Obama fails to shed celebrity skin

Barack Obama took very little time accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in his Thursday night speech, but slowly meandered into his campaign platform no less than 16 minutes later.

On the blue-lit stage similar to a fashion show catwalk, Obama appeared like a Grecian actor wooing his audience with every emotional appeal thinkable. He spoke of the American promise threatened by the Bush administration and its "broken policies." He revealed McCain's "unmaverick" voting record of siding 90% of the time with Bush within the Senate and how the Arizona senator referred to America as a "nation of whiners."

"It's not because John McCain doesn't care," Obama said, "It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

But Obama's use of the historic night for political gain only proved that he was not fully aware of what is happening himself. Though he mentioned John F. Kennedy within the final five minutes of his speech, his interpretation of the American dream differed greatly from the infamous "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" address.

"Each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we want, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect," Obama said to his crowd--those on Invesco Field and through cable to those at home--of more than 38 million, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Obama used layman's terms when addressing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Langston Hughes' "Dream Deferred" near his close as well, although his dream for American oil independence called for his signature rhetoric--an oozing sore ripe for McCain's picking.

Obama stated that as president, he would create an America independent from oil within 10 years--a farfetched proposal using clean coal and tapping into natural gas reserves as building blocks for the blueprints--allotting $150 billion for the program. According to NaturalGas.org, natural gas is an abundant yet non-renewable energy source that would require even more drilling into the American terrain--an idea far from the normally "more earthy" Democratic platform.

Obama also said that he would "cut taxes for 95% of all working families" to restore dignity to the middle class. How would this affect pooling $150 billion for an oil-free America while staying submerged under the $300 billion federal deficit reported by the Christian Science Monitor?

While Obama continues to dream of an American utopia, he must not allow his dream to "explode" all over his empty suit.

Florida's tussle with evolution parallels problems within Southeast

Charles Darwin wrote his infamous "Origin of Species" in 1859, yet nearly a century and a half later schools in the Southeast "Bible Belt" of the United States are showing slow progress in educating their pupils properly in evolutionary theory.

New York Times journalist Amy Harmon says the Florida Education Department did not mandate high school-level biology courses to teach evolution in its public schools until February 2008. The conundrum lays in evolution's contradiction of a literal translation of the Bible.

"But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith," Harmon says.

This hostility has managed to nearly wipe out evolution education in most Southern public high schools. This story provided by the New York Times illustrates more hindrances Darwin's evolutionary theory has faced throughout the last 150 years.

Even certain 2008 U.S. Presidential candidates lack knowledge in the evolutionary process. Mike Huckabee states in an interview with Bill Maher that he "thought it was utterly silly that a question [on the existence of evolution] was asked in a presidential debate."