Obama, his cronies, his friends who gave out loans that would never be paid back.

O: Gotta Correct senator Mccain not suprisingly

M: Get rid of the Cronyism

M: What were the categories health? They are all important. Present day retireeess reach across isle russ fiengold ronald regan millions of new jobs clean coal tech, we can overcome, barak is putting 700 billion in the hands of terrorist organizations.

M: Not the overhead projector that Obama asked for

M: Nailing Jello to the wall. Lost 700,000 300,000 by small buisness. Obama will increase taxes 50%

Gold plated cadillac fantasy's i'm not looking for hair plugs

Did we hear the size of the fine (Acts like a weasel!)

We don't have time for on the job training my friend.

M: Requires a cool hand at the tiller

President Regan my hero

You know my hero is teddy roosevelt. Walk softly and carry a big stick!

I get follow ups too

O: The guy who sang bomb bomb bomb Iran

The Debate.

At this point in the election I don’t feel like either candidate will make a move that significantly alters the momentum at any given time. I don’t think Obama will slip up; I don’t think McCain is willing to take the gambles necessary to get him a big win (Although all this terror bating stuff comes close).

This debate was fine on substance. I am not a fair evaluator of that part of the debate because I’m not undecided: I firmly believe that the orientation of Obama’s policies are better, and the discussion between the two candidates usually supports my opinions, in my opinion.

So, the interesting part of the debate comes from the elements of the debate that arise out side of the repetition of campaign talking points.

The way time limits came up offers an interesting insight. Obama would defy Brokow in the interest of defending his position (or being impetuous) and, on a single occasion, actually changed the format of the question. You could argue that this is childish, to me, though, he came through as adamant and assertive. Subconsciously, I think that this is important.

McCain always reacted to situations with humor. It is the quality of his humor that interests me. He comes across as between snide and self deprecating. And I’m not certain about his wandering around while Obama was speaking. I thought it was kind of pointless and distracting, but certainly his advisors told him otherwise.

I’m not certain that these issues will be brought up by the general media. And if not, that’s great, because the coverage of this event ought to be reserved for those who have not decided, those who focus only on the substance.

Why We Lose

The unmistakable result of this “new” form of campaigning- the type that eschews substance for abuse, the one where Ayers and the Keating 5 take on more relevance than the currently plummeting DOW or crashing international markets -the unmistakable result of this is that the election will not have a winner.

As I see it there are two possibilities for this election, either Obama will win a sizable electoral college majority or McCain will sneak by in a close election. Either of these possibilities will leave a president without a clear mandate trying to bridge an insurmountable chasm between the reds and the blues.

If, for instance, Obama comes through the election with 50.5 of the popular vote and 2/3 – 1/3 split on the electoral college, he will be able to claim a clear majority and have what should amount to a mandate. Yet the current tack of the McCain/Palin campaign, while not clearly shifting the overall trend of the polls, is certainly radicalizing the GOP base, which, while shrinking, is ever significant, encompassing an easy 40% of the electorate and clear majority in at least 20 states. This base includes, to go along with many well meaning social conservatives, overt racists, unrepentant xenophobes, cloaked bigots and dormant fascists who have no problem using intimidation as a substitute for political discussion. An Obama victory would not yield a graceful stepping aside by this latter group and I can’t imagine many of these people sitting calmly along and abandoning their zealotry for cooperation.

A McCain victory, similarly, would create a huge swath of disillusioned voters, bringing the mistrust of the electorate to levels more befitting a third world dictatorship than a world democratic leader. After two elections that, to many, stunk of electioneering (between Florida in 00 and Ohio in 04), Obama losing a solid election lead in less than four weeks would never be seen as anything but the result of cynical demonization of Obama or an even worse rigging of the vote. I can’t imagine the uproar and anger a McCain victory would engender.

If you can imagine a peaceful outcome to the current political war, I would be interested in your comments. I for one, have trouble envisioning November 5th.

