Tuesday - November 04, 2008

US elections: Danger lurks in Barack Obama’s comfort zone. (but, he’s been sent by god.)

And |I won’t even post the editorial cartoon illustration in todays paper.  Jeesh ... and for a conservative (?) paper. Well anyway,
Simon Heffer here at least is on the mark if nobody else is.

The remark re. O. sent by God. Yeah. And who says that? Stupid white folks and not the ones on the fringe right either. 

I need a coffee break. First of the morning.

Stay Tuned.

US elections: Danger lurks in Barack Obama’s comfort zone

By Simon Heffer in New York
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/11/2008

Two days ago, when the Sunday political talk shows of the US television networks were brimming with pundits announcing a landslide victory for Barack Obama, John McCain was jetting around America making five campaign stops. Yesterday, with the polls still showing him up to seven points behind his rival, he took in another seven. Most men would have wound down in the face of such apparently inevitable defeat. But John McCain, for whom life has never been so rewarding as when fighting against a seemingly intractable problem, is not most men.

What is regarded as the inevitability of defeat has given Mr McCain new energy. Being 72, it is certainly his last chance. He joked as much during Saturday Night Live last weekend, saying Mr Obama was young enough to have more opportunities, and now was his turn. The joke was only so funny because of its element of truth.

It is no reason to elect Mr McCain. His determination and his warrior-like quality never to admit defeat until it is obvious certainly are. There is an even more important point: he is laden with experience relevant to the job. He is not a rock star like his opponent, but no one has yet argued that this would make him a better chief executive of the world’s only superpower. This contest comes at a unique moment in modern American history and Mr McCain, despite the obliviousness of so much of America to the point, is the man for that moment.

The country is not merely at war in two theatres. It is not merely facing threats to its security. It is also trying to come to terms with the worst economic outlook since the 1930s. Add to that the constantly expressed concern about those scores of thousands of fellow Americans “in harm’s way” on foreign battlefields, and the fear of what challenge might be thrown up next, and you have a landscape of extreme uncertainty.

The choice faced by the electorate is clear. It can either vote for reality or for escapism: and John McCain has the greater appreciation of what reality might entail. I have been struck on several visits here this year just how much Americans, worn down by the failures and embarrassments of the Bush years, want something other than reality. That, though, is simply storing up troubles. The landscape of uncertainty requires someone tested in fire to lead people through it: not just for America’s sake but for the sake of that portion of the world that looks to America for leadership.

Mr Obama is a confection; he is an image, a brand, a lifestyle. He has the talents of the thespian, less obviously those of the executive. He has been branded a socialist by Sarah Palin and, because it was Sarah Palin doing the branding, the term was ridiculed by media here who are almost clinically biased against the Republicans. However, when one examines Mr Obama’s rhetoric about “spreading the wealth”, and looks at spending promises made in the past 21 months, socialism is a fair term. He plans, or at least has promised, expensive projects - such as healthcare reforms. Inflicting tax rises on a country where people are losing their jobs, having their homes foreclosed upon and having their businesses driven into bankruptcy is something whose consequences Mr Obama has yet to outline.

Neither candidate sees that the economic policies they have dealt in have been rendered anachronistic by recent events. Mr McCain was all at sea at the height of the crisis and it damaged him badly, perhaps terminally. Mr Obama knew no better: he just had the sense to keep quiet. As president, he would find he can’t keep quiet. At least Mr McCain, with his long?standing message of smaller government, less regulation and reduced spending, has a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances. An Obama presidency, given the dire straits of America’s economy, will quickly and inevitably disappoint once reality kicks in.

The clinching reason why America should vote for McCain over Obama rests, however, in the question of foreign policy and international security. It is to be hoped that America (and therefore the free world) faces no new security challenges in the years ahead and can extract itself from Iraq and assert control in Afghanistan. But these are only hopes. There are unscrupulous and fanatical elements who may take the election of President Obama as an invitation to see how far America can be pushed. One thinks of Iran, or the failure of Pakistan to rein in malevolent elements. Some argue that the advice of the State Department would be the same to President Obama as to President McCain, and that it would have to be followed. I am not so sure. Mr McCain, who understands well how foreign powers and military operations work, would have a much more informed discussion with his advisers. Mr Obama would be starting from a position of near total ignorance, and on a matter of life and death.

That question of international security is fundamental. It is the case for voting McCain. America is famed for its parochialism, even in time of war. That is why so many have found it easy to enter the Obama comfort zone. Whoever wins, being comfortable will not be part of the job of being president. A man with five-and-a-half years in the Hanoi Hilton under his belt would adapt better to that ultimate reality than would his rival.

http://tinyurl.com/5ex3cy

Posted by peiper     on 11/04/2008 at 03:37 AM   
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   Monday - November 03, 2008

Barack Obama victory will hurt US firms - and world economy. (PLEASE READ ALL OF IT PPL)

This is I know a wordy but worthy editorial and I would urge you all to PLEASE read all of it.  See the link and read some of the comments as well.

I don’t want to make this long and so will post something later that NEEDS sharing with you.

Barack Obama victory will hurt US firms - and world economy

By Janet Daley
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 03/11/2008

Read comments: 

(by all means folks, do read some of the comments that follow the editorial in the Telegraph. Amazing that so many ppl who really know so damn little about us, now think they can advise us on how and why we NEED to vote Obama. I guess I’m a bit thin skinned when foreigners tell me who to vote for. But there are some very good comments as well. Perhaps not always seeing our side it, but at least thought out and well expressed without always being nasty.)

Well, it’s nearly over - this presidential election campaign that has gone on for so long I can scarcely remember what life was like before it started. So long has it been running that the world has actually gone through two tumultuous transformations of political reality during its span.

First there was the emergence of Russia as a threat to international stability in a form that should not have, but nevertheless did, come as a startling revelation to a complacent free world: a phenomenon which, in cynical partisan terms, played heavily in John McCain’s favour. But that was followed, and almost totally eclipsed, by the economic implosion that brought every earlier assumption about the electorate crashing down with it.

So, in one of those bizarre jokes that history sometimes plays, the United States is apparently about to choose as president the most inexperienced, untried and virtually unknowable (because there is so little to know) candidate who has ever run for that office at a time of unquantifiable international risk and unprecedented economic instability: a candidate who, as Bill Clinton revealed in a wonderfully back-handed “tribute”, responded to the banking collapse by ringing every expert he could find (including Bill) to ask them what he should be saying.

And not only does it seem likely that Barack Obama will be elected president, but that he will arrive in office accompanied by a legion of new Democratic senators and congressmen which will give his party a lock on both the executive and legislative branches of government, thus permitting it to do precisely anything it wants.

A week ago in New York, I talked to senior Republicans who were dividing their time between conference calls to the White House to discuss the economic crisis and exasperated confrontations with the McCain campaign team over the ineffectiveness of its strategy. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the state of dissension and dissatisfaction within the higher ranks of the Republican Party - which is why the Obama claim that a McCain White House would simply be George Bush by other means is so ludicrous and disingenuous.

In truth, McCain’s status as an outlaw within his own party ("maverick" is much too mild a word) has meant that he has had only the most ambivalent relationship with what was once a very professional Republican campaigning machine. Those members of the Bush team who have been involved with the McCain-Palin ticket have been accused of being so out of sympathy with its message and tone as to be positively counter-productive.

Combine this with the fact that McCain has been running against not just a super-financed Obama machine but the most monolithically hostile media barrage in electoral history, which forced him to spend most of his time and energy on defensive fire-fighting, and you get a sense of why the Republican effort has so often seemed at cross-purposes with itself.

