The only energy policy I’ve heard was from Paris Hilton.  Maybe someone should have chosen her as a running mate. (insert quizzical smiley face)

Hi Kevin,
there’s much I agree with but this paragraph caught my eye.

Yes, where are the policies in the US election ? Maybe some of them will just follow Kevin Rudd’s example and just promise to ‘look into it’ once they get elected and then they will set up committees, enquiries, commissions, panels, bureaus, agencies etc. Let’s see if the US media does indeed get sick of all the spin and smoke-and-mirrors stories - but, then again, certain media are addicted to it and unable ( or unwilling more likely ) to change.

It’s an easy accusation from the Liberals but they tend to contradict themselves. On the one hand it was “Kevin the communist come to bankrupt us” and Labor were not conservative enough financially. Now they’re not spending enough on various programs that they neglected themselves and let fall into disrepair.

Or “Labor are all talk and no action”, setting up reviews on how to introduce a carbon trading scheme… then the next moment the Liberals are screaming that the carbon trading system will be far too much too early and their policy of waiting an extra year or 2 will make all the difference. (According to the Liberals’ new found acceptance of global warming.)

So I guess I’m sick of the boring partisan politics strategies in this country as well. It’s all spin and no substance. If either Labor or Liberal governments put out real policies to debate and refine, then I might get interested. If we had a system of not “candidate elections” but “policy elections”, where both wings of politics put forward a bunch of ACTUAL polices (not personalities… no people attached to these things!), then that might be something.

John McCain: Reformed Maverick lol

Dave Lankshear - 07 September 2008 02:20 PM

Other than maybe staying or pulling out of Iraq, have any other real policies been discussed or is this just personalities? I’m over it.

I think I agree with Bob Carr that if Australia ever became a Republic, the President should just be chosen by Parliament. I’d hope that we the people didn’t have to choose a President in an expensive election procedure, let alone the horrors of eventually ending up with an American system. The American system seems to be the worst on earth, with the whole silly candidate election procedure dividing parties and burning out the country before the real election. It makes the whole country focus more on personality and less on policy. If only that much time had been spent dealing with the American debt, their economy, their commitment or lack of to global warming, peak oil and energy security. They could have had half the country’s problems solved by now if they’d put as much time and energy into discussing ideas as they have personalities.

Who has the time for that much politics? It makes me wince.

Good call Dave. I’m worried about any system of republicanism that we’ll end up with if Australia chooses to adopt that. I think that almost inevitably it would be a directly elected system, which would be expensive, and dominated by personality, celebrity and political parties grandstanding to get “their” candidate into the top job. We’ve had some good G-Gs in the past, from areas of life that most Australians wouldn’t have a clue about. Bill Deane, Michael Jeffery, etc. would probably not be the sort of people most Australians would nominate and elect to govern a country. What sort of people are we going to nominate for a Head of State?

There will need to be some seriously good safeguards to depoliticise the process, or else we’ll end up with something resembling the farcical system that America has (as much as I like following elections).

Gordon Cheng - 06 September 2008 09:31 AM

Thanks David for your hard work on the abortion question, by the way. Praying for you.

It is hard to get past Obama’s stand on abortion, which goes to the extent of sanctioning the failure to intervene in the preservation of lives of babies born alive; that is to say, passive infanticide.

See here. Came via Justin Taylor.

Wow… I had no idea Obama had that sort of view on things. Interesting.

Here’s a BBC link where we can look at different polling service results :

US Election polltracker

The most recent Rasmussen poll ( 11 Sept ) has McCain at 49% and Obama at 46% ( a reversal from about 3-4 weeks ago ).

And the Gallup Poll from 13 Sept has McCain dropping to 47% with Obama climbing to 45%.

Some other smaller ( older ) ones have Obama in front by a slim margin - but all polls seem to indicate Sarah Palin’s speech as being the turning point in time when voters started to turn from Obama to McCain.

Statistics, and more statistics to baffle and bemuse us - with even more to come until Tuesday 4 November. At this stage, “it’s going to be close” is all I can say.

That’s a cool tracker, RealClearPolitics has an average tracker too (plus a lot of good news links on their home page). You can see both candidates got a post-convention bump which has now worn off and it’s back to a total dead heat in the polls.

Looks like it’s going to come down to a handful of states which will be ‘in play’ and will decide the election.

<50 days to go. *Bites nails*

Meanwhile, substantive discussion of the Export Land Model is totally missing from open political dialogue in all Western nations…

**bites nails even more**

The US election is a joke. I, quite frankly (and impossibly naively) still expected more.

