If you’ve been on the internet at some point since Tuesday night (and if you’re reading this, then yes, I’m talking to you), then you’ve probably read one headline or another about the Iowa Caucus, which was one of the first “races” for the Republican presidential candidates. It’s usually supposed to be an accurate early indicator for who will win a political party’s nomination, but what happens when over 120,000 votes are tallied and a candidate leads by only eight votes? Should we even care about these caucuses at all?

To be honest, you shouldn’t really care about these results. The fact that one extra handful of people wrote Mitt Romney’s name down on a piece of paper (forget pregnant chads or digital votes, this caucus process is some serious old school stuff) really won’t determine the fate of these Republican candidates. Because those who caucused on Tuesday night are only a percentage of those who live in Iowa because even they’re only a percentage of the people who care a little about so many long speeches. Besides, these votes don’t even count for anything when it comes to the official nomination; people’s minds change and those eight people just might vote for someone else!

However, you should care about the caucus altogether: even though former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney just barely beat former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, it’s interesting that Santorum was at the bottom of opinion polls just a few weeks ago. Oh, and his campaign may not be backed by as much funding as Romney’s is, and yet he managed second place in the closest caucus in history. Even though Tuesday night was like a “test run” of what’s to come at the national convention later this year, there’s still much to learn from it. It’s the same reason why sports teams play preseason games and why students the PSATs in high school: they literally don’t mean anything, and yet there is so much be said about those supposedly negligible games and tests!

If you’re voting Republican, Tuesday night brought the first glimpse of who might earn your support at the voting booths (note: it’s no longer Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who dropped out after placing sixth at the caucus).

If you consider yourself a Democrat, then you saw who Barack Obama might be up against in November (not that you could clearly tell from those results or anything).

And if you have yet to decide where you stand politically or who to lend your support to, this is the year to do so. Four years ago, America voted the first African-American president into the White House, and this year has already seen the closest caucus in history. Sure, you don’t have to watch every single primary event or fly out to support in person, but if you’re one of the many who are unhappy with the state of this country, then cast your ballot carefully. Even if you think your vote won’t count, or that the entire democratic system of voting really doesn’t matter, or that politicians always go back on their word once elected into office, I still think that we should try.

Maybe I’m just super naive because this will be the first presidential election I can vote in (I missed the last one by being one month too young), maybe I’m just getting too excited from too many media headlines that I just had to write my own for College Candy. Either way, I’m voting this year, and since it’ll be my first time, I’m not just gonna give it away to anybody!

Ashley is a UC San Diego grad who is holding on way too tightly to a potential career in magazines and goes to Vegas all too often. She’s fascinated with celebrities and strawberry beer and doubles as a pathological texter/emailer/blogger. Feed the addiction with tweets @cashleelee. Thanks in advance.

The Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Recession, Depression, Stimulus, Democrats, Republicans, Congress — sometimes the big issues in today’s world can make your head spin. There’s so much going on and it’s tough to keep up with all the details, but even though it’s hectic, the big issues can have a big impact on your life, your career, and your future. Lucky for you, I’ve taken the  top headlines and condensed them into easy-to-read tidbits with all the info you need to know. And trust me, this is the stuff you need to know.

Are you a fan or a critic of Obama? Were you counting on a new stimulus package this year? How do you feel about Congress’ decision over whether or not to keep troops in Iraq? What issues matter most to YOU?

On one hand, I’m undeniably an Obama supporter—even if I don’t have a graphic tee with his face emblazoned on it like most of my friends do. I read Dreams from my Father, voted for him (twice), and watched the election results breathlessly last year while furiously checking FiveThirtyEight every ten seconds. I love his eloquence, his poise, and everything he represents: the return of intellectualism to the White House and the possibility of improved race relations across the country. Plus, he graduated from my alma mater, even if he hates talking about it. And his wife is pretty kickass.

On the other hand… when I saw this SNL sketch last week, I couldn’t laugh because I was too busy cringing. I agree with most of the points that the Saturday Night Live crew is making: Obama’s rhetoric has rarely been matched by decisive action. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still dragging on, healthcare is still a mess, and the recession hasn’t exactly ended, despite what some media outlets are saying. (Also, the sketch itself was just horrifically unfunny. SNL kind of blows this season… but I digress.)

Other Nobel Peace Prize laureates—Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, even Al Gore—achieved specific things that unarguably changed the world for the better before they got their awards. Obama, though, is almost more of a symbol than an actual agent of change—at least so far. If nothing else, this award seems incredibly premature. Why not wait until he’s at least been president for an entire term, after he’s actually had enough time to make good on his promises?

