Never mind Hollywood’s perpetual fascination with the end of the world motif.  Humankind has always been curious about how we got here and how it will all eventually end.  This writer wonders if it’s at all a coincidence that 2012 will be this nation’s next presidential election year.

At the risk of reading excessively into the influence of movies on the thinking of the general public, it’s worth pointing out a couple of things from the film’s theatrical trailers on Apple’s website.  In the trailer below we see a Tibetan monk running for cover as the question pops up on screen: how would the governments of our planet prepare six billion people for the end of the world? Answer: they wouldn’t.  How comforting.

Trailer 2 features eye-popping special effects and questionable, over-dramatic acting (after all, John Cusack is famous for [fill in the blank]).  What really stood out for me was seeing an African-American president preparing to speak in the Oval Office.  The Mayan calendar predicted an end to the world on December 21, 2012, more than a full month after the 2012 presidential election.  Apparently, we are being conditioned to the idea of four more years of Obama in the White House.

Also, if you pay really close attention to the wording on the side of the first “2″ in 2012 at the very end of the trailer, you will see the words “ever into a place,” a phrase purportedly taken from the Book of Revelations: “There is coming that time when they will be turned away forever into a place known as the lake of fire, a place of eternal torment which is so much worse than anything they have yet experienced.”  I thought it was interesting that Roland Emmerich, the wizard behind the so-bad-it’s-good “Independence Day” and the forgettable “The Day After Tomorrow,” would covertly toss in this biblical reference that most people won’t even think to investigate.  Plus, Roland is a highly active liberal who is outspoken about global warming and equal rights.  Has Roland become disenchanted with Obama to the point where he would paint him as a disconnected leader ready to implement shady plans for the continuity of government?  Nothing new here (see George W. Bush, rex84).

I’d love to hear some input about general impressions of the trailers as well as the timing of this film.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do the Obama deficits compare with past presidents? And how did the national debt get so big anyway?

Click here to view the embedded video.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow discusses how Obama is adopting and expanding upon Bush era policies of indefinite detention for detainees who they think may commit crimes against Americans in the future.

A little over a year ago an artist made George W. Bush resemble a comic book villain with little fanfare.  L.A. Weekly put an image of Bush as a vampire on a front cover in 2004 with no subsequent national outrage.  The photoshopped TIME portrait of President Obama as Heath Ledger’s Joker, however, has created a firestorm of debate across the country.  The image has been dubbed by some “dangerous,” “hateful,” and “mean-spirited.”  Myspace and Flickr have reportedly begun banning the pictures from user accounts.

Due to charges of the posters as “racist,” the national discourse on race relations has been reignited just weeks after Obama asserted that a white police officer acted “stupidly” in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  But what really motivated Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year old Palestinian-American attending the University of Illinois-Chicago, to create the picture?

He had no intention of distributing his work outside of his Flickr page.  The image sat in cyberspace for a few months, garnering merely a couple thousand views before a mystery individual snagged it up and inserted the word “socialism” at the bottom.  And so the Jokerbama poster was born.

Alkhateeb’s own political views fall neither to the left nor the right.  A self-proclaimed independent who “calls it like he sees it,” Firas was exercising his right to free speech.  And that’s what this is really all about.  And consistency.  Our presidents and political leaders have been lampooned in political cartoons and by artists since the 1700s.  Whatever your own personal feelings are toward the Jokerbama poster, it’s important to remember this kind of political speech is an important part of American society.  It’s what separates us from nations like North Korea and China, where people don’t have the right to express themselves freely.

In the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall:  “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”