President Obama

Yeah, finally, a black president. It is time for a country with so many African-Americans that they have a African-American president. and the good thing, he is not someone who was a spokesman for blacks, but someone for everybody to start with.

Obama knows his priorities

Campaigning is important, sure, but the announcement that Obama is going to visit his serious ill grandmother who raised him shows two things to me. One, he really cares about interpersonal relationships, and second, he knows his priorities. A sick and, if I read correctly between the lines, dying grandmother deserves this kind of attention. This is not a situation where he has to decide to nuke a foreign country or not, there is no national security involved, and thousands of lives, so, this is the right thing to do!

Which foreign dependency is worse: Oil or Money

if Americans think they have it bad with their dependence on foreign oil, they haven't even started to realise how incredibly dependent they are to foreign money. Without China, Japan, Korea, the Arab oil states and Europeans, the USA would not even be capable of sustaining the incredible trade and budget deficit it is currently trying to control. So, if we compare, which of the two is worse? Oil or Money?

Social Security, American Style

In the US, when you get unemployed, are sick, or whatever, only limited help can be expected from the federal government. Capitalism rules, and if you cannot help yourself, you are crewed. Really, well, it is more nuanced.

Take the current crises in the financial markets. They are big enough to bring the US economy on its knees, and most of it is caused by the idea that you should lend for everything, even when yo do not have the means to pay those bills..... And so it began. bad credit, here is a loan anyway. A mortgage for the house? Sub-prime, no problem, here it is...... And then the economy did not exactly do what the Bush administration wanted, so you give everybody a stimulation package (Thanks Uncle Sam), but did it solve the issues. No, it just made the deficit sky rocket, but heck, most of the people making those decisions will be embalmed and put in their grave fault before those worries will hit our children and grandchildren. Who cares, we can at least live rich and destroy our earth....

But lets stop that rant there. I wanted to address another aspect of this insane system. First the government encouraged sub-prime loans because that was good for the economy. But the economy did not do what they wanted, so they nationalized two semi-private corporation, Fanny mae and that other one when they came in trouble. (O yes, they tried a few things in between, but that did evidently not help a bit either. Anyway, so what to do next? Well, uncle sam is going to be a mortgage broker, and is going to buy mortgages. Congratulations.

So, who is going to pay all this? We, the tax payers (remind me, no taxation without representation, but I as a foreigner am not allowed to vote, but I do have to pay taxes!)! So, instead of directly developing some system that will help those in need, the US does it inderect by first pushing those people into debts to deal with the life-emergencies, after which they will hekp them anyways, and along the road, leave a lot of money with finacial instititions that could have been left out of the equation if a more sensible social security system would have been in place.

A nightmare scenario!

I am puzzled. In the primaries, all conservative candidates could do no good in the eyes of the voters, and McCain was massively favoured over the more conservative candidates. But he did not do good enough against Obama in the polls. But the most puzzling was that the republicans, who themselves voted massively for him, did not get really excited. Weird....

Now he has whipped up an ultraconservative female VP-candidate, and suddenly things are really different. I listened to parts of their acceptance speeches, and bluntly, it felt to me that the republican base was more enthusiastic for the attacking rhetoric of Palin than for McCain.

McCain is old, and various fundamentalist christians already have start praying for the untimely death of McCain so that their ultraconservative darling can become the president. And I am sure that there are fanatic christians out there that at least hope someone will help McCain to see his creator in an untimely manner.

In short, we have a nightmare scenario here. With this scenario, the conservative right has the option to get an ultraconservative president in the white house, more conservative than that they would be able to elect directly. This back-door with an old dude that can die every day, and a ultraconservative VEEP, could be the far worst thing even happened to this country.

I fear that McCain/Palin will win. After that, lets hope he lives long enough and does not get assassinated.....

Palin and the Failure of Abstinence Only Programs

LOL, when I heard that the teenage daughter of the vice-presidential candidate Palin was pregnant out of wedlock, it could not be a better example of the failure of 'Abstinence Only Programs'. So, here we have the woman that is the conservative face of the republican ticket who is going to defend 'Abstinence only Programs' as an effective way to prevent teen-pregnancies. Well, that worked perfect with her own daughter. To me, this is roughly the same as an anti-gay republican found in bed with another guy! Anyway how, you can guess how I would vote if I was allowed to in this country.........