Quote of the Day

…is from The Flash #1 from the New 52 series. The next 12 months are what it all comes down to. As graduation looms, the need to find a real job becomes urgent, and the uncertainty of the future becomes scarier, I find myself connecting to this quote very well.

Life is locomotion… if you’re not moving, you’re not living. But there comes a time when you’ve got to stop running away from things… and you’ve got to start running towards something. You’ve got to forge ahead. Keep moving. Even if your path isn’t lit… trust that you’ll find your way

In many ways this is exactly where I’m at in life. I don’t know what my future holds. For the past several years I’ve spent so much time running away from who I used to be, that I forgot to ask myself who I want to be. Now is the time to answer that question. Now is when I move to become something bigger than myself. I don’t know what my future holds, but I’m excited to find out. Fearful, but excited. 

––M

Sally Albright is Clueless

Sally Albright, a “comms strategist” and organiser, recently went on a rant on twitter yesterday in which she demonstrated that even young people can be completely out of touch and tone deaf to reality.

Albright took to twitter to defend the Democrats losing 1,000 seats under Obama and being wiped out at every level of government from dog catcher to the White House. Rather than admit what really happened, that since the 90s Democrats have sold out workers in exchange for corporate cash, pushing things like NAFTA, TPP, bailing out wall street, passing Romneycare, and repealing glass-steagall, Albright decided that the Democratic losses can all be attributed to voter suppression and gerrymandering. 

Albright concludes that it is not ideology that cost Democrats 1,000 seats, but just gerrymandering. This is such an out touch perspective it’s almost hard to believe this is a serious person and not a parody account.

Ideology is exactly the reason the Democrats are wiped out. When presented with a choice between a Republican and a want-to-be, mini-me, Republican lite, milquetoast centre-right hack, they’re going to go with the Republican almost every time.

Look no further than the 2014 Kentucky senate race. Allison Lundergan Grimes ran to unseat GOP senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Rather than run as a progressive, Grimes decided to distance herself from the progressive base and even from president Obama and ran to the right. During her campaign she touted her NRA membership and spoke of her strong support for the second amendment. She threw a bone to the neoconservatives by voicing her support for the Israeli ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system. She also came out against EPA regulations because they would harm the coal industry in Kentucky. Grimes ran with the strategy that corporate Democrats advocate for all the time; in order to pick off Republican seats, we have to run to the right and be more conservative. So how did it work out for Grimes? She lost to McConnell 56-40 and McConnell went on to become senate majority leader. 

Fast forward to just this week where Bernie Sanders delegate, Christine Pellegrino, a Democratic candidate for NY-9 State Assembly defeated her Republican challenger, running on a progressive platform modeled after Bernie Sanders. Trump won this district in November by 23 points. Imagine that, a progressive, running on a progressive platform won in a red district that Trump carried by a landslide.

Back in April, James Thompson ran as Berniecrat for a congressional seat in KS-04 which was vacated by Mike Pompeo (who became Trump’s CIA director) who won reelection in November by 30 points. Thompson ran on free college and medicare for all, and wouldn’t you guess, he took a district that went for Trump by 27 points, and came with 7 points of his Republican challenger with little to no help from the DNC or DCCC. Running as a progressive in a gerrymandered district, Thompson gained 20 points on the GOP. 

What happened to gerrymandering? A progressive nearly won in a gerrymandered red district that the Republican won by 30 points. Imagine if the DNC had lifted a finger to help Thompson. And in NY, a Berniecrat won an important state election in a strong red district. It’s almost as if running on a progressive platform, helps overcome gerrymandering. Which is exactly why it hurt the Democrats in 2010 and 2014, because they aren’t progressive. 58% of Americans support medicare for all. 60% of Americans support free college. Over 50% of Americans support making the minimum wage a living wage. Over 80% of Americans want to get all corporate money out of politics. The problem is, the Democratic party as an organisation, doesn’t support those things and that’s why we end up with Republican lite candidates like Allison Lundergan Grimes who lost to Mitch McConnell who was deeply unpopular in Kentucky by double digits.

So it turns out Sally, yea it is about ideology. Bernie Sanders just showed you that you don’t need the big donors or corporate cash, and with zero name recognition and a progressive platform he almost caught up to the person with the most money and the most name recognition (who went on to lose to Donald Trump). 

