I’m certainly not the biggest fan of Christian Voice, but their press release discussing the Richard Dawkins backed plan to put an advertisement for atheism (although from the wording of the advert I’d say it was more agnostic) has produced probably the most amusing quote, one which the BBC are highlighting on their news story:
Bendy-buses, like atheism, are a danger to the public at large.
Seems I’m not alone in being disturbed by the palling around with terrorists/Muslim associations.
This is the full video of General Colin Powell, member of the Republican party, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State in the first George W Bush administration, endorsing Barack Obama for the next President.
Powell is considered a moderate Republican, has donated to the McCain campaign, and indeed was touted as a possible running mate for McCain, and he doesn’t just endorse Barack Obama. In a measured and thoughtful statement he questions McCain’s judgement in both his selection of Sarah Palin, and over the recent financial crisis, and then addresses the whole terrorist/Muslim issue head on. It is pretty clear that he thinks that the McCain campaign is quite deliberately associating Obama with a terrorist and letting people believe that he is Muslim, so he unequivocally says that Obama is Christian and always has been. But then he goes further, and questions the assertion that a Muslim can’t be President, highlighting a particular example of a Muslim American who has died serving his country in Iraq. Certainly it is a statement well worth listening to, the question is now how will the McCain campaign respond. Will they turn on Colin Powell? We’ll have to wait and see – but I doubt stuff like this will be uncommon.
I had to share this video that is doing the rounds which is from a report on the English language version of Al Jazeera who went out to a Sarah Palin campaign rally in the conservative heartland of the mid-West.
There has been quite a bit of discussion over the fact that McCain seems unwilling to publicly use Jeremiah Wright in the campaign. Call me sceptical, but my thought is that it pays the McCain campaign to not highlight an association between Obama and a Christian pastor if potential voters think he is a Muslim. This video also shows the effect of keeping on repeating the palling around with terrorists comment on parts of the electorate, despite the reality being rather different.
All in all though it is a disturbing picture of the opinions of some of the McCain supporters.
In amongst the news items over the past week, you cannot have failed to notice news of the spectacular collapse of the banking system in Iceland, with all three major Icelandic banks being put into recievership. The problem impacts people in the UK because two out of the three having popular British operations who thanks to high ratings were being used for local council reserves, and through their regular placement at the top of reputable lists of the best savings accounts the banks were popular places for the general public – including a number of financial journalists – to put their savings.
Looking through the various comments that have been posted online about the crisis – and especially the bailout by the UK government – there is a substantial minority criticising savers for not using a British bank. The question us though, what is a British bank?
Some of the biggest names on the high street are no longer owned by British companies. For example if you are a customer of Abbey, your bank is now Spanish owned. On the other hand HSBC is based in London, but has massive international interests so you could perhaps argue that this isn’t a UK bank either.
Okay, maybe we define a UK bank as one which is fully UK registered under the UK compensation scheme. No help there as both Icelandic banks that were active in the UK market had parts of their business registered under the scheme and other parts using the passport scheme relying on the Icelandic compensation scheme – both parts of both companies have folded. You also make some surprising discoveries, for example by that by that definition the British Post Office isn’t a UK bank. Whilst you can obtain National Savings products through a Post Office, the Post Office has it’s own branded financial products which are from the Bank of Ireland, and are registered under the passport scheme – I doubt many people putting money in at their local Post Office realise that if that goes under they’ll be left claiming their money back from Dublin.
How about defining it as companies that are active in the wider UK economy? No help there as a look at the Landsbanki Disclosure table reveals – investments right across all parts of the UK economy.
It’s not like investors were taking a punt on some dodgy foreign investment, stuffing internationally addressed envelopes with cash. Both banks had UK addresses, and had superb credit ratings – or else numerous local authorities would not have been allowed to invest in them. The UK consumer offerings were being recommended across the board as being a good investment, with numerous money journalists investing their own money, indeed some sites are now explaining how they were caught out.
The simple fact is that in these days of world financial markets there is no such thing as a UK bank, and all the patriotic flag waving isn’t going to change that. The UK market includes banks from India, Spain, Cyprus and Ireland alongside those from UK companies, and they all have business interests, liabilities and customers across the world, hence why our economy has been impacted by the collapse of the housing market in the USA. Indeed institutions can be destroyed almost by guilt by association, for example two out of the three Icelandic banks were thought to be financially sound when the third was nationalised, but following a classic bank run on the remaining two, all three have now gone under, and the entire country looks set to follow. Whilst we’re not quite as reliant nationally on financial services for prosperity as Iceland, over recent years a lot of our wealth as a country has come from the city, and a large number of peoples jobs are in the financial services sector. As such it is a truly frightening proportion of our money as a country that is being offered to prop up the banks.
Last night was the first of the US Presidential debates, which after initial suggestions by John McCain that it should be postponed, went ahead with the participation of both major candidates.
Since of course it took place in the middle of the night UK time, various of the UK channels have been rerunning either the whole debate, or highlights. You can watch the full debate on the BBC News site. Of course in the UK we don’t have a say, but thanks to the close relationship our governments have recently had with each other, it does have an effect on those of us in the UK.
I’ll leave any discussion of the finer points of policy, but what was interesting was comparing it to what happens over here. Certainly we’ve never had face to face debates like this, what we most commonly have is a series of programmes where each of the individual leaders of the political parties face an audience of voters. Perhaps the main example of a programme where we have opposing parties together is something like Question Time. The interesting difference between both formats and this presidential debate is the silence from the audience. In the UK there is usually an instant response from the audience to statements by the politicians, and on a number of occasions politicians have been heckled by members of the audience. The other difference was, I guess in part due to the rigid time-boxing applied to the debate, there wasn’t that much confrontation. There were a number of points where it was pretty obvious that Obama thought he was being misrepresented, tried to cut in, McCain kept ploughing on with his point, and Obama just capitulated and indicated to the chairman that he didn’t wish to respond.
Commentators seem split over who came out best. Both campaigns are not surprisingly claiming victory for their candidate, but it wasn’t really clear to me who won. In terms of policies I’m always going to be much more towards Obama, but then in a world driven by soundbites, things like McCains KGB line over Russia, however corny it may seem, probably go over a lot better than trying to explain the massive complexity of the political situation in the former Soviet Union. You can make your own mind up by watching the full debate.
20080926_Oxford_MS_FirstDebate0377 originally uploaded by Barack Obama.