Jacksonian Democracy

Politics is something that has been going on for a very long time. In the earlier years when the government was still being established there was something called the Jacksonian Democracy. In the Nation of Nations book that I am reading it says that Henry clay organizedThe National Repuclicans, and it also says " the new style of politics came into its own nationally only when Andrew Jackson swept to power at the head of a new party, The Democrats." So in the Nation of Nations book it lets us know that the new system of politics came to be when Jackson organized the new democratic party. With this new style of politics many things changed new things started to happen. The Jacksonian democracy changed things from being not equal for all to the equal rights that people have now.

Jacksonian Democracy had certain principles by which they abided and tried to make things happen. I will talk to you about these things. One principle they had was Expanded suffrage, the Jacksonians felt that voting rights should have been more important they made it so that any white man could vote at the time, instead of just the richer people who onwned land.
Another thing was thing was Manifest Destiny they wabted to expand to other countreis, and this was something good because it built on our country. They wanted a limitation on the expantion because they did not want slavery to expand to other countries as well, the whig party a rival tpp the Jacksonians did not like this system of politics, but the Jacksonian way of doing thing led to what we have today the equality of all races.

The Jacksonians wanted the people to be a part of the governement, that wasn't happening before the Jacksonian Democracy, and the Jacksonians accomplished that, the influance of the people in the government. The uprising if the Jacksonian Democracy made the politice kind of how they are now with the two opposing parties, Republicans and Democrats. Jacksonian Democracy made the increase in respect for the common man not just the people who have more money or own land, there was more equality in the country.

The Jacksonian Democracy was constantly politically fighting with the Whigs party, and they made an impact in the political participation of the people in the government with their votes and stuff like that. John Quincy Adams was the firts person who was elected witht the vote from the common man and not only land owners.

I think that Jacksonian Democracy made it possible for a lot of things to happen a new system of politics, the equality of the people. It made it so that the people could be more in the government like they had a decision that they could state by voting for these candidates that were there. The growth or our country was also something else that was good, and overall i think that the Jacksonian Democracy was very good in the early start of America as well as now.

Sources:

James West, Davidson, Gienapp William E., Heyrman Christine Leigh, Lytle Mark H., and Stoff Micheal B.. Nation of Nations. United States of America: McGraw Hill College Companies, 1999.

Voting Scandals Edited!!!

There seem to be many things going on in the world now that the elections are coming up. some of those things include vote-suppression and the ACORN scandal. These things are said to be taking away peoples vote and their voting rights which is something that is very important to people. That is their say or their opinion in this greater society, they get to choose the different things that they feels is good for our country and the candidate that seems to represent these things. What I have to see is if these things are actula scandals.

Currently ACORN is under investigation by the FBI, for vote fraud. They are sending in a bunch of voting registrations of people who have already registered and they are also said to be making up fake names , such as Mickey Mouse. This is said to be a big scandal since the presidential elections are here and now everybody is stressing because they don't want people to win with false votes. The republicans called out Barrack Obama on supporting this group and that he is doing wrong things. The Acorn Organization is turning in a lot of fake registration forms with fake names, which is not good they want a lot of vote but they are not doing it in the right way. Something that Is a little wierd is that MCcain was saying that Obama is not very good since he is a suppoter of ACORN, but he himself was a supporter of this compnany.

MCcain spakes at ACORN rally in 2006


MCcain was also someone who supported the ACORN company, he spoke at one of their rallys as shown in the video above.
Acorn is actually not doing anything wrong the MCcain-Palin Campaign is accusing ACORN of voter fraud but it is actually not, the fraud that has been commited was some voter registration fraud by some of the ACORN employees who just wanted to get paid for work they felt was a little hard to meet. These actions would not actually help fill up the poll ballot boxes.
Acorn was just doin their job it is illegal for them to discard ant registration forms that can only be done by the election officials all that they could do with the suspicious forms was flag them which they did. The NYTimes says: "According to Acorn, most of the forms that are now causing controversy are ones that it flagged and that unsympathetic election officials then publicized."