This media phenomenon may yet prove double-edged. There is just a possibility (maybe I am clutching at straws here, but we shall see) that the relentless onslaught from the mainstream press and television networks has made support for McCain unsayable rather than impossible and that this is producing seriously skewed opinion-polling results. This could mean, to put it in British historical terms, that this election will be 1992 (complete with premature victory celebrations) rather than 1997. Interestingly, in the 1992 election it was the issue of tax that brought about Labour’s defeat in the face of resounding leads in the polls. And it is tax policy that is Obama’s most dangerous ground. It must be surprising to British observers that his proposal to cut taxes for the 95 per cent of people who earn less than $200,000 a year (down, incidentally, from his initial figure of $250,000) has not straightforwardly won the day in the American national debate.

In Britain, such a promise (if believed) would be an electoral free pass to Downing Street. But in the US, voters are aware that the largest category of people who would be hit by Obama’s higher tax would be those who own small businesses, as Joe the Plumber famously aspired to do and as many, many of his countrymen already do. Ordinary working-class people in America do not automatically expect to be low earners, or even employees, all of their lives: they believe that through hard work and resourcefulness, they are as likely as anyone to rise in the world. And so they do not necessarily take kindly to someone who wants to penalise them as soon as they break through an income ceiling in order, as Obama fatally put it, to “spread the wealth around”.

But there is another facet of Obama taxation with even more serious consequences for the US. In order to pay for his tax cut for 95 per cent of the population (half of whom do not pay income tax and whose “cut” would be in the form of a cash rebate), President Obama and his Democratic Congress would raise the US rate of corporation tax - already the second highest in the world - from 15 to 20 per cent. They also plan to punish through taxation companies that employ people overseas rather than “creating American jobs”. These measures would have the almost immediate effect of driving companies and capital out of the US.

In the same “help the little guy” spirit, Obama proposes to raise capital gains tax, thus penalising those whose investment is desperately needed for market recovery. As my economist friends always tell me when I advocate tax cuts for the low-paid: it may seem a morally and politically attractive policy but it doesn’t do a damn thing for economic growth. The tiny amounts that the lower-paid receive in such wide-ranging cuts make little difference as a stimulus and if they are balanced by penalties on business and on the investing classes, they are worse than useless.

So what will happen? For what it is worth, I think it will be a close presidential race with the favourite, Obama, winning by a squeak (which is what happened in 1960 when the then favourite, John Kennedy, was the voice of the “future"). Whoever gets the White House, America will eventually return to being what it must be: the economic engine of the world and the greatest testimony to the power of human initiative in history. On both of those counts, it will once again be resented. But it will take a while longer to reach that point under Barack Obama.

http://tinyurl.com/5cz8uk

Posted by peiper     on 11/03/2008 at 04:58 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Editorials • Politics • Republicans •  
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   Sunday - November 02, 2008

After a Barack Obama election victory party, a hangover will follow.

And in other comments NOT posted here, a very much conservative Simon Heffer says that “America can’t get rid of Bush fast enough.”
Is President Bush really as despised even by our side as I’m led to believe here?  I know some may think I could keep up more with home (USA) stuff then I do, but my defense can only be you’ve no idea what I have on my plate here.  It really isn’t easy as it may seem.  Though I do read what I can.  Point is however, what I read doesn’t paint quite that picture.  But then , I haven’t been reading the left.  Maybe I should.

Finally, America will elect a new president this week. Many voters believe that if Barack Obama wins, a new day will dawn in American politics.

US presidential election 2008

For his supporters, Mr Obama has become an almost Messianic figure. Many believe an Obama presidency will mean that America withdraws from the wars to which George W. Bush has committed troops.

Many also think he will increase the federal government’s role in the economy, so as to achieve goals such as providing universal health care.

If Mr Obama is elected, there will inevitably be disappointment and frustration, as millions of those who voted for him discover that he is mortal, and cannot achieve the miracles they hoped for.

In the straightened economic circumstances which America will find itself, the new universal health care plan he promises may not be affordable.

Moreover, the new President will find himself confronting so far intractable foreign policy challenges, such as the belligerence of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, the difficulties of trying to achieve peace in the Congo, and of securing victory in Afghanistan.

If he does anything at all about those problems, Mr Obama will disappoint those who voted for him in the expectation that he would end America’s use of armed force around the world.

As The Sunday Telegraph reports today, Mr Obama is already preparing to ask Britain to commit an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Unlike George W. Bush, Mr Obama enjoys significant popularity in Europe. But after the years of bloody war in Iraq and Afghanistan, even he may struggle to achieve the commitment from European nations he says is essential – especially given the very high level of borrowing that so many countries have already committed themselves to in bailing out their banks.

Still, Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to help revitalise America’s influence on the world as a force for good. If he is elected, we hope he will use that opportunity wisely.

http://tinyurl.com/6mvctp

Don’t be fooled by Hillary on the stump

Bill and Hillary Clinton have been stumping the country this week to do their bit for Mr Obama, the 42nd President himself sharing a platform with the anointed, and associating himself very closely with him and his supposedly impending glory.

Now it looks as though Mr Obama has won, it is a typically shrewd Clinton move to ensure that their dynasty is tarred with the brush of the imminent victory. Do not underestimate the cynicism of these people.

Since Mr Obama might be president until 2016, when Mrs Clinton will be nearly the same age as John McCain, this may look selfless. But we know what Mrs Clinton really thinks: that some madman could well shoot President Obama. Good ol’ Joe Biden would be a comical president.

Hillary would be there in 2012 to restore order, with the added blessing that neither she nor her loathesome husband had done anything to impair the Obama victory.

Think about it: they certainly are.

Another woman with her eye on the prize

It’s not just Hillary who still has one rather tasteless eye on 2012. A group of prominent Republicans is scheduled to meet in Virginia next Wednesday - if John McCain loses, of course - to discuss ways of keeping Sarah Palin in the game until the next election.

Media bias has helped pass over the fact that Mrs Palin is hugely popular in much of middle America: here in the media village of Obamamaniacal New York the quickest way to get a laugh is to mention any sort of regard for her political skills.

http://tinyurl.com/6lg24c

Posted by peiper     on 11/02/2008 at 07:49 AM   
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   Wednesday - October 29, 2008

Barack Obama is the Busby Berkeley of modern America.  (All show and mirrors)

I felt BMEWS would want to see this and no comments from me. Well, maybe not.

Barack Obama is the Busby Berkeley of modern America

By Simon Heffer in New York
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 28/10/2008

One can find two kinds of voters in this great city in the week before the presidential election; those Democrats who can see no possibility of defeat for Barack Obama next Tuesday, and those who wake with a jolt at 4am imagining he has lost, and feeling in their bowels the fear that something might happen in the next few days to stop the saviour of the United States from fulfilling his mission. I have yet to find a Republican, despite this being the city that returned Rudy Giuliani twice as mayor. But then it is hard to find anyone in the city that gave Hillary Clinton a big victory in February in the New York state primary who will now not admit to being a dyed-in-the-wool Obamamaniac. The fat lady has yet to sing, but, as far as New Yorkers are concerned, the show is over already.

