Mitt Romney Either Forgot He Supports "Age Appropriate" Sex Education Or Figured No One Would Research A Fib

At last night's CNN / YouTube Debates Senator Barack Obama said in response to CNN;s Anderson Cooper's question about his views on teaching age-approrpriate sex education to children and Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's criticism of Obama on the matter, "Well, Mitt Romney supported age-appropriate sex education, so I don't know what the problem is."

Well, I do. Romney either forgot he did in 2002, or figured that no one would catch him telling a fib. That's a big mistake in an Internet society.

According to Jonathan Martin over at Politico.com, Romney "himself once indicated support for the same sort of sex-ed approach -- "age-appropriate" -- that Obama backs."

Martin reports that, "In a Planned Parenthood questionnaire he filled out during his 2002 gubernatorial run, Romney checked 'yes' to a question asking, "Do you support the teaching of responsible, age-appropriate, factually accurate health and sexuality education, including information about both abstinence and contraception, in public schools?"

Wow. It's also not the first time Romney was caught with his hand in the cookie jar on this subject, as Martin writes that Romney's support for age-appropriate sex education was caught by a rival campaign. But in the case of Obama, Romney's apparent fib didn't stop him from broadcasting it on his YouTube page. But now that the cat's out of the bag, Romney should appologize and come clean.

Shame on you Mitt. Not a good start toward the White House.

Esther and Anderson Cooper At CNN YouTube Debates

Esther and Anderson Cooper
Originally uploaded by breathinglife

Well I wasn't there, but the next best thing is having your question shown and these Flickr photos.

Esther and Anderson Cooper At CNN YouTube Debates

Esther and Anderson Cooper
Originally uploaded by breathinglife

Well I wasn't there, but the next best thing is having your question shown and these Flickr photos.

Here's my take on the event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqv91nfkYKk

..And my question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf1ZDTB5vYw

Zennie's Video Take On The CNN / YouTube Debate - Score The Debate For Barack Obama

New York Times' Kit Seelye Can't Get Her Black Guys Straight - I'm Referenced and Linked Twice In The Same Article!

Katharine Seelye a reporter for The New York Times wrote an article about tommorrow's CNN / YouTube Debates where she links to two of my videos twice in paragraphs close to each other, but fails to identify me as the same person!

This is both sad and funny. But it's mostly sad and not that funny. Here's the part of the article I'm writing about:

" Another asks the candidates if they would put their friends in important government jobs. “Or are you going to hire the best and the brightest?” he asks. “Or are you prepared to tell us that your friends are the best and the brightest?”

A black man standing in front of a check-cashing store asks the candidates how they would stop predatory lending in low-income neighborhoods. A college student wants to know if the candidates would lower the legal drinking age to 18 from 21.

Now if you click on each link, you'll discover that both lead to videos of me asking questions. In other words, she sourced the same person for two different points of information, but to the lazy eye and finger that would not bother to click on the links -- yeah, right, -- it looks like she's writing about two different people.

Nope. She's not.

Katharine, what's the deal? I've just got to ask why you would reference me twice in this way, one paragraph after the other? And why "A black man standing in front" of a check cashing center, when I wasn't even STANDING IN FRONT OF A CHECK CASHING CENTER. THAT'S A BANK OF AMERICA ATM!"

It just goes to show you how stupid racism is, in this case, institutional racism, where the person thinks they're doing no harm at all in reaching for a stereotype, even if the stereotype tells the story incorrectly.



Wow, this is terrible!

Now, you might be saying "Hey at least she noticed your videos." But that's not the point. It's the principal of the way "Kit" Seelye (as she's called) did it. The best way -- the most direct way -- would have been to write something like "And Zennie Abraham, a YouTube vlogger, has two provacative questions, ..."

Think about it. Read the story. She wrote the article as if I were two different people, rather than the same person. I can't help but wonder what was rolling around in her head.

Geez.

Mitt Romney Stands Next To Sign Mocking Obama / Clinton - Anyone Think He's Courting David Duke?

