A recent story on NPR explains the race to win over Wood County in Ohio between the presidential candidates. As we discussed in class the other week about how important Ohio is to the election with David Schultz, specifically to Republicans, according to the article, what are your thoughts on who has better chances. The article interestingly explains "Obama's Edge."
posted by Jordan Paul @ 10:41 PM
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I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Commitment to Community Keynote Address yesterday featuring Professor Michelle Alexander. I enjoyed her speech thoroughly. I think she was well spoken and well researched. Even after her speech, she was able to give valuable information in her answers to the questions asked during the Q&A time.
I found her argument to be compelling and thought-provoking. It made me question myself and the factuality of the stereotypes I may be guilty of holding.
Her argument which I found to be the most interesting and persuasive, I saw as a perfect response to the Amazon reviewer, Firestarter, whom we discussed in class on Thursday. It was that according to Michelle Alexander, the greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it is driven by crime and crime rates. Basically that people, meaning black men, are committing more crimes then ever before. But she argued that the facts do not back this myth up. Crime rates have been fluctuating over the time that incarceration rates have sky rocketed. In fact, currently, crime rates our at an all time low.
I found this to be incredibly relevant to our discussion on Thursday and that this may have changed my own feelings about this topic as well from how I felt on only a few hours before.
How do you all respond to this argument or any others she made?
And in response to some students feeling as if this speech wasn't relatable to all of us, I'm not sure that it was meant to be. If we were all inner-city, African American teenagers, I have a feeling that we would feel incredibly close to this issue. It is not something that affects most of us, so therefore we don't have very strong feelings about it. I think that with issues like this and others that directly effect only one group, it is simply a matter of empathy in order to feel its relevance and importance.
I would be interested to hear other opinions about this as well.
posted by Anonymous @ 10:45 AM
2 Comments
Hey all!
I was just wondering how many of you went to commitment to community. I went and personally didn't really enjoy it. There were many people on my floor that felt the same way also; that it didn't really relate to all of us. I thought that she portrayed her feelings and beliefs as facts. Yes, she did have good statistics, but she made them seem to her audience different than what the statistics actually meant. What were your thoughts and views?
posted by Anonymous @ 9:37 PM
1 Comments
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/voter-id-laws-elections_n_1915571.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
Supposedly ballot counting this year is going to be more tedious due to the excessive amounts of provisional ballots due to new voting laws. Provisional ballots are for people who go to vote but live at a residency that they are not registered under, didn't bring the proper id, or went to the wrong polling place. They say that it could take days after Election Day for any results to finally make it through with a provisional ballot. There is fear that an election like the 2000 election may occur again where the winner, George Bush, wasn't announced until later. If the election is close this year it means that provisional votes will be taken very seriously.
posted by Anonymous @ 10:55 AM
1 Comments
What do we all think of the way President Hanson has handled the stance on the amendment? Do you think that the students should be protesting? Personally, I believe that the university did the right thing in backing away from the issue as not to alienate anyone. If the university would say no, the say yes people would be alienated and vise versa. Here, the university choses not to take a stance to not say a statement that the whole student body doesn't all believe in. If the university would take stance, what would it do? That would not convince anyone to vote either way. Wouldn't it be more beneficial for the protesters to actually go out and inform the community about this? What are your opinions?
posted by Anonymous @ 8:48 PM
3 Comments
http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/24/politics/campaign-wrap/index.html?hpt=hp_inthenews
Lately, it seems like Romney has been getting killed. Romney has been losing both in the polls and fundraising to Obama, and neither of those are helpful as he tried to win over key swing voters in key swing states. My main question is how does this affect the Romney campaign's effort in swing states. I see this influencing swing voters in two ways. The first is that it reinforces the image of Romney and the Republican Party as eternally critical of Obama. While this doesn't invalidate Romney's argument, it can hurt Romney's image. The second is that it broadens Romney's message from being too focused on just the economy, and shows that there may be some sort of foreign policy philosophy should Romney win the White House.
posted by Anonymous @ 11:18 AM
1 Comments
I think by now most of us are aware of the old main protest that many Hamline students are organizing for Tuesday the 25th at 11:00. This came in the wake of a mass email from president Hansen about Hamline's stance on the controversial marriage amendment. The university took a neutral stance on the issue and this angered a lot of students. So the two questions i want to ask are what are your views on this protest and how do you think social media affected the response and organization of the event. Personally i think this just shows the power that social media has as just a mass organizer. Regardless of your view of the protest, it only took hours for hundreds of people to know about it. I'm curious to see how parties and interest groups use this power to their advantage in the future.
posted by Anonymous @ 10:45 PM
5 Comments
I think this election is going to possibly change the rate of younger voters because it deals with a lot of modern problems that effect the younger generations. Though it the political laws that affect younger adults are always presidential, the fact that the "vote no" law has raised so much political awareness, it has definitely made the younger generation aware of the political things going on. I think that Obama is just a younger president with a younger family and he naturally just aims his views towards the younger generations. It seems to feel like the generations of children are getting older and older faster. Politics is introduced more often in schools and I feel like the younger generation will get more involved. The fact the political race is so interesting and controversial also interests our generation. At least it interest the political junkies like me! Do you guys think that if Obama wasn't who he was, the age he is or the race he is, that people would even vote as much as they do now?
posted by Anonymous @ 11:10 PM
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This blog belongs to "Through the Looking Glass," a first-year seminar at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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