Factcheck says:

"ACORN also says it cannot simply discard suspicious forms on its own, but is required by law in most states to submit to local election officials all the forms its canvassers bring in. ..... only election officials are legally able to determine the validity of a voter registration application."

So in reality ACORN did not do anything wrong they just did their job. People are making this bigger than it should be it is not a scandal, they just turn in the registration foorms that does not really change the vote that go in the poll ballot boxes.

In the vote-suppression is something that is worse than this supossed ACORN scandal many peoples votes are being cast out for minor things while registering , so they are not getting their voting rights either.Voter-supprresion makes it dificult or impossible for people to vote.
The Huffington Post says,"One of the brightest hopes for the Obama-Biden ticket is that many people will read and act on the advice in RFK, Jr and Palast in their guide to protect their legitimate voting rights. Failing that America is headed toward another election that will see millions of ballots discarded on pseudo-technicalities." That is saying that people should get their vote back, and the peoples voting rights should be protected, because many peoples votes are basically being thrown away.
The help America vote law is something that makes sure that people are not commiting voter fraud, but it actually leads to voter -suppression because if there are any small things that are different on your informationlike on a licencse or something and it is different from the information that the elction officials have then they basically tell the people they cannot vote, that is not good for people.





Sources:
NyTimes : the ACORN story

Fact CHeck: ACORN Accusations

Huffington Post: voter-suppression

Presidential Debates

After watching the presidential and vice presidential debates I saw that both candidates had a lot to say and also a lot of things they wanted to clarify. The vice presidents were there to also state the goals as well was the achievements of both parties. In these debates they were stating a lot of things that are going on in our country now, how they could make a change, and how they would be better than the other candidate.
They were talking a lot about the main issues going on, like health care, education, taxes, the war in Iraq.
Both of them had something to say.
Obama was very dedicated to expressing how important health care is to the people and how he would help people get it.
He also talked about the education of the people in our country and how people need it.
They both talked about how the taxes are not doing a lot of good in our community, and how they both want to change that. Then they both talked about how one or the other supported these things , they would just attack each other trying to make the other look bad in the eye of the public. That what debates are about they, are where people argue their side on a certain topic(s).

For the war in Iraq they both had their own opinion Obama wants to bring back the troops and MCcain says to leave them there so that they can finish the job that we started.
People agree with different things i guess you would just have to see the different perspectives that people have.
These debates are different to the ones that happened years ago, where they would last up to 3 hours and each person spoke for 90 minute instead of 90 seconds. I think in the debates back the the candidates had more time to talk and express the way they view the situations at hand. Now they only get a short amount of time to speak and they always seem to get cut off in the middle of their explanations. I think that the debates always help people see a little bit more of what the candidates are about which is always good.

can the internet affect your choice?

I think that the Internet can most definitely affect the choices that people have on the presidential candidates.
All kinds of media can affect people think of certain things.

There are some websites that promote the candidates and they let the people know what these men are trying to do to change the country.
A website that would kind of be good for like promoting would have to be YouTube because on that website there are a lot videos where people can express themselves on how they feel about the candidates and who people should vote for.
On that website there can also be commercials that are made by the candidates themselves and commercials can be very persuasive for certain people.
Something else that people can do is make their own website advertising the person that they want. People can make their own websites all of the time and since it is theirs they can put whatever they want on it. People promote things on the Internet as much as they can on the street passing on fliers. On the Internet it can get around the world even more than you passing fliers on the street. The Internet can be accessed by so many people and a lot of people do use it. So yes I do think that the Internet can have an affect on how people make their choices.

Project Reflection..