Former Mass Gov. Republican Mitt Romney's just stooped to an all time low for a politician in a Presidential campaign and it makes me wonder if he's watched George Allen Jr.'s "maccaca" speech one too many times.

Whatever the case, he looks pretty much not smart in the photo and the fallout from this isn't going away anytime soon.

CNN/YouTube Debates Current Statistical Breakdown As Of 10 AM Sunday

As you know, the CNN / YouTube debates is set to air tommorrow night and give the American public a window into, well, what American's thinking about. I'm a video presenter, having submitted seven clips, including the one that is part of the example video at youtube.com/debates I thought it would be fun to analyze the range of videos.

read more | digg story

CNN/YouTube Debates Current Statistical Breakdown As Of 10 AM Sunday July 22

As you know, the CNN / YouTube debates is set to air tommorrow night and give the American public a window into, well, what America's thinking about. I'm a video presenter, having submitted seven clips, including the one that is part of the example video at youtube.com/debates

I thought it would be fun and informative to cull through as many of the submissions as possible and find patterns.

Here's what I've learned.

First, CNN and YouTube have strict guidelines. They are as follows from the debates website:

Be original -- choose your own approach.
Be personal -- your perspective is important.
Choose your focus -- you can address one or all of the candidates.
Keep it quick -- your question should be less than 30 seconds (and, in the language of your choice).
Make it look good -- speak loudly and keep that camera steady.
Provide context -- in your question or video description, include your name & home town.
Please note -- all videos are subject to the YouTube Terms of Use.

The guidelines are rather subjective, save for one: "your question should be less than 30 seconds"

They're pretty serious about that one and to the degree one can pair down a video to get under this, it stands a better chance to be picked for the debate itself. I wondered just how many videos were over 30 seconds in length, so I counted them one by one. I came up with 631 submissions that were over the limit, and some were way over, like 3 to 5 minutes -- ok, just two of them. But that comes to 26.7 percent of the total and dropped the number of eligible videos to 1,649 as of this writing.

I next wondered how many of the submissions were by women, or had women in them as part of a group or couple. The number was about where I thought it would be. There were 551 videos that featured women or had women in them. That comes to 23.7 percent of the total, and that does include the videos that are over the time limit. That means about 1 of every four submissions was female. Ideally, since women are about 50 percent of the population, you'd like to see a video submission spread that reflects the culture. We're 25 percent off here.

Now the other question is how many people of color are represented in the CNN / YouTube Debates? Well if you really stop and think about it, that's a hard question to give a perfect answer to without surveying the people themselves. CNN / YouTube did not do this, so I had to use an "eye count" and that's a hard one because taking away someone like myself who's obviously black, how can you tell if someone's a mix of, say, Latino and Black, or any combination?

Well, you can't.

But it's important to try and gain some handle on this question of racial / ethnic representation, so you know what I did? I counted all of the obviously black and African American faces like mine. I came up with 157 people, or 6.6 percent, or to put it another way, almost 7 percent of the total number of submissions. I was also careful not to include people -- like myself -- who made more than one entry. There's one guy called "antmoe" that must have installed 15 videos -- I think he holds the record number so far.

So the 157 count is a good one -- no double counting.

According to the 2002 U.S. Census update, 13 percent of the U.S population was black -- and that includes children. This is 2007, of course, but we've got to go with the best data, and that's the best the country can do right now. But that comes to just over 1 of every ten people. We're at 7 percent -- almost -- here. But I'm going to give a different take on this, because again, according to the U.S. Census, 79. percent of the population lives in urban areas.

My point is that the real number that is of importance is the one that shows the racial composition of the 80 percent of the population that's in urban areas. It's really hard to get a good number which reports this for the whole country and not city - by - city -- WEIRD -- but I can tell you that the ranks of blacks and other minorities is greater and the city is also the place most likely to contain people who will make and upload videos.