I’m also hesitant about congratulating Obama because this honor can only fuel the awful, hateful things that his enemies say about him. Republican pundits are already snidely responding to the award by calling it a “joke,” and I’m sure that crazy, right-wing internet commentators everywhere are also having a field day with it. The Nobel Committee has accidentally done something that will only widen the political gulf between red and blue by increasing the opposition to Obama, which will make it even more difficult for him to actually achieve any of his goals.

I wish I could be proud of my president right now, but there are just too many problems that come along with him getting the Peace Prize. At least I can count on him delivering a beautiful acceptance speech.

What do you think—does Obama deserve the Nobel?

The week the White House launched a website called Reality Check, obviously aimed at the younger “internet set” to voice its side of the story on Obama’s healthcare reform and answer some of the questions that have arisen. This is one of those issues that I’ve heard about all. over. the place. But the sad truth is, I haven’t been listening much, and either have a lot of other people our age. It suddenly occurred to me that I have heard an awful lot about what our parents and grandparents think on the issue, but next to nothing on it from girls like me.

Are you all like me and just not paying attention, or is it just that we aren’t talking it out?

Well here’s your chance, ladies. If you don’t know what’s going on, it’s time to get informed. If you do, well, duke it out. I want to know what you all think.

But first, we all gotta know what’s up. If you’ve been a little lax in your news watching (like me) or if you just love legalese, here’s the official barackobama.com PDF on the healthcare reform plan. Now, if you weren’t patient enough to wade through all of that (because who is?), I’ve slogged through a lot of the recent news on both sides and here’s the gist:

On the “pro” side: The Obama plan addresses some of the big problems with healthcare right now – the high costs, the hoops doctors and patients have to jump through, the big money insurance companies make at the public’s expense and the way that the poor get the worst level of healthcare (if they’re lucky enough to get any at all). The Obama plan, it seems, would create an option where the government would help subsidize certain qualifying insurance plans to make them more affordable for everyone, particularly low-income people who can’t afford insurance now.

There have been a number of assurances that the new program would be strictly voluntary, particularly aimed at those without healthcare now. And there are plenty of modern countries, like the UK, that have government run healthcare systems, which many argue are more effective than our own. Even in the US, many note, government-run systems like Medicare do a better job of providing care than private HMOs, which could be a strong point for a bureaucratically based system, as well as the heavier regulations that would come along with government control.

Perhaps the biggest point on the the “pro” list is the basic fact that our current system just isn’t working. Community hospitals have had a hard time in the last few years, with many going bankrupt and being replaced by for-profit facilities that do much less for lower-income groups. Many healthcare workers have lost jobs and both the cost of procedures and the amount of time it takes to get them approved and covered has only gone up.

On the “con” side: The details are still a little sketchy on how exactly things would work with the plan due in large part to the fact that the program actually only exists in the form of several different drafts, leaving a lot of important facets to the reform left to be nailed down.

Some say that the system for funding the $1 trillion program (a major expenditure in still difficult economic times) would probably backfire and end up with the middle-class footing most of the bill. It also seems likely that those who can already afford healthcare would hold onto their superior plans, with many doctors catering to them, leaving those with the government subsidized plan with mediocre coverage and facilities once again.

There are also many who balk at the level of government control that would be involved, even suggesting that certain healthcare rights might be lost in the program, and no one wants that. Despite assurance that no one will be forced to use the government plan, there’s a big question about how government subsidized insurance can co-exist with a for-profit plan. The government plan would almost necessarily undercut the current insurance companies (otherwise, it’s existence would be pointless), potentially causing the for-profit companies to fail and ultimately pushing everyone into the subsidized insurance - in direct opposition with what they seem to be trying to do.

Finally, one of the big beefs about the current bill is that it has been put together very quickly and is intended to be pushed through in just weeks with very little concrete information out there about what exactly the whole affair is about.

Obviously there’s still a lot of questions up in the air right now and the Obama administration has been criticized from both sides about how poorly the information about the new bill has been distributed. Maybe the new website will help, but it looks like many of the major news sources have already cast their vote against the effort. Still, with the current healthcare system taking some hard hits, it’s obvious something needs to be done.

So what do you think ladies? Am I getting it all wrong? Is the new healthcare reform a good idea? The best of a bunch of bad ideas? Or just a bad idea altogether?