Finally Sally, if it’s truly not about ideology, if Obama’s policies were so popular and things are going so well, then how come Hillary Clinton, running as Obama’s third term, lost? If Obama’s policies were so great, Americans should have jumped at the chance to get an effective third term of those policies. The answer: They weren’t so great. Sure corporate profits were at all time high. The stock market was at record highs, but the only people that helps are millionaires and corporations. Middle class and working class people were still suffering as wages stagnated. If the ideology the Democrats are currently running on, centre-right corporatism, was really working then millions of people who voted for Obama twice, wouldn’t have voted for Trump. And even with voter suppression and gerrymandering, which I agree are big problems, it was the most winnable election, possibly ever. Why wasn’t Hillary 50 points ahead?! Run as a progressive and you galvanise the American people and can win in a strong red district. Run as a centre-right milquetoast neoliberal, you lose to Mitch McConnell by 16 points.

––M

Wisconsin Voter ID Laws & the 2016 Election

In my new article for IVN I discuss a recent story that has been essentially ignored by mainstream media outlets. According to a recent study conducted by Priorities USA, the voter-ID law in Wisconsin suppressed 200,000 votes in the 2016 election. Wisconsin was crucial to Trump’s electoral victory and he won the state by just 22,748 votes. 

With all this hysteria over ‘Russian collusion’ within the Trump campaign, it’s easy to overlook stories like this, as they don’t fit the narrative. Or the news earlier this month that the Supreme Court effectively upheld the lower court ruling that North Carolina’s voter ID laws were discriminatory toward African Americans. 

The reality is, Hillary’s lead in Wisconsin went up or stayed the same from October 27th to November 7th. So what was it? Comey’s letter? Wikileaks? A Russian conspiracy and collusion with the Trump campaign? All great attention grabbing headlines that make for good tv ratings, but perhaps a simpler explanation, at least for Wisconsin, might be voter suppression as a result of voter-ID laws. Occam’s razor.

My article can be read here.

––M

On Manchester and Ariana Grande

 

Just two months ago I was at Ariana Grande’s concert in Kansas City. She was amazing and I loved seeing her perform. Last year I was in Wichita to see her on her last tour. I am beyond saddened and angered over the news of the terror attack that took place last night at her concert in Manchester. Children, teens, and twenty something went to hear Ariana perform and instead the night was stolen by a gutless and miserable person who intentionally targeted young kids. Ariana is an amazing woman who spreads positivity and love. Her fans are an incredible group of people who have formed a family around their favourite singer. All she wanted to do was share her music with her fans and someone took that moment away. 

As 22 young people are now dead and some parents will now have to suffer the ultimate burden of having to bury their children, my thoughts are with Ariana and all those are were affected by this atrocious act of terror. One of the victims has been revealed to have been just 8 years old. This is not right. People should not have to fear for their lives when attending a concert, especially for someone who spreads as much love and kindness as Ariana Grande.

People should be able to attend the Boston Marathon, or enjoy the theatre in Paris, or a concert in Manchester and feel safe. 

As Theresa May said this morning, “all acts of terrorism are cowardly attacks on innocent people, but this attack stands out for its appalling, sickening, cowardice.”

My thoughts are with everyone in attendance and especially to the families whose lives have been forever altered. 

––M

Quote of the Day

….is from an article by Les Leopold at AlterNet in which he highlights the problem with neoliberals like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and why corporate Democrats are seen as out of touch. Here Leopold brilliantly critiques Obama’s acceptance of $400k for a Wall Street speech and the growing problem of Democrats taking corporate money:

What Obama, Hillary and the corporate Democrats have never grasped and may never grasp is that Wall Street’s riches come from strip mining of the rest of us. As hedge funds press companies for lucrative stock buybacks, workers suffer as wages and benefits are cut, and jobs shifted around the globe. Communities suffer as Wall Street helps the rich stash their wealth abroad, shifting the tax base to tapped out workers. States suffer as Wall Street firms extract enormous fees to mismanage pension funds and provide high fee financing for badly need infrastructure projects. Students and their families suffer as Wall Street gouges the young through student loans. Those trapped in the prison system suffer as Wall Street backed firms set up private prisons for profit.

