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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Community Comment

Put on your thinking caps…

Good morning, Netizens...


It is early on a Saturday morning, and while the fog hovers near the brackish river while we sit, high and dry, above the worst of it all. Our lives move onward, nonetheless, as we have jobs and businesses to maintain, bills to pay and thus the day begins pretty much as any other day.


What I am following this morning are two entirely different sets of opinions, each from a far-different camps of political thought. I first heard of these from cartoonist-columnist David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and like any self-respecting fish in the river, the minute I watched the first video, I was hooked.


The first video is of group of Obama supporters who were polled about President Obama's policies and the his history prior to being elected President of the United States. While I cannot swear authoritatively that there is no attempt on the part of the interviewer to sway or lead those whom he interviews one way or the other, I submit the video rests as a troubling document nonetheless. This video was shot on election day last year.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZLJj_q4xI


On the other hand here we have the people recently interviewed at a Sarah Palin book signing. Once again, I cannot make any claims that this video is untainted by the videographer's personal opinions; only that the opinions of the public themselves, are equally troublesome.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKKgua7wQk


The truly troublesome aspects of both videos are that Americans perceive our country's foreign policies as viewed from whatever news source(s) they happen to watch/hear, but overall at least the people being interviewed in both these videos appear to not understand how government works, is supposed to work or who is actually in charge. Nobody has a clue about what Sarah Palin would do if she were elected President of the United States. As history shows us, the voters who elected President Barak Obama in a landslide vote apparently had no idea what his foreign and domestic policies were going to be, either.


My opinions are that Sarah Palin as a Presidential candidate is very troublesome, for it exploits the underlying ignorance of mainstream Americans. But before anyone points to that statement as proof of a hidden bias, I will go further and state that most the people who elected President Obama into office were as ignorant in as many ways as those who support Sarah Palin.


I located a copy of the citizenship test that all newly-arrived U.S. Citizens are required to take prior to becoming citizens this morning, and took and passed the test easily. Since it is rather lengthy (100 questions) I will post it in its entirety in a separate message. I should note that the test questions I am using are the original questions, not the revised questions in use since October 1, 2008. That, too, is troublesome. If you go to http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/blinstst_new.htm you can comparatively examine the two sets of questions. Then it up to you to decide why the questions were changed.


Dave



Spokesman-Review readers blog about news and issues in Spokane written by Dave Laird.