Care to elaborate? I'm not saying you need to change my mind but instead I'm trying to have a dialogue about the situation. It's P&C so feel free to lay it out there. I see a group of black students in military fatigues chanting Obama policies and quotes and marching. The Alpha & Omega is a phrase used in worship so that' the most troubling aspect of it all. With that said, these students were instructed to some degree to perform the chant and it's in no way influenced by Obama. If these were white students carrying out the same chant for McCain would there be an issue here?

Not exactly. The article says that the superintendant did not know whether it was the teacher who scripted it, or the students. If indeed the teacher made them perform it, than that's just not right. If the routine was the students idea, I can't see why there'd be a problem with it.
The teacher isn't getting in trouble for what the students did so much as for posting it online, which he was apparently warned not to do.

It does look creepy indeed. BTW the students... way grown up for the middle school grades. Altogether, there must be in Missouri's water supply.

There's nothing wrong with teenagers looking up to Obama, but what's with all the gestures and rituals? Why the military fatigue? I think it's disturbing because it reminds me of some popular dictatorships in the past. Hitler had his Hitler Youths, and Mao his Cultural Revolution, especially the Cultural Revolution. It filled my head with images of young people singing and dancing to the Communist ideal, and to Mao. It's just disturbing, no matter who came up with the idea. There is zeal in this, and zeal is never good.

Alpha Phi Alpha step show. The fatigues definately lend a "This is my rifle canidate" vibe to the performance, but in its context, it's not nearly as scary as you seem to think it is. It's not as dancy as a step show usually is, true, but they're just kids, and kids without a coreographer at that.

That answered some questions and added new ones. But I feel better now, yeah.

My pal and across-the-street neighbor is a senior tech at a local VW dealership. His family is doing pretty well and he's highly respected in the hood.

And as our consumerist economy grinds to a slow, mechanics will be more and more in demand while lawyers, stuck with 150k college bills, get stuck as paralegals for 15-20 years.

Expanding it to not just automotive mechanics -- I have a "broken" 27 inch TV in my basement I'm probably going to throw out -- I'm pretty sure it just has a wire that needs to be re-soldered on, but the hassle of bringing it to a TV repair shop is more than just buying a new one.

Cut my income in half, and suddenly I'm lugging that bad boy to a repair shop. =)

It wasn't much of a step show. On the other hand, despite the camo pants (which are more and more becoming pure fashion completely divorced from suggestions of military), there was nothing scary or in the least bit intimidating about this performance. They spend the whole time talking about their career paths and Obama's health care plan for crying out loud.

Owatta! Beikoku!

For the first time in several generations ordinary people are actually excited about their candidate, truly excited, not just the feigned nonsense you get for a lot of elections. We piss and moan that people don't get involved and don't care and when they do it gets labeled as a "cult of Obama".

I saddens me that as a country we'll vociferously defend sports teams, wear their colors and sing stupid songs yet when you do it for something really important it gets mocked and labeled as "dangerous".

The Republican's and Conservatives would be drooling all over themselves if they had a candidate that got that kind of response from the American populace.

Her name is Sarah. When was the last time 90 million people watched the vice presidential debate?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say 50 million of them tuned in expecting to watch an absolute train wreck. When was the last time you watched a debate wondering if one candidate could put together a sentence in comprehensible English?

Every poll I saw had Biden winning the debate by double digits, I think it's safe to assume that they came away unimpressed.

Don't you mean militant black youths? I still don't understand all this Sarah fear going around. She likes to hunt and has a large family. But I do always find it funny that feminist's are saying she can not do the job of VP because she is a girl and has kids! Or the say in the home type signs.

A trainwreck would be fun, but unproductive. One of the positive aspects of that night, in my view, was that many of those 90 million people (in no small part comprised of conservatives) got to see and hear Biden and see that he is (or can create an appearance of being) a reasonable, sharp, informed, and very personable man.

My wife doesn't follow the election politics as closely, so she didn't know much about Biden at all, and she got immensely impressed by his conduct and performance at the debate. I suppose many others across the country were as well. Thank you, Sarah Palin, for attracting viewership to Joe Biden's performance