That unbridled greed tells us why the richest country in the history of the world has a crumbling infrastructure, a declining middle class and the largest percentage of children living in poverty among developed nations.

Through financial strip-mining the wealth of our nation is siphoned into the hands of the few. Neither political party has done anything about it, except make it worse.

By Obama so clearly casting his lot with the Wall Street Democrats, a new path is opening for the re-election of Trump — the fissure of the Democratic Party. The more the Democrats try to become the party that raises “the most money in history” from Wall Street, the greater the odds that an independent candidate with muscle and resources will emerge in 2020 It’s not hard to imagine a Ross Perot of the left capturing 20 percent of the vote in a national election. Then Trump, like Bill Clinton in 1992 could win with only 43 percent of the vote.

The corporate Dems have lost 917 state and local offices since 2008. Yet they still seem oblivious to their Wall Street baggage. They think they can continue to line their own pockets and still be anti-Trump champions. They are convinced they don’t need to cut their ties to the super-rich because after four years of Trump mayhem, voters will come running their way. After all Hillary won the popular vote, didn’t she? So why change?

But what they continue to miss, and what “immature” Bernie people see so clearly, is that the country is hungry for politicians who give them a voice against unbridled greed. You can’t fight against greed when you become a symbol of greed itself.

I couldn’t agree with this more. The problem that Democrats have to address is that they are no longer a progressive party. At best they’re a centre-right party. The Democratic party is now about as progressive as Nixon–so basically not progressive at all. So all this talk about “we have to be more centre and move to the right,” if they’re already centre-right, then moving to the centre would actually mean moving to the left! 

The Democrats are suppose to be the progressive party and the party of workers, yet ever since rightwinger, Bill Clinton was president, all the Democrats have done is get in bed and make sex tapes with Wall street; passing the crime bill, DOMA, repealing Glass-Steagall, shipping millions of jobs overseas with “free trade” deals like NAFTA, deregulating the telecom industry, and pushing for CRA lending which led to the housing bubble. The Democrats have been completely bought by Wall street, billionaires, and corporations. Pretending Obama, who never prosecuted a single Wall street criminal, who only let the banks get bigger and richer without reinstating Glass-steagall, who pushed a job killing trade deal in TPP, and who saw the stock market success, which only helped rich people, and corporate profits hitting all time highs as his own success while middle class and working class families suffered, was a progressive is keeping the party back. Hillary Clinton was at best centre-right and at worst, she was a total rightwiner. On foreign policy, she’s basically a neocon’s neocon. 

The problem is corporate money and the Democrats have sold out workers in exchange for corporate money so much so that someone like Donald Trump can rise up and convince workers that he’s on their side, because the corporate Democrats have completely abandoned them. Bernie Sanders was right. The problem is money in politics and Hillary Clinton, who just launched a new PAC that will pour even more dark, unaccounted, money with no limits and undisclosed donors, and Barack Obama are clueless to this. Why? Because they aren’t real progressives. They’re centre-right corporatists who only see things through the lens of the establishment, 1%, billionaire, Washington elite class.

–M

Excited for the Wonder Woman movie

In just under two weeks, director Patty Jenkins, actress Gal Gadot, and Warner Bros. Pictures will bring to life, on the big screen for the first time ever, one of the most prominent, and my personal favourite, DC comics character, Wonder Woman. Last night the social media embargo on those who had already seen early screenings of the film was lifted and at 9:00 CT the Twitter reactions began pouring in. 

After three hits and three misses (granted I did actually like Man of Steel), it appears as though the DCEU has finally hit a home run with Wonder Woman. Reviews on Twitter last night were overwhelmingly positive with many calling it ‘by far the best DCEU movie so far’ with others comparing it to Marvel’s, Captain America: The First Avenger, saying that Wonder Woman does for the DCEU what that film did for the MCU. 

Forbes contributor Mark Hughes said the film is, “everything you want in a #WonderWoman movie & more.” Of Gal Gadot’s acting, Alisha Grauso of Movie Pilot News wrote, “Gal Gadot is absolutely phenomenal as #WonderWoman. She KILLS it!” Rachel Simon of Bustle, tweeted that the film is, “really damn good” concluding that she, “loved every minute of it.”

