The Gleaner’s Jamaican Election Blog has a great collection of major oopsies by Jamaican politicians. My favorite:
““Gangsta fi Life!”
– PNP candidate for Northern Clarendon Horace Dalley got a little overexcited on a campaign platform with microphone in hand when he chose to imitate the refrain popularised by deejay Mavado. This might be viewed by some as a Freudian slip about the political system given recent violence and the widespread belief that both political are tainted by associations with gunmen.”
Given that the PNP’s major argument for why they should win is that change is bad and that the JLP’s most convincing defense is that they should be given a chance because, hey, what else can go wrong…maybe Jamaica should just roll FCC-style and just flip a coin or something.
Next post: favorite Jamaican music videos. Yeaaaah!
God I love 400-year old vampire Southern senators — particularly Robert Byrd. I’m pretty sure he’s a Black Ops steam powered automaton that President Lincoln commissioned during the Civil War to fight the Confederacy or something.
I got reminded of him most recently, of course, because of the dogfighting controversy where he went nuts.
But there’s so much more awesome in Robert Byrd’s eternal lifespan. The Best of Byrd, after the jump.
UPDATE: It was brought to my attention that Byrd is also president pro tempore. Agreed: this is bodaciously awesome.
So I finally got around to watching the CNN’s Youtube Presidential Debates aired on Monday. If you were out of the loop — the basic idea was that the questions were provided by “viewers like you” through videos submitted on Youtube. A press release from CNN cited it as “tak[ing] the bold step of embracing the ever-increasing role of the Internet in politics.”
As much as I love Anderson Cooper’s virgin snowy white hair, there’s the obvious comment that’s already been made by a number of prominent bloggers that this is just old media wrapped up new media clothing. CNN cherry-picked who got aired, and the questions were as softie as they wanted them to be. It’s obvious that CNN still hasn’t quite gotten what the “internet in politics” means for their role in the public sphere when they openly admit that “a small group led by Senior Vice President David Bohrmann” will be deciding “who makes the cut.” If they’re embracing it — it’s only because it still can fit into the traditional way of doing things — with media as ultimate arbitrator.
As implementing Web 2.0 comes increasingly into vogue (i.e. USAToday) I think we will increasingly need a heuristic to parse out the “good uses” from the “bad uses.” I’m not sure what that heuristic is, but I think this instance was a bad use. Granted, I think it’s great to get people into the habit of generating their own media, that much is awesome. Though I think the practice is twisted in a bad way when it re-affirms the principle that the gatekeepers of media bottlenecks have the right to decide who is “valuable” enough to get mass distribution. Plus, it tends to center attention on YouTube as a sole conduit of submitting video, which is also pretty problematic.
Although all this is an important point to be made, I think there’s actually, another more distinctively surreal popomo side to this — the fact the hosts of the show are now Bizzaro-clones.
Mike Gravel, ex-Senator of Alaska, is totally TSIB’s favorite presidential candidate of the month. Standing above all the casually back-biting campaign ads and manuvering, he’s produced the most genius postmodern piece of political advertising in a long time.
This Shit Is Bananas 