inside aebrahim’s head

A friend of mine wrote a blog entry about Hillary and I felt like writing a response because there are a lot of things I don’t agree with.

Hillary’s campaign has not been one waged on ethics and grassroots support but rather one that is based on entitlement, poor ethics, and poor planning to boot. A brief note about each follows.

Entitlement
As much as she tries to distance herself from Bill, there’s no doubt that Hillary would be a nothing without him and she’s riding on his coattails.

Women are supposed to identify with her because of what happened to her in the Whitehouse, but would that experience make her a good President? I don’t see why it would.

Poor Ethics
When she’s down, she hits out with negative comments about other candidates and turns the campaign into a cursing match instead of focusing on any substantive issues.

When she’s down her campaign preys on Islamophobia by releasing pictures of Obama in “muslim garb”, that is more African than Muslim anyway. Not to mention totally irrelevant.

When she’s down she wants to throw away the rules and make up new ones so that delegates from states that broke all the election rules get seated anyway. Especially in states where Obama was not even on the ballot.

Sounds like she’s teaching the next generation to denigrate those who disagree with you, if that doesn’t work, make people afraid of them, and if that fails as well, just subvert the playing field.

Poor Planning
How in the world is she going to balance the budget and reverse the trend of mounting debt when she couldn’t even achieve the relatively much simpler task of balancing her campaign budget.

We already know that her solution to debt is to borrow, borrow, and borrow more. Can you say sinking US dollar?

There’s just so much wrong with her campaign and so little that’s right with it that sometimes I wonder how blind some Americans are not to be able to see it.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for some time now, and it’s really long overdue given how rapidly things are forgotten and how quickly new issues come up. Between the trio of McCain, Hillary, and Obama, I think I’m pretty clear in my mind that Obama has the best vision for the country.

I hate to use the cliché, but McCain really would be just another four years of Bush. And let’s be honest here, I’m pretty unhappy with how the last eight years went, politics wise. Between the two democrats, Hillary is the “republican” and Obama is the “democrat”. What does this mean? First I refer you to the NYT Decision Tree, which I think is an excellent piece of work. What does it tell us? That the well educated vote for Obama, and the less than well educated vote for Hillary.

In short, educated democrats vote for Obama, and uneducated democrats vote for Hillary. That’s no surprise really, Hillary tells great sob stories. People identify with that. Especially uneducated people who don’t know any better.

I might be considered an elitist for saying this, but I strongly believe that educated people make better policy decisions and that Obama’s vision is one that appeals to this crowd for good reason.

This is why I was especially disappointed with the handling of Obama’s “Muslim identity crisis”. He could have handled it so much better. It’s said that one shows their true colours when they’re cornered, and when Obama was cornered his campaign put out statements that were disappointingly anti-Islam and borderline racist.

Instead of playing clean and saying “I’m a committed Christian, but there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim in our secular country,” his campaign went all out denouncing Islam as an evil that is anathema to Obama. That anybody who insinuates that he is a Muslim is insulting the core of his very being. From someone who is looked up to as a visionary, I expected a lot better.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have. Conservative Christians and Jews are too important a demographic in American politics and anybody who upsets them doesn’t have a real shot at the presidency. After all, what good is a visionary who is unelectable?

All things considered, I’d still take Obama over the others, by a long shot. But what used to be unadulterated admiration is now tempered by a wariness about his character. He’s not been tested so far; and when push comes to shove, how will he react? I’d venture still better than the others, but should ‘better than Hillary and McCain’ really be America’s benchmark?

Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) has been working the right side of his brain hard over the last couple of weeks. Aside from making the ludicrous claim that HRC is better poised than Obama to win a general election against McCain because the states she won count for more electoral votes, he’s been using creative math elsewhere too.

Senator Bayh, along with two others, has sponsored the China Currency Manipulation Act of 2008. If passed, this ominous sounding act is poised to coerce the Secretary of the Treasury into finding that China is manipulating their currency and that the IMF should be consulted regarding what remedies can be sought to correct or stop this evil manipulation.

On 3 April 2008, Bayh’s office shoots out a press release where he says:

American companies and workers are put at a major competitive disadvantage when China engages in massive intervention to lower the value of its currency and lower the cost of Chinese goods…This legislation will force the Treasury Department to stop turning a blind eye to Chinese attempts to gain an unfair trade advantage by undervaluing their currency.

This guy is so out of touch with reality that the mind boggles as to where his statistics come from. Let’s take a look at some hard numbers. A year ago today, one US dollar was worth 7.72 Chinese yuan. Today, the Chinese yuan is trading at around 6.98 to the US dollar. While the yuan has appreciated against the dollar by about 10%, this guy complains that China manipulates their currency to undervalue it.

His other claim is that China is working to lower the costs of Chinese exports. I work in the manufacturing industry and get information first hand about what is going on in China. There is not a shred of truth to what Bayh says, and in fact the opposite is true. Between mandating that workers are only allowed to work 5 days per week, or else receive excessive overtime pay, and requiring employers to enroll them in umpteen different types of social insurance, to cutting electricity on certain days of the week, to tightening controls on pollutants, there is nothing going on in China that reduces the cost of anything. The only price pressures are upwards and these are all artificially created by the Chinese government.

