If The Truth Fits

When I stayed up late last week watching the drama unfold in the U.S. election, I was keeping up with the opinions of people that weren’t holograms by seeing what all the Americans that I follow on Twitter were saying. It was a fun way of gauging the zeitgeist in America at the time, I think that all but one of the people that I saw tweets from were Democrat/pro-Obama, so naturally they were pretty excited. One thing that I did notice was that when John McCain gave his concession speech (which was admirable considering it was way past his bed-time) lots of people commented on how gracious his speech was, and all of a sudden he’d managed to elevate himself above the negative campaigning that had kept his campaign wading in the mud for the past few months.

It was in that moment I realised that if we had been watching ‘McCain the loser’ for the past year that a lot more people might have wanted to vote for him. For me, we were seeing the real John McCain in those few minutes for the first time in well over a year, the John McCain that I actually thought would actually make a pretty good candidate (and a pretty good President) when I saw him on a few Daily Show interviews and also in a couple of articles I read online. That McCain was a man that I could respect because of the content of his character and the way that he held himself, after he sold out his own beliefs it felt as if I was being forced to respect him because he is a war hero (respect he obviously deserves, but I did feel it was rammed down our throats somewhat).

It made me wonder who would be President elect right now if McCain had stayed true to himself throughout the campaign rather than pandering to the interests of people that he wouldn’t have necessarily seen eye to eye with a few years ago. I understand that the fine art of compromise is all part of the political game, but if you bend over backwards for everyone then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that you don’t have too much of a spine, and if I know Americans, that is not a quality that they particularly care for. Hopefully now that the election is over the McCain of a few years ago can return and do some good, not as much as he would have achieved if he had become President, of course, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want all of that “saving the world” pressure that Barack’s under now anyway.

Of course, I’m pretty sure that if JM had spent a little more time thinking up his pick for Vice President beyond “oh, she looks nice” then things would have been a bit closer, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have been more interesting.

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Okay, I know I’ve said more than once on this blog that us here at Pop Vulture don’t want to officially endorse one candidate or another, not that we’d expect it to sway you in any way, if the blog from a clothing company is going to decide which candidate you’re going to vote for, it might actually be a good idea if you stayed home on election day, and perhaps for a lot of other days too. That said, I’d be very proud if some of the things I’ve written over the past couple of months, and some of the stories I’ve linked to, actually did help to form your opinion and guided you through the extremely complex and important process of deciding who to pick. Or, failing that, just pick the person with the best hair, that almost always works.

That whole paragraph was basically a pretty long-winded way of saying Pop Vulture have released a t-shirt (the one in the picture accompanying this post, surprisingly enough) which features Barack Obama. So, yeah, we’re kind of endorsing Obama. The t-shirt could have just as easily been made with a John McCain image, but I’m afraid that Barack has already pretty much sewn up the graphic design vote. In my other job, writing about t-shirts and hoodies on Hide Your Arms, I’ve been sent e-mails about many, many Obama t-shirts, some well designed and some not so well designed, but I haven’t been sent a single e-mail pointing out a t-shirt supporting the Vietnam veteran, and since I place a massive amount of importance on t-shirts (hey, they’re my life), I think that is a pretty telling statistic.

The t-shirt is based upon the very famous series of prints done by Andy Warhol of Marylin Monroe, a style which has been reused countless times since the white-haired artist popularized it. I think its a very good way of portraying Barack Obama, pointing out the way that he has come to have a foot in both the worlds of celebrity and politics. The McCain campaign tried to publicize that as being a bad thing, but to me that smacked of them saying “why the hell would you want to vote for him? Because he’s popular? Because people like him? Are you a moron?” Just because someone is famous does not mean that they’re the same as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, its a link that makes a few leaps of imagination for me to fathom, but I guess that the insinuation that Barack could become distracted by his status of being a ‘cool’ world leader is far more important than whether its actually true or not. Yes, Obama gets endorsed by celebrities all the time (don’t worry McCain, you’ve still got Chuck Norris and Heidi Montag!), but its not like you see him going out to brunch with George Clooney and then swinging by the Pitt-Jolie’s for dinner so that they can all talk about how awesome they are.

Let’s hope that when November comes around Obama doesn’t suffer a similar fate as the subject of Warhol’s orginal prints (I’m talking about a political death, by the way) and also that his fame lasts for rather more than the 15 minutes that is so often talked about when Andy Warhol is brought up.