Old school repubs are scared.

Everyone should share their sex stories.

Forever 21 calls Kim Kardashian fat.

Jen Garner and Ben Affleck having sex problems?

Your daily dose of Chase Crawford.

The worst part of Thanksgiving is the dogs. Everyone has that one relative with a German shepherd, two Corgis and a Schnoodle/Pug mix. Some of us have more than one of these relatives, and some of us have many, many more than one. Some of these relatives have named their dogs Bill O’Reilly. All of these relatives arrive at every holiday party.

But you can’t just tell someone that you don’t like their dogs. There is no greater insult around the Thanksgiving table; you may as well have stuffed, dressed and roasted nephew Kenny.

Political beliefs work the same way, and in some ways are more annoying, because there’s no practical limit to how many you can stuff into the same party, and they’re usually invisible, unless Uncle Joe’s got some kind of witty hat (“Republicans Screw The Country, Democrats Usually Raise Taxes”).

And so you’ve got Grandma’s staunch Grand Old Politics jumping on your new dress and cousin Laura’s furious socialist anarchism taking up all the space on the couch and Teddy and Ralph are barking and howling about the liberal media and you can’t just shoot them.

So you’ve got to find a non-violent, pleasant solution to the problem. Just how do you deal with divergently political relatives?

The simple Thanksgiving solution is to compliment their cooking. This isn’t always easy, because people will put anything in a pie these days, and it might be compliment enough to even swallow Aunt Maura’s green bean and rhubarb casserole. But a quick white lie can be an effective deterrent to all-out family feuding (“All I’m saying is that they should learn to speak English — ” “Oh, Maura, I just love the way you’ve pickled the rhubarb!”).

Dropping the ‘willful ignorance’ bomb might sting, especially when this is the year for politically passionate young people, but it’s an acceptable Big Red Button when the situation gets too dire. Refuse to know anything about anyone, anywhere: just for today, you don’t talk about foreign politics, which includes anything outside the circumference of the pumpkin pie.

Alternately, you can simply pretend you’ve got wildly inconsistent political beliefs and simply agree with everything. Play it off as a product of your age: all that multi-tasking us young folk do has taught us to radically re-align our world view every five minutes, and maybe Grandpa will be impressed and give you ten dollars or something.

If you think you’ve got the wit, you can try taking both sides at once. Try playing devil’s advocate, but do it with such dripping sarcasm that your allies think you’re hilarious and your enemies just agree with you. After all, if people disagree with your political beliefs, it’s because they’re stupid, right? They’ll never catch on (“O’Reilly? He’s a genius! He’s got the sexiest pout on TV!”)

Finally, you can try to appeal to the elementary spirit of the day: we should cast aside our grievances and unite in the common spirit of thanks.

But who’s going to buy that?

Sometimes it seems like the only thing keeping the family together is the dogs.

The other thing that paralyzed me, and that made me think it wouldn’t matter if I voted even in the presidential election, was the electoral college. I’m from good old Massachusetts — you know, the first state to legalize gay marriage, the so-blue-we-don’t-even- see-the-color-red state, the most liberal state in the union. There is never a contest about who wins our state’s votes. In fact, the politicians don’t even try; in the last election, I didn’t see a single presidential campaign ad.

So why bother voting? My vote amounts to a spit in the wind, and as long as we’re not talking about national popular vote as an option, things are going to stay that way. Still, though, I felt a renewed urge to cast my vote this year, because more than ever it seems like a year when a tremendous amount is at stake. Like hundreds of millions of others, I’ve seen my country slowly going down the tubes in the past eight years. It’s gotten a lot harder to be proud of my country, and I see the ideals it stands for increasingly obscured by smoke.

That’s when I found out that several states — including my college’s state of New Jersey — have voted to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular election. Hot damn, my vote counts for one vote again! It’s a very exciting and rebellious move on the part of several states who are tired of only Ohio and Pennsylvania getting all the love.

So I registered!

And you should too. For all you college students out there, register for an absentee ballot the next time you’re in your hometown, or you can register to vote in your college’s state as long as you have a resident address there. College democratic and republican organizations are eager to register young voters, so they often have booths up in public spaces on campus to help you get registered (and are always giving away free stuff!). Go to that extra effort to be a first-timer and you’ll feel invested in your country’s politics and future to a whole new degree.

So for those of you who feel apathetic the way I did, I urge you to reconsider this year. There’s just too much at stake to sit idly by — and this time, your vote just might make a heck of a difference.

