The McCain campaign implosion

We’re starting to hear more about the inevitable impending implosion of the McCain campaign. According to wikipedia, the media endorsements now stands at 127-46 in favor of Obama. What’s more interesting is the growing landslide of endorsements for Obama’s as compared to McCain’s. See for yourself. This is in contrast to years ago when the situation is the exact opposite. Here in the Wall Street Journal, we have the defections of Republicans to the Democratic ticket. On Karl Rove’s, the architect of the Bush presidency, site, see his electoral map. The blame game is already starting in the McCain camp, with finger-pointing, ass-covering and resignation starting to snowball. What’s worse, the McCain camp has to defend negativity generated by the press for the ridiculous amounts of money spent on Palin’s wardrobe and the mutilation hoax perpetrated by a McCain campaign worker. Then he is forced to blast Bush for the current situation without mentioning the fact that he supported Bush 90% of the time. That is all not good news in McCain-land. The implosion has begun and Obama’s campaign does not even need to lift a finger.  It will just snowball from now on to it’s foregone conclusion, an earthquake election.

What’s happening ? McCain could have been one up against Obama at any time in this campaign. Now why does Obama seem to be so impervious to any move made by McCain ? Obama’s black and that’s supposed to be a big advantage to McCain and still is. Obama is inexperienced, not very well known and an idealist which can be a double-edged sword. Every which way you dissect the 2 candidates, McCain will always start out the stronger party and Obama the weaker one. But in this case, Obama has managed to minimize his own weaknesses and maximize his opponent’s. It never cease to impress me that Obama’s team is disciplined, principled and steadfast irregardless of anything that’s thrown at them. Every move McCain makes end up backfiring. The lesson here is that the most important thing about winning is to put your own house in order first. It’s like a tree firmly anchored to the ground but adapting by swaying with the force of the wind. No matter which direction or how strong the wind blows, the tree is till standing. In my opinion, McCain has already lost from the beginning because :

1. His world view and value systems does not exactly align with the Republican’s more extreme positions. He is more centrist and moderate. This causes conflicts and infighting which is already happening.
2. There’s no central overarching moral theme of his campaign. It’s just throwing everything at the wall at any moment to see what sticks. They are too quick to abandon their main message with too much attacking and too little in solidifying their core theme.
3. He’s too much inside Washington that he’s just out of touch.

Obama’s camp is the exact opposite. In a fight, the loser always blames the opponent for being the stronger, faster, more skiIled, the weather, whatever. The perspective of the loser is never the fact that there’s something wrong with himself in the first place and needs to keep his own house in order above all else. The martial art taiji teaches us to first and foremost find our root, to be introspective, to know ourselves before we learn how to fight others. There is no firm root in McCain’s campaign. I am impressed with Obama’s campaign who seemed to have mastered this basic truth so obvious but yet so elusive to a war veteran like McCain.

Colin Powell and the soldier Kareem R Khan

Yes, the former Secretary of State Colin Powell has endorsed Obama, saying that he’ll be an “exceptional president”. But the most memorable moment is when he mentioned the story of a soldier killed in the line of duty in Iraq, saying :

Mr. Powell mentioned Mr. Khan’s death to underscore why he was deeply troubled by Republican personal attacks on Mr. Obama, especially false intimations that he was Muslim.

Mr. Obama is a lifelong Christian, not a Muslim, he said. But, he added, “The really right answer is, what if he is?”

“Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? No, that’s not America,” he said.

Yes, what if he is a Muslim indeed ! If more Republicans are like him, then McCain will surely be the next president. But in the hunger for power, they sold their soul to the devil. They choose to ally with the forces of hatred, intolerance and bigotry in the country to advance their ambitions. This is what’s wrong with America today, blindfolding people’s eyes with the specter of 9/11 while they are cultivating the wrong kind of values and nobody has the backbone to sock it to them until this election. It has to wait 8 years for one of their own, a brave soldier, Colin Powell to deliver this knockout. And it takes another brave soldier, young Muslim American Kareem R Khan who sacrificed himself in the line of duty to defend America, to remind Americans what America really stands for, what America really is and what America should never tolerate. The real enemies of America lies not outside of its borders but more within. It has disguised itself among us in the form of patriotic, self-righteous defenders of America, sowing ignorance, discrimination and bigotry in our minds with their propaganda machine. They have already succeeded in splitting the country, caused thousands of deaths and breaking the piggy bank to advance their own misguided ideology. Now is the time they should be roundly defeated.

