Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Contradictory US Voters -- The Two Americas

American voters are a contradictory bunch: They say they want social welfare, but don't want to pay for it. They claim they are left-leaning, but vote for center-right candidates. Only candidates who can appeal to both sides stand a chance. …

One option is to listen to the candidates and their advisors malign each other. When it comes to name-calling, the worst labels that have been tossed around to date have been "monster" (an epithet that was applied to Hillary Clinton) and "Judas" (the word that was used to describe Bill Richardson, who was appointed US ambassador to the United Nations by Bill Clinton but who endorsed Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination). As spring temperatures rise, the level of civility is apparently falling.


The second option is to listen to the people, to the way they express their views through the lens of opinion polls. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of US citizens of both genders and of all races, age groups and income classes have been polled to gauge their mood and political preferences.

The results say that America is divided, but not just into North and South, black and white, poor and rich. The two Americas appearing on the pollsters' radar screens coexist in the political brain of every voter. The findings are clear: the desires of American citizens contradict their fundamental convictions. … By Gabor Steingart in Washington, Spiegel International

Friday, April 4, 2008

NATO - Putin vs. Bush in the Battle of the Legacies

Bucharest has been a hugely important summit for Nato

President Putin was the first winner from the Nato summit in Bucharest, and he wasn't even there. The Nato-Russia Council begins only today, but Putin, who has played the Western alliance with obsessive skill in his last months as President, ensured that relations with Russia dominated the earlier gathering.

For him and George W. Bush, Bucharest was a battle of the legacies, and on points Putin won. The summit failed to give a date for Ukraine and Georgia to join, which Bush had forthrightly declared it should, but which Germany and France blocked, partly to avoid antagonising Russia. Gordon Brown yesterday said that “no one outside a Nato meeting could influence it”, but Russia's threats and courtship seem to have done just that.

The summit did make an unequivocal declaration that “these countries will become members of Nato”, which is powerful rhetoric, but remains vulnerable to members' doubts, whether or not because of Russian pressure behind the scenes. Putin did lose one important point, however: Nato committed itself to hosting the US missile defence bases in the Czech Republic and Poland... Bronwen Maddox. The Times - online

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Political Offers and Expectations in the United States

e-glob, Washington (DC) - But there's always things they don't think through or they think it through and then when they win they have to back down because it costs too much.

If they had given the government the money they needed to go after those bond brokers who used the bad mortgages to back their securities with several layers of masquerade - just like Enron which Bush promised would never happen again and supposedly passed legislation for.

If they had given the authorities more money in terms of enforcement and fraud, it wouldn't have happened.

There’s enough regulation - if nothing else downright common every day fraud laws - that they could have used to prevent it.

If you don't give cops enough money you can't get the job done.

It's not that we need more regulations but we need to stand tough on what we have and let the crooks know we are watching and there are repercussions. Supplements with Obama YouTube video clips