Class and Class

By Annita Achilleos

I just read an article in which the author was wondering when did the elite became a bad thing in America. She was referring to some instances during the VP debate in which Sarah Palin talked about being in the middle-class and being an outsider and hockey moms and all those things that I’m sure you have all heard so many times. Then the author mentioned how Biden referred to Home Depot presumably in order to show that he knows and understands the middle class and that he is not something alien. On top of this I had a discussion with an Obama fan that was saying that Obama looks more like a professor and someone that the average American won’t necessarily understand. In other words he looks too serious and too knowledgeable to be voted by the American people and that he needs to loosen up. I mean…are you kidding me? I am not saying the president should be cold and distant (the American people do not need a Putin), but the president needs to have some class. It’s the president of a country for god’s sake; he represents his whole nation on a political and a cultural level. Consider all the other world leaders and compare them to the current American president. The president cannot be a joke. George Bush has damaged this country already. Someone has to make things better and a middle class hockey mom that winks during what should have been serious debate definitely cannot!

Objectivity vs. Balance

An ongoing commentary of this election questions the role of the mainstream media in shaping the outcome. The McCain campaign has endlessly and brazenly accused the media of a bias towards Obama, decrying the disappearance of objectivity from political discourse.

In the McCain campaign’s estimation there is the neutral Fox and the biased everyone else.

I don’t want to interrogate the fundamental claim that any given news source is biased: I don’t have the capacity or the will to do this research. Rather, I hope to point out that being objective and balanced are not necessarily the same. For instance it is entirely objective to report Obama’s relationship with Ayers as innocuous while concluding that McCain campaign manager Davis had a monetary relationship with Fannie and Freddie. Now that one of those investigations turned out to be in favor Obama and the other largely incriminating to McCain doesn’t alter the objectivity of the two investigations.

However, the decision to publish the two reports could certainly show a imbalance in the NYtime’s agenda. This is the claim that McCain’s campaign is making while conflating the idea of objectivity and balance.

Playing the Wrong Game

By Aman Gill

Biden and Palin in Thursday's VP debate agreed on exactly two things. 1. They luuuuuv Israel (The love is not equal though; Palin's is much less elitist: "We will support Israel. A two-state solution, building our embassy, also, in Jerusalem, those things that we look forward to being able to accomplish, with this peace-seeking nation, and they have a track record of being able to forge these peace agreements." Expectations exceeded.) 2. They don't like married gays. We don't often get to hear about the shared foundations upon which we are governed, so I appreciated them making it a little more clear.

I'm not supporting either presidential candidate, so I look at this race sort of in the same way I might watch a football game featuring two mediocre teams--without much vested interest, but with some interest in gamesmanship, the battle of strategies and the exploitation of matchups. And I have to say that the coaching on Team Democrat is severely deficient, even looking at it from the vantage of their own interests.

26% of Americans approve of George Bush's job performance. 35% think Sarah Palin is competent to act as president, if necessary. Coarsely, somewhere in that quarter to third of the electorate is the base of the Republican Party. Within this fraction are the 13% of voters who think Obama is a Muslim. They probably think it's awesome that the two chants at the RNC were "USA! USA! USA!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" They're charmed by Sarah Palin's folksy vapidness, just as they were (and apparently still are), by Bush's.

They will never vote for Barack Obama.

Yet the Democrats won't cast them off in the way that the Republicans have disavowed the votes of anyone who identifies as, or to the left of, a liberal. Biden didn't invoke the large majorities in his favor on Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change and Palin's readiness to assume office? Palin's total discourse on Iraq was "surge" (repeated 10 times), "victory," and don't fly the white flag of surrender. She repeated her stupid line on climate change, that there's no point in focusing on causes, just solutions. Etc. But there's no offense. It's not an issue of weakness, it's that the Democrats are afraid of the right-wing echo chamber, and don't want to alienate the people who will never support them.

There's a history to this orientation that's based in the prostration of labor and black leaders to the Democrats, offering their people as a sacrifice, every four years, to the god of lesser evil. And they of course will not imperil their posture as the responsible party of American imperialism.

But even within this framework, they are a historically terrible party. They want the Republicans' god vote, ignoring the potentially powerful appeal that secularism could have over the electoral center, especially after the Bush years. They won't trash the ridiculous argument that a victory in Iraq is at all possible in the first war that was dumb even from Washington's own perspective. Biden wouldn't attack what I thought was the most notable passage from the debate last night, where Palin embraced the Cheney corollary to the doctrine of the unitary executive--which is that the executive is unitary, above the other two branches, except for the VP, who is outside of all three. The list goes on...