I salute Kareem R Khan, Colin Powell for reminding us what the really right answer is.

Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan.

McCain’s riches

McCain is a very rich man. Now of course, it does not mean that rich men can’t be presidents and whether a person is rich or not have nothing to do with being a good president. But from how McCain and Obama have each conducted themselves so far, Obama is just the obvious choice.

Where’s the Joe the plumber logic

So what’s this hoopla surrounding Joe the plumber anyway ? Another 1 of McCain’s aimless roundhouse punches again at Obama. McCain’s tactic here is basically devoid of any purpose but to paint the image of a fight-for-the-ordinary-guy in our minds. There’s a complete lack of mojo in this Joe the plumber caricature. Now Obama didn’t make Joe famous, McCain did and he has the bloody cheek to apologize to Joe for bringing him overnite fame and Joe the man is probably already busy milking his newfound fame. Now what’s all this fuss about Joe anyway. He’s far from being in the $250k bracket, so what’s the big deal ? I would dare say that most plumbers are unlike Joe, making less than $250k but maybe McCain’s own plumber is different. There is just no message here, nothing, nada, except for the fact that McCain wants to stick his face on Joe’s body so that we see him as our plumber next door who’ll save the country’s economy. Maybe McCain has a fetish of being a plumber ? Who knows ?

Now unless the conservatives want to make the case that progressive taxation doesn’t work, I can’t see where they’re going with Joe the plumber. Progressive taxation has been with us since time began. The poor will always pay less taxes than the rich. Under Obama, the rich will probably be asked to fork out more. Well call it socialism or communism or whatever, in times of need, it only makes sense that those with the means be asked to bear more of the burden. Good times will generally benefit the rich as the saying goes, “the rich gets richer” but in bad times, the poor and not-so-well-off is harder hit than the rich. The rich can ride it out but the poor suffers more. Now taxing the rich more does not call for the dismantling of the free market nor is it that we become a welfare state or even changing the current status quo much. Here’s why from a snippet in wikipedia :

In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.

In describing tax systems, it is important to distinguish between the percent of taxes paid on a given income, and the percent of taxes paid by a person with a given income. For example, if a person earns $1,000,000 and is taxed at a rate of 10%, they will owe $100,000 in taxes. On the other hand, if a person earns $10,000 and is taxed at a rate of 20%, they will owe $2000 in taxes. The person with the greater income is taxed at a lower rate but pays a higher tax. The person with the lesser income is taxed at a higher rate but pays a lower tax. The United States has a tax system which is a mixture of progressive taxation and regressive taxation. The income tax is progressive, capital gains tax, at a lower rate than the income tax, is regressive, as is the sales tax, since the less wealthy spend a greater percentage of their income. In 2003, the one percent with the highest salaries paid more than 34% of the nation’s federal income tax; the ten percent with the highest salaries paid more than 66% of the total income tax; the top 25% of paid 84% of the income taxes; and the upper half accounted for virtually the entire U.S. income tax revenue (nearly 97%). This is an inevitable consequence of the concentration of wealth. People who do not have much money cannot pay high taxes, even when they pay a greater percentage of their earnings in taxes.

Now 40% of population owns less than 1% of nation’s wealth. Yes, 40%, holy shmokes ! Raising or lowering taxes for this group has no effect at all on tax revenues. The top 10% accounts for 66% of tax revenues. So now, who are you going to collect more in taxes to make any difference at all ? The top 10% of course. So Obama’s plan is not changing anything at all except collect more tax money from the top 5-10% of the population who can afford it. So I don’t see where Joe & McCain is going with all this sand being kicked in our faces.

