To some it was a surprise that an African American was elected to the US Presidency in 2008. Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is leading the charge for the Republican nomination in 2012. As of Friday, Romney has 562 delegates, according to CNN estimates, nearly half of the 1,144 delegates necessary to clinch the GOP (Grand Old Party) nomination. Santorum has an estimated 249 delegates.
Will he succeed? Will he go all the way? Let me know what you think.
Thanks.
Are we Westerners in any position to lecture the Chinese on how they should run their economy?
I don’t think so.
Its a hot topic given the fact that the Chinese economy has a healthy growth outlook.
Western Europe is deep in the doldrums, the UK is about to go into its third recession in five years or something.
It’s like we Westerners were all gung-ho to take advantage of globalisation when it suited us.
But now the tables have turned.
And power is shifting.
China gets criticised for not balancing the books when it comes to trade.
The countries leveling this charge against the Chinese should be looking at the opportunities to export to China.
That’s the only solution to a trade deficit. They have to make their economy and its output attractive to what will soon by the biggest economy in the world.
There’s also the constant back stabbing about China’s human rights policies.
As if the West has that sorted.
Western systems have concentrated wealth into the hands of the 1 per cent during the last 50 years while the Chinese lifted 600million people out of poverty.
The powers that be in the UK and other Westerns economies should be providing creative solutions that will drive economic growth over the long term.
Not pointing the finger at China and being all holier than thou.
I’m ashamed by the hypocrisy of the West. Short termism and diversionary tactics will get us nowhere.
This BBC podcast (The Forum) provides an excellent example of the sort of sermons that Western experts are pumping out without providing anything constructive on the home front.
We often have CNN on in the office at work.
The hop topic of late has been Obama. The so called political commentary now includes direct and personal attacks, which seem to the new norm in politics.
Closer to home in Australia, we’re seeing a similar trend.
The Prime Minister has been re-branded as Juliar Gillard and is regularly on the receiving end of that jibe during parliamentary sittings and Question Time.
You don’t see this kind of behaviour in the business world or amongst normal people, how can it be acceptable in public service?
Shouldn’t politicians in all countries be setting standards for respect and constructive debate between people rather than lowering the bar.
Tony Blair’s legacy is the Iraq war. That must be disappointing for a self proclaimed socialist who entered into our political consciousness as a fresh faced do gooder with a ‘New’ political agenda. He sounds old, defeated and stubborn these days.
Tony’s heels are firmly dug in. I’m sure he just wants people to stop asking tricky questions and to be left to his retirement.
The Iraq War inquiry is in progress in London.
His defence is that he believed that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the ‘right thing to do’ – a point I can accept in isolation. What I can’t accept is that manipulating evidence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and ignoring legal advice was the right thing to do, particularly from an individual who has traded in part on his religious ideals.
Worse still, this man is aggravating for further conflict in the Middle East. The West must be prepared to face down the ‘looming challenge’ of dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, he said.
According to Mr. Blair, Europe and the US need to drop their “wretched posture of apology” and get on the front foot. He is yet to apologise and apparently the inquiry will make no recommendation.
How did it come to this? What happened to Tony Blair?
Traditional media can respond to the changing media environment in a number of different ways, what’s crucial to them is the need to stay relevant and attract an audience. There are probably many ways that traditional media can achieve these objectives.
One option is to move away from the convention of neutral news reporting and move into more opinionated territory. This opinion could take many forms but fundamentally newspapers either become more political or more activist. I think a good example of the latter is The Guardian campaign in support of the International Year of Biodiversity.
On the political spectrum we have the politically aligned Fox News, which as Paul Krugman of Princeton University says in this article for the New York Times has ‘decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan’.
“Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.”
Of course, political alignment in the media is not a new thing but out and out political bias, control and affiliation is. Perhaps its inevitable given the completely unfettered nature of the blogosphere but a potentially worrying trend nonetheless.
Will political opinion and vested interests characterise the future of media? Do you think activism is a sustainable strategy for traditional media in print and online?
Tags: fox, Media, Murdoch, nwespapers, Politics, Print, traditional
Britain’s Progressive Future has begun with the election of Ed Milliband to the Labour Party Leadership. So called Red Ed, a tag he denies, beat his brother David to become leader of the opposition. Personally, I don’t see why a more left wing perspective is such a bad thing. The Conservatives have finally got the excuse they need to dismantle the welfare state, thanks to the problems caused by their friends in the city. They got their because of the Labour Party’s failings, not on their merits.
Tags: Government, labour, leadership, milliband, Politics, UK
Tags: cameron, conservative, Politics, wizard
Julia Gillard, Australia’s new PM and the first woman to hold the top job, has a shortish to do list of big problems to fix prior to the Federal election, which is expected to be held in August of this year.
One of her biggest challenges will be deciding whether Australia needs a great big fax to track and reduce carbon emissions.
It looks as though faxes will be a hot election issue.
Tags: carbon, election, emissions, faxes, gillard, Politics, taxes
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