In this project he had some time to do a lot of things. We were assigned one of the Lincoln -Douglas debates in our case we got the first debate. We had to research that topic and then make a newspaper cover of it . With articles and pictures relating to our specific debate. Something that I contributed to the final product that I liked would have to the article that I wrote, which was the Lincoln's view on slavery. Another thing was the poll quote in our newspaper, I had my article already and I just needed to pick something string in that article that would catch somebodies eye or also specify what the article might be talking about.

Something that I did no like so much in the final product would have to be, my article's headline I could have put more thought into that. If I had done that I would have been able to come up with a better headline that would be kind of like an attention getter for the reader.

The process fro this newspaper was long we had a lot of stuff to do. What I first had to do after getting assigned to a certain debate was research the debate. I actually had to read the transcripts to find Lincoln's view. I pulled out specific quotes from the transcripts to show both sides Lincoln's and the opposing side Douglas. After I had read the transcripts and pulled out quotes I had to start write the first draft of my article. The next day I brought it to school and got it critiqued by my peers and group members. When that was done I revised and edited my article as well as Aaron's, while he started working on the page on indesign. Once I was done editing the articles they were given to Aaron so that he could put them into the actual paper. I also had to find pictures and make headlines and captions for the articles and pictures. This process was a little hard, making captions or headlines were not to easy but we got it done. After all of this Aaron was working on the paper and he would ask for our input on how we liked the layout or what we could do to change it, so Me and Sophie both helped in that. We also reviewed the paper to see if there were any mistakes that way Aaron could fix them. That was pretty much the whole process of this project for me and my group members. Overall I think that our final product was good I really liked it, It had some minor errors in it but besides that we were able to all put in work for this paper.

Use of photography...

Photography

This image shows a good snse of composition. I chose this picture because there is one main object, which is the shell, but they took the picture using the ruke of thirds method. They take the picture in a certain way so that you can see the obeject but you also see the background which is really good.

This picture is showing the use of depth in field. I chose this photo because it shows how there are many things in the picture like the wide open space in the background, but in this photo there is one thing that is focused on. The photographer focused on the smirnoff bottle, and you can still lond of see the background but it is blurred.

This photograph shows eyes, color, and filling up the frame. In this picture they got a close up picture of the cat they filled the whole frame with that one object and the cat was actually even cut off in certain areas. This is a very good picture to show the filling of the frame.

In this photo the photographer used the light that was coming into the room to their advantage. In this photo the girl is mostly in a shadow except in the part where the light is slightly shining on her face I really like how this photo looks,

This photo shows a great use of someone getting on the eye level of the object they are photographing I really like this photo because it is not easy to get a photo like this, a giraffe is very tall and they got on its eye level and took a good picture of it.

This is the use of close up macro photography it can be closee up or far away. I chose a photo with a close up on an eye

I chose this photo because not only do I like color photos but also black and white photos. I son't know why I do but sometimes black and white makes things pop out a little bit more like in this phoyo the couple in the middle pop out more than the background.

I got all of my photos from google images.

Debate is the subject...

The Lincoln - Douglas debate that I had to research in particular was their very first debate. This debate took place in Ottawa, Illinois, and these senatorial candidates where debating on slavery and popular sovereignty. There were many people there that day who wanted to listen to what these two men had to say about slavery. In the beginning of this debate the first to speak was Douglas and he started it off by saying a bunch of things that Lincoln had done, which was kind of an attack to Lincoln. When Lincoln got his turn to speak the first thing he said was that he did not like when people misrepresented him and that is what Douglas had done something good about this action was that he said what he wanted to say and then he clarified any false information that was given.
In this debate Lincoln and Douglas had different views on the topic at hand. Lincoln felt that slavery should be abolished and he stated this clearly in the debate. He hated slavery just for what it was a human without rights, I would have to say that is what he thought about it.

Lincoln: " I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself."

In that quote he basically states that he is not for slavery, he thinks that it is something that is not good for anyone to be in. On the other hand Douglas never really explicitly says that he is for slavery, but he says that a country should be able to decide for themselves whether that country would have slavery or not, this was called popular sovereignty.

