Gangsta Gail and the Anti-Apathy Crew

It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.

This week’s fail was brought to you by Understanding the Manitoba Election. Not the act of understanding the Manitoba election, which is taking place in October, but the campaign devised by the University of Manitoba to encourage young people to do exactly that, culminating in their casting a ballot. A worthy objective, to be sure, but the execution is . . . well, see for yourself.

Most of my readers won’t recognize that poor, sad woman as Gail Asper, who runs Winnipeg’s largest philanthropic organization. When I was younger and, bizarrely enough, more cynical about politics than I am today, I tortured myself with visions of politicians attempting to engage young voters by going gangsta. Never did I dream that it would actually happen. Yet it did. And it’s just as patronizing and desperate as I always imagined it would be.

This campaign, “VoteAnyWay,” is designed to combat youth apathy. How exactly can they accomplish that by, essentially, naming the campaign after it? The logic of voting is perfectly sound, but it’s been proven time and time again that no amount of shoving it in young voters’ faces can be effective. Also, having a fabulously wealthy woman in her early 50s, along with other celebrities (by Winnipeg standards) of age, sell students on voting is just a bit trite.

What’s even more hilarious is the link on the program’s home page, which complains that the machinery of politics is too boring for young people to engage with it. They’re better off paying attention to stories of MPs who spend the entire campaign period in Vegas and still win. (Uh-huh.) Isn’t this entire program centered around educating students about the machinery of politics? Do they even know what their objective is?

There’s a good reason young voters came out in droves for President Obama in 2008. Not only did he invest time in making a true connection with them, but he tapped into the source of their cynicism and connected it back to his own policy proposals. That’s the way to get young people interested: Give them a candidate they can give a shit about, long enough to delve into the issues. And since that never happens in Canada, least of all Manitoba, expect an even more historically low turnout come October.

Disposal Day #71: Teach your children well

STORY #1: Young guns

This was a bit disturbing: “. . . this highlights the need for political parties to win the allegiances of voters at a young age.” That quote refers to a British study showing that the Republican Party has experienced considerable growth in their support from young voters due to 9/11, many of whom were not of voting age when the attacks happened. Those who celebrated birthdays that month or afterward were more likely to register as Republicans than those who had birthdays in August 2001.

If anyone can make heads or tails of that methodology, please clear it up for me. But the article is only making this point in the interests of the parties. It’s natural for younger politicos to be drawn to one party or ideology at the start; I certainly wasn’t immune to this. But should either party have a hand in perpetuating this, as opposed to encouraging general political education? I’d like to see a goal for all kids to pass a U.S. citizenship test by graduation.

STORY #2: A sickly Constitution

Apparently there’s a 2004 federal law requiring schools to teach the Constitution during a certain week in September. I’m not sure that law is constitutional itself, but the more kids learn about civics, the better. Unfortunately, the Tea Party Patriots have gotten involved, demanding increased enforcement of the law and the use of teaching material by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which sounds innocent enough but “promotes the Constitution as a divinely-inspired document.”

Understanding American Politics by R.V. Denenberg has the entire document up until the 25th Amendment – it was first published in 1984 – in the back. The kids can use that. The law doesn’t establish religion, but the Center does, and they ought to act in the Constitution’s spirit. I mean, think about it. What would Jefferson do?

STORY #3: Update on Amy Myers

And so it seems that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will not be engaging in a debate with New Jersey high schooler Amy Myers on, yep, the Constitution. No word if Bachmann has responded to her supporters who have called Myers a “whore” and a “Communist” and threatened to publish her home address – and worse. You know, if you don’t have the backbone to talk to someone who can’t yet vote about the Constitution, how can you preserve, protect and defend it?

An open letter to Amy Myers

Dear Amy: I had my own political awakening when I was around your age, so of course I was impressed to see you going public with your thoughts on the Constitution; there don’t seem to be many teenagers who have any opinion of it at all. But challenging Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on her opinion of it? That takes a lot of guts. And your description of yourself as an Independent and “split-ticket” voter-in-waiting takes an equal amount of brains.

It’s especially reassuring to see that your challenge to Bachmann was enough to shut up those boys at your school who gave you a hard time for running for class president. Not that they were much of a bother. Any guy who makes jokes about women getting sandwiches isn’t worth your attention; it’s Yahoo! Answers-grade humor, if you can call it humor. Next time that happens, please let the guy know there have been better jokes written on the windows of bus stops.

More disheartening was the word that slightly more advanced idiots have dubbed you a “Communist” for daring to criticize Tea Party patroness Bachmann. I’m sure you understand this already, but a reminder to other people never hurts: Ignore them. Your criticism is perfectly valid, and it’s their fault if they can’t see the value in it. It should have made them ask what they’re paying for. Perhaps it is, in secret.

