Let’s end poverty, folks!

Blog Action Day 2008 is a day in which members of various online communities yap about a particular cause in order to raise awareness and effect change. This year’s topic is poverty.

Not sure if you know this, but… there is no insta-cure for poverty. Seriously.

But as fellow human beings who do not — or should not — take joy in the misfortune of others, the least we can do is take a moment to focus on a way to help, if we are so fortunate enough to be in a position to do so.

For my part, today I am officially scheduling a pickup of multiple bags of clothing I have been putting off for a while. If you have items you would like to donate, but are either too lazy to make the trip to a local Goodwill or Salvation Army drop-off or just don’t know where or how to do it, I will help! Shoot me an email, or give me a call (if you have the digits!) and I will help you arrange. This may not seem like much, but the saying “one persons trash is another person’s treasure” is quite true. That’s why Craigslist is so popular!

Here are some ideas of items you should think about donating:

• Shoes you’ve outgrown
  Stop clinging to those fresh pair of Nike kicks you can’t fit into without curling up your toes. Someone out there is shoeless and those relatively decent tiny toe-squeezers may brighten up their day. Just. Let. Go.
• Jerseys of players who no longer play for the same team
  In the back of many a closet lies the forgotten team members of yesteryear. I had a few of these stuck in my closet that I will never wear again. They are included in my donation stash and you and yours may want (and need) to part ways as well. Remember, your old throwback Stephen Davis Washington Redskins jersey may be junk to you, but bring joy to some other kid who has never had a jersey before in their life.
• Hats!
  Your head may have expanded through your years of education. Why not give up those that you used to love wearing, but can no longer fit? One day you’re a collector, the next a pack rat.
• Plain Old Old Clothes
  Maybe your style has changed from geek to chic. Maybe you used to wear small shirts to make you: look muscular (dudes) or chest-clinging “Angel” tees (girlies). It is time to let go. Why not donate that stuff to someone two can appreciate the retro style and/or actually fit in that extra SMedium t-shirt?

Feel free to leave a comment about other suggestions for folks to donate. Like I said, let me know if you need my help. Or, if you find a place online to donate, post it in the comment section. At any rate, let’s do our part for THE CAUSE!

To me, it is a matter of human decency. America is grand because we one of the most charitable nations of the world. I take an enormous amount of pride in that. You should too.

The economy is bleak right now and some of us are swimming in bills, but if you can do one tiny thing today to help out the life of someone else, do it!

Resources

• Blog Action Day List O’ Resources
• CharityGuide.org: How to make a difference in 15 minutes
• Change.org
• Military Order of the Purple Heart
• Salvation Army

Look, my friends, at various points in last night’s town hall debate in Nashville, I felt fairly certain Senator John McCain would rear back and launch himself at Sen. Barack Obama.

I am also fairly certain McCain was not referring to Obama in the roundabout 2,823,892 times he used the phrase “my friends…”

(Note: That is an unofficial count. Consider the error margin: +/- 2,000,000)

Not that the two were especially heated and firing back and forth at any particular point, but the intimate, podium-less setting provided the imaginative type (I know I’m not the only one) a visual for the 1-in-1,000 chance that the town hall debate would turn into a town hall brawl.

(Ah, fisticuffs! Where would democracy be without it?)

McCain’s demeanor was as fiery and pointed as a candidate down in most every national poll should be.

Obama’s demeanor was as calm and poised as a candidate ahead in most every national poll should be.

Despite the McCain campaign implying that for the rest of the campaign it would “turn the page” on the economy and focus on Obama’s ties to various persons of controversy, the questions from the town hall debate were mainly focused on how everyday working Americans would pay their bills and be optimistic despite the current poor state of the economy.

Each candidate spared no time limit – much to the dismay of NBC moderator Tom Brokaw – to explain their key campaign talking points, no matter what the question was.

For every figurative punch, an appropriate and long-winded counterpunch followed. That was, except for when McCain would just toss in the “he’s gonna tax you!” jab as his time ran out and subject moved on.
Neither candidate seemed to blow the audience away. Each had their moments, but it barreled down to being more of the same rhetoric heard at every campaign stop in the country. (Granted, McCain did not mention William Ayers, and Obama did not mention the Keating Five scandal.) Polls and the questioners showed that the number one issue on Americans’ minds is the economy; leave your political finger-pointing and personal jabs at the door, we say.

A rather interesting moment in the debate came early when the candidates were asked to name who they would choose to be Treasury Secretary. Neither candidate gave an outright answer. Instead, McCain answered first by throwing out either a bad joke or jab: “Not you, Tom.”

I laughed at what seemed more like a joke to me. Unfortunately, the moderator did not seem to feel the same way, judging by Brokaw’s demeanor throughout the rest of the debate. At various points throughout the debate, Brokaw took time away by restating rules and time limits in an agitated tone. Of course, Brokaw was determined to keep within the rules each campaign agreed on, as was his job as moderator, but this was assuming that any two chatty politicians (redundant: politicians all seem to be chatty) would ever fully comply.

