ha ha
quality 
Obama is going to win.
At least thereās some kind of choiceā¦
In the UK youāre stuck with whoever the party choses as their leader. Otherwise Gordon Brown - whoās been a non-entity since becoming PM - wouldnāt have stood a chance of becoming leader.
Heāll be giving the biggest speech of his life (so far) in a couple of hours.
Lordradish said he was going to have press credentials. Itāll be nice to hear how it was to be there from one the forumās own.
Beats listening to the inane chatter of the talkng heads.
Lordradish?
By the way, Iām worried about my 8 year old. I was watching Shanghai Joe on my TV last night and I went to my sonās room (where I thought he was watching SpoungeBob Squarepants) and found him watching Joe Bidenās speech at the convention instead.
I hope Iām not raising a politician! :o :o
i though Bidenās speach was remarkable, while hillary was mainly talking about herself, that ego bitch 
hahahaha
looking forward to watching obama tomorrow for breakfast
Obama is a freakin GREAT speeker! Bidenās is too as is Obamaās wife. Hilary just sounds like she is yelling instead of speaking with force or umph as Obama does. At least she has the cojones to come out and fully endorse Obama as some of her dumbass supporters will defect to Mccain. >:(
Mccain will not only win but he will win in a landslide.the polls always lean democratic sometime by as much as 10 points and the republican still wins.this time the polls are dead even you do the math.
Well, today our US polls said Obama was ahead by 9 points. Yes polls can be wrong but I donāt wonāt to do the math because I just got home from school.
I had expected that
McCainās good results in the polls were mainly due to the Sarah Palin hype, and I thinks she āpeakedā too early
The elections are in November, not August
Today we are back at our starting point: Obama ahead a few points
Itās still close, both sides can still win, but I would put my money on Obama
Not only for this reason, also because the upcoming debates are important and Obama seems to me the better debater
I donāt think he is a great speaker in an intellectual sense, but he seems to have those oratory and debating qualities that do well on television and are appreciated by what I call the common voter. Elections are generally not about ideas but about suggestions of ideas. Take for instance the Obama terms āhopeā and āchangeā : he has, in a sense, adopted those terms as his, suggested that heās going to restore hope and change things. McCain/Palin have tried to steal those terms from him, I heard them talking about changing the country too, but I guess those voters who have not decided yet, will have more trust in Obama.
But weāll see. The next months will be interesting and you never know whatās going to happen
A natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a stupity by one of the candidates - such calamities might change the outlook completely
[quote=āJack Burns, post:2, topic:1040ā]It will be much of the same, regardless of who wins.
The ruling elite in the United States have done a good job of convincing people they really have a āchoiceā in elections. Nothing could be further from the truth. We live in an oligarchy, where the winners are selected by monied interests, knowing full well theyāll continue to do the bidding of their corporate masters.
Obama is another one in a long line of 'em. Militarism and the expansion of the industrial capitalist machine ad infinitumā¦
For example, Obama is said to favor expansion in Iraq via private forces. Blackwater thugs. And why not? Itās good for business. The business of the United States is opening markets and attempting to sustain non-sustainable growth. Obama knows this. So does McCain.[/quote]
A man after my own heart.
Iād even go a step further and say weāre living in a monarchy.
A lot of U.S. presidents were related to one another.
For example, Obama is a 9th (give or take a #) cousin to Bush.
Pallbearer, actually itās worse. ITās Cheney whoās his cousin.
You know, I completely forgot about this thread. Someone asked how the convention wasā¦
It was a freakshow. Basically, the conventions(of either party) are like big commercials. I was lucky enough to be front row for all of it. I was like 50 feet from the speakers. It was really strange, I went to a breakfast that had our entire congressional delegation (Sen. Patrick Leahy is a heavy hitter, and Bernie Sanders is the only real āsocialistā in the entire Senate), Howard Dean, and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Iām a political blogger and I was also in theis thing called the āBIg Tentā, a new media center. I was interviewed about 4 times, I was on tv in NYC and Rome, too.
It was a lot of fun, but as I took the bus back to my hostel late at night and saw the homeless sitting on benches and such, it felt sort of perverse, because what I was seeing in the convention center had nothing to do with them.
That said, although Obama is nowhere as liberal as Iād like, heās light years ahead of the moron we currently have. To all of my friends here, please accept my sincerest apologies for the actions of my government over the last eight years as well as that of many of my fellow citizens for going along with it. Weāll do better, I know that much.