They may well be right. The McCain camp says that its private polls show the race is far closer than those published by media organisations: but then it would, wouldn’t it? There is much anecdotal evidence that, at the grass roots in states where John McCain is not now campaigning (and even in one or two where he is), the fight has more or less stopped. After a good convention eight weeks ago in St Paul, the Republicans have lost the initiative at every turn. They had a bad financial crisis. Neither Mr McCain nor his running-mate, Sarah Palin, was able to land a killer blow in the televised debates. Things have reached the pass where Mrs Palin is having to protest that the haute couture on which $150,000 was spent to enhance her glamour belongs not to her, but to the Republican National Committee: and that she will now revert to shopping in the factory outlets of Alaska. After one has paused to consider just who on the RNC will be wearing Mrs Palin’s clothes next, one realises just how much this pathetic squabble signals that the game is almost certainly up.

Visiting from Britain, one senses just how like the spring of 1997 it is. Obama supporters often bridle at comparisons with Tony Blair, though why they should mind being lumped with a man who won three elections handsomely, inflicted serious change (for better or worse) on the country he governed, and put his opponents off the map for at least a dozen years is beyond me. Perhaps they are sensitive to the triumph of Mr Obama’s image over his content, to the accusations that his media management, with its brutal threats to journalists who cut up rough, belies the image of integrity that they seek to disseminate, and to the unspoken difficulty that, when and if Mr Obama gets into the White House, the magnificence of his rhetoric and the vast extent of his oratorical skills will do little to help him tackle an economy in the tank and a precarious international situation.

However, the Obama camp need not worry about any of this, because it appears most of the electorate don’t. The voters’ decision appears to have been simple: that George W. Bush, when he becomes history in January, should for the time being take the Republican party with him. Mr McCain has been at pains to distance himself from Mr Bush since before he won the nomination, and has had the facts mostly on his side in doing so.

However, that has failed to penetrate the souls of many voters. Polls in states that returned Mr Bush in 2004 now show Mr Obama far in front. Mr McCain is even at risk of losing Virginia, which is a little like the Tory party being wiped out in Surrey. The evidence that American voters have had enough is becoming more abundant. Mr Obama can capitalise on a lethal cocktail of economic hardship and, among the more outward-looking of his fellow citizens, a deep and pervasive embarrassment at how America is now seen around the world.

(okay wait a minute. how many Americans do know and if they do, give a flip what foreigners who aren’t paying our bills think?)

There is, though, no euphoria about what most of America feels to be his imminent election. It is, rather, a sense of relief at their being about to be shot of a discredited administration and a dismal president. Again, it should remind us of 1997, when Mr Blair surged to power not so much on a national wave of faith in him, but because so many Conservatives stayed at home and declined to shore up his inadequate opponent, the incumbent.

Here, the incumbent party is run ragged, too. It is fashionable to blame Mrs Palin for this, but the truth is that she is by far the more impressive of the two candidates on her ticket. She speaks directly to her audience, has conviction and charisma and is not trying to be something she isn’t. Ever since the convention John McCain has pretended not to be John McCain, and it just hasn’t worked.

In the circumstances of such a poor campaign by the Republicans, Mr Obama has not been pressed to outline how he would govern. All that has mattered is that he is not what has come before, or like what has come before. In these past days there have been attempts by his opponents, and especially by conservatives, to paint him as a socialist because of his talk of “spreading the wealth”. His opponents are correct: he is, by the lights of all his rhetoric, an orthodox Leftist with an ill-formed notion of redistribution of income.

But it no longer matters. The mood here is to get the people who have run America for the past eight years out, and get in someone completely different. The time to discuss what, in their turn, they would do would come once they are there. This is far from ideal, for that is what election campaigns are supposed to be for. But in the unusual predicament of an America that feels weakened, embarrassed and angry, it has become nearly inevitable.

The last time the American economy was on the ropes to the extent it is now a whole industry of escapism grew up, and produced such gems as Gold Diggers of 1933. You might remember that the plot of that charming film was a millionaire putting on a musical that saved countless Broadway hoofers from the soup-kitchen during the Great Depression.

Barack Obama is the Busby Berkeley of modern America. He is ordained as the great choreographer who will spirit America out of its misery, using not his own millions but the billions of the taxpayer to put the country back on course. Having listened all year to his message of “change”, and being entirely unclear what it means, perhaps at last we have the answer. It is The Great Cause Of Cheering Us All Up.

The reverence with which Mr Obama is regarded by most of the American media, and by much of the American elite, is such that, when I see him on television, I look — so far in vain — for the stigmata on his hands. This feeling is entirely appropriate, for what America seems to be preparing to embark upon is the most massive act of faith. Not since 1960, and the election of Jack Kennedy, has so much disbelief been suspended by so many in such a massive cause. If it does indeed translate into an Obama victory on Tuesday, further prayer may well be in order. Not long after Gold Diggers of 1933, I seem to remember, came The Grapes of Wrath.

http://tinyurl.com/6ywjzh

Posted by Drew458     on 10/29/2008 at 11:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Politics • Republicans •  
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   Tuesday - October 21, 2008

Barack Obama: Why I believe he should be the next President.  (From the Mayor of London)

I just could not be more disappointed in this guy who I have long held in esteem and thought was a leading Conservative light here in the UK.

I really don’t think it’s right for someone in his position offering opinions on our political doings.  Least not publicly.  I don’t think he can sway American voters of course, minds are pretty much made up buy now.  But he isn’t being logical at all, and if there was one thing I used to think I liked about this guy, it was logical thinking.

I find it very hard to digest the fact that he is saying we should (among other reasons) vote Obama because he is “black.” Which of course is IS NOT.
But no matter. He’s brown right?  Mulatto.  Still don’t matter.

Thing is this .... what if a conserv. paper or editor wrote an article right here in the UK and said people should vote for Dave Cameron because is is NOT a Scot.
Or in a local election an editor wrote that ppl should vote for ‘X’ because ... why, he’s white.  Can you just imagine the storm that might cause?  Especially as there are some many of so many hues over here.

I am not going through all the other issues I may have with hiz honor.  That one is quite enough.
He suggests we tamper more with the Supreme Court which voting Obama would certainly be.  I guess Mr. Johnson for all his grand education and travel and family (sister a successful writer), knows less about my country then I thought he did.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Please read the comments in the paper at the bottom of his editorial.

Barack Obama: Why I believe he should be the next President

By Boris Johnson
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/10/2008

Have your say Read comments

There are all sorts of reasons for hoping that Barack Hussein Obama will be the next president of the United States. He seems highly intelligent. He has an air of courtesy and sincerity. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

Unlike his opponent, he visibly incarnates change and hope, at a time when America desperately needs both.

It is no disrespect to John McCain - a brave and principled man - to observe that he has chosen a difficult time to stand on the Republican ticket.

Barack Obama: Why he should be US President
An Obama win could signify the end of race-based politics

The legacy of George Bush may take years, if not decades, to determine.

But at present he seems to have pulled off an astonishing double whammy.

However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy.

The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit - in some people’s eyes - the idea of free-market capitalism.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.

(BORRRRISSSS!  I don’t a F*&!*^&$"£$%&*## what people here think in MY election.  STAY THE eF OUT!)

It would be tough for any candidate to receive the Republican baton from Dubya, and McCain can be proud of doing as well as he is.

His chief problem is that he does not seem to offer any hope of repair to those American ideals.

Or, to put it another way, it is not clear how America under McCain would recover her standing in the eyes of the world.

His chief selling-point is his grasp of foreign affairs, and his staunch belligerence in the pursuit of American interests.

(the pursuit of American interests. Oh well crap. We can not have that in a president. Can We.)

He is certainly owed the respect due to a man who fought for his country, was captured and tortured.