You asked a very simple question of a high-profile figure, but that question brought something more complex to the surface: What degree of expertise in basic civics should we expect of our elected officials? You inspired several people to recommend that candidates take some sort of related test before taking their seat. Speaking for myself, considering that you’ve become famous for even thinking about civics, I’d rather see it on a standardized college admissions exam.

I would love to hear your insights on how we can make a basic understanding of American politics and government an integral part of school curriculums. If you plan to pursue a career in some aspect of politics – and I hope you do – this would be an excellent start for you. Anyone can yammer on about the importance of voting, but it takes a certain person to convey the importance of tuning in before and after the ballots are cast.

If Bachmann responds to you, please be sure your conversation goes on YouTube. It would make a lot of people’s days. And regardless of whether you win or lose, playing the game is something we all should admire. Meanwhile, don’t let ignorance get you down. Sincerely yours, Jess.

The Michelle Obama Anti-Fatass Act

On the heels of the individual health insurance mandate’s unconstitutionality ruling comes President Obama’s child nutrition bill, half of which may also be ruled a federal overreach within a much shorter amount of time. Inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama, the bill gives the government power to determine the kinds of foods sold in school cafeterias, vending machines and fundraisers. Of course, this power is not enumerated anywhere else.

There is no question that school cafeterias could use drastic improvements across the board. When I was in high school, it was commonplace for kids to order fries and ketchup and not much else for lunch. Oftentimes, they’d go all out and order poutine. (For non-Canadians, that’s fries with gravy and cheese curds.) Combine this with a limited amount of physical education and a lack of consideration for nutrition, and you have a recipe for a school full of fatasses.

The new standards would likely keep popular foods like hamburgers and pizza in school cafeterias but make them healthier, using leaner meat or whole wheat crust, for example. Vending machines could be stocked with less candy and fewer high-calorie drinks. Bake sales and other school-sponsored fundraisers that sell unhealthy foods could be limited.

That’s a good middle ground for the most part (but don’t you be touchin’ mah bake sales!). Leaner meat and whole wheat crust seem like obvious improvements that sound minor but do make a difference when it comes to healthier food. The trouble is that fattening crap is cheaper for overstretched schools, which is why the federal government sees fit to pony up the cash and the rules at the same time.

If I wanted to improve the food served in schools, here’s how I’d do it: I would create a funding contest for schools and school boards across the country who demonstrated their own ideas for better nutrition. Some have already done this on their own accord in a variety of ways, ranging from vegetarian options to on-site gardens and greenhouses to expanded cooking classes (which really should be compulsory; why wouldn’t you learn how to cook?). This is the level on which these policies should be made.

The bill has already been signed into law, so it’s too late to bring this up – at least until someone gently reminds Obama that the federal government does not have nutrition within its purview, to this extent. For someone who once so fervently insisted that “Yes we can,” he seems to have forgotten which “we” he was talking about.

Disposal Day #40: The young and the listless

STORY #1: Vote or die, muthafucka

A lot of aspects of politics annoy me. ( “No! Really?!”) Here’s another: when politicians talk to younger voters in a way reminiscent of Mr. Mackey. Here’s former President Bill Clinton trying it out: In a speech at the University of Mississippi, he informed a crowd of 2,000 that not voting would be “malpractice.” Not voting is bad, m’kay?

The general definition of “malpractice,” according to Random House, is “any improper, negligent practice; misconduct or misuse.” Clinton used the Democratic push for better student loans as proof of why a vote for the other side, or no vote at all, would be “negligent.” His message would have been far stronger if he simply reminded the students that voting is the most vital thing someone can do to create even a marginal amount of political change. I have no sympathy for those who refuse to vote and then bitch about who should have won.

STORY #2: Spring break is over

I warned before his inauguration that if President Obama did not make good on his promise of change, it would have disastrous consequences for anyone seeking the youth vote. His campaign sparked an interest in politics in students who wanted something different. So far, according to an AP-mtvU poll, only 44% of young voters currently appear convinced he is that. Disapprovals rose by 12 percentage points.

Were I in the shoes of a young American voter, the one thing that could make me enamored with Obama again would be a clear outline of the policies included in the next two years of his presidency. He seems to be scoring points with the anti-DADT crowd, but he can’t run solely on social issues. He needs to prove to young voters that, under his watch, there’ll be a healthy job market waiting by the time they graduate.

STORY #3: . . . among other things

Obama himself was present at a town hall meeting at which the audience mostly consisted of young adults. I wish I could tell you where, but the related article missed that part. (Seriously?) Here’s what they asked him about: DADT, the war, the stimulus package, the lack of congressional bipartisanship, school bullying and several other topics.

That’s a little more comprehensive than from 2008, when I dare say that most young voters simply wanted the candidate least like former President George W. Bush. Conclusion: I’m not the only one in that age bracket who wants straight talk about policy matters. This may require treating young voters like everyone else.