What I'm getting at is there's not enough black and African Americans in the video submissions to really represent the population in my view. But it's getting better and I think it will improve and in a short time. What I do take from this spread of videos is that on the whole the population of them is closer to than the American makeup than I thought they would be. I'm really happy about that. Moreover, as racial and ethnic integration improves -- in other words, more people realize that racism is a mental illness and will not be racist -- the improving condition will be further reflected in the video program.

But that written, if we consider that about 50 percent of the U.S Black Population consists of kids, then the number of adult blacks roughly matches the percentage of participants in the debate - just over 6 percent. That's good, I think.



See, acts like the making and submission of videos for this contest are a cultural development. But if, say, only one part of the culture's doing it, that fact points to segregation of behavior and ideas. That's bad. The CNN / YouTube debates reveal that even though we still have a long way to go, we get better with each passing generation. But I think one short-term solution is in the "team videos" that are present in the contest.

"Team Videos" are where the username -- say DailyYonder is actually a collection of video questions by different people under one YouTube name. These group efforts present different people asking questions and the range is racially, sexually, and age diverse. It's really the one practice that has contributed to what diversity exists in the debate effort.

But what it says more importantly is the desire of a group of Americans to help level the field for everyone else. That's the beauty of this country.

1-18-08 -New Cloverfield Clues - J.J. Abrams' Slusho Movie

Or whatever the heck it's called. I just know that there's a new photo up at the 1-18-08 website. It's time is noted as 1:24 AM. So there's a pattern -- a story pattern developing here.

More info here.

CNN / YouTube Debate Question - The U.S and Hugo Chavez

This CNN YouTube Presidential Debate question stems from comments made by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last year. The video of President Chavez was a rare find and appears in this question clip.

CNN/YouTube Debates - Godzilla and Terrorism

The title of this question is dramatic, but give a listen and look and you'll understand. Also visit http://www.communitycounts.us and vote for this question when it appears.

Thanks!

TED SORENSEN - President Kennedy's Aide Compares JFK To Barack Obama - From New Republic Online

Is Barack Obama the next JFK?

Heir Time

by Ted Sorensen
Post date: 07.19.07
Issue date: 07.23.07

t first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy--the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom I worked for eleven golden years--seems notably different from the most interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator Barack Obama. But when does a difference make a difference? Different times, issues, and electors make any meaningful comparison unlikely. But the parallels in their candidacies are striking.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy and I embarked on a period in which we traveled to all 50 states in his long, uphill quest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. He was, like Obama, a first-term U.S. senator. But he was not yet 40 years old, making Obama, already 45, a geezer by comparison.

At the time, Washington pundits assumed Kennedy had at least two insurmountable obstacles. The first was his lack of experience, especially compared with the senior statesmen also seeking that nomination-- Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Stuart Symington. Kennedy acknowledged that his age and inexperience would turn away some voters. Obama, though older than Kennedy, is similarly dismissed by some today. But Kennedy noted in one speech that "experience is like tail-lights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going."



TED SORENSEN - PHOTO

Kennedy's second major obstacle was his heritage. Some said he had lost his chance to be president of the United States the day he was born--or, at least, the day he was baptized as a Roman Catholic. No Catholic had ever been elected president of the United States, and the overwhelming defeat suffered by the only Catholic nominated for that position, Governor Al Smith of New York in 1928, had persuaded subsequent Democratic leaders that it would be hopeless ever to risk that route again.

The conviction that no Catholic could win was greater, in that less enlightened era 50 years ago, than the widespread assumption today that a black presidential candidate cannot win. The subtly bigoted phrase most often repeated in that election year--by former President Harry Truman, among others--was that 1960 was "too early" for a Catholic president, that the country was "not ready," and that Kennedy should be a "good sport" by settling for the vice presidency. No doubt Obama will hear--or has already heard--similar sentiments about the color of his skin.