Douglas: ".... each state to state perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery."

These are two different views on slavery, which clash and that's why it is a debate. Two opposite opinions and they candidates argue their view on a question, and the people I think are the one's who ultimately decide who wins in these debates

In the Presidential debates now the format is very different to that of the debates back in the day. Now the candidates are asked several questions instead of one and they have to answer them in like 90 sec instead of ninety minutes.

The presidential debates now are going good so far. I think that sometimes both candidates make valid points on what they are talking about whether it be about the economy, taxes, or the war in Iraq. There is always one better than the other in these things. I think that Barrack Obama does a very good job in stating his ideas. Something else he does is that if Mccain says something about him , he clarifies it and that is kind of like what Lincoln would do in his debates against Douglas. So far in the debates that have occurred I have learned a lot even though at times i get bored and doze off, I still seem to get stuff out of it. I can here what these men are proposing to do for our country as president.

All around the world..

After looking at the demographics of different places I saw that I had questions on somethings.
In some of the demographics I would see that that obviously the age ranges varied and in some ages there were higher percentages of people , does that mean that more people were born during their time rage? If so why was that?

Is the population in California and Texas bigger because they are border states?


I was looking at the demographics in America on American Fact finder. On here I was able to look at statistics on many different things like the percentages of the different races, populations in different states, age and sex, and also education. I found this very helpful to my learning what there is in America through numbers.

I had to answer the following question:

1. Explain how a particular demographic may be impacted by—or could impact—the election of one of the candidates for President.

Well for this question I can't really say how they demographics would affect the elections, I would have to say that it depends on who is a Democrat or Republican. I know that there are many in both parties. Something that I can say is that if there are people that want something different they will vote for Barrack Obama because he is African-American, and he would be the first African -American as a president. There may be a lot of people who don't want the same thing they want to see something knew. There are also many people who are already accustomed to the old ways and don't want change. Change to them might not be something that will have a positive but negative outcome in the end, so those people might vote for MCcain. They are so used to something that they say something knew will ruin everything, but in reality that is a fallacy of tradition, which is when people think that if something has been done a certain way for many years as long as they can remember it cannot be done any other way , which is not true. People do things out of the ordinary all of the time those can be good or bad. I saw that in the populations the whites have more people than any other race including African-American, that could have and impact in the elections depending on the view of the whites.

You think you are free of rasicm ...think again

Racism is something that has been going on for a very long time, even more in the times of the civil war. Racism and discrimination has happened, is happening, and I think it always will be in our midst.

Racism and discrimination is something that has been around for a long time. There were the slave during the civil war. They were seen as not human and more like property. An example of this would be the Dred Scott case. Where a slave tried to sue for his freedom this took place in the year 1847 well at least his first attempt at it was in that year. The Supreme court had at first rejected his Case , but then a couple of years later when they decided a re-trail they made the decision of denying him his freedom, they said that because he was black, he was not a citizen and therefore he could not sue anyone. I don't think that was right because back then they did not see slaves as humans and they like basically had no rights. The thing I did not understand was, how could they not see them as human? They had all the same things that all the rest of the people had the only difference was the skin color. These slaves wanted their freedom they wanted to be like all of the other human, they wanted to be Free.

In class we are learning a lot about the civil war and slavery was a big thing going on during that time, I got this very valuable resource from my teacher. It is a book called Letters of a Nation, in this book there are many actual letters that people have written to others, I was able to find some letters that were written by slaves. In these letters the authors are writing mostly to their loved ones. I would like to share with you some excerpts from the text. The following letter is from Louisa Alexander to her husband Archer.