Right
I had (have) my doubts about Obama too, but I must admit that I at least underestimated the effect his election would have on the black population. And I can understand their joy, their feelings of āliberationā. They have known slavery, they were never treated as equals, not even treated with respect, and now one of them, even if heās only half black, has become president. Itās very easy to say that it wonāt make any difference, that theyāre all the same etc. Even a difference in mentality (of a part of the population) may make a lot of difference. And just imagine how things wouldāve been if Al Gore had won the election 8 years ago. Would anybody say that Al Gore ad George W are āall the sameā ?
But, as said, I have my doubts about Obama
Some are related to the person, some to the situation
Bushās policy was based on two principles, or presumptions: the believe in a) pro-active military action (resulting in arbitrary attacks and threats) and the believe in b) a market completely (or nearly completely) free of government control (leading to an unheard financial crises in western countries)
Obama is saddled up with the result of Bushās economical wasteland, with a country that lies in economical and social ruins; I think he can restore social coherence, but heāll have enormous trouble to get the country back on track economically. Heās not a socialist, of course, but heāll have to convince the American people that good policy requires a balance between personal freedom and social justice, and in a country like the US, that is a hellova job. His opponents will say that yes, he is a socialist, that no, the casino capitalism of the totally free market didnāt cause the crises, that it was caused, quite on the contrary, by government control etc.
Obama wonāt make the same stupid mistakes Bush made over the last eight years, but he may make some others. He said heās willing to talk to Iran, North Corea, Hamas, Chavez etc. but so far I have not heard what heās going to say to them. Attacking countries at random is not the right thing to do, but itās a bit naieve to think you can have a good conversation with the above mentioned, without stipulation any conditions beforehand. I also have the idea that he doesnāt realize how profoud this hate is, that is felt by islamists (note: that is not the same as muslims) and communists; he somehow seems to have the feeling that itās the result of Bushās foreign policy, but that is not the case: that has aggravated the situation, but not created it - islamists donāt hate the US, or the West, because of Iraq, nor do communists hate the US or the west because of the Bush dynasty. Islamists and communists hate the West (us) because they prefer another kind of worldorder and form of government than we do, and the hate the US most because theyāre the strongest representative of the existing world order they want to overthrow
I donāt think it is as simple as this Scherps. It certainly isnāt just Bushās foriegn policy decisions that have led to āAmerica Hatingā becoming so virilant around the globe. But it isnāt simply that the U.S stands for capitalism and the dominant world order either.
Countries around the world (specifically the third world) have had generations of bullying interventionism as part of U.S foreign policy which has built up an ingrained resentment. The same is true of my country, the UK. Succesive UK governments have acted out of self interest and arrogance and tried to dress it up as being some kind of benevolent international policeman who the rest of the world should be grateful to. The middle east is just the latest shameful chapter but there are a number of other nations around the world who have just as much reason to look at us with jaundiced eyes. And yet we still have the image of ourselves as standing for fairplay and honourable behaviour in the same way that the U.S believes it stands for liberty.
That, in my opinion, is why our countries are resented. The U.S possibly more so because they are the biggest kids on the block and have even more recent transgressions under their belt. (Specifically in Latin America over the past thirty odd years) Where I agree with you is that it is going to take a lot more than a bit of a chat to fix this situation for both our countries and in the case of the islamists it may already be just plain too late.
Sorry for the political rant. I feel better now.
Oh, I donāt disagree with you Phil, donāt worry
I wasnāt defending our (or UKās) foreign policy
Both the āislamic grudgeā and those āgenerations of bullying interventionsā (as part of, or not as part of) probably originate from the colonial times. When Egyptian Said-Qutb defined the islamic revival (resulting in the brotherhood of islam and - eventually - a phenomenon like Al-Qaāeda) in the first half of the previous century , he asked himself why Islam had lost control over the world, and even over its own countries: it was a direct reaction to colonialism, and what he was dreaming of - and what islamists today are dreaming of - was a resurrection of the islamic khalifa (from khalafa = to succeed), the time of Mohammedās successors, who conquered large parts of the world.
When we (the US, the UK, the rest of the Western Word) are preparing our interventions, we still seem to think the peopke overthere should be grateful for the āblessingsā we bring to their countries (capitalism, freedom, democracy and war). Theyāre not, and thatās part of the problem. But the fact that their hate is - at least for a part - understandable, doesnāt make it less profoud. Nor does it change the islamistsā pretentions.