But is this bellicosity really what the world is crying out for today? 

(Screw the freeken world. I’m not conerened with the world or what they feel or want. I’m concerned with MY COUNTRY!  Period!)

When asked what his policy was towards Iran, Mr McCain sang - to the tune of the Beach Boys - “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”.

No doubt he was joking, but if I were an Iranian politician, those words would make me want a nuclear deterrent all the more.

McCain seems to stand for perpetual sabre-rattling against the terrors of abroad, and Obama wins because he seems to stand for hope, not fear.

(OF COURSE, THERE’S NOTHIN’ TO FEAR OUT THERE. IS THERE?)

Not that the Democratic candidate is a pushover.

He has shown terrific steel, beating off the Clintons, and defeating McCain in all three televised debates.

If elections were decided on the ruthless efficiency of campaigns, then Obama would already have it in the bag.

The defining image of the battle so far is of the two candidates leaving the stage after the last TV debate - Obama moving confidently off, after another grave and measured performance, and McCain gagging like a gargoyle, tongue out, as he realised he was about to walk over the edge.

I am not suggesting that McCain is a buffoon, or that Obama is quite as Messianic as some of his supporters seem to believe.

He gave a speech of unrivalled torpor in Germany, for instance. He needs to stick up more vigorously for free trade, and we must hope that any ill-considered new taxes will be thwarted by Congress.

But then again, he is patently not the Marxist subversive loony Lefty that some of his detractors allege.

I revere Melanie Phillips, and I have carefully studied her blog entries about Obama and the vote-stealers, or Obama and his association with a quondam terrorist called Ayers.

In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun.

Obama’s terrorist chum is now a professor, and his last act of terrorism took place when the candidate was eight, and it is not really clear that he and Obama are chums at all.

The entire set of allegations seem to be an attempt to smear him by association, and are about as damaging as pointing out that some of Tony Blair’s colleagues used to be Stalinists, or that Tory party conferences used to feature people who advocated the hanging of Nelson Mandela.

Obama deserves to win because he seems talented, compassionate, and because he offers the hope of rejuvenating the greatest country on earth in the eyes of the rest of us. All those are sufficient reasons for desiring his victory.

And then there is the final, additional reason, the glaring reason, and that is race. Huge numbers of voters, whether they admit it to themselves or not, will hesitate to choose Barack Obama for President because he is black. And then there are millions of white Americans who will undoubtedly vote Obama precisely because he is black, and because he stands for the change and the progress they want to see in their society.

After centuries of friction, prejudice, tension, hatred - you name it, they’ve had it - America is teetering on the brink of a triumph. If Obama wins, then the United States will have at last come a huge and maybe decisive step closer to achieving the dream of Martin Luther King, of a land where people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

(So tell us Boris .... who’s your pick to win the office of PM here among the many coloreds you have here?  Has there ever been a Negro PM? Indian? Pakistan? Caribbean? )

If Obama wins, then black people the world over will be able to see how a gifted man has been able to smash through the ultimate glass ceiling.

(NO SIR! What they will learn if brains in gear, is how much money it takes to run for office in the USA.  And that is a shame!)

If Obama wins, then it will be simply fatuous to claim that there are no black role models in politics or government, because there is no higher role model than the President of the United States.

If Barack Hussein Obama is successful next month, then we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance-culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it.

If Obama wins, he will have established that being black is as relevant to your ability to do a hard job as being left-handed or ginger-haired, and he will have re-established America’s claim to be the last, best hope of Earth.

http://tinyurl.com/6pvzpc

Posted by Drew458     on 10/21/2008 at 03:41 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Politics •  
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   Tuesday - October 14, 2008

WITH APOLOGIES TO BMEWS. CLASS.  A MEA CULPA?  CARLA BRUNI AIDS TERRORIST.

Recently Drew and I agreed on the term class as applied to certain women.  Neither of us thought Paris Hilton exhibited much by her overall public behavior, though I tended to think perhaps she might be improving somewhat after being incarcerated.  Something she was never brought up to believe one of her monied class would experience. 

I then posted an eye candy photo of a woman who up till that time I thought exhibited class beyond all measure.  The First Lady of France, Carla Bruni. 
Fully clothed she had far more appeal and striking looks then many women half her age (40 something). 

I forgot she had been a million dollar model and so knew how to best present herself.  I now confess that blinded by her physical appearance, I was quite willing to conveniently forget just how far left her politics were are.  I came to believe she was one who did exhibit class as I understood the word.
Well, maybe I don’t understand what “class” really is.  I always just assumed I’d know it when I saw it and she seemed to embody the very meaning itself.

If real class in a person goes beyond the physical (and it does), then my idea of Bruni class has shown her to have hooves of clay.  Actually, that might not be fair to her as she never made a secret of her leftist politics and has spoken openly on the subject.  And that fact alone (being left) doesn’t mean she’s classless.
However, it’s what she’s managed to bring about in criminal matters, the total disregard of victims as she worked on the ever horny Sarko, president of France, to deny Italy the extradition of a member of The Red Brigade, that has me riled this morning.

She has NO CLASS whatever.  Simply a very good actress with the appearance of class.  I’m more disappointed in myself (typical male huh?) then in her.
She never denied her stripes and I never gazed beyond her light to see what what was behind.  So, here’s the story that has me all bothered today.

Carla Bruni uses influence to halt extradition of Red Brigades terrorist
Carla Bruni and her sister have persuaded Nicolas Sarkozy not to extradite a woman who faces life imprisonment for murder to her native Italy, sparking anger amongst her victims’ families.

By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last Updated: 6:01PM BST 13 Oct 2008

In a sign of her influence over her husband’s decision-making, the Italian-born First Lady - along with her sister - convinced the French president to drop a court order to deport exiled Red Brigades terrorist Marina Petrella to Rome.

Her personal intervention and the presidential u-turn sparked anger in Italy, which has been seeking Mrs Petrella’s extradition from France since she fled after being freed on bail in 1986.

A group representing victims of the Red Brigades said it would travel to Paris this weekend and protest against the decision in front of the Elysée palace.

Mrs Petrella was found guilty in absentia by an Italian court in 1992 of murder, kidnapping, attempted kidnapping and armed robbery.

A French court approved her extradition in December and an order to send her back to Italy had been signed by the prime minister. But after “pugnacious” lobbying by Mr Sarkozy’s wife on behalf of her older sister, actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, the president changed his mind - citing humanitarian grounds.

“Mrs Petrella was in danger of dying. This hunger and thirst strike had to stop, which it did. There is a humanitarian clause, I used that clause,” Mr Sarkozy said during a financial press conference.

“I told him (Mr Sarkozy) about her, especially just after I saw her in jail.

I gave him some information that was perhaps a little bit important in his decision,” said Miss Bruni-Tedeschi.

“He focused his attention on a case that he hadn’t completely focused on before,” she said. Her sister Carla said she was “happy” about the decision.

The pair personally delivered the message to Mrs Petrella on Sunday at her secure prison hospital bed, where she is refusing to eat and is in “very poor” health.

“I have a message for you from my husband,” the First Lady reportedly told her. “You will not be going back to Italy.”

The Communist Red Brigade was accused of dozens of murders in the 1970s and 80s, including that of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

Mr Moro’s widow, Olga, expressed outrage: “All judicial accords and conventions have been violated” by a decision “no doubt taken because the Sarkozy household was scared of unpopularity,” she said.

