To Clear Up the Confusion about Obama vs. McPalin

* If you grow up in Hawaii , raised by your grandparents, you're exotic, different.
BUT IF...
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
BUT IF...
* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
BUT IF...
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
BUT IF...
* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive and next in line behind a man in his eighth decade.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
BUT IF...
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and then left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a true Christian.

* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
BUT IF...
* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.
BUT IF...
* If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude," with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

This really clears things up for me, you?

McCain Can't Multi-task?

Obama called McCain and suggested that they get together and focus on the economy. McCain said okie-dokie, but then suggested that they delay this Friday's first debate.

Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

In this day and age, if you can't focus on multiple things at once, then you aren't going to connect with the rest of us who are. In this country we have many issues that are coming to a head at the same time: poor education, faltering economy, war in Iraq (Afganistan), immigration, senior entitlements, health care and more.

Two years ago, "TIME" magazine's Claudia Wallis wrote an article about the wired age. In it she states, "Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once. Mothers have done it since the hunter-gatherer era--picking berries while suckling an infant, stirring the pot with one eye on the toddler. Nor is electronic multitasking entirely new: we've been driving while listening to car radios since they became popular in the 1930s. But there is no doubt that the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers, when it has become routine to conduct six IM conversations, watch American Idol on TV and Google the names of last season's finalists all at once."

Perhaps McCain needs to send Palin to the debate... after all, she needs to prove that she can run a family and attend to the needs of a country at the same time. Or is that attend to the needs of a family and run a country?

The "TIME" article continues, "That level of multiprocessing and interpersonal connectivity is now so commonplace that it's easy to forget how quickly it came about. Fifteen years ago, most home computers weren't even linked to the Internet. In 1990 the majority of adolescents responding to a survey done by Donald Roberts, a professor of communication at Stanford, said the one medium they couldn't live without was a radio/CD player. How quaint. In a 2004 follow-up, the computer won hands down."

At this point, McCain should know his agenda well enough to talk about it at any time and in any place. I'm tired of these so-called "debates" not really being a debate at all.

In the words of Mills Lane, "Let's get it on."

OK, back to the beatings...

I'm not one for negative campaigns ads, but I'm posting this one as an example of how an organization can successfully use video to achieve their goals (repost from The Agitators).

DISCLAIMER: I'm always hesitant to believe what I see because I'm too much of a relativist... there may have been reasons (or earmarks) to support action or inaction. First, watch the video:

The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has done well to tell their story:

1. GET ATTENTION: The headline does a good job of that, "Put Palin's Awful Wolf-Killing Record on Television."
2. STIMULATE EMOTION: The word "killing" always draws emotion. Killing animals even draws more ire. Their word selection is excellent: gunning, brutal, needless, indisputable.
3. REINFORCE WITH REASON: They use bullets (pun intended) to cover exactly why this is necessary. The bullets (pun intended) are the logical alibi for the emotional reaction that they've already created within the viewer. The bullets also reiterate what is said in the video.
4. CALL TO ACTION: It's simple and you can do it NOW. Now is always important and you'd be amazed at how many entities forget to ask for what they want. In this case, donate NOW!

At the time of this writing, I think they'd raised more than $600,000 even though their goal was $100,000. Now that's good use of marketing!

If you'd like to see the appeal, please visit the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund page.