Even some Catholic religious leaders--who thought Kennedy was not Catholic enough, having attended secular schools and expressed disagreement with the Catholic hierarchy on church-state separation--opposed his candidacy. So did some Catholic political leaders who thought his candidacy might raise unwanted controversies or produce an unwanted rival to their own positions (much as Al Sharpton and Vernon Jordan may not initially welcome an Obama candidacy). But, in time, Kennedy's speeches and interviews strongly favoring traditional church-state separation reassured all but the most bigoted anti-Catholics. In the end, despite his ethnic handicap, Kennedy proved to be less divisive than his major opponent, fellow senator Hubert Humphrey. Obama may prove the same.

In addition to their similar handicaps, Kennedy and Obama share an extraordinary number of parallels. Both men were Harvard-educated. Both rose to national attention almost overnight as the result of starring roles at the nationally televised Democratic convention preceding their respective candidacies: Kennedy in 1956, when he delivered the speech nominating Stevenson and subsequently came close to winning an open-floor struggle for the vice presidential nomination with Estes Kefauver; Obama in 2004, by virtue of his brilliant speech to the convention that year in Boston.

Both also gained national acclaim through their best-selling inspirational books--Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, published in 1956, and Obama's The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006. Both men immediately stood out as young, handsome, and eloquent new faces who attracted and excited ever larger and younger crowds at the grassroots level, a phenomenon that initially went almost unnoticed by Washington leaders and experts too busy interviewing themselves.

Kennedy's speeches in early 1960 and even earlier, like Obama's in early 2007, were not notable for their five-point legislative plans. Rather, they focused on several common themes: hope, a determination to succeed despite the odds, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and confidence in the judgment of the American people. In sprinkling their remarks with allusions to history and poetry, neither talked down to the American people. JFK was so frank about his disagreements with the leadership of his Catholic "base" that one Catholic journal editorialized against him; Obama was equally frank and courageous with the Democrats' organized labor base in assessing the competitive prospects of the American auto industry in Detroit. Both were unsparing in their references to the "revolving door" culture in Washington.

On foreign policy, both emphasized the importance of multilateral demo- cracy, national strength as a guardian of peace, and the need to restore America's global standing, moral authority, and leadership. Both warned of the dangers of war: Kennedy motivated by his own harsh experience in World War II, Obama by his familiarity with suffering in all parts of the world. Both were cerebral rather than emotional speakers, relying on the communication of values and hope rather than cheap applause lines.

Perhaps most tellingly, both preached (and personified) the politics of hope in contrast to the politics of fear, which characterized Republican speeches during their respective eras. In 1960 and earlier, cynics and pessimists accepted the ultimate inevitability of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, much as today they assume a fruitless and unending war against terrorism. Hope trumped fear in 1960, and I have no doubt that it will again in 2008.



lthough President Kennedy became the breakthrough president on civil rights, health care, and other liberal issues, he was not the most liberal candidate for the nomination in 1960. His emphasis on the importance of ethics, moral courage, and a multilateral foreign policy made him--like Obama--hard to pigeonhole with a single ideological label. His insistence that the United States "must do better" in every sphere of activity, including its cold war competition with the Soviet Union, caused some historians to mistakenly recall that he "ran to the right" of Richard Nixon on national security issues, forgetting his emphasis on negotiations and peaceful solutions.

JFK's establishment opponents-- probably not unlike Obama's--did not understand Kennedy's appeal. "Find out his secret," LBJ instructed one of his aides sent to spy on the Kennedy camp, "his strategy, his weaknesses, his comings and goings." Ultimately, Kennedy was both nominated and elected, not by secretly outspending or out-gimmicking his opponents but by outworking and out-thinking them, especially by attracting young volunteers and first-time voters. Most of Kennedy's opponents, like Obama's, were fellow senators--Johnson, Humphrey, and Symington--who initially dismissed him as neither a powerhouse on the Senate floor nor a member of their inner circle. That mattered not to the voters; nor does it today.

Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner--and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.

Ted Sorensen worked with John F. Kennedy for eleven years, first as his senatorial assistant and then in the White House as his special counsel and adviser. He is presently working on his memoirs, to be published in 2008.