Why My Friends Will Not Be Voting in this Election

My friend Jeremy posted a great blog entry yesterday about what infuriates me when it comes to illegal aliens voting here in America. Jeremy and his Canadian bandmates have lived exclusively in the United States since 2000, working very hard to support themselves and their families while abiding by the restrictive rules of their work visas. Until Jeremy married an American in 2005, he was only allowed to earn money from playing music in a band - NO other side jobs like Starbucks were permitted. When they first moved to Nashville, the band squeezed 7 Canadian adults (4 band members, 2 wives, and their manager) into one house for more than a year to make ends meet. Each band member was making about $300/month for income. Not exactly what you think of when it comes to living the lifestyle of a "rockstar," eh? So here's a group of honest, college-educated, very hard-working individuals who have followed the rules, while living here for two entire presidential terms, having plenty of opinions of their own. Yet they cannot and will not vote in this election, while millions of others - so many of them uninformed - will vote illegally. What is wrong with this picture?!!? Read Jeremy's blog post here.

Posted by email from goldentwig's posterous

Edwards' Campaign Tries to Silence Student Reporter

A local radio station has been discussing this YouTube video for the past few hours, detailing how a journalism grad student from UNC-Chapel Hill has been the target of presidential candidate John Edwards' Media folks. Student Carla Babb's assignment was to create a feature piece on a topic being discussed on campus, so she decided to present a "fair and balanced" piece in response to an article written by another student in the Daily Tar Heel campus newspaper. The DTH news article had stated that Edwards' campaign office, located in an "affluent" part of Chapel Hill, contradicted his "campaign platform of fighting poverty." Babb created a video piece for the "Carolina Week" newscast, interviewing both that student reporter and another student working as an intern for Edwards' campaign office. She then posted the video on YouTube as part of an MTV News contest. Soon thereafter, she received a call from campaign officials working for Edwards, demanding that she pull her story offline and "saying that the story was straight from the Republican Party." C.A. "Charlie" Tuggle, a professor at UNC and news director of the "Carolina Week" broadcast, received repeat calls from Edwards' campaign after Babb refused to remove her piece from the web. "I thought I wrote it as balanced as possible," Babb stated in a radio interview.

You can read the rest of the details in the AP story here and watch the video for yourself below.

What do you think? Was her story fair and balanced? Have Edwards' campaign officials turned a non-subject into a major exposition of how silly they can react to something that otherwise would have only been seen by a few thousand people?