I’m just hoping and praying that the violence doesn’t pick up too much before the election to really interfere with it. I think an election with less of a visible US troop presence will be able to have a lot more support from the general public.

As a citizen of the state of Illinois, home to Abraham Lincoln, I would be proud to accept any and all prisoners from our current conflicts in Illinois prisons. For too long our country has operated outside the rule of law with respect to those who have wronged us. We have laws in place with which to punish them, and if we ever hope to regain the trust of the world we must use them. The first step is to find a place within the bounds of the US to house our most dangerous criminals, and we have at our disposal an empty maximum security prison. The citizens of that town seem happy to help out. Once in place we can bring them to trial and finally have justice done. This country has waited for too long, and the rest of the world begins to doubt our sincerity.

Thank you for your attention in this matter,

Moonglum

p.s. Ignore Mark Kirk, he seems to prefer keeping one prison empty while the rest are overcrowded, when opening this one, while providing local jobs could also relieve some of the overcrowding in the rest of the prisons in Illinois. How this reduces our safety I have no idea.

My favorite item though? Mr. Obama has also threatened to veto any attempts to salvage an early version of a new presidential helicopter that the administration canceled. That’s walking the walk.

Thoughts?

I’m sorry, but if this guy is an ad expert and an iconography expert he knows exactly what he is doing, and it is playing on the base fear of the “other”. He is “different”. He is not like what has gone before _in this country_. He is _not us_. This video has nothing to do with iconography, and is full of misdirections and lies. The W disappeared for four years? Please. The DNC isn’t using the presidential seal? That’s because it is ILLEGAL to use it for anything other than official government business. The eagle is flying away? The eagle is ALWAYS flying, for the same reason that the donkey is kicking, it makes the icon more active and exciting. Heck, it’s flying away in _the presidential seal_ as well!

As for the O icon continuing to be promulgated, every official speech the president has done has had the presidential seal on the podium. His weekly podcasts used to be branded with the O, but the day he became president they were rebranded with the presidential seal. This iconography argument is a thin veneer for trying to brand the president a different from all the others, and different from us. And that is where my fear for the racial thing comes in.

I hated George Bush, but at the end of the day he was my president. (If anything the argument against him was that he was _too much_ like us.) This line of thinking and talking is what is driving the far right to “mobilize for action”. This causes people to yell at the town halls and show up with guns at Obama’s speeches. By painting him as on par with the epitome of evil, the right is slowly building up the idea that ANYTHING is acceptable in opposition to him. This iconography video is just more of the same. Sarah Palin’s death panels and Rush Limbaugh saying he has brown shirts. That crazy Baptist saying it’s OK to kill Obama because he supports abortion. Right wing (birther) blogs say that he actually is hitler and is going to round up and kill 6,000,000 jews. People showing up in town hall meetings, or filling up message boards with Obama and Hitler comparisons when the rest of us are trying to talk about healthcare. This causes me to turn into a knee-jerk liberal.

Which is really frustrating, because there is actual discussion that I would like to be able to have about things like economic reform and healthcare reform. Important questions, like what would a public option mean? How would it operate? And if we don’t have one, how can we guarantee that the health insurance companies can’t go on abusing the middle class like they already have been? And if we decide that everyone should have health care, how are we going to get the 40,000,000 people who aren’t covered, covered without a public option? But when I go to a town hall meeting, or a website, and someone comes out with “Obama is Hitler!” it makes me immediately jump to his defense. Because at the end of the day, even though I may disagree with him on some items, like George Bush, he is my president. And that path leads to the end of social discourse.

And I think that is where the difference lies. It feels (to me) like it was easier to have discussions about the ramifications of Bush actions than it is about Obama actions. I suppose it could just be that he is actively trying to be more accessible, and thus the conversation is similarly louder. For example, there weren’t any town halls on the decision to invade Iraq, but the probably would have been pretty tense if there were. But a final note is that Obama gets four times the death threats than Bush did. It just seems unlikely that that comes from policy differences alone. I find it hard to believe that more people are violently opposed to health care than to torture. And much easier to believe that a general culture of hate and painting the black president as different from us has a lot more to do with it.

Second, and by far my favorite, is a “reading” of the beat poem that is Palin’s speech, as read by William Shatner. Oh yeah.

So it appears that someone who just lost his job is complaining that telling the truth risks national security. Really? All this sounds like is sour grapes. He should just be thankful that Obama isn’t charging anyone for crimes committed.

I understand that some secrets are needed, but I really do fear when every little item is classified for “national security”. And Obama is just continuing this trend with (thankfully at least) a few exceptions.