Mrs Petrella had been living at liberty in France until she was arrested in August 2007 at Italy’s request soon after Mr Sarkozy’s election. He had promised to end France’s policy of granting repentant ex-Red Brigades members asylum– first initiated by Socialist president François Mitterrand in 1985.

Mr Sarkozy denied that his decision would anger his Italian counterparts. “I remained in contact with them. I don’t think there was a lack of understanding. There is never a lack of understanding when one takes a humanitarian decision,” he said.

But Isabella Bertolini, a member of Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party disagreed: “To apply a humanitarian clause to a terrorist convicted of homicide, theft and kidnapping sounds like a bad joke,” she told newspaper La Republicca.

The First Lady’s sister told Italian daily Corriere della Sera that Mrs Petrella’s story had particular significance for the wealthy Bruni family, which had fled to France after receiving death threats from the Red Brigades.

“I arrived in France as a little girl exactly because my family was afraid of what was happening in Italy, also because of terrorism,” Miss Bruni Tedeschi said.

“We all had a sentiment of fear, even I who was so little, and I know what it means to be welcomed by a foreign country, feel protected by it, and I can imagine what it means to suddenly lose that welcoming, lose that protection.”

This is a rare foray into politics for Mr Sarkozy’s third wife, who unlike her husband has always espoused left-wing causes.

However, it is not the first time the President has involved a spouse in politics: last year he sent his second wife Cécilia on a successful mission to free Bulgarian nurses from jail in Libya. The pair divorced last October and a month later he met Carla Bruni, a top model and successful folk pop singer.

http://tinyurl.com/3kra9x

Posted by Drew458     on 10/14/2008 at 04:02 AM   
Filed Under: • Celebrities • Commies • Crime • Editorials • Euro-Peons • Terrorists •  
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   Sunday - October 12, 2008

STAND UP, SHAKE IT OFF, AND GET OUT THERE AND FIGHT.

MY DEEPEST THANKS TO FRIEND DREW WHOSE KNOWLEDGE OF THINGS TECH. HAVE ALLOWED ME TO POST THIS TOON OF OUR SARAH, WHICH I ORIGIANLLY GOT FROM THE TELEGRAPH A WEEK AGO BUT HAD NO IDEA HOW TO GET RID OF THE PRINTED ARTICLE THAT SURROUNDED IT, AND GET IT TO DO THIS.

I’M AFRAID TO ASK HOW HE DID THIS.  ANYWAY ... THANKS.

NOW THEN ... TO SOMETHING TURTLER POSTED UNDER COMMENTS.  IT DESERVES A REGULAR POST RIGHT HERE. AND I SHOULD THANK T. ALSO BECAUSE I HAVE NOT BEEN FEELING TOO UP ABOUT THINGS LATELY.  BUT T. IS RIGHT.  WE CAN NOT JUST LAY DOWN AND LET EM RUN US OVER NO MATTER HOW BAD THINGS LOOK.  SO THANKS TURTLER, FOR THIS.

I cannot guarentee that Obama will not win.

I cannot guarentee that our political system will recover from its present corruption.

I cannot guarentee that we will remain a nation worthy of its past.

I cannot guarentee that any effort we make will not be in vain.

HOWEVER, THAT DOES NOT MEAN WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIE DOWN IN A FOXHOLE AND DIE WITHOUT AN EFFORT!

In the pledge, we swear ourselves to this nation, its flag, its Democratic Reptublic, and its Constitition. We are obliged to serve and support it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And in this we cannot waver.

But you say that there is no use, we are certain to loose, even if we do defeat Obama.

However, and this is purely my opinion, that does not matter. We are obliged to stand and do our damndest, even if there is no hope for success.

Why?

Because, imagine what the world would look like if there were no people to stand up and fight the good fight even though they were certain they would be destroyed?

What would have happened at Theromopylae?

And, once more, history has been changed by futile stands against impossible odds by people with no real expectation of winning.

It is entirely possible that the Western Allies in North Africa would have been overrun had it not been for the brave resistance of a group of hodge podge Free French and Palestinian Jews who fought the full wrath of the Afrika Korps at Bir Hakeim and Bir el-Hamet after the Allied disaster at Gazala.

If it were not for the ultimately futile Armenian resistance agianst the Turks in WWI, it is entirely possible that the Turks could have turned the full force of their troops (who outnumbered the Allied forces in the area) around and pushed the Western Allies out of Mesopotamia and Palestine, which would have given them control of the Suez Canal, thus greatly weakening the Allied Cause.

Were it not for Charles de Gaulle going to Britain in defiance of the tactily legit Vichy government, it is possible that the French Colonies would have fallen to Germany.

The bottom line is that we must be willing to accept defeat but fight anyway. For without the willingness to make sacrifices and even suffer defeat for lost causes, Democracy would have been snuffed out long ago.

SO STAND UP, SHAKE IT OFF, AND GET OUT THERE AND FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT!
Posted by Turtler United States 10/11/2008 at 03:32 PM

Posted by Drew458     on 10/12/2008 at 10:43 AM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff • Editorials • Politics •  
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   Thursday - October 09, 2008

Barack Obama looks the part .  (I HATE to post this but, as it’s seen from here.)

This is the editorial that appeared in today’s paper over here.  I’m hearing this from American friends who are conservative, and frankly I am worried.
Not that there’s anything I can do about it.  Maybe I’ll go live in Lyndon’s house in Canada. Claim it as a human right.  Why am I joking about this?
Taint funny McGee!  Cause if I don’t laugh I might cry. 

Should O. carry it off and win, I guess the most consv. can do is try and block supreme nominations of the left.  What a mess.

Singapore’s lookin pretty good right now.

Barack Obama looks the part

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/10/2008

There will be many victims of the financial crisis, and one of the most prominent could be John McCain. However much he tries to distance himself from the Bush administration, the Republican candidate in America’s presidential election is finding it increasingly hard to make up ground on Barack Obama, his Democrat opponent.

But it was less their policies for dealing with economic calamity than their demeanour that provided the most noticeable difference between the two men during their second televised debate on Tuesday night. Mr Obama appeared calm and confident; Mr McCain seemed uncertain, tired and tetchy.

It felt, admittedly from afar, like the modern-day equivalent of the famous clash between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, when those who listened to the debate on the radio believed Nixon had won while those watching on television felt that the more youthful and assured Kennedy triumphed.

With just 27 days to the election, Mr McCain must make his experience and more astute grasp of foreign policy tell, though even on this, his supposed strong suit, he found Mr Obama able to brush off the charge of being wet behind the ears. Polls taken after the debate in Tennessee handed a clear win to Mr Obama, who is now forging ahead in the so-called ‘’battleground” states that will determine who will occupy the White House.

This was supposed to resemble an old-fashioned town hall meeting, of the sort we used to have in this country; and while there was something almost comical about the exercise as the two men prowled around the stage, the cut and thrust of American politics is refreshing to those who lament the absence of similar clashes between party leaders during general elections here.

http://tinyurl.com/3l3vdu

Posted by Drew458     on 10/09/2008 at 03:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats • Editorials • Republicans •  
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We’re all socialists now, comrade .

Because this is a very long read, and I’m not sure everyone will want to take the time to read it all here, I’ve cut it off at the link. For those who are interested please use link below.

Financial crisis: We’re all socialists now, comrade

By Simon Heffer
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/10/2008

A quarter of a century ago, in the era of the Labour manifesto that was dubbed (by a member of the Labour shadow cabinet) “the longest suicide note in history”, when one wanted to depict the absurdity of the view of the world advanced by Tony Benn and Michael Foot one simply had to say: “They want to nationalise the banks!” People fell about laughing.