Overall, the first reactions to Wonder Woman offer high praise of the film and the direction the DCEU is taking.

Last night at around 9:05pm I let out a large sigh of relief after seeing the initial Twitter reviews. I have been excited for this film since I saw the first trailer that was released last summer at San Diego Comic Con. I knew a few years back that the movie was coming but truly forgot about it until I saw the trailer on YouTube. Since last summer I have taken it upon myself to read every Wonder Woman comic I can find. As of today I have read just about every solo title comic since Perez. Naturally, she has easily become my favourite character, unseating Batman from the top spot. Needless to say, thus I have a lot invested in this movie and knowing that the first reviews are overwhelmingly positive allows me to sleep peacefully. I won’t be in for another Batman vs Superman or Suicide Squad where it gets a ton of hype and the trailers are great, only to be largely—bitterly disappointed when I finally see the movie.

It’s really important for me that Wonder Woman does well. She’s such an important, amazing, and inspiring character, not just for girls but for everyone. What made me fall in love with this character was not that she was a hot, slender, brunette, who runs around in a bikini (she doesn’t even wear that anymore). It was her strength, her courage, her compassion for humanity, and her unwavering belief in love and in people and her ability to bring out the best in others. And the fact that she’ll kick your ass when she has to–that’s also pretty awesome. 

As Gail Simone, who wrote one of the best Wonder Woman stories of all time, The Circle, once said, “If you need to stop an asteroid, you call Superman. If you need to solve a mystery, you call Batman. But if you need to end a war, you call Wonder Woman.” And how fitting that this film takes place during World War I. 

I knew going in that I wouldn’t care what the critics said about Wonder Woman. They don’t know her like the fans do. But knowing the positive reactions to early screeners gave the movie, makes me even more excited to see the Amazon Princess take the world by storm.

–M

Supergirl Rebirth vol. 1: Review

I just recently finished rereading Supergirl vol. 1: Reign of the Cyborg Super-men. I originally read this arc in single issues and just the other day bought it in trade paperback. After reading Supergirl New 52, The Adventures of Supergirl run based on the tv show and being a huge fan of the tv show, Supergirl has easily become one of my favourite characters. I read the one-shot for this series way back in August and really enjoyed it and saw it as a great kickstart to what I thought would be a great series. 

The writing of Steve Orlando is strong throughout this arc and he did not disappoint as the story was very engaging and easy to follow. That said, I do agree with some readers that the story seemed a bit too drawn out and slow paced. However, I tend to credit that to the fact that Supergirl only comes out monthly as opposed to Detective Comics or Action Comics which are released every other week. A month is a long time to wait for a new issue and I think that’s what contributes to the notion that it’s too slow. Rereading it in TPB I found the story to be a perfectly fine pace.

One thing that did take a bit of getting used to is the difference between Kara of the Rebirth universe from the Kara of New 52. New 52 Kara (which was one of my favourite titles of the N52) was edgy, fierce, strong, and had a lot of attitude. She was more of a punch first and ask questions later kind of person. This Kara, is very different. That’s not inherently a bad thing and in fact in many ways it’s a good thing. The Kara of Rebirth much more reflects the Kara of the tv show (although in the comics she’s a teenager, in the show she’s in her mid twenties). We actually get a lot of great elements from the tv show in this comic, such as; the DEO, the Danvers, and Cat Grant. Unlike New 52 in a lot of ways, this story has a lot of emotion and more compassion to it. (Not to say N52 didn’t, but this is a different way of showing it). We also get a lot of personality from Kara, so the character development is done nicely.

The art also took a bit of getting used to and not sure I entirely like it but it doesn’t take away anything from the story which is, though very simple, very compelling and engaging. Though it’s not my favourite story ever, it definitely was a good read and a good place for people interested in Supergirl to start.

7.5/10

––M

Mnuchin’s 21st Century Glass-Steagall is Just More Deregulation

Today, the Intercept is reporting that the Trump administration is set to go back on yet another campaign promise. This particular part of the campaign was so groundbreaking that many in the Republican party were not only shocked but dismayed that it made it all the way into the GOP platform. The particular section of interest here lies on page 28 of the 2016 Republican platform which reads, “We support reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which prohibits commercial banks from engaging in high-risk investment.” 

