Totally unacceptable

Before the recent US election, fifth grade teacher Diatha Harris decided to ask her students who they would vote for and why. While I am not even sure if this is appropriate, it gets a lot worse. Making the rounds throughout the classroom, she ridicules those students that put their support behind John McCain.

The classroom discussion begins with Harris asking the class who they support for president. When two students say McCain, she responds with “Oh Lord” and “Oh Jesus.”

When one girl says that she will support McCain because her parents do as well, Harris moves on to another girl who says that she will support Obama becuase he will end the war in Iraq, a “senseless” war according to their teacher. Harris then targets the McCain supporter again and asks her what she know about Iraq. When the little girl cannot answer, Harris has this to say:

And by the way the person that you’re picking for president said that our troops could stay in Iraq for another hundred years if they need to. So that means that your daddy could stay in the military for another hundred years.

After the exchange, the little girl is so embarassed that she doesn’t respond. The little girl was totally intimidated and essentially bullied by her teacher, a person of trust, infront of her entire class.

Conveniently enough, the exchange was captured by a Swedish television documentary crew. You can catch the video here:

Quebec Pair Prank Palin

As if she was’t having a hard enough time already.

Two notorious Quebec comedians have pranked Sarah Palin, tricking the Republican vice-presidential nominee into thinking she was speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy during a Saturday afternoon phone call.

The conversation ranges from hunting from a helicopter, to Palin’s presedential aspirations, to Canadian Prime Minister “Stef Carse”.  She may be a little slow at times, but you would think that the helicopter bit would have activated her spidey senses.

You can catch all 5 embarassing minutes here:

Obama and Palin featured as playable characters in Mercenaries 2

There’s been a lot of talk about how well Barak Obama could effectivley deal with the terrorist threat. Thanks to EA games however, we can all sleep at night knowing that he is capable of throwing grenades into tanks, using rocket launchers, and taking on terrorists with his bare hands.

Well PLAYED Obama

I could be mistaken, but I have yet to see any reference to this in any blog outside of the tech/video games sphere. Gamers on the Xbox 360 version of Burnout Paradise will have the joys of driving their cars through a billboard with presidential candidate Barack Obama on it. Some of the  in game billboards now feature an Obama ad that urges voters to vote early (directing them to the vote for change website).

A spokeswoman for EA has this to say:

“Like most television, radio and print outlets, we accept advertising from credible political candidates” 

 “Like political spots on the television networks, these ads do not reflect the political policies of EA or the opinions of its development teams.”

Some are claiming that this ad is a hypocritical move on behalf of the Obama team. Citing parts of his speeches, they claim that a man that has equated video games with underachievement should not be using video games for advertising.

Though I am no supporter of Obama, I have two problems with these claims. Firstly, when Obama takes aim at video games, he usually does so by suggesting that parents need to be more engaged, and for lack of better words, better parents.

We’re going to have to parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instill a sense of excellence in our children, and that’s going to take some time.

As you can see, this doesn’t have as much to do with video games as it does with effective and ACTUAL parenting. I think most would agree that parenting, or lack there of, is a major concern for our youth (a concern that trumps video games)

Secondly, the advertisement is clearly targeting a demographic that has seen a continual decline in voter turnout and responsiveness. I think that this represents (even if only for political gain) a step in the right direction to get these disengaged youth back into the realm of politics. If it takes an untraditional in game ad to get the attention of these voters, then by all means be untraditional.