Alaena Hostetter

There are dozens of volunteers gathered around the tennis courts at the Sylmar Park on the corner of Borden and Polk in Sylmar.  These volunteers are from local churches that turned the tennis courts into a temporary relief hub for the victims of the Sayre fire.

They set up tents full of shoes, clothes, house wares, food and bottled water.  All of the supplies were donated from local residents and everything is free to victims, all they need do is register at the makeshift front desk. 


Most of the victims of the Sayre fire were residents of a mobile home community called Oakridge Park.  About 500 mobile homes were destroyed in the fire, making it the hardest hit community.

Rosa Soto is one of the victims that lost everything.  She had a four-bedroom house in Oakridge Park.  Tonight she and her sister Dalila Soto are sifting through piles folded clothes on the tennis court.

"My house is burned.  That's why I'm here right now, cause I have a big family and we don't have nothing," says Soto with an expression weary from exhaustion.  "I lost everything.  Every bedroom had a computer, TV, everything, now we don't have nothing."

This is the third trip to the relief site for Soto.  She and her sister are still gathering some supplies for the family to get by on.  For the time being, Rosa, her husband, sons and grandchildren are all living with Dalila.

"Now we have a full house, but that's okay.  I'm okay.  That's why I'm here," says Dalila.  

    Dozens of hungry men sit packed onto wooden benches in the lobby of the Los Angeles Mission.  They are here this Friday at noon waiting for a free lunch. 

    "I'd say about 90 percent of them are homeless.  Some live across the street in the Skid Row housing authority, and they come over here to receive clothing, showers, food, medical care and hygiene kits," says Chaplain Jorge Espinoza who works in an office tucked into the corner of the noisy lobby. 

    This Los Angeles Mission is an institution run solely on donations.  It leads a two-part effort to help the homeless.  The mission houses "guests" for 15-day periods in which they get a bed, food, clothing, medical care and other free services.  It also has a resident program in which students complete a two-year course of study that involves rehab, GED certification and life skills courses. 

    The program has been so successful in rehabilitating the homeless that some students come back to work for the mission in a corporate setting.  The operations coordinator, Hylas Allen, is one of those success stories.
  
    Allen is a former drug addict.  His addiction began when he was a just a child in elementary school.  Eventually the addiction caused him to lose everything, and he ended up on the streets.

    "I started with marijuana and from marijuana went with the next best thing.  I wanted to feel good.  Marijuana helped and then when I came into crack cocaine that made me feel a little better, but the bottom line is I ended up with nothing," says Allen.  Then Allen decided to clean up his life.

     "When I came here I needed help with me, I had a drug problem, and I was finished.  This is where God lead me to come," says Allen.  At that time, the L.A. Mission didn't receive Proposition 36 cases, but it does now.
 
    "Prop 36 is for people that have a drug offense or a drug connection. They give you an option to go through a program, complete the program as opposed to going to a state penitentiary," says Allen.

Is anyone getting tired of hearing from the candidates, besides me?  It seems like it is no longer about the issues in these presidential debates.  In the town hall set-up last week, the "issues" quickly spiraled into finger pointing by both candidates.   Anytime McCain accused Obama of anything negative, Obama responded with a denial of the accusation and his version of what happened.  Obama buried the next question with his denial and subsequent finger pointing at McCain. 

I wanted to hear about the issues from each candidate.  I think I am an informed citizen of the issues in this election, but I am always hungry to learn more about important stuff.  And IMPORTANT is the key word here.  

All of the accusations sounded like juvenile banter reminiscent of playground taunts like "I'm better than you are",  "I'm right and you're wrong", "It's his fault, not mine."  

What a turn-off!  I am an Obama supporter, and I'm even getting sick of him.
 
I tend to be distrustful of people who over-explain, who schmooze, who don't speak off-the-cuff from their heart and sound rehearsed.  The candidates both reminded me of sleazy car salesmen.  I've never met a car salesperson I trusted and for good reason.  After knowing a car salesman, I learned about all the shady things they do behind the scenes to squeeze the customer unrelentingly.  I want to think Obama isn't the typical politician, a car salesman's public  counterpart, but after the last debate my opinion is shifting.

The only positive thing stemming from these debates is the Saturday Night Live parodies of the candidates.  SNL has injected some much-needed humor into the stale campaign trail.  The parody of the town hall debate illuminated just how ridiculous each candidate sounded.  It parodied Brokaw's frustration with the candidates exceeding their time limit for each response, and how at least the first part of their responses wasn't issue-related.

Tina Fey's interpretation of Sarah Palin is perhaps the most convincing and inspired.  Fey captures Palin's look, accent, inflection and gestures to a tee.  Fey's impersonation, I hope, shows voters just how ridiculous Palin is as a vice presidential candidate.  Obviously, Fey exaggerates for comedy's sake, but the truth to it is what makes the comedy so effective.  As professor Alan Mittelstaedt says, "There are very few jokes in the world.  There is always an element of truth to humor."

I think the candidates should take a month off before the election.  How refreshing would that be, to not have to hear candidates blame-lay on one another?  People could have a whole four weeks to research the issues, think about what has been said in the last year and tune in to political analysis.  Plus the president would take office refreshed and ready to lead the country. 
 

Disclaimer:  Here are some of my observations following the debate.  Don't expect the following assemblage of words to be a coherent blog, cause it's not.

The media's reaction to the Obama and McCain debate is shocking.  I thought I would see more decisiveness in the media, someone to call a winner, but what I found was most media outlets declaring the debate a tie.  Saying McCain won this one, Obama won that one, blah blah blah. 

The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney and Sam Stein live blogged during the debate and published this from a CBS instant poll: 

• 40% of uncommitted voters who watched the debate tonight thought Barack Obama was the winner, 22% thought John McCain won, 38% saw it as a draw.

• 68% of these voters think Obama would make the right decision about the economy, and 41% think McCain would.

• 49% of these voters think Obama would make the right decisions about Iraq, 55% think McCain would.

Pitney and Stein at least peppered their commentary with some insight and definitiveness.

News filtering sites such as SpinSpotter.com and NewsTrust.net are successful in so far as they allow users freedom to air their grievances about news stories. 

SpinSpotter attempts to seek out the bias in news by urging its users to edit articles they find on the web.  Users download the "spinoculars" application which allows them to highlight text in an online article that they consider biased.  They are supposed to go to their favorite news sites and "find bias and tear it a new one."  Then anyone else who views that web article and has subscribed to the SpinSpotter spinocular will see the highlighted text believed to be biased and the reasoning for why it was highlighted. 

The website offers guidelines to its users for sniffing out bias.  These are listed in its Seven Deadly Spins.  For example, the website says to watch out for reporter voice, such as when "the reporter employs language (in the form of adjectives, adverbs, verbs, or superlatives) that conveys meaning beyond the supporting evidence provided in the article." 

Journalists' job is to flesh out what they're reporting on.  To fill in the blanks between quotes.  To say something more than "the grass is green."  Reporting without verbs and adjectives such as SpinSpotter recommends isn't reporting at all, it's not even forming complete sentences.