Today in a senate banking committee hearing today, Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, again articulated that the Trump administration is in support of instating a 21st century Glass-Steagall act. However, one caveat is that Trump administration’s vision for a 21st century Glass-Steagall does not include separating commercial banks from investment banks–otherwise known as the entire point of Glass-Steagall. 

So once again, the Trump administration says one thing and then proceeds to do something very different. There is no real way to have a true “21st century Glass-Steagall” without the fundamental principle of creating a wall of separation between commercial and investment banks. Mnuchin was then justifiably grilled by senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for his inconsistency and apparent misunderstanding of what Glass-Steagall means; “So – in favor of Glass-Steagall which breaks apart the two arms of banking, except you don’t want to break apart the two parts of banking […] This is like something straight out of George Orwell.” 

Worse still, as the Intercept noted, earlier this week, Tim Pawlenty, head of the Financial Services Roundtable (an industry lobbying group) told Bloomberg News, “The administration’s view of a modern-day Glass-Steagall is a two-tiered approach to regulation in which smaller banks would receive some regulatory relief.” In other words, Pawlenty said that the Trump administration’s view of a 21st century Glass-Steagall includes further deregulation. 

Not only does Mnuchin fundamentally not get what Glass-Steagall was and what any modern revitalisation of it must include, namely, separating commercial and investment bank, but the administrations approach seems to be simply pushing for even MORE deregulation of the banking industry and just calling it “Glass-Steagall” and hoping no one pays attention. Sad!

–M

The Most Important Class I’ve Ever Taken

The following is a portion of the final self reflection paper I had to write for my Coms 342 (problem solving in team-groups). Our assignment was to reflect honestly and thoughtfully on how we perceived our performance throughout the semester, and to reflect on what we learned and any personal growth experienced. This is what I wrote:

Spring semester 2017 could be easily summed up for me as the single worst semester I’ve ever experienced in my college career. Right from the jump I found myself behind in classes, performing poorly, and overwhelmed by classes and the daunting reality that a year from now I would have to be finalising plans for my departure from KU. Different people handle this kind of pressure differently. I personally, handled it exceptionally poorly this semester. This was by far the busiest semester I’d ever experienced and I was completely throw off and never got a good handle on anything. Yet despite all that, I often found solace in Coms 342. Not because I inherently loved the material, not because I felt that I learned much of anything, not even because I necessarily enjoyed the class itself, but because it was easy to get through. The reality is I did not have to do much in order to get out of this class alive. Once I realised that to be the case, I took advantage of it and in some ways I’ll admit, perhaps a little too much so. 

The two main reasons I took this course were a) because my friend took it last semester and said it was perhaps the easiest class he’s ever taken, and b) I’ve taken Coms 130 and Coms 210 and enjoyed both and figured I’d take this one. In fact, when I first enrolled at KU back in the fall of 2014 I declared as a communications major, believe it or not [on a side note; after this semester, I changed my major back to communications]. As far as this class is concerned I did actually enjoy it, though not necessarily for the reasons one might expect. I mostly enjoyed it for the social aspect. In terms of people watching, this class was a great spectacle to observe. One quality I have found that I possess is the ability to read a person and figure them out within the first meeting. After three and a half months, I feel I had the people in the class figured out. Whether it was the ditzy sorority girl who didn’t take herself seriously enough, the cute blonde who clearly spent way too much time at Sun Tan City, or the overly eccentric guy who tried way too hard to be funny and instead ended up just being really awkward, I feel this class really brought out my more intuitive side. I’ll leave you to put the faces to the descriptions. And then there’s me. As far as what I brought to the class, I would best describe myself as, the guy who had a lot of potential but quickly figured out he could breeze through without much effort and relied too much on quick wit and his, at times, lofty vernacular.

In truth, I learned far more in this class about myself as a person and my attitudes toward higher education, and my future than I did about any of the course material. Yet I think that ultimately is more valuable than anything the book could have taught me. To be quite honest I still don’t actually know what this course is called, I just know it as Coms 342. One thing I think I definitely took away from this class is that working in groups is overrated. If I remember correctly, the book stated that working in groups is necessary for many things. I tend to disagree. In fact, in my opinion, working in groups is not only in many instances superfluous as a means of achieving a goal but often is counterproductive to that goal. One need only look at congress to see that working in groups often ends in worse results. That doesn’t mean I never like working in groups, but that they need to be efficient, and my group was not. 