Another odd moment came when McCain answered a question from a gentleman, possibly in his early 30’s, about Americans paying for mortgages in this economy by telling him, “I’ll bet you, you may never even have heard of them before this crisis.” It seemed like a tone parents give to their children when saying, “This is probably way too grown up for you. You’d never understand.” He may not have meant to phrase the words the way he did, but McCain came off as demeaning and very offensive.

And last, but not least, was the demotion McCain gave to Obama. At first, Obama was mocked for being a celebrity of sorts, and called “The One” by the McCain campaign. This time around, McCain brushed off Obama’s relative importance by referring to him simply as “That One,” as he gave a sideways head nod in his opponent’s general vicinity. Maybe McCain was trying to put Obama in the way old veterans do the new kid on the block, but it ended up coming off as a “grumpy old man” moment.

My own simple conclusion of this night came down to this:

The key difference between the town hall format and other campaign debates is that the candidates get a chance to be face-to-face with questions of regular, everyday Americans – you know, Joe Six Pack and whathaveyou – and delicately walk around their questions just as if they were sitting in the moderator’s seat.

After all, hockey moms, Joe Six Packs, construction workers, emergency service workers, town hall debate attendees and moderators, each only get one vote come November 4, 2008. Might as well give every voter fair and balanced treatment.

For all intensive purposes, Governor Sarah Palin hit the ball out of the park in last night’s debate versus her Democratic counterpart, Senator Joe Biden.

She was well-versed in her studied key words of “maverick,” “reform,” and “hockey mom.” She managed to avoid diving too deep into any subject she was not adequately prepped to defend her candidate’s position; instead, she would steer the discussion toward her stronger topics — energy independence, drilling and reform. She took very little chance at making the same mistake of rambling off into space with topics she did not have adequate amount of information on, which was a key flaw exposed in her latest interview series with CBS’s Katie Couric.

But something about her demeaner made me especially curious:

Either Gov. Palin has a twitch in her eye, or she’s trying to flirt for votes!

Maybe she has a bad poker face; or, she may even have a physical ailment I am unaware of. If that is the case, please forgive the curious observation.

But my own two eyes saw what appeared to be a politician flexing every ounce of charm, using every bit of her experience (she’s been a politician since the early 90s and is former beauty pageant winner) and charm to be provocative to “Joe Six Pack” and I (Or am I considered “Joe Six Pack”?).

How many times did Gov. Palin look directly into the camera, smile and wink?

I counted four times where Gov. Palin would take a break from looking at her notecards, look directly into the camera, smile real big and then wink.

At first, I playfully joked with my roommate that she was flirting with me. She may’ve just done it once by habit, because she appears to be a personable, playful, fun person by nature. By the last time she pulled off this “charm moment” it seemed a step beyond just playfulness, and ventured into provacative territory.

Gov. Palin pulled out the “flirt card.”

Undoubtedly, male politicians have used the same tactic for years upon years. They dance for dollars — figuratively, of course — campaign events for votes and donations. Supporters need to know they can trust the person they are investing their vote into. But this time seemed different. This is a candidate who was coming off a bad string of interviews, and even though she and Senator John McCain decried the media as using “gotcha journalism” — a term which means the same as saying, “That was taken out of context!” — the polls continued to lean toward Senator Barack Obama.

Now, regular “aw, shucks” charm is one thing — she used it plenty last night, which is why she did manage to move her positive poll numbers up — but Palin crossed the line by openly flirting with ol’ “Joe Six Pack” sitting at home.

The first Saturday Night Live skit this season comes to mind, where Tina Fay and Amy Poehler give a parody of what a public address with Gov. Palin and Senator Hillary Clinton would be like. At one point, Poehler’s Clinton character yells out in frustration, “No… mine!” … going on to explain that she didn’t want just any woman to reach the white house, she wanted to be the first. After this battle for the “Veepstakes,” Hillary Clinton was probably sitting at home throwing random items at the television screen.

All the time she spent working her way to the top, meticulously going through issue-by-issue to be sure she was well-versed, conversational and specific, only to have a less-qualified politician be plucked from the snowy state mainly because she is a woman — a poor an insulting attempt of the GOP trying to take away women voters who supported Clinton but were having second-thoughts about Obama.

Even if the McPalin ticket is falling behind in the polls (how reliable are those, anyway?), it is insulting — to both Hillary Clinton and “Joe Six Pack” — to have a candidate taking the “flirty” route to swaying voters back to the GOP ticket. Her natural “gee golly, Joe!” charm alone makes her a likeable candidate. No need to muddy up the waters by using the demeaning “flirt card.” It has no place inside the political arena.

Related:

• “Palin The Populist” by Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal)
• “Projecting through the screen” by Rich Lowry (National Review)
• “Hockey Mom on Thin Ice” by E.J. Dionne (RealClearPolitics)
• “Palin Scored Points, But She Did Not Win” by Howard Finneman (Newsweek)