US and Iran’s elections

Interestingly, it seems like Iran’s own elections in March 2009 actually depends on the US election outcome. It also seems like Iran’s political landscape is also quite similar to the US’s. There are also red & blue in Iran, moderates/liberals vs conservatives, mirroring the US. Also surprisingly at least to me is that quite a number of the candidates standing for election in Iran are actually schooled in the US ! Some of them are MIT, Stanford and George Washington University graduates. The article’s author Hossein Askari, who is a professor of international business and international affairs at George Washington University, says :

If there is a president McCain, there will be a second term for Ahmadinejad. If there is a president Obama, the next Iranian president will be a moderate, soft-spoken and Western-appealing individual, one who is not weighed down by Ahmadinejad’s baggage and who can start afresh with the US and achieve favorable results for Iran with an Obama administration. In that event, the leader would come from Qalibaf, Najafi, Aref and Nahavandian.

Incidentally Qalibaf, Najafi, Aref and Nahavandian are candidates who are either US-trained or are moderates/centrists in Iran. I don’t think Americans, even the politicians themselves, realize or understand the implications of this fact. The Iran that is so demonized by the US’s own conservative forces is actually not much different from the US. There are also conservatives in Iran that wants to take the extreme route much like American conservatives and there are also moderates/centrist groups in Iran and the US that wants more peace and dialogue. I think this point is lost on most Americans. The American conservative propaganda machine has ratcheted up so much ignorance, fear and hatred that it has succeeded in painting a negative stereotype in people minds. Iran is about as normal a country as the US though it still have some ways to go to fully adopt the kind of open, free and democratic society practised in the US. But then again, isn’t the US supposed to be a more enlightened country because of its open, democratic ways ? Why then are some supposedly educated, smart, patriotic American politicians no different from Iran’s conservatives when it comes to blinding and encouraging false stereotypes among their own constituents. I believe that a behind-the-scenes system or conspiracy not unlike Iran’s political system lies hidden in Washington D.C.. They are hiding behind deceptive patriotic facades and slogans and misinformation to push their own agendas of power and wealth that ends up betraying the real interests of America and its people.

Conservatism dangerous

After watching this unbelievable video, well, it’s now time not to be nice anymore. I think Obama is not doing enough here. He should not be so polite anymore and do the country the patriotic act of drawing attention to the evil propaganda machinery run by the Republicans and blast it all to pieces. This is precisely the thing that everyone should be indignant about and should not be ashamed of. Because all decent human beings can tell that it will only breed more ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, racism and intolerance and it’ll get passed on to future generations. It’s gotta be nuked right now and forcefully if American still wants to talk about the American dream, still wants to maintain its superpower status and still wants to be the moral and freedom icon of the world. The conservative’s agenda of fanning and harvesting the ignorance and bigotry of their supporters smacks of similarities to what the Middle Eastern Islamic mullahs are doing to their own population to keep in power. Yes, I think it is that bad and the Republican brand is now in danger of being hijacked by the forces of evil, really.

The Palindromic Debate

Duh, this article here about sums it up what I’m gonna say. According to Wikipedia, a palindrome is a word, phrase, number or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction. That’s what I’ve been hearing from Guv’nor Palin, the hockey mom VP wannabe. Now I’ve no problems with a hockey mom as VP. We all also know the kind of IQ and integrity that can come out of Washington these days and expectations of public servants are at an all time low. Given other circumstances, the McCain-Palin ticket would have been almost a no-brainer. 1 is a bona-fide war hero with years of political experience & the other a down-to-earth goody folksy human being who can relate to the average person-in-the-street. It’s a good team for good times. But these are not good times. 7 years of a war-ravaged economy that have taken numerous lives, squandered resources that can be put to better use and America’s tanking world credibility and I should think the average person-in-the-street should feel enough is enough. It’s not that Joe Biden and Obama are such capable superheroes who can save the day but it’s just that they are just the…the better team. Sarah Palin for all her charm & goodiness have shown us in that 1 hour debate just how far she is when it comes to managing the affairs of the state. Yes, you can be folksy & “average” & it’s got all the makings of one of those inspirational American dream stories. But somehow, it’s not enough. The fear is that should McCain-Palin win, it will just be more of the same disastrous mismanagement for another 4-8 years. Bad.

Historic moment for US

America is making history today. This is a great moment for America. It certainly shows how much progress & change that have happened since the racial tensions of the past. It is still pretty unbelievable that this can happen what with all the stereotypes about race that is still peddled thru the media. I think there’s a very high possibility that he’ll be the most powerful black man on earth. You can’t help but like this guy especially after all the redneck idiocy demonstrated by Bush and cronies.