[Since in the next few sentences I name and discuss my group members specifically, I refrain from posting it]

What I got from this class ultimately was a lot of personal growth rather than direct knowledge. I’ll be honest I can count one hand the number of things I learned or that stuck with my from the book. What I think this class did very effectively though, was put people in real world situations and test their ability to handle them in an environment where the risk was minimal. I think it’s safe to say that no group was perfect or had flawless dynamics. And I believe each member of each group walked away with what may seem like a useless ‘easy A’ class under their belt, but later on will learn from their experiences and see that this was in fact a very good test run for how the professional world works. When we leave KU, we don’t always get to pick who our group members are. We don’t pick where we live based on where our friends live. We don’t sit next to someone in an office because we’re best friends but because we have to. Whether we become friends is entirely up to us and in many cases we don’t end up becoming friends. As you stated, when you picked the teams, you did so in a way that would be challenging for everyone involved and that would require each and every person to step up and take their own responsibility. In most cases this worked (or at least appeared to have worked). In the case of my group, it didn’t. In fact the complete opposite happened.

Yet despite that, I will walk away from this class with much to build upon. In many ways this class is more usefull than any class I’ve taken here at KU. By that I mean it presents people in a real life situation and requires them to lead on their own and be productive and produce something with little instruction. It forced us to work with people we don’t know and in some cases may not have liked. It forced us to work with people with ideas and personalities entirely different from our own and it required that we be responsible for getting things done ourselves. These are all very real world scenarios and things most of us will have experience again someday when we leave KU and enter the professional world. No history class is going to prepare us for that. No math class or foreign language or any other tedious and ultimately useless (insert subject)-studies class is going to give us experiences like that. This class, whether that was the intention or not, did. At least for me.

During this class, via the strengths finder assignment I discovered that my top five strengths are; communication, maximiser, adaptability, input, and competition. While I don’t necessarily disagree that those exist as strengths of mine, I remain sceptical as to whether they are the top five. In terms of how each of these were brought out by me throughout the semester, by and large they weren’t. Had my more competitive edge come out, we would have had an event. Not only that, we would have had a more successful event that any other group and had that not been the case I would have been very upset. Yet for some reason, that never manifested. (Though I suppose knowing that currently one of my friends in the class has a higher percentage than me does infuriate me to no end). Input didn’t really have much of an opportunity to play itself out this semester and mainly the only things I gathered were my internal profiles and judgements on everyone else in the class. Adaptability I suppose was exhibited by me in the sense that a certain member of my group took it upon herself and decided to leave everyone in the dark for most things and as such I had to pretty much adapt to everything regarding our presentations. Communication was probably the only trait that really came out this semester which is fitting since it was a communications class. That particular trait however was more personal in that it regrettably came out not so much during group presentations or group dynamics, but in the strengths finders reflection paper, the Hunting Ground reflection paper, and the written event proposal. Essentially anything that involved writing in this semester I tended to prefer and based on the results I can say generally excelled at. One thing someone wrote in our group paper is that despite my having communication as my top strength, I did not use it in terms of contacting the Care Centre or setting up connections between our group and Rachel Gadd-Nelson. However, I would contend that that is not what Strength Finder’s means when they say communication. What she took it to mean was that I’m a well connected guy who likes to reach out and make deals and network with people. What I took it to mean, based on the book and what Strength Finder’s actually says, is that I like to talk and communicate, verbally or written with people and enjoy relaying information and discussing things with people. That I’m able to effectively present ideas and communicate with others in an efficient manner. In that sense, I think that did come out well during the semester, though admittedly not as well as I would have hoped as far as the presentations went. Again, being left in the dark about our presentation was not helpful in that regard.

