Wednesday, April 13, 2016

RCL#5: Advocacy project


For my advocacy project I will be sticking with something I know, I will be advocating for action against careerism in politics. 

I deliberated for a while on a possible new topic but I kept coming back to this.  I think the reason was I had already put in so much time and though into picking a topic for my advocacy essay that this was and still is something I feel passionately about.  The medium I will be using for this project is still up in the air though but I have narrowed it down to two choices.

My first choice is to build a website, because this seems like a method that there can be a lot of user interaction.  My only trepidation is I have never built a website before.  I am hoping it is not too hard I will be investigating a few different web design website and fiddling around.  If I find creating a website to be out of my comfort zone I have a fall back plan.

The fall back plan is to go with a method I am well practiced in, iMovie.  Through high school and college I have used iMovie for numerous project there would be no learning curve for input images sound or even audio recording.  All I would have to do is plan out how I would present my topic.

Sometime a challenge is interesting though and can yield the best results.  This is why I am straying away from iMovie to begin with because it just seem plain and boring while a website holds a lot of potential upside if I can develop the site well.  After looking at some example advocacy projects there is defiantly a high standard of web design ability in past CAS classes I will have to uphold.  A learning experience is a good thing though.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

CI#5


Who will win the democratic and republican presidential nomination?  First I will start with the democratic race.

It is now the beginning of April and there is still two candidates in the race for the democratic nomination.  This would have been the biggest surprise of the primary if it were not for Trump.  It seems that for the last three years Hilary Clinton had been appointed as the next democratic presidential nominee.  It seemed like she was 100% locked in to win it... except the perfect storm is roaring in politics that makes candidates like Hilary Clinton, career politician who represent the establishment the enemy.  Compounded by the controversy that has surround Clintons stint as Secretary of State, there is now a vary small chance that Clinton losses to none other than Bernie Sanders. 

No candidate this primary cycle has received the kind of excitement that the crazy man from Vermont, Bernie Sanders has.  He was fighting an uphill battle all along going against the political machine of the Clintons.  Only one other person had the fortitude to every try to challenge that and it was Martin O’Malley.  Who is that you wonder... exactly he did not last long in the race.  Bernie on the other hand has been tapping into the emotions and feeling of a group that is usually not targeted by politics. A young liberal generation who feel the government should make more things free and take away from the billionaires (Trump LOL).  Image a general election of Trump Vs. Benies it would be the most intriguing presidential race every. 

Even with all the hype around Bernie there is still no chance in my mind that he secures the democratic nomination.  The election was predetermined long ago by the super delegates and the establishment supporting Hilary Clinton.  It is a corrupt process on the democratic side, if Bernie can keep winning states like he did is Wisconsin he may secure the popular vote but that doesn’t matter.

On the republican side things are really interesting because of the high probability of a brokered convention. The only candidate who has any shot of reaching the required number of delegate is Donald Trump.  Yes, Donald Trump.  The other two candidates, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, are simply trying to force a brokered convention with one of the candidates Kasich only winning one State, the state he is governor of Ohio by a slim margin over trump.  That one win for Kasich though could be huge because it prevented trump from securing the sixty-six delegates from Ohio.

I think there will be a brokered convention with Trump falling just short of the required delegate count.  It would be unimaginable that the republicans would insert there own candidate.  That would be suicide in the general election. And there is no way they will want to back Trump or Cruz.  It is a conundrum to say the least.

With that I predict that Trump will secure the nomination in a brokered convention, and if he does not, well it will be bad.  The general election will be Hilary Clinton Vs. Donald Trump.   They are the antithesis of one another.  A career politician whoses every word is measured with extreme tact and strategy, while the other could give a dam about what he says.  All the polls say Hilary would beat Trump in a general election.  There is something called a response bias in polls and while these polls are well run republicans have a hard time admitting they will support trump.  I think it will be  a close race.  This summer and fall will be vary interesting.