Given the socialistic leanings of our Prime Minister, it may well have been a move he undertook calmly and, quite possibly, with a little excitement

Today, it is all considerably less funny. We are all socialists now.

For the Government to take stakes in our leading banks in order to re-capitalise them is not quite the sovietisation of Britain, but it is a pretty good start. Given the instinctively socialistic leanings of our Prime Minister, it may well have been a move he undertook calmly and, quite possibly, with a little excitement.

Perhaps the consequences of his not having socialised our financial system in this way could have been catastrophic - a view taken not just by his closest Cabinet colleagues but also by the main opposition parties. Equally, the consequences of his having done so could be catastrophic, too, because the socialist experiment rarely ends up with people feeling happier, richer and more free until it has ended.

Anyone over the age of 40 will recall the abiding result of the days when we had a socialist economy in this country: poverty. We had better prepare for some more of that. The state does not have its own money to engage in stock market speculations, such as buying shares in clearing banks. It undertakes this gamble with our money.

http://tinyurl.com/3omlkb

Posted by Drew458     on 10/09/2008 at 11:11 AM   
Filed Under: • Commies • Editorials • UK •  
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   Friday - September 26, 2008

The Brit View from the Telegraph:  Congress must agree Henry Paulson’s cheque

More economic stuff and I don’t think I like this word.  catastrophic

I guess is all depends on what they mean by .....

Congress must agree Henry Paulson’s cheque

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/09/2008

Once President George W. Bush had warned the American people in near-apocalyptic language that, if Congress failed to approve his $700billion bank bail-out, the entire US economy was in peril, it became hard to conceive of the deal being blocked.

Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson intends to buy the banks’ toxic debts with the $700 billion

Such once-in-a-lifetime threats can never be made — or taken — lightly. So, despite immense reservations on Capitol Hill, on both sides of the aisle, about the implications of the rescue package and the alarmingly slapdash way in which it appears to have been constructed, no one was under any illusion last night that, if it is not approved, the impact on world markets will be catastrophic.

That has not prevented both the Democratic and Republican leaderships in Congress pushing the plan to the wire. Neither side has been prepared to give Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, the blank cheque he was looking for.

They are right to be appalled at the size of the bail-out, the vagueness of Mr Paulson’s proposals and the unconscionable speed with which he wanted it approved. Congress has felt it is being bounced, and who can blame it?
# £$700bn bail-out deal hangs in the balance

In three days of wrangling, much of it conducted in public, it appears to have succeeded in building in safeguards for the American taxpayer: an oversight board to monitor the plan, combined with a requirement that taxpayers take a share of future profits from assisted lenders. Measures to help mortgage defaulters were also being bolted on.

If President Bush’s warning of Götterdämmerung looks like serving its purpose, his swipe at the “irresponsible actions” of bankers has been less helpful. Yes, some of the market practices we have witnessed in recent years have been hard to defend.

But the President — in much the same way as Gordon Brown in this country — breezily ignores the role of governments in laying the groundwork for this crisis. More precisely, it was the purely political decisions of the major central banks — notably the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan — to keep interest rates unfeasibly low for too long to boost their economies that created the cheap money world in which the banks made hay.

If the Paulson deal is sealed and has the desired effect of kick-starting the banking sector, there should be no need for a similar bail-out package in this country. Given that the Government has already committed £50 billion of taxpayers’ cash to rescuing Northern Rock, that is as well.

But this is far from being over. If the Paulson Plan clears Congress, the next big question will be: what if it doesn’t do the trick? Where do we go from here? Are there any more shots left in the locker? These are not comfortable thoughts.

http://tinyurl.com/4r4g3j

Posted by Drew458     on 09/26/2008 at 12:06 PM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Editorials • UK •  
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US taxpayers are being enrolled in an economic chain gang .

What Brits woke up to with their morning paper.  Read it right here.

Well people, I have to tell ya that I am very far from smart when it comes to high finance or for that matter, balancing a check book.

I recall some 20 years ago when the wife and I had a disagreement over who knows what at this late date.  But in the course of our chat she got a bit angry (probably cause I wasn’t) and asked me why I married her if ... but I no longer remember what the subject was.  I do recall my reply though which was meant to be funny and she laughed and that was the end of the disagreement.

What I answered was .... I married you because I couldn’t find an accountant that would have me. haha. You had to be there.

Point is ... I am hopeless with this stuff and the wife balances the check book and took care of the books when I was working. See, I add 1 plus 1 and come up with 11.  So I have to have ppl explain this stuff.  Like, do I need to be frightened?

Funny thing .... I understood the stock market well enough during the bubble (bubble? what bubble) thanks to a fellow named Wade Cook.
But this stuff?  Don’t think so. 

Well anyway ... I would be most interested in your opinions on the subject.

more later.

Thanks. jdp

US taxpayers are being enrolled in an economic chain gang

By Jeff Randall
Last Updated: 10:01pm BST 25/09/2008

“To preserve their [the people’s] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude” - Thomas Jefferson

There was a time, early in America’s history, when its leaders believed in financial discipline. No more. Perpetual debt, which Jefferson feared would enslave future generations, is clamped on Uncle Sam’s undercarriage like a ball and chain. US public borrowing is $9.8 trillion - and rising.

Jefferson, America’s third president (1801-09), is widely regarded as the White House’s most intellectually gifted occupant. He believed that “banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies”, and that “the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity … is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

If Congress approves the Treasury Secretary’s $700 billion bail-out of dysfunctional banks, it would be hard to invent a better example of what Jefferson foresaw: authorised “swindling”. Tomorrow’s Americans and those who come after them will pay and pay for the grotesque excesses and self-indulgence of today’s flim-flam merchants.

As Jefferson put it: “If we run into such debt, as we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts … [we will have] no means of calling our mis-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

Having failed to deliver victory in the War on Terror, President Bush is hoping for better luck in the War on Error. His goal is to limit damage from the egregious mistakes of sub-prime mortgages; his tactics are to carpet-bomb the banking system with federal funds. The upshot, in Jeffersonian terms, is that US taxpayers are about to be enrolled in an economic chain gang.

The prospect is unappealing, but, we are told, there’s no alternative. Hank Paulson’s plan offers fewer details than his weekly milk bill, but now, it seems, is no time for nit-picking. Having collected sacks of gold at Goldman Sachs, this former champion of free markets wants to nationalise assets at a pace not seen since Che Guevara was lighting cigars with Batista’s legacy.

No wonder so many Congressmen look queasy. They must persuade constituents, many of whom are losing jobs and homes in the credit crunch, that it is a bright idea to rescue those who profited hugely from the creation of dark instruments. Not for the first time, Wall Street is bilking Main Street.

For those who work in the fast lane of finance, the speed of decline has been ear-popping. Less than a year ago, America’s investment banks were wallowing in record bonuses, totalling almost $38 billion. Yes, billion.

Their pool of monopoly money was greater than the GDP of Bulgaria. Split among 186,000 workers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, it equated to an average of more than $200,000 per person, about four times the median US household income.

Goldman’s chairman, Lloyd Blankfein set a new standard in executive gluttony, collecting $68 million (about one third in cash), but at least his bank is still standing. Richard Fuld, Lehman’s chief executive, trousered $41 million. Nice work, except that he took the lot in the bank’s shares. Nine months later, when Lehman went bust, Fuld’s bonus joined his reputation, in the trash-can.