Unless you live in a cave, you know that things haven’t been going well for the United States during the past couple of weeks. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG crumbled under the weight of our own idiocy and greed (and are also being investigated by the FBI, yay!), Democrats and Republicans are harshly divided, no one can agree on Bush’s $700 billion bailout, and Washington Mutual was just sold off to JP Morgan.

Oh, also, an asteroid is probably going to come after us some point in the near future.

We here at CC agree that school work is of the utmost importance, so by no means should you blow off that 15-pager on the life cycle of the zebra fish in lieu of our national downward spiral, but perhaps you might want to pour yourself an extra glass of wine this weekend (or if you don’t drink, purchase a nice package of Oreo cookies) and force yourself to relax.

The media is doing its best to scare us, and yes, times are kinda sh*tty, but the best thing we can do as young people is educate ourselves on the issues currently effecting us, process them to the best of our ability, and then tell ourselves to remain calm.

You know what also helps? (find out after the jump)

HALF NAKED JOHNNY DEPP!!

Now, over the course of my employment history, I have helped 70-year-old women try on bras. I have scooped ice cream for ten hours straight. I have swiped cards at my dining hall after rugby practice lets out and the guys are pulling said cards from the sweaty waistbands of their shorts (um, ew). I fact checked articles on light bulbs and dumpsters all summer. I work hard for my money, darn it, and losing a substantial portion to taxes does not make me happy.

The upcoming election is a hot topic, and the discussion of what’s going to happen to our taxes is part of the reason. People are already paying large portions of their income to our government and it’s always scary to try and figure out just what the next person in office is going to do to your paycheck. Instead of paying for the new suit you need for work, that money just might be sucked into the oblivion of our national deficit.

So what to do? Well, for starters, look at the candidates’ tax proposals. Yeah, you might think that Democrats usually lower taxes for us in the peanuts range of the income scale and Republicans mean tax breaks for the wealthy, but in reality it’s far more complicated.

Take Obama, for example. If we only consider his individual tax changes (let me tell you, there are a lot of different taxes out there, for both corporations and individuals), we’re looking at tax cuts for what he terms “the middle class,” where he considers the wealthy anyone earning more than $250,000 annually. McCain is also proposing tax cuts, on a smaller scale. How is a person to choose?

The Los Angeles Times published a chart estimating how much the average federal tax (including taxes on income, dividends, capital gains, and payroll) bill will change for the everyday American under the two different proposals. Recent college graduates enter the job market at a variety of salaries, but for our purposes, let’s say it’s generally between $20,000 and $60,000.

If you’re on the lower end of that scale, McCain’s tax cuts are going to save you about $124, according the LA Times. In contrast, Obama’s will let you keep about $950. A week of groceries versus a month’s rent. The upper end of that scale means a difference of saving either $282 under McCain or $1,035 under Obama.

However, the more you earn, the more the gap narrows until the top 20% of earners, where Obama’s proposal will actualy increase the tax rate. You’re not there yet, but maybe your parents are, or you will be in a few years. McCain’s largest tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of earners saves them about $31,943, but Obama’s proposal adds a whopping $114,238. In my case, my parents pay my college tuition, for which I am profoundly grateful. That additional $114,238 covers almost three years for me.

I’ve heard people argue that the wealthy still make a lot of money despite huge tax payments, but the reality is, they generally work for it. Given the pain I feel at losing that $7.50 of an hour worked at an ice cream shop, I can only imagine what it feels like to give up one hundred grand. What does that represent to them? A week away from their family? Never being home in time for dinner? When looking at these tax proposals, absolutely consider your income range but also consider how the rest of the population will be affected. Yes, Obama’s plan is awesome for people like me, but McCain’s offers some relief for everyone. It’s at least something to think about.

I graduate in May of 2009, and as I refuse to undergo any more schooling for the time being, I will (hopefully) have a job. With the typical entry level salary for a college graduate, Obama’s proposal is going to be more beneficial to me, and probably to many of you CC readers. However, McCain is also offering us a break, just not quite as much of one. When it comes down to it, both plans will (unfortunately) increase our national debt by several trillion dollars. Different means, same results.

As for me, I will just be grateful if there are any tax cuts at all. Giving up the money from that hour I personally fitted someone’s grandmother into a Miracle Bra almost made me cry.

[photosource:www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24353211/wid/%2011915773]

It’s during these moments that we’re glad to see people using their free time to create masterpieces such as…well…this:

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