The testament of Levi

It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.

This week’s fail was brought to you by Levi Johnston. This is one of those fails that has been months, if not almost two years, in coming, because this kid has barely taken a right step for as much time. The dam broke when he learned to capitalize on it, the last thing he should have learned.

There’s no need to recap the entire sordid history of Johnston’s fails, so I’ll give you the condensed version of the past month or so. He gets back together with Bristol Palin. (I’d say something about what I think of her, but that’s the kind of attention I can do without.) She dumps him within about five minutes because he may have knocked up someone else. Johnston finally admits to wanting the much-desired plum of his own reality show. If that’s not bad enough, it’ll focus on him running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. (Next year.) At least he’s planning ahead.

“Johnston told Variety, which first reported the news, that the mayoral run wasn’t originally his idea but was pitched to him by producers Scott Stone and David Weintraub.” Doesn’t that just say it all? That he’s going along with this speaks volumes about Johnston’s judgment functions. (I’d say something about how that assessment can also be applied to the proper use of contraceptives, but . . . well, you know.)

Variety also reported the show would “center on Johnston’s fame as the father of [former Gov.] Sarah Palin’s [R-AK] grandson Tripp.” His fame? If that’s all it takes to be famous these days, I should have had a reality show months ago. I do stuff, dammit!

Way to be father of the year, kid! Bringing a child who is already an early therapy candidate into your futile pursuit of more credibility than you could ever hope for, and wasting Wasilla’s time the whole way. If this is for Tripp’s sake as you have stated, I assure you he will not be impressed with a father who knows less about running a city than his grandmother knows about being a vice-president. In short, Levi Johnston is now Alaska’s answer to Spencer Pratt.

For you trivia buffs, the working title of the show is Loving Levi: The Road to the Mayor’s Office. I smell a winner already. No, I’m sorry, that’s not it; I’m smelling the giant heap of dung into which television has devolved and staring, longingly, at the episode of Murphy Brown currently being aired on a new Canadian station that plays really good old sitcoms.

How to make employers want your help

I’ve never been given a government paycheck. The first summer job I ever had was as a sales rep for an outbound call center, a job I would only wish on my worst enemy. Plenty of students depend on jobs with their municipal government in the summer, though, and they’ll be sorely disappointed to learn that they might have to wait before funding for the jobs program is passed by the Senate, which is on a 10-day break.

The program is normally targeted at “at-risk” youths, 330,000 of whom are estimated to be enrolled in it. The alternative, besides no job at all, is for them to work at some fast-food joint or the mall or – God help them – a call center. Essentially, except for a lucky few who enjoy those things, the summer job situation is a choice between nothing, for-profit crap, and government-funded less-crap. Of course, most 16-year-olds probably don’t care about who their paycheck depends on as long as they get one.

Rep. John Linder (R-GA) does, though: “Let’s really promote jobs by relieving job-creating businesses and workers of higher government spending, borrowing and taxes.” Yes, the same Republican philosophy you’ve heard 37 thousand times since the Reagan era is even hitting the youth employment discussion. Not that I disagree, but a line like this out of a Republican mouth makes me wonder if the RNC plays recordings of fiscally conservative talking points while they sleep.

So let’s talk about these job-creating businesses. Can we reconcile finding jobs for youth with a low cost to any level of government and help for small businesses? Well, that job at the call center wasn’t my first-ever job; that was as a freelance writer for the city paper. There’s the answer. Teaching kids how to freelance their most marketable skills will enable them to create jobs for themselves when nobody else will give them one.

Small businesses would appreciate these low-cost services such as bookkeeping and PR, the latter of which I’m doing this summer, assuming they have decent samples to show. Since high-school teachers are unlikely to be able to teach more than one of these services, tops, there ought to be a temp agency-cum-training school that could provide these lessons on weekends and after school. It would be especially good preparation for students looking to get into business.

This may not work for nearly as many high-schoolers as it would for college students, but I’d say it merits exploration.

Video Game Ban: Modern Warfare 2

There are times when I really have to laugh at any attempt on the part of a government, or even parents, to “protect” youth from things they don’t want them to see. California’s attempted ban on the sale of violent video games to minors, now before the Supreme Court due to the constitutionality factor, is a perfect example of this. A California appeals court threw out the ban last year “on grounds that it violated minors’ constitutional rights,” which is the first time I’ve seen a court acknowledge that minors have constitutional rights.

Let’s put the right to buy what they want in context: Video games have not been shown to have a direct effect on health, safety, or well-being in general. Teens are fully aware of what the ESRB ratings mean. If they have enough money to buy games themselves, it’s possible that they’ll ignore those ratings. On that note, I would recommend this as a more effective deterrent than the current description of the T for Teen rating:

Contains content that might be considered unsuitable for people who don’t suck. Titles in this category may contain more sunshine, rainbows, bunnies, simulated unicorn riding, and/or infrequent use of giggling. If you play this, you might as well admit that you’re a total douche.