Any thoughts out there about what things might look like if the Democrats gave a Rove-style "fuck you" to the right third of the country?

Suicide is Painless

It will be an unprecedented political disaster if either candidate garners the support needed to pass the corporate bailout that was roundly defeated this Monday. By now one can make a convincing case that Nancy Pelosi, with purpose, derailed the legislation by giving the GOP no choice but to foot the blame and the bill.

In an ongoing commentary about the fecklessness of McCain’s acuity, he actually claimed credit for the passage of the bill prior to its passage. This move now looks even more damaging than it appeared at first. Not only did he try to broker a deal among his own party on a terrible bill, but his claim of leadership among his own cohort was called into question.

Now we hear word that both presidential candidates are redoubling their efforts to push forward a new version, perhaps lightly modified, of the bill by Thursday in order to claim credit.

The problem, not at all hard to finger, is that the public, with reason, unabashedly opposes this heinous piece of corporate welfare. A saw that has been honed in the past few days states that the only acceptable form of socialism in the United States is socialism for the rich. I would take it a step further and argue that welfare, too, resides in this same realm. A single mother relying on her will, energy and a bit of government support to survive is a leech; a failing bank, witless and morally spent, relying on exploitation, profiteering and a whole lot of government support to survive is rather a national imperative.

I am no economist, but the market failing in reaction to Monday’s legislative conscientiousness rather than as a result of the prior week’s failings, only furthers my claim that this is a load of artificial bullshit that is meant to scare the spineless bunch up on the Hill into repaying the lobbies that have provided endless bacchanals over the past decades. Now there are certainly legitimate concerns about the failings of cash in this strapped marketplace, but giving low interest loans rather than buying equity in the cornered financial institutions provides this fire of mismanagement with the fuel of billions of dollars to continue burning.

Who, then, pushes through a bill that is a mirror of Monday’s failed effort will die a sudden political death. I hope that over this oldest of new years a novel focus on this pending crisis may emerge.

To Be Avoided

Late update: I know all of you really appreciate my artistic ability, but this cartoon gains a little bit of meaning given Palin's recent response about what she 'reads' (by reads I think she means: throws in the bonfire).

Pakistan and unilateralism.

McCain pointed to a public statement Obama made regarding the US going into Pakistan as naive. On ABC Sunday morning McCain reiterated this debate point, framing such an action as 'unilateralism'.

It is my understanding that letting someone know you are willing to do it yourself if they are unwilling to comply, while not bilateral, is far better than not ‘saying it out loud in public’ and then doing it anyway. The latter, secrecy, is the current position of McCain and is nothing more than a continuation of current Bushian foreign policy.

Drinking Games

Take a sip of beer if:
McCain says "Financial Crises"
Obama says "Depression"
McCain says "Fannie Mae"
Obama says "Bailout"
Obama says "Change"
McCain says "Victory"
Obama says "terrorism"
McCain says "September 11"
Anyone blames "the media"
One candidate interrupts another candidate
One candidate compliments the other

Take two sips of beer if:
Obama mentions blogs
McCain says "surrender"
McCain mentions Jeremiah Wright
Obama says "more of the same"
McCain mentions Obama's "bitter" comment
Either candidate talks past their time limit
McCain refers to Russia, Georgia or the Ukraine
McCain says "the Surge"
John McCain asks the moderator to repeat a question


Finish Your Beer:
Anyone in the audience gets dragged out of the auditorium
Anyone says "occupation in Iraq"
Anyone mispronounces any word or name
Anyone uses a sports metaphor
Anyone attempts to speak Spanish to pander to Latinos
McCain says he would rather lose and election than lose a war
McCain jumbles Obama and Osama
Anyone says anything that gets bleeped out

Drink A Full Beer or take a Shot:
If McCain Doesn't show up

Who's Comin' With Me?

By Nathan Rodriguez

I think I'm going to be moving to Canada within the next year or so.

Some of that probably is based on my innate desire as a Hispanic to migrate to the north.