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I know its an incredibly self-centered way of looking at things, but I decided that I was only going to start caring about this whole global financial crisis/meltdown/disaster/recession/crash/doom when it started effecting me, and up until now I’d been doing okay. Since oil prices had dropped I was actually paying less to fill-up my cute and fuel-efficient euro mobile (it has a 1.1litre engine, which I assume most Americans would feel would be underpowered even if it was just for a smoothie blender), food prices seemed to be dropping in the supermarket, and I even dropped a jeans size, I’m not sure if the last one is connected to the economy, but since everything on the news seems to be related to finance, I presume that it must be.

And now, when I thought I could just hide under a rock about the economy (ironic considering people have lost their houses and would look forward to living in a cave), it goes and starts to effect me. ME! The audacity!

The pound, which had enjoyed a towering position of the almost laughably weak dollar for many a year, which was part of the reason why I started buying t-shirts from the USA, then started writing about t-shirts, which in turn led to me spouting all kinds of opinions and commentary here at Pop Vulture. Basically, the dollar being weak has a lot to do with who I am and what I do. Today, the pound hit a five year low against the dollar, currently sitting at around $1.69:£1 at the time of writing. That means that when I move to Philadelphia in December, all of a sudden I’m actually going to have to think about the money I’m spending, when it was $2:£1 I thought I’d be dining on filet mignon every night, and laughing at my co-interns for not eating caviar at lunch!

When I arrive in the US, George Bush will still be the President of the USA (so at least I get that fun) but in January either Barack Obama or John McCain will be sworn in as President, and let’s be honest, it’s probably going to be Obama, will be sworn-in, and they’re going to have a lot of work cut out from them fixing this terrible mess, in addition to all the other messes that need to be fixed from George W.’s eight year reign of terror. During my quick bout of research, I can’t find a handy checklist which shows how each man will save the economy, but I have found an article that has a few ideas in from both men. McCain has suggested that the government buy bad home-mortgages and then re-negotiate them at lower prices, which should play well with everyone that bought a mortgage they couldn’t afford. He also “called for legislation suspending a requirement that investors age 70 1/2 begin to liquidate their retirement accounts.” That means that people wouldn’t be forced to sell their stocks when they’re worth so little just because of their age, which should play well with Florida.

Obama wants “a temporary extension in an expiring tax break to let small businesses write off the cost of many new investments immediately, rather than over several years.” That should play well with people that own small businesses and people that work for small businesses that are worried about their jobs. Following the business theme he wants to “extend the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program to help small businesses that cannot access other sources of capital” which seems reasonable. But if those small businesses do have to shutter their doors then he also wants expiring unemployment benefit to be extended.

For me, none of those suggestions can get use out of this economic funk, they seem far too focused on certain demographics, far too political, and if $700 billion of bailout money couldn’t fix this mess then I severely doubt that these voter-pleasing but not economy-soothing measures are going to have all that much effect.

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Guess what subject I still don’t understand? The economy, stupid! I thought I’d had it all figured out, the bailout bill would pass, the economy would stabilise somewhat, the banks would be more confident and have less fear of lending to each other, and the world wouldn’t be completely doomed and I wouldn’t have to start stockpiling turnips for the winter because my money is worth less/nothing/going to be replaced with Chinese Yuan (please delete as necessary relating to when you read this article). Clearly, that hasn’t happened, as the markets are continuing to tumble like people from Gloucester chasing a wheel of cheese down a hill, which sounds a lot more entertaining than the stock market, but I’m pretty sure that more people are getting hurt on Wall St.

After the Chinese milk scandal, which has seen some 53,000 people people ill and caused the death of four infants (that we know of, who knows what the real number is), the Chinese government has seen fit to issue official limits on the amount of melamine (the chemical which caused all the problems) that can be used in baby formula. I guess this is the second time that I’m accusing the Chinese of closing the gate after the horse has bolted after that mining corruption scandal, but its pretty amazing that its taken them this long to sort out how much, if any, melamine can safely be put in the formula.

Apparently Barack Obama ‘pals around‘ with terrorists. That’s the latest monumentally important debate point raging amongst the media. Not how they’re going to fix the economy, pull out of Iraq, lower crime rates, stop the prison population from continuing to rise, or deal with the myriad of foreign policy situations that the US finds itself embroiled in on a near weekly basis. Oh, and John McCain might be corrupt. It’s getting really hard to see the issues on the road to the election with all this mud being thrown at the windscreen.