Trust me, put that on a video game case and you’ll never have to yell at your kid to do his homework again.

But it’s the video game industry, not its consumers, who are leading the charge against this ban. Since youth take up such a huge part of their market, it’s understandable that they wouldn’t want to lose them as customers. But they shouldn’t be worried about a subsequent drop in sales. Ever heard of a fake ID? Or an older sibling?

I don’t mean that all teenagers are crafty enough to work around this ban or game-driven enough to want to try. But almost all of my friends in high school were big into gaming, often first-person shooters, and they would have figured something out if such a ban were implemented. Lawmakers need to consider this before attempting to regulate teen entertainment. If the fear is imitations of the games, take a kid charged with a resulting crime to a morgue to watch an autopsy. That’ll be a real wake-up call.

And to designers of video games that depict violence, especially sexual assault: Can’t you think of something a little more tasteful? Whether or not you have the right to do it, why do you even bother?

Who’s really the childish one?

It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.

This week’s fail was brought to you by Michelle Malkin. Now before I explain why, I will say that I do not condone victim impact statements as a legislative bolster and consider them much more of a rhetorical strategy. But when it’s a child making one of those statements, it’s the responsibility of those of on the outside to look the other way if necessary. As annoyed I am by “Let kids be kids”-type arguments, we can make an exception if it involves a parent’s death.

Anyway, this all started when 11-year-old Marcelas Owens and his grandmother, Gina, used the example of his mother and her daughter, respectively, to promote the need for health insurance reform. Tifanny Owens “got sick [with pulmonary hypertension], lost her job, lost her health insurance and died.” It’s a story we’ve all heard many times with different people. Because it came from a child, Malkin, along with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, decided to speak up against his “exploitation.”

Limbaugh: “Now this is unseemly, exploitative, an 11-year-old boy being forced to tell his story . . . Well, your mom would still have died, because Obamacare doesn’t kick in until 2014.” Telling a kid his mom’s death was inevitable in order to make a political point. How . . . seemly.

Beck: He criticized the Owens’ trip to the capital because it was paid for by a pro-health-insurance group funded by George Soros (who’s liberal and evil, doncha know) and asked where they were when Tifanny Owens “was vomiting blood.” Great idea putting that image in his head.

And finally, the big one:

Malkin dismissed Marcelas Owens as “one of Obama’s youngest lobbyists” who has been “goaded by a left-wing activist grandmother,” promoted by [Sen. Patty] Murray [(D-WA)] and has become a regular on the “pro-Obamacare circuit.”

I am so sure that someone who hasn’t even made it to middle school is that desperate to fight on behalf of President Obama. He can’t possibly speak from his heart!

You can never blithely assert that a minor is being “exploited” without proof. It’s worse to accuse them of that and not take them seriously for just five minutes.

Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children?!?!

It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.

This week’s fail was brought to you by the parents and Republican culture warriors who are desperately trying to protect schoolchildren from the message of President Obama. The absurdity of their theory that Obama would attempt to indoctrinate them all into his “cult of personality” – or, even worse, inspire them to support socialism (GAH!) – has already been exhausted. I will only say on that matter that there’s little that Obama can tell them about his policies that would cause any major shift in his public support. They are pre-college students, after all, and their civics education sucks.

Here’s what makes the whole situation worse: nobody is calling for giving the students the choice to listen to Obama. Instead, they want it left up to their parents or, failing that, their Republican representatives. Meanwhile, they’re treating the kids as if they require ”protection” from the nefarious message of the president. Maybe they’re too young to get a firm grasp on the finer points of his legislative work, which he wouldn’t even be discussing, but they’re old enough to say whether they want to hear what he does have to say or not.

But no. Instead, in Biloxi, Mississippi: “If parents don’t want their students to watch, those children will be brought to another classroom.” Yeah, that’s totally not indoctrination. I could understand if they didn’t want their kids to be subjected to a half-hour porno, but this is the democratically-elected, youth-vote-locking President of the United States – there’s nothing that would damage these kids besides (GASP!) developing a different opinion of Obama than theirs. These parents are training their kids to be afraid of him, or hate him, just because they do.

I would really love to see a high school full of students in some deep-red district of Missouri or wherever lock themselves in a gym with a TV and refuse to come out until they see the entirety of the speech. It’s also a particular fantasy of mine to see them storm a PTA meeting and yell obscenities at their parents and teachers for treating them like idiots. And then hack their way through a crowd of conservative protesters with hockey sticks. That’s what we would have done at my high school. And it would have been awesome.