But seriously – if McCain wins in November, I don't think I can handle another four years of GOP rule. I'm utterly sick of the transparent bullshit.

If the way McCain has run his campaign is any indication of how he'll head his administration, we're fucking doomed. The man hasn't held a press conference in 40 days, while Palin has managed to avoid any questions — outside of Chucky Gibson and Fanboy Hannity — for almost four weeks. If she can't handle a press conference, she has absolutely zero business in the Oval Office. What we can judge her by, then, are her actions...and those are a little suspect, in refusing to release about 1,100 emails regarding the Trooper probe. Didn't we just go through this executive privilege claptrap a couple years ago with the whole Rove / Libby debacle?

It's astonishing and disheartening to think that John McCain, who just eight years ago, may have been a decent nominee for president, has turned into someone who will do or say damn near anything to get elected. It speaks volumes that the harshest interview he's faced has come from those geriatric vultures on The View. Say what you will about Obama, at least he faced (and ran circles around) Bill O'Reilly. Think there's any chance someone like Keith Olbermann could get within 50 feet of McPain?

Even more staggering is that we could have half the voting public honestly believe McCain knows his stuff better than Obama. Forget about that whole Iraq-Pakistan border gaffe — he just instinctively KNOWS foreign policy! Forget that McCain's top advisors have links to the embattled mortgage giants, or that he claimed to "not know as much" as he should about the economy — Obama's gonna raise your taxes!

But the real reason I'm so opposed to the idea of a McCain presidency is that he will be the oldest president elected to office. He has battled skin cancer four times, and both his father and grandfather died at a younger age than he is now.

This means one thing: President Palin.

This is a person who thinks drilling for oil is a "mission from God." She is redefining "Christian" to only mean "born again Christian." Her answers to Gibson's softballs on foreign policy were as shallow as a puddle of puppy pee.

I even endured part of Hannity's interview — a glorified suck and fuck — and she still kept uttering the same canned horseshit that makes you wonder if she even knows what the hell's coming out of her mouth. I swear, if she says "stringent oversight," or "change business as usual," once more, I'm heading straight for the goddamn border.

When she actually does get into specifics, she contradicts herself in such a way that even the most unseasoned high school open debater would call her on it: "I'm in favor of economic regulations," followed by a "Oh yeah, and I want to get government out of our lives."

Come again?

The absolute disrespect by the McCain campaign for our intelligence as sentient fucking beings is unconscionable.

They've tried to brand him as the candidate of "real" change, and say they're going to "clean up Washington," when homeboy has spent the last three decades in the corridors of D.C.

Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't feel like change when one party has held an advantage on the Supreme Court, has had a rubber-stamp Congress for the better part of eight years, and the O.G. Maverick, Bush, occupying the White House, with whom McCain has sided more than 90 percent of the time.

And the worst part is, their plan is working. They may just be able to keep this shallow enough that a good chunk of Middle America will once again fall for the same scare tactics and vote against their own interests, and wonder what the hell happened four years from now.

If that's the case, I'll probably be somewhere in Canada...or maybe a little island off the Florida coast (not Cuba).

I've put up with enough lies, enough deception, and enough double-speak for an entire lifetime. Obama may not bring the full change he so eloquently talks about, but I for one am ready for a president who doesn't embarrass me when he speaks, and one who actually talks to me like an adult.

And I'm starting to doubt that will happen anytime soon in this country because whether we're failing as concerned citizens or as journalists, it may be that on the whole, we're a hell of a lot dumber than Obama gives us credit for...so maybe we deserve McCain after all.

All I know is that my landlord should be watching TV on November 4.

Negativity

By Annita Achilleos

How far will this negative ad campaign go? (both of them actually). Can it get worse? Is this really the way to go in order to win an election? Both Republicans and Democrats have spent millions of dollars on ads that simply say how bad their opponent is and some times deliberately misinterpret what they say. Sex education at kindergarten? I mean…come on…the republicans think that the American people are 10 years old? This kind of misinterpretations just underestimates the intelligence of the American people. By using a phrase that has the word pig and lipstick Barack Obama was NOT talking about Palin. I still cannot accept the fact that there are people out there that even made this connection. The American people should not be portrayed as brainless and idiotic!