Oh, and the debates between Obama and McCain are really, really boring. All they do is go over the talking points, pretend to agree with each other, avoid the questions, act all folksy (okay, not as much as Sarah “Don’t ‘cha know” Palin), and then stand around shaking hands for a while afterwards. It’s boring, where’s the zazz? Where’s the interrogation? Where’s someone calling them out on all the ‘facts’ that keep getting cited that simply aren’t true. There’s a news presenter here in the UK called Jeremy Paxman who is respected by pretty much everyone because he really goes for the jugular. Not because he’s after the fame, just because he doesn’t let them get away with lying to him, I think that CNN, MSNBC or maybe even crazy-old Fox News should have borrowed him from the BBC to try and get some real answers out of politicians for the upcoming election. If you’re wondering who I’m wittering on about, try checking out Paxman on YouTube if you’re in the mood for seeing some politicians getting a well deserved nailing.

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Fridays seem like a good day to do a roundup of stories from the news, its the end of the working week, so it just feels right to try and tie off a few loose ends before we start fresh on Monday, and when I say fresh, I mean bleary eyed after spending far too much of my weekend fighting what will surely be a losing battle with a bar (the battle is trying to drink the whole bar by the way). Let’s kick off this news round up!

1. Apparently there was some kind of a debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? I’d forgive you for not knowing about it since the media don’t really talk about the upcoming election all that much. Apparently, it was actually the most watched vice Presidential debate ever, drawing in 70 million viewers, which was actually more than the amount of people that watched the debate between the two men going for the top job, as Obama and McCain could only manage 52.4 million, although I guess that since they’ve been on debates before people know what to expect when they see those two, whereas Biden and Palin are a rather more unknown quantity, Palin especially. I get the feeling that most people tuned in just to see yet another locomotive crash into the train wreck that her media exposure has been so far, and whilst she was by no means an inspirational orator, she didn’t mess up, she read from her note cards and added in folksy sayings to prove that “she’s a real person,” which is probably the best that the Republicans could hope for. Side note: what’s the deal with this ‘real person’ schtick, why on Earth would anyone ever think that the best person for the job would be someone ‘normal’ that could easily be their neighbour? Don’t they want someone that’s well qualified, intelligent, and would actually be a good candidate for the position?

Oh, and once again, Pop Vulture does not officially endorse one candidate over the other, even if its really, really obvious what I think.

2. Russian President Dimitri Medvedev is of the opinion that the current “financial crisis should be taken as a sign that America’s global economic leadership is on the wane.” I’m not quite so sure how right he is there, the US certainly seems to be leading the world through extremely stormy economic seas at the moment, and earlier this week when the bailout was rejected it looked like they were steering their ship towards the Cape of Doom, and Russia is hardly one to wag the finger, they’ve had to shut down their stock markets three times in the last month (including today), and on September 16th their markets plunged more than 17% in a single day, aren’t you glad that the world doesn’t revolve around Russia?

3. The $700 billion bailout bill was passed at the second attempt. From what I understand, it will actually only end up costing $100 billion, but I still don’t know whether the bill itself is a good thing or a bad thing, so let’s just move on before you realise once again what little grasp I have upon economic concepts.

4. The music industry and Apple, the makers of the most exciting thing in my pants (my iPhone), are at loggerheads over what royaltys musicians should be getting from digital downloads, most of which are done through Apple’s iTunes service. Each track costs 99 cents, and from that, 9.1 cents goes to the artist, the same amount as when an artist sells a track on a CD. The music industry believes that the artists should get 15 cents per track since its much cheaper to distribute things digitally since there are no packaging and shipping costs. Yeah, I can’t work out that logic either, surely the artist gets paid for the song, not the medium its packaged in, otherwise bands would have probably started selling vinyl records that had been dipped in gold so that they could claim the music was more valuable and therefore they deserved more royalties. Yes, that example makes no sense, but then again, neither does the record labels position.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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Yesterday I wrote about a few different celebrities and how they weren’t fans of Sarah Palin, one of which was Lindsay Lohan. Just to refresh your memory, between attending glamorous social events and walking around with Samantha Ronson having her picture taken by paparazzi, LiLo blogged on her MySpace that she “cannot hold [her] tongue anymore when it comes to Sarah Palin,” and then laid into her for a few hundreds words (one of the few things that Lindsay and I have in common) before instructing her legions of fans to go out and vote for Obama. After overcoming my own prejudice that someone like Lindsay Lohan (professional eye candy) could have a decent opinion, I read through what she had to say and found that, much to my chagrin, I agreed with much she had to say. Yes, she’s not exactly the world’s best blogger (it’s polite to link to your sources!), but I think that her fundamental points make a lot of sense. Oh, now is probably a good time to point out once again that we here at Pop Vulture don’t necessarily endorse or support one candidate over another, however blatantly obvious it is that I favor one over the other (at least on the Vice Presidential end of things).