While on the surface it is easy to say that throughout this course I was lazy, took the easy way out, didn’t put much effort in, and checked out 3/4ths of the way through, I contend that I did take away a lot from this class, but in a much bigger and broader sense than the syllabus intended. What I got out of this class was a experience that will prepare me for future situations just like this one. I took away a lot of lessons about myself, about what to expect in the future and how best to handle such situations so that they don’t end up the way this one did. Did I really learn anything as far as the course material in the book goes? No, not a thing. Did I still find this to be, in hindsight one of the most useful and beneficial classes in the long run that I’ve taken? Absolutely. As I said, memorisings dates or equations or verb forms doesn’t help anyone prepare themselves for the corporate world. This class provided us with a real challenge and hit us with the reality that life is not college. In life we don’t get pick our own groups, and we don’t always like our groups, and things don’t always go the way we want them to. Yet this, while it may be easy to gloss over as ‘that class I took where we played with legos and just watched Ted Talks and Community’ in reality gave us real life experiences that we will no doubt see again down the road in our lives. And when that happens, I’ll at least be able to look back and say to myself, “well, It can’t be any worse than my Coms 342 presentation.”

• • •

[This was pretty self-deprecating and in many ways was perhaps overstated. Even my instructor told my group we were too hard on ourselves. That said, it cannot be denied that I did not put as much into this class as I know I could have. Part of it stems from the fact that it just was not a hard class in the slightest and as such, I didn’t need to. But nonetheless, I meant every word I said in terms the personal growth I experienced, and what I ultimately took away from this class. Despite all the downfalls in our group projects, and despite having a member drop the class early in the semester and another member being on the football team and contributing less to the group than our member who dropped the class, I still managed to get an A in the class. As I stated, after all the drama and everything that has happened over the past 3 years, I ultimately decided to change my major back to communications. In many ways, I’m now right back where I started three years ago. Funny how life has a way of bringing us back. After switching to journalism for a quick minute, and then to religious studies and flirtations with graduate school, and then my quick fling with history, and then back to religious studies with no graduate school intentions, I’m now right back where I very first started. Except this time, I have something I didn’t have last time. A sense of myself and what I want. Now I know what works for me and what doesn’t. I know so much more about myself now than I did when I arrived at KU three years ago as a gawky teenager who wore too much black  and thought Bacardi Superior was a classy drink. In a way I’m meeting myself for the first time and now it seems life is giving me the chance to go back and make things right. We’ll see how it goes, but after all that has happened during the last three years, I’m very optimistic about the coming years. Of course there is still much work to be done and steep hill yet to climb, but as the saying goes, “life’s a climb, but the view’s great.”

––M

 

Hillary’s New PAC is Everything That’s Wrong With Politics

Recently Hillary Clinton decided to come out of the woods in order to launch a new PAC to raise money for ‘the resistance.’ Prior to this Hillary had only come out to warmonger when she supported president Trump’s airstrikes in Syria, only to lament that he may not have bombed enough, and when she took full responsibility for her loss to Trump and then proceeded to read through a litany of excuses. 

To no one’s surprise, Hillary’s new PAC entitled, Onward Together has met harsh criticism from progressives who have nicknamed it, Owned Together. Once again, corporate Dems get it wrong. The problem with politics is money in politics and corporations and billionaires buying elections and politicians. A huge reason for why she lost is because of her massive Wall street ties and her Super PAC funding taking hundreds of millions of dollars from mega-donors.  So what does she do? She launches a Super PAC that will be spearheaded by billionaire and mega donor, Haim Saban. 

Also to no one’s surprise, Hillary’s new PAC breaks one of her campaign promises to “end secret, unaccountable money in politics.” That certainly doesn’t help the narrative that Hillary is dishonest and untrustworthy. As Thomas Hawk at IVN writes, “On Tuesday, The Campaign Legal Center released a statement expressing its disappointment that Hillary Clinton’s new 501(c)(4), Onward Together, will not commit to donor disclosure.” 

The Campaign Legal Center stated it its press release that the nature of Hillary’s new PAC, “would break the spirit of her own promise by starting a new dark money group to allow her to raise unlimited funds from secret donors.” 

So once again, here are corporate Democrats saying one thing and doing the other. The last thing we need is more corporate money influence and certainly more Clinton influence. What a perfect way for Hillary to hijack the ‘resistance movement’ and make it about herself, by starting a resistance PAC that will pour massive amounts of corporate and billionaire money into the system. 

––M