Banking’s bacchanalia has morphed into a therapy group for manic depressives. Those still in work look around the room and wonder how many will be flipping burgers by Christmas. In an interview with Fortune magazine, Mr Paulson admits: “Raw capitalism is a dead end. I’ve seen it.”

Now I have heard it all. What next?

In place of rip-roaring markets, according to a Wall Street trader, America has embraced “trickle-down communism”. This system involves the state paying “cash for trash” to benefit a few miscreants, and then hoping that some of the taxpayers’ largesse will trickle down to the masses.

Toxic rubbish will not be made to disappear by Mr Paulson’s proposals. All that will be different is ownership. It will be like removing nuclear waste from a failing business and parking it in a government building. The risk moves from private to public.

It is this form of regressive redistribution that Messrs Bush and Paulson are peddling as the road to redemption for Western finance. Excuse my cynicism, but would you buy a used derivative from either of them?

After Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, Mr Bush’s record on rescue missions does not inspire confidence. As for Mr Paulson, if he’s so insightful, why, when he was earning an $18 million bonus at Goldman in 2006, did he not spot the radio-active dump piling up in his industry’s back-yard?

Mr Paulson’s sales pitch is essentially: “American capitalism, I love you! But we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!” In return for a promise to head off financial obliteration, he is demanding a cheque of disturbing blankness. It is to be a bail-out with precious few strings, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or administrative agency”. His legal team must have chuckled when they slipped in that one.

The scheme is under attack from right and left. George Soros, the investor who helped break the pound in 1992, is in favour of action to stem insolvencies, but insists that Paulson’s plan falls short. Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton, has little faith in Paulson as a fixer: “He’s making it up as he goes along, just like the rest of us.”

Outside Washington, in the real world, there is a growing clamour for something to be done. Ordinary voters are in pain. They want government to make it go away. But there is no magic powder.

Those who borrowed to buy assets at the wrong prices will have to suffer, as financial gravity re-asserts its downward pull. There is no policy yet invented that can make fifty cents worth two bucks forever.

Any long-term solution will have to recognise that contraction cannot be deferred in perpetuity. Having restored stability, it should punish those who created the mess. Where’s the retribution in Paulson’s package? It looks too much like a parachute for his chums at the back of a burning plane.

Finally, there needs to be an overhaul of banking governance. The rules of the game were, in effect, made redundant by the ingenuity of financial engineers. We do not need more regulation, but more appropriate regulation.

Which brings us back to Jefferson. Two hundred years ago, he demanded: “The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.” Twas ever thus.

http://tinyurl.com/4omo5q

Posted by Drew458     on 09/26/2008 at 11:02 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Editorials •  
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   Thursday - September 25, 2008

Why can’t a woman boss be like a man?  (don’t know. cause they’re built different?)

I have been reading this lady for about four years now.  I like her writing style and quite frankly, I kinda like her.  Oh yeah .. Lyndon reminded me once.
Celia Walden also. It’s really difficult to ignore pretty women.  Especially Walden .. now then where was I?

Oh yeah .. the following story ....  and my final post for the night.

Cheers all and hope to see you tomorrow.

Why can’t a woman boss be like a man?

By Bryony Gordon
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 25/09/2008

So now we know. Women don’t much like women, and they certainly don’t like working for them. Research published this week has found that females who have the misfortune to have a boss with breasts and a high-pitched voice are more likely to suffer from stress than those who answer to a strapping hunk of a man.

Ladies who work for ladies suffer more from depression, headaches and insomnia. Well, obviously. Who wouldn’t experience horrific, disturbing night terrors, knowing that, in several hours’ time, they must trudge to the office and be told what to do by a woman?

Indeed, just thinking about the concept of a female being put in charge of a workforce has given me a migraine. Make it stop! I may have to go and lie down, but, while I’m gone, could somebody see to it that all bosses with two X chromosomes are replaced by ones with an X and a Y?

Scientists at the University of Toronto believe that there are two reasons a female boss causes such strife. The first is that women prefer to be told what to do by men: that’s the way it has been for thousands of years, we are used to it, why change the habit of several lifetimes? The second is Queen Bee Syndrome. People who suffer from this do not like it one bit when they are surrounded by competitors of the same sex.

For years, women have pondered why gender equality in the workplace has been so difficult to achieve. Here we are in 2008, and in Britain there is still a 17 per cent pay gap - despite the fact that all the evidence points to girls consistently outperforming boys at school, year in, year out.

We have long blamed men, believing that our career has been hindered by sexist, chauvinist pigs who think that the main points of a lady is to look pretty, cook dinner and pop out babies.

But we have made scapegoats of the opposite sex for too long. What this research suggests is that we are our own worst enemies, allowing petty jealousy to get in the way of our careers. Change comes from within, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can smash through more glass ceilings.

• We are, it seems, a nation of criminals. We should all be locked up, the keys thrown away forever more. Apparently, the average person breaks the law at least once a day. We download music illegally, park on double yellow lines, don’t clean up our dog’s mess, cycle without lights after dark and even eat while driving. We should all be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.

This news reminded me of the time a friend - a middle-aged professional - was stopped by a policeman and given a warning for cycling on an empty pavement. Pc Plod told my chum that it put pedestrians in danger, despite there being none around, and besides, how could he be sure that my chum was not going to cycle past a non-existent pedestrian and relieve them of their non-existent handbag before making a quick getaway on his fold-up bicycle?

My friend responded that he could not be sure, but the fact that he was in his mid-forties and wearing a suit might perhaps give him some inkling that his only intention, while on this bike, was to travel from A to B. And with that Pc Plod went on his way, presumably to continue with his job of bothering other, mostly law-abiding citizens.

• It’s official. Blondes really do have more fun. Hooray! Researchers - this time from Nottingham Trent University - found that a woman who bleaches her hair is more confident, more adventurous in bed, more likely to complain about unfair treatment and, finally, more likely to ask her boss for a pay rise. Just as long as her boss isn’t also a woman, I suppose.

http://tinyurl.com/3ubwr2

you may have to scroll down a bit for this article.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/25/2008 at 12:01 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Fun-Stuff • UK •  
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   Saturday - September 20, 2008

IF THERE’S A WAY OUT OF A MESS, AMERICANS CAN FIND IT. A BRIT REPORT ON USA.

Crisis schmisis - there’s money to be made

By Tom Leonard
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/09/2008

The sight of jobless Lehman Brothers staff leaving their Manhattan headquarters clutching cardboard boxes, like a line of leaf-bearing ants, was an arresting one.

But far more startling was the crowd of people waiting to greet them last Tuesday morning. When Americans say - and they often do - that one man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity, they aren’t joking. A pair of bankers from a small - still solvent - Connecticut firm were dressed in pyjamas and dressing gowns waving “Brokers Wanted” placards and shouting, “Tired of the big boys? Get into bed with us”.

A few of the downcast Lehman people even managed to smile. The air was thick with flashing business cards. Recruitment consultants shoved theirs into the hands of anyone in a suit.

The entrepreneurial spirit in action outside Lehman Brothers’ New York offices.

A man seeking staff for a new internet company was doing the same and, although the news of Lehman’s collapse was only a day old, he had already printed a “Wanted For Hire: 7,000 Brothers of Lehman” T-shirt.

“I really want to get into the building and have a good chat with them,” he told me. Didn’t he think he was being a little insensitive? He smiled. Perhaps only a Brit would waste time asking such a question. Yes, he obviously did think that, but frankly so what?

