It’s almost mind-numbing to hear John McCain and Sarah “Putridly Perky” Palin go on and on about how the Obama campaign is living in the past, how the Obama campaign is thinking they want to run against the Bush administration and how the McCain/Palin ticket is a mechanism for change. John McCain and Sarah Palin regurgitate the mantra that they are thinking of the future, that solutions are found in the future and the past is not where we should look for answers. While that mantra may look good on paper, sound good to those who are blinded by partisan politics and lead the faithful to cheers of “John McCain”, the reality is that John McCain and Sarah Palin are the ones who are truly “living in the past.”

Take a deep breath, exhale and then here comes the pragmatic reminder of John McCain’s service to his country, in specific, his former status as a prisoner of war at the “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War. McCain can’t get through a single speech without using that POW crutch in attempt to solidify his “loyalty to country” and his honour. Should voters empathize with his former predicament and believe “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”, an old analogy that McCain would have us adhere to? Has he forgotten, “those who fail to study the past are doomed to repeat it”, another old analogy that McCain and Palin see as weakness in their competition?

Running a bombing mission over another country, a mission that would inadvertandly kill numerous civilians - men, women and children - is a risky business in itself. Now that Communism has fallen, the cold war is over and America has set it’s sights on a new enemy, an enemy McCain would seek “victory” over, why would he continually harken back to his prisoner of war experience as a foundation for his campaign?

As Americans, if we fail to study the past and study what conditions have produced the current economic recession as well as past recessions, we are doomed to repeat the past, without hope for any future. Our current indulgence in a “territorial war” in Iraq is costing this country trillions of dollars, not to mention a horrific loss of life on both sides. These scars will take generations to heal, diplomacy will take generations to mend, yet the real toll is still uncertain.

The cost of “victory”, as McCain puts it, has a price, the question we must ask ourselves as Americans is are we ready to look at the past and find solid solutions to the problems we are facing?

Nobody likes writing asignments, not when there’s better things to do like text messaging your girlfriends, updating your MySpace profile or going to the mall to get your hair done. That didn’t stop Metro State College student Janna Barbara from weaseling her way out of a writing assignment by reporting her professor to university officials over claims of bias, harassment and bullying.

Andrew Hallam, an adjunct Metro State College Professor, asked his class to write an essay contradicting what he called the “fairy tale image of Palin” presented at the Republican National Convention. For most of us with a higher education, writing assignments are generally assigned regarding topics that may or may not be inline with our personal beliefs or thinking. After all, the whole idea behind college is to expand one’s social, economic, political and cultural belief structures and to develop an analytical method of thinking. Writing assignments that stink are nothing new. In my sophomore year, I was required to write a 5,000 word biography of former president Richard Nixon. Not exactly my idea of a fun time but it was completed as requested without incedent even though the topic did not appeal to me.

Things don’t seem to work that way for kids today. Janna Barbara, a student in professor Hallam’s class decided the assignment would hamper her busy MySpace and FaceBook schedule so she complained to a relative who works for Worldnet Daily who picked up the poor little girl’s story and it ended up on Fox News in between three other stories about how Gov Palin is being ridiculed.

Janna Barbara, who appears as though she spends more time grooming her hair than she does studying gave an account of professor Hallam’s intolerable assignment to Bill Hemmer’s bleach blonde, rough and tumble co-anchor Megan Kelly. Janna offered no real insights as to why the dubious assignment professor Hallam handed the class should have the professor under investigation but she sure found an innovative way to get out of a writing assignment. Perhaps real college is not Janna’s bag, however her Fox News appearance is certainly an innovative technique to accelerate her search for a rich boyfriend. Maybe she won’t have to spend so much time in those boring classes and on those tedious writing assignments.

A Metro State College spokesperson responded :

A former student of Hallam’s stated “I could understand how the professor’s style could be misunderstood. Hallam often picked a topic for students and asked them to write a specific viewpoint as an exercise in critical thinking.”

Evidently Metro State College is not a place where thinking or critique is part of the curriculum. What’s poor little Janna going to do when she has a math assignment she doesn’t like? Is she going to cry to university officials that it’s unfair she should have to learn the Pythagorean theorem because Pythagoras has been dead for over 2500 years ?

  Any photographer taking pictures of presidential candidate John McCain, especially for the cover of a magazine, would have to be experts at photoshop to touchup all the wrinkles, liver spots and general oldness that would be exposed by the lighting.

  Not so for photographer Jill Greenberg, who in her cover shoot for the Atlantic Monthly went the opposite direction and used lighting and positioning to create a truly evil looking portfolio of portraits of Senator John McCain, one of which appeared on Atlantic Monthly’s cover…

The problem wasn’t simply that Jill Greenberg delivered a saggy, wrinkly photo of McCain for the liberal rag’s cover, she has even bragged about it to PDNPulse, a professional photography journal :

Let’s face it, McCain isn’t exactly the most attractive candidate and considering the camera tricks Fox News and other conservative media outlets have been using to make Barack Obama look discolored and darker skinned than he actually is, it’s only fair game that the pale, wrinkly, saggy Senator from Arizona was given similar treatment.

American Digest, however, doesn’t see the camera tricks as very funny and even refers to them as political pornography, whatever the hell that is, because some of the images from the session leaked out and were modified by photoshoppers into a ghastly view of the geritol popping Senator :

At least the American Digest was kind enough to grab the afformentioned images from Greenberg’s site and put them up on their own article. Here’s just a few (if you want to see the rest you’ll have to visit political pornography) :

What do you think about these John McCain evil pictures by Jill Greenberg for Atlantic Monthly ?