"My dear husband, I received your letter yesterday and lost no time in asking Mr. Jim if he would sell me, and what he would take for me. He flew at me, and said I would never let you free only at the point of Baynot, and that there was no use in my ever speaking to him any more about this...... He says that if he had a hold of Lincoln he would chop him up into mincemeat"

In this letter she is telling her husband that there is no chance of her getting her freedom, and how her master does not like Lincoln because he was trying to free the slaves. Her master must have despised Lincoln to want to harm him in that way. There were families that were being separated from each other by their owners selling one of them to someone else. I know that I would not like to be separated from my family now for a short amount of time, let alone not being able to know whether I will see my family again, this is something that many of the slave went through. Another thing that We read in class was Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom. In that text I found that the people who wanted slavery had a system in place that supported slavery and that nothing could entrench the system unless it was a huge war or a big slave rebellion, the system was as follows.

" A system harried by slave rebellions and conspiracies developed a network of controls in the southern states, backed by laws, courts, armed forces, and other race prejudice of the nation's political leaders."

In that part of the text it is saying that because the slaves were rebelling they had to take stronger measures to keep it the way they wanted it, with there being slaves. So they started using militia and many other means of power to stop the slaves from being free.

These slaves did not have natural rights, or human rights, I think they only had one which was life but they were missing the other two as seen in the Declaration of Independence, they were missing Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness. Since they were not seen as humans they did not get any of these things until they were free.
I thought it was weird because they fought for their freedom and everything, and when they finally got it they thought they would be free from everything. That is not the case there are still many people that are racist or they like to discriminate. All victims of racism want to escape all of that but it still goes on now even after all of those laws of equality. Some people will never see that equality, they don't see that we are all created equal.

Dying for Dixie, is a very good example of this this story is about a man that was shot by black teenagers because he had a confederate flag posted up in the back of his truck. I this story it showed how people were not over that fact that blacks were no longer enslaved, they were still very racist and they did not care for the integration of races, even though it was already happening. They had The KKK and other groups who did not like the blacks, and they weren't afraid to show it. The whites felt that if the blacks got m,ore things that they requested that soon they would take over everything.
There was a part in the text where this lady is talking the the reporter in Kentucky about the whole situation and how blacks should " get over slavery". I don't think that anyone could really get over that especially when they are still being treated as lower beings. In this she says, "Slavery was not that bad, A lot of people were quit happy to be living on a large plantation" And then she starts talking about how blacks would take over everything if they got some of the things that they wanted, this made her mad and she said "Don't put us where they used to be." If she felt that slavery was not that bad why was she so enraged by the fact that she might be put in the same situation the blacks were in? That is very contradictory, but that is how some people feel they don't want anything tho happen to them, and they don't care about others.

Something that is a more recent case of racism is the Jena 6 case in Louisiana. Where six black high school students were arrested for beating up a white student. They felt that they had a reason to do it because they were just minding there own business and they sat down under a tree in their high schools courtyard, and this spot was somewhere that usually some of the white students would sit. The next day when these black students went to sit there they found that there nuces hung on the tree. Which was very racist and hurtful to these black students because it symbolized when slaves would get hanged.These students were really offended by this. So the black students beat up a white classmate and they were all arrested, at one point all but one of these boys were released. People felt that this was a racial act because this guys chargers were already casted out by the courts, but the judge would not set bail for this boy and that is not fair it is just like the Dred Scott case I mentioned before they were denying this boy his freedom.



People might have felt for a moment that they were free from something, but they soon found out that they were still frowned upon by some they were not seen as equal but less than the others. Racism and discrimination has been happening for a very long time and it will continue to happen I don't think there will be a time when there is no racism and discrimination. I have gone into the past to show you some examples of an issue that some people just cannot be without and I have also shown you some more current events involving the same thing, Racism and Discrimination.


CITATIONS

Carroll, Andrew. Letters of a Nation. New York City: Broadway, 1999.

"Dred Scott." PBS. 2 Oct. 2008 .

"Neo Nazi Group threatens Jena 6 students." Youtube. 22 Sep. 2007. 2 Oct. 2008 .

"The Jena 6 CNN Report." Youtube. 6 Sep. 2007. 2 Oct. 2008 .

Zinn, Howard. People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.