It turns out that Lindsay doesn’t want to just soapbox on her blog (one of the many thing Lindsay and I don’t have in common) and offered to host a series of events in support of Obama that would try and energize young voters, because apparently young people don’t like Obama enough yet, but she her advances were rebuffed, which I assume is something that doesn’t happen to Lohan very often. Apparently, a top source from the Obama campaign told the Chicago Sun Times that the Mean Girls star ”is not exactly the kind of high-profile star who would be a positive for us.”

I can see where Obama’s people are coming from, not so long ago it was hard to hear the words “Lindsay Lohan” without them being preceded by “troubled star” or followed by “is heading to rehab again,” but beyond the fairly mild scandal of her getting a girlfriend Lindsay seems to have stopped being being such tabloid fodder. Trust me, I’m pretty surprised at myself to be taking the position of defending a celebrity, but I think that if a girl like Lindsay can turn it around in the high-pressure and high-temptation world of Hollywood that she wouldn’t actually be the worst person that they could have to front a few events.

Y’know, Heidi Montag didn’t have this trouble when she announced she will be voting for John McCain, in fact, he took it really well, saying that “she’s a very talented actress.” (hold up, The Hills isn’t real?). Yeah, its really reassuring when a potential President looks straight at a camera and lies like that, isn’t it?

If there’s one thing that I don’t like, and you’ll find that there are quite a lot of things that I don’t like, its uninformed, self-righteous celebrities forcing their religious, political and environmental views upon us ‘normal’ people when no one asked them to. They all seem to do it after they get bored of merely entertaining us, perhaps their lifestyles eventually catch up with them, they start feeling a bit guilty about driving a hummer to Starbucks two or three times a day and decide that its time to “give something back,” as the famous phrase goes.

Or in other words… I don’t like Madonna.

At a performance on Sunday night in Cardiff, Wales, the so-called Queen of Pop (who actually has the audacity to enter the stage sitting on a throne) ran a video montage during a song called “Get Stupid” that showed images of social and environmental destruction interspersed with pictures of Adolf Hitler , Robert Mugabe, and John McCain. Wow. That’s about as subtle as throwing a brick through someone’s window then screaming nonsensical ramblings through the hole you just made. As if that weren’t enough, when the song ended images flashed up of John Lennon, Mahatma Ghandi, Al Gore and Barack Obama, presumably whilst a white-robed choir sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

Okay, maybe I’m embellishing slightly with the choir, but the part about the video montage is all true. I’m a reasonable guy, I don’t expect her to stop half way through a song and bring up a power point presentation detailing why she thinks John McCain should be compared Adolf Hitler and Robert Mugabe, but this kind of heavy handed and ill-conceived stunt doesn’t add anything to the political discourse in America, it just takes the focus and attention away from the issues and onto a few seconds of footage from a concert that was taking place in the Welsh capital of Cardiff, a city that is three and a half thousand miles away from Washington D.C., although I’m sure that events this week in Denver will ensure that McCain doesn’t get all that much attention over the next few days anyway.

I feel that I should point out that we here at Pop Vulture aren’t necessarily backing one Presidential candidate or another, we want you to make your own choices, and those choices should be based upon sound and reasoning logical decisions, not based upon rumours, slander and baseless attacks. I know Madonna has managed to reinvent herself numerous times throughout her career, but can’t imagine that if she were to transform herself into a political pundit that historians would regard it as a particularly golden era for Madge. I’m certain that she’d get a lot of air time on TV to let the world know her views, she is a global megastar after all, but perhaps she should leave politics to the experts… and bloggers that have half a politics degree.

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