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From the good folks at My Silver State

This is the new McCain logo for 2008. Symbolizes his campaign almost perfectly, and sadly.

I remember 9/11 well. I was 18. I was heading of to college, about to, for the first time ever, live away from home. I’d decided to move to California, halfway across the country from my hometown of Overland Park, Kansas, and on 9/11, me and my dad were halfway to California. We were in Flagstaff, Arizona, actually, on a quick stopover to visit the Grand Canyon.

That morning I turned on the TV to check ESPN. Instead, I found out the world I’d be entering college into a world completely different than the one I’d graduated high school from. The first thought on my mind as I saw the twin towers in flames - “please, let it not be Arab terrorists.”

I want you all to think for a second - on those first few days, when America was twisted inside out. I knew about the Japanese internments during World War II, of the history of slavery and subsequent Jim Crow segregation that had only ended when my dad was my age. As a brown American, not of Arab origin, but fully aware of the fact that most Americans could not tell the difference, I honestly wondered for a few days whether America would accept me anymore.

Fear gripped me.

Osama Bin Laden. He was everywhere. Terrorism had become communism of our era. My generation now had it’s JFK moment. Fear was pervasive, onmipresent. Not far from where me and my dad spent the following night, September 12th, at a hotel where the receptionist’s eyes were glued to pictures of Bin Laden on the news, Balbir Singh, a Sikh-American, was murdered in an hate crime for refusing to remove his turban.

It could very easily have been me. That was the world those days.

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You’ve not only made history, but you’ve restored my belief in the American dream and my country.

Now, let’s go change America.

12 1/2 months ago, I stepped foot on American soil for the first time in over a year. I wasn’t wearing a flag lapel pin, and my passport had stamps from some rather unseemly countries (Turkey, the Emirates, Malaysia, to name a few), my hair was long, and I was going to live at home. But I knew then that, even though I had just finished a trip around the world, with experiences that I’m only now starting to understand, I was starting a far grander journey.

The journey to change America.

Last night, we took a powerful first step in that direction.

I travel with a slightly different perspective than most travelers. The world is a patchwork of disparate peoples, each with their own dynamic and fascinating history - and I only wanted to tap into this great collective of knowledge. So I went, from the picturesque battlefields of Gallipoli, where the seeds were planted that led to the great ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia only a decade ago. I visited the remote kingdom of Nepal, where the rapidly changing weather patterns were wreaking havoc on subsidence crops (a precursor to the food crisis today, I now realize).

I realized what power I had - I was from America. Six years of Bush had taken it’s toll on me, but I still believed that I could make a different. I just hadn’t tried hard enough.

Change isn’t easy. And last night, we took our first step towards Change we can believe in, and for the world, an America they can look up to once again. The next step - beating John McCain.

Classic

This man never ceases to amaze me.

In response to the elitism charges.

It’s amazing how the 3am ad, of all of Hillary’s ads, has reached cult status and become the most iconic ad of the primary campaign. And how that hasn’t really been a good thing for Hillary. Let’s take a look at two spoofs of her 3am ads.

This from the Jed Report.

Those unpaid Hillary bills have, unfortunately, not become a large issue in this campaign, much to my chagrin. For someone who is running on competence and ability to lead, how can this be a positive testament to how she will run Government?

The second one comes from Saturday Night Life, and was far more controversial. I happen to think that it attacks Hillary more than Barack, but many on the blogosphere disagreed. Take a look.

Once again. I wonder how much we’ll see this in the fall.

On April 19th, 2007, I, for the first time in 13 months, set foot on American soil. I planned it like this on purpose, to travel for a year, experience the world, volunteer in third world countries, grow as a human being, then return just as the political season was getting heated up. It was less than nine months until the Iowa Caucuses.

On November 2nd, 2004, I, like many of us here, was devastated. Another four years of George W Bush? My idealism and my innate belief in my own ability to change the world had taken a serious beating, and the floodgates were open leading to the dark waters of cynicism.

Yet, the very next day, as people began to face the truth, I faced reality in the eye and made a vow. That day, I wrote this:

This is horrible. Yesterday I felt like everyone was angry alongside me. Today, though, that number has shrunken dramatically. How? Yet not so surprising. But this election has ignited a fire inside of me – in 2008 this will not happen again because I will be actively involved and actively working to ensure it.

I feel – more powerfully today than even before the election – that I can make a difference.

Now, with four years of experience behind me, 2008 was here. I was ready to go, and three weeks later, I was zipping down I-70 towards Chicago, on my way to Camp Obama. I’d found my candidate – Barack Obama - I saw in him the hope and potential to move America past the failures of the past.

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