Obama is a dangerous political aberration, unique in history, in many ways. If you review the past 7 yrs. facts, honestly, you will conclude the economy, jobs, progress in Iraq has been far better than the constant Dem/ anti USA foreign investor’s propaganda campaign has stated. This downturn has been since the inception of the Pelosi/Democratic Congress..the “do nothing” group that has brought the complaining, carping and divisive policy’s of the socialist invasion! Oh..are they back from the July 4th holiday as yet? Typical attitude.. “everything is so bad....let’s go home and think about it” to prove our point!! I’m just basing my opinion on the video clip that i saw in pollclash wel you can try to see the clip here

I think the Republicans are finally getting it if this slightly edited version of the RNC is any indication, and McCain is definitely a ‘straight talking’ kind of person ;-).

Ummmm, is this a cliché attack on the left or what? Is pulling out of Iraq more dangerous to the American way of life than starting this dangerous, illegal, and obscenely expensive war in the first place? If that money had instead gone into solar thermal power and electric rail, America would be heading half the way off coal and at least starting on the road towards giving up the oil habit. Obama dangerous? Naaaah. He’s so soft and cuddly I don’t even know what he stands for.

The Republicans are currently overseeing some of the biggest government interventions in the marketplace to save these rich boys money-clubs from going under. Why are they doing this when right-wingers usually treat “the market” as sacrosanct? Why didn’t they do something to undercut the housing bubble in the first place? Way back in 2005 my mate Neil predicted today’s recession, and in 2006 he predicted that house prices across the USA would fall. He’s not even a professional economist, yet foresaw these problems. Why didn’t the ‘economically responsible’ republicans do something to prevent these bubbles building so high? Indeed, one can argue that their policies directly contributed to inflating these bubbles!

Both Republicans and Democrats have overseen historically larger and larger subsidies for fossil fuel companies, distorting the marketplace and competitive power of renewable energy, and then when Global Warming scientists insist we need to put a price on carbon to subsidise renewable energy, the right-wingers scream about “not interfering in the free energy marketplace!”

What a joke! If they had given me the hundreds of billions of dollars a year of tax-payer subsidies that went to fossil fuel companies, I’d have America half the way off fossil fuels by now.

The stagnant nature of American rail is also going to be a huge issue in the coming years. World peak oil is about to hit, and America uses twice as much oil as the average European. They are twice as addicted and dependent!

So, both candidates talk about “Change” yet I’ve yet to hear substantive policy debates about the very “clear and present dangers” that are Global Warming and peak oil.

Dave Lankshear - 19 September 2008 10:40 AM

What a joke! If they had given me the hundreds of billions of dollars a year of tax-payer subsidies that went to fossil fuel companies, I’d have America half the way off fossil fuels by now.

Dave,
You forgot to put in the:
attempt at humour and /attempt at humour
tags.

But you still

FAIL

Cheers,
Andrew

Hey, I never said I wouldn’t take my cut. “The worker deserves his wages” as they say. ;-)

Latest update :

Obama rebounds in polls

Obama rebounds in polls

Article from: Agence France-Presse By Stephen Collinson in Washington
September 19, 2008 08:29am

DEMOCRAT Barack Obama today surged into the lead in national polls which showed the financial crisis rocking the White House race and “Palin power” fading for the Republican ticket.

The Democratic hopeful, who has been lacerating rival John McCain over his capacity to rescue the US economy, led 49 to 45 per cent in a new poll of likely voters by Quinnipiac University.

In a CBS/New York Times survey, Senator Obama was up by 48 per cent to 43 per cent, with the race apparently reverting to the narrow Democratic ascendency seen before two presidential nominating conventions.

The trend was confirmed in Gallup’s daily tracking poll, which had Senator Obama up 48 to 44 per cent, the first time in two weeks that the Illinois senator had a lead beyond the statistical margin of error.

Rasmussen’s daily poll had the contest at a 48 per cent tie nationwide ahead of the November 4 election, but again the trend was towards Senator Obama, who had trailed by three points just three days ago.

Senator Obama’s momentum set the stage for the first of three one-on-one presidential debates with Senator McCain, which begin next week and may represent the last chance for one of the candidates to cement a lead.

Senator McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate electrified the conservative base and pushed the Republican into the lead in polls, spreading panic among some Democrats.

But Governor Palin’s momentum seems to be diminishing.

“Senator Obama is right back where he was before the so-called convention bounces with a four-point lead,” said Maurice Carroll, director the Quinnipiac University polling institute.

“The Democratic discombobulation after the selection of Governor Palin as GOP running mate seems to be steadying......”

You just got to love that “discombobulation” word, don’t you ? Those three one-on-one debates will indeed be the ones that matter to a lot of people. And I’ll be counting how many times the phrase “working families” is used.

I’ll be counting the amount of times the phrase “peak oil” is used. ;-) There’s no conspiracy of misinformation… No really!