Bayh’s facts are so incredibly wrong and at odds with the truth that the only explanation is that he’s living in an alternative universe. The sad truth is that most Americans won’t know the difference and will accept as fact that China is evil and America is the only country willing to stand up to it.

While electronic voting is not bad in principle, the recent implementation during the US presidential election was appaling. Here’s why. I’m by no means a luddite, but if we’re going to use technology to solve problems, lets at least use best practices and leave an audit trail.

The terrorists have already won.

That’s right, they instigated a sense of national fear, duped politicians into passing the unnecessary PATRIOT Act, and have managed to keep Americans scared enough that their leaders (Bush, Rumsfeld, ex-AG Ashcroft, et al.) were able to break down existing protections of personal privacy under the more vague than ever notion of national security. That, and the already opaque US Government has found itself in a position where it can deny accountability for its actions, claim that divulging information would be a threat to national security, and call anyone who challenges them unpatriotic. Really, 9/11 was a gift to the intelligence agencies of the US.

John Barlow has himself experienced (alternate link for those who live in places where TypePad is banned) the extent to which intelligence and security agencies feel they can take liberties. During one of his travels, he was subject to an illegal search of his possessions (the TSA is legally authorised only to search for threats to national security, nothing else), was thrown in jail, and was subject to a body cavity search. I recommend you read his story, which is quite disheartening (to say the least).

When federal agencies feel empowered to take these kind of actions, I wonder what kind of privacy Americans expect to have going into the 21st century? Right now, it’s looking like most Americans are willing to settle for little or no privacy, as long as ‘national security’ (whatever this means) is not breached. By the time people realise what they’re giving up it will be too late.

If the terrorists have succeeded in creating an environment in which its become acceptable to erode personal privacy and relax legal safeguards against government interference in personal life, then I contend that they’ve already won.

There are many reasons I like the British print media more than the American print media. This is one of them. Granted, it’s a tabloid, but I’d like to see the day that an American tabloid has the balls to publish this cover.

I also thought that this was both highly amusing and very telling.

Fool voters once, shame on Bush. Fool voters twice, shame on the American electorate.

Well done America. Thanks for another four years of crusades grounded in religious fanaticism.

This is what I don’t like about democracy; too many uneducated bumpkins who can’t tell left from right end up skewing the vote. Only in America is intelligence considered to be an undesirable trait in a President. Monkey see, monkey do. What else can I say?

Following on from my last blog post on the elections, I wanted to mention one of the issues that is important to many Americans, outsourcing. Bush is for it, Kerry is against it. But what is outsourcing really about? Let’s take a look behind the scenes with Conan O’Brien!

Cheney ripped on Kerry today because Kerry apparently took a poll to gauge the American public’s reaction to the new Osama Bin Laden tape. Or, in other words: “Kerry chose to consult his electors, the American public, rather than acting on blind conviction.”

This is the story of the whole election year. On the right we have a candidate called “blind faith; act based on rigid convictions” and on the left we have a candidate called “consult the American public before embarking upon reckless policy”.

On the right we have the side who says that “you’re with us or against us” and on the left we have the side who says “we want to build genuine multinational force, not a ‘coalition of the willing’, where the US does the grunt work and has a few ‘allies’ tacked on for the sole purpose of perceived legitimacy”.

On the right we have the side whose sole criterion for making any decision is whether something is “good or evil; right or wrong” and on the left we have a side that attempts to engage in some level of cost-benefit analysis to arrive at policy decsions based on rational thought.

On the right we have the side who has attempted to quash the freedoms of the American people, and has offered false hope of freedom to those abroad. It is the side who wants to ’strengthen’ the Patriot Act by enacting a second bill and eliminating all sunset clauses on the first. On the left we have the side who is open to re-examing the Patriot Act, and will stand up for the individual rights of all Americans, especially those falsely accused of terrorism.

On the right we have the side who has attempted to polarise the public using the (irrelevant) issues of homosexual marriage and abortion. On the left we have the side who chooses to respect the individuality of Americans and focus on substantive issues.

On the right we have George W. Bush. On the left we have John Kerry. You know what needs to be done; vote Kerry!

UPDATE: Also of interest is a simulation done by Jesse Ruderman, which calculates that only 22% of the popular vote is technically required to win a US presidential election (based on census data for 2000).

This whole election deal in America has been going on forever. Everybody has heard so much about Kerry, Bush and others that surely at this point, nobody cares to hear any more. If only that were true. Apparently, some fickle minded people are still undecided.

What’s wrong with these people? Seriously, if you’ve not heard enough about the candidates in the last year to make a decision, what in the world makes you think that by November 2nd you’ll have figured it out? Or maybe they’re waiting for some divine revalation. I wish these people would decide already, and that tomorrow was November 2nd. Campaigning in the US starts way too early, and by August, everybody is already sick of it. I want it to be over. But noooo, all these weak-minded undecided voters have to spoil it for everybody because they’re being indecisive.

In short: people who are still undecided suck. They get all the attention. Why? Because they’re fickle losers.