CNN / YouTube Debates - Senator Joe Biden Answers My "In God We Trust" Question

This was my question number 36 in the list of videos presented at the CNN / YouTube Debates:

The cathedral behind me is the perfect backdrop for this question. This quarter reads "United States of America." And when I turn it over, you find that it reads "liberty, in God we trust." What do those words mean to you? Thank you.

Falcons News Conference On The Michael Vick Issue

I'm watching Atlanta Falcons' Owner Arthur Blank, General Managr Rich McKay, and Head Coach Bobby Petrino talk to the media about the Michael Vick issue.

If you've not followed this, Vick's indicted for being involved in felony dogfighting. This press conference is for the Falcons; heads to explain to the public how they're dealing with this.

To me, it seems as if Arthur Blank's forced to walk a tightrope between supporting Vick and not upsetting the activitist animal rights organizations that have been crawling all over them.

More soon..

Hillary's Flip Flop - Senator Clinton Backs Off On Promise Of New Leadership

At Monday's CNN / YouTube Debate, Senator Hillary Clinton stopped short of saying she would talk to Third World leaders like Hugo Chavez, explaining in a complex way that she would send diplomatic envoys to do this. By contrast, Senator Obama expained that he would send a message that he was willing to have dialog with leaders we don't currently have a great relationship with.

After the debate, some have tried to paint Senator Obama as less experienced than Senator Clinton because of the debate. While that's inaccurate, another story has emerged that paints Senator Clinton in the position of flip-flopping. In the article below, she says President Bush should talk to leaders like Hugo Chavez! Morover, she said this on April 22nd of this year.

Read!

Clinton Blasts President Bush's Foreign Policy
http://wcbstv.com/us/local_story_112220939.html

(CBS/AP) DECORAH, Iowa Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday criticized President Bush's foreign policy, and said if she were president she would do things differently, including beginning diplomatic talks with supposed enemies and sending envoys throughout the world.

"I would begin diplomatic discussions with those countries with whom we have differences, to try to figure out what is the depth of those differences," said Clinton, who spoke to about 1,000 people at Luther College in Decorah in northeastern Iowa.

"I think it is a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people. You don't make peace with your friends -- you have to do the hard work of dealing with people you don't agree with," said Clinton, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

Opening talks with other countries doesn't mean the U.S. won't defend its interests whenever necessary, she said, "but what it means is that we should discuss other routes before we decide we're going to pursue military options.

"We cannot provide the leadership we need unless we are willing to try engage the other countries," she said,

She dished out plenty of criticism about the war in Iraq, and said when it comes to Iran, the U.S. needs to engage those with the real power -- the clerics.

Of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad she said: "He's like their front man, he's like their puppet. He goes out and gets people agitated and says things that everybody responds to, but he's not making the decisions. The decisions are being made within the alternative government of these clerics.

"We have no idea of how these people think, we have no contact with them," Clinton said, arguing that she's advocated for years to have a process of diplomacy with Iran.

"If we ever have to use force against any country, it should be seen as an action of last resort, not first resort," she said.

YouTube's Nathaniel Krefman On Barack Obama and "A Call For Change"

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.