Saturday, September 6, 2008

HOT or NOT: The Week-In-Review

And just when you thought that the “Week-In-Review” was no more, it’s back and better than ever (well, I can’t promise that)! This has been quite a convention-ful week. Let’s take a look...

HOT: Diversity. Though speakers at the Republican convention stressed that they are in-touch with “real Americans,” the sea of white faces in the audience told a different story. At the Democratic convention, Blacks made up 25 percent of the delegates at Invesco Field, black musicians Stevie Wonder and John Legend performed and vendors sold T-shirts with slogans in Spanish. With racial minorities set to be in the majority in a few decades, Republicans need to rethink their strategy to avoid possible extinction.

NOT: Presidential elections = Personality contests. Um, can we please not decide another election based on “who do you want to grab a beer with?” If that’s the basic qualifier, then make it Daniel Craig and (instead of a beer) a mango mojito please. Seriously, while Republicans continually push McCain and Palin’s “character,” we still know very little about what issues, policies and reforms that their administration would implement.

HOT: Community Organizers. After numerous assaults on Obama’s work as a community organizer, a coalition of community organizers across the country launched the Web site OrganizersFightBack. What Palin didn’t know was that Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. Boo-yah.

NOT: Unemployment. What everyone seemed to miss this week was news that unemployment has climbed to a 5-year high of 6.1 percent. Worried about the economy and their own business prospects, employers cut payrolls by 84,000 in August, marking the eighth straight month of losses. Unemployment rose among almost all demographic groups, but women were hit hardest, with a rise equal to the high for the last downturn in September of 2003. Oucher.

HOT: Reformist Image. As John McCain replaces his campaign strategy from “experience” to “change,” the battle of the “Reformists” is on. Hey, I guess if you can’t beat the strategy, join it. Sigh.

NOT: Invoking Racist Code Words. Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland described Barack Obama as “uppity” on Thursday. For decades in the segregated South, “uppity” was a word applied to African-Americans who didn't stay in their place. Westmoreland, who was born and raised in the south, recently issued a statement saying, “I’ve never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense.” Really now?

HOT: Voting. Since the last federal election in 2006, the Obama campaign’s voter registration efforts have added more than 2 million Democrats to voter rolls in the 28 states that register voters according to party affiliation. Voting: So hot right now.

And - of course - check out Our Fabulous Video of the Week:

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