It has been a miserable week in New York and it could get even worse. The bankers and brokers are inconsolable and there is a lot of talk of 1929. In a city so reliant on the financial sector, it is hard to find people who aren’t worried that the banking crisis will trickle down and hit the “little guy” like them; if not taking their job, at least shattering the value of their home. And yet, as the entrepreneurial bunch outside Lehmans illustrated far better than the platitudes coming from John McCain and Barack Obama, Americans are not ones to see a glass half empty.

They don’t tend to stay on the floor too long after they’ve had a kicking. It’s a gritty, ruthlessly pragmatic, sometimes - like the man in the Lehman T-shirt - purely self-interested resilience that is rooted in the country’s can-do psyche and centuries-old belief in self-help. And rooted, too, in America’s belief in itself. Those philosophical ideas of American exceptionalism and the United States’s Manifest Destiny - as the Puritans were first to outline it, that God created America as a “city on the hill” to provide an example to others - smack of chauvinism. But they certainly don’t hurt when a country needs to pull through a gloomy patch.

Of course, that sunny, ingrained optimism that America’s detractors like to dismiss as simple naivety has particular benefits in a crisis that is largely about confidence. Americans just cannot stay downhearted for long; it’s not in their DNA. A CNN presenter summed up that positive spirit yesterday as she introduced a segment on “the financial challenges out there and what folks are doing to meet them”. Weaned on generations of Hollywood disaster movies, in which over-dressed Americans run screaming and helpless from every crisis, foreigners tend to dismiss the real ones as pampered and complacent - missing the gene that governs coping with adversity. It might be true that Americans have grown too attached to an easy lifestyle, but they certainly don’t shrink from a challenge.

Many have written off the US car industry as doomed to extinction because of its reliance on big, gas-guzzling vehicles at a time of soaring petrol prices. And yet, to huge applause, General Motors failed to live down to expectations this week when it unveiled the Volt, a radical new type of electric car that can do 40 miles on one battery charge. Just like in the world wars, Americans have come rather late to the “green revolution”, but - as in 1942, when Sherman tanks rolled off the supply ships in their thousands - they tend to make a difference when they set their minds to something.

(well now hang on there. the sherman tank wasn’t a match for the tiger tank as I’ve read history. but we had the fuel to run ours and the numbers.)

Every week, some West Coast technology company or East Coast laboratory comes up with an ingenious energy-efficient, planet-saving idea that no one in Europe - with its head start - seemed to have thought of. And, it being America, and the green economy being one of the country’s fastest-growing sectors, you can be fairly sure that the bright idea will make it on to the market. Academics have talked in the past of America’s “Promethean creativity” and you can see it now in the way that the country’s creative juices are being channelled into getting through this financial mess. Where there’s a buck to be made, the average American won’t hesitate to make it. This creed may have helped get the country into its current financial problems, but one cannot help feeling it may help get it out of it too.

“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” sang Sinatra in New York, New York. The supreme self-confidence - the sheer puffed-out chestiness of a conviction no doubt shared by the rest of the city - always made me cringe. But it doesn’t stop it being largely true and, as New Yorkers take the vanguard in an American economic fightback on which we all depend, it’s also oddly reassuring.

http://tinyurl.com/3z2t4p

Posted by Drew458     on 09/20/2008 at 01:05 PM   
Filed Under: • Big Business • Economics • Editorials •  
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   Wednesday - September 17, 2008

Sarah Palin: You Brits will never get her.  (From an American writer for London paper)

I rather like what this fellow had to say and so am sharing with you folks back home.
Sorry ‘bout the longish link at the bottom. Some things just aren’t working well today.

Sarah Palin: You Brits will never get her

By Irwin Stelzer
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/09/2008

The American election campaign has made life better for those of us living here and identified as non-enemies of President Bush or, even worse, one of the “neo-cons” David Cameron went all the way to Islamabad to denounce.

It is not that our British friends have fallen in love with George Bush, or adopted a more tolerant attitude towards those of us who think the world might be a more dangerous place if America were to retreat into reliance on the United Nations to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

No, it is that Brits with any interest in America, which means most of you, are so distracted by the campaign that they don’t have time to share with us their latest reason for Bush bashing, or to tell us at dinner parties that 9/11 wouldn’t have happened if the Jews hadn’t been so ghastly to the Arabs, or to accuse us of over-heating the globe.

Now, there is only time for, “Tell us about the elections? Is it really possible that Obama won’t win?” That’s the easiest question. Yes, it is possible that Barack Obama’s rhetoric will not succeed in fooling enough of the people enough of the time to gain him the keys to the White House.

He claims to be a bipartisan healer, but has never voted against his Democratic leadership in the Senate. He claims to love America, but spent 20 years as a disciple of a pastor who urged his congregation to “God damn America”, rather than call on God to bless it.

He is a man whose list of ways young people might serve their country definitely does not include enlistment in the military.

No matter. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, Barack Obama is seen as the second coming, at least of John F Kennedy, if not of that other fellow.

Tall, articulate, handsome, with a stylish wife and engaging children (paraded on stage at the Democratic convention before 80,000 fans and tens of millions of television viewers, but, says the candidate, “off limits” to reporters). Better still, he is black but, as Charles Moore reminded us last week, borrowing from Colin Powell, “not that black”.

There is, we have found, no use laying out such facts before Brits who want to see Obama in the White House.

It is, however, productive to discuss Sarah Palin, John McCain’s choice for vice-president. The first question goes something like this: “My God, does she really believe in God, just like those jihadists we are supposed to be fighting?”

Well, yes and no: yes, she is deeply religious, but no, she is not about to engage in a holy war against Islam, or even against Europe’s secularists. Nor is she about to denude the nation’s libraries of books with which she disagrees, or bar the teaching of Darwinism in schools, even though she thinks there should be a place to advise students that there is another point of view as to the origin of man.

Should she want to do just that, our founding fathers had the sense to reserve power over education to local communities and the states.

Next question: “She shoots moose and wolves, poses with the sort of weapons favoured by Vladimir Putin and drug lords, and seems to have no objections to the proliferation of arsenals in the homes of Americans. Doesn’t that worry you?”

Not very much. The second amendment to our constitution guarantees Americans the right to bear arms, a right affirmed only recently by the Supreme Court in a decision Obama says he supports.

Also, we have long known, as Britain is now learning, that laws do not keep guns out of the hands of the bad guys; they only disarm law-abiding citizens and reduce their ability to defend themselves. Surveys in prisons show that burglars fear two things: trained guard dogs and armed potential victims.

Many Americans find it encouraging that the McCain-Palin ticket includes a man willing to defend his country and a woman willing to defend her home.

Then there is abortion: “Won’t she deny women the right to choose?” Well, no. Sarah Palin is opposed to abortion - witness her “hillbilly fecundity”, as Mark Steyn describes liberals’ reaction to her five children, her willingness to bear a Down’s syndrome baby, and support for her unwed daughter’s decision to carry her baby to term. But Governor Palin has shown no inclination to impose her view on others.

In the end, the Supreme Court will remain the arbiter of the battle between “pro-life” and “pro-choice” Americans. Which perhaps is unfortunate: were the electorates in several states given an opportunity to pronounce on the issue, the minority might be more willing to accept the verdict than it is when eight men and one woman in black robes opine.

What many foreigners might be missing is that Palin’s supporters don’t much care what she thinks about babies, guns and Jesus. They seem to care only that she is what one British friend described as “a real person”.

Fortunately for the American electorate, there is nothing much that the British commentariat can do to prevent its worst nightmare from becom