Nobody likes a campaign commercial, they flood the screens and they are always the same. Then I stumbled upon these here, and thought, wow, now that is something different!
No real change in negative, boring political campaigning there, pretty shameful too might I add. However the democrats opted to step somewhat above the fray with this response...
One of the best responses to a negative campaign I think I have ever stumbled across. If this is what to expect from the Democrats leading up to November, one can only hope that it changes the tone of all future political campaigns around the world. It's time to stop with the negativity and make people accountable to their failures!
I've held back for a while, for no particular reason, on blogging in relation to the US presidential race, but time to change... As the candidates are falling into place, YouTube is becoming even more popular a channel for conveying political opinion...
I was mildly amused at McCain's comments re- Obama's Experience (see entire article here.)
CHICAGO (AP) - Republican John McCain accused Democrat BarackObama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day.
McCain made the attack Monday in Chicago, Obama's home turf.
"Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess," McCain said in an appearance at the restaurant industry's annual meeting. My reason for such amusement, well, obviously Mr McCain believes that singing about bombing a sovereign territory dictates experience and sound judgment, something the rest of the world continually wishes an American president WOULD possess.
And because I have really enjoyed posting video this week, I through in this Robert Greenwalddoozy, on the aforementioned Senator...
I have recently been reading The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind which tells the interesting tale of the Cheney Doctrine. In essence the doctrine can be boiled down to one sentence, "if there is a 1% chance of something negative happening to America, then America must do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening." A chilling notion that barely meets any standard burden of proof, I mean there is at least a 1% chance of me having a drink tonight (OK it's much higher than that) I guess it's more a 1% chance of me NOT having a drink tonight, that doesn't mean the university tavern should close... (Terrible analogy I know)...
I wasn't overly concerned until I watched former undersecretary of defence (US) Douglas Feith being interviewed on The Daily Show. I've embedded both parts of the "uncut" (if it was uncut, I fail to see why there is two parts) interview, it seems to confirm Suskind's argument, especially towards the end where Feith proclaims something along the line of "Imagine what the pundits would be saying if we didn't invade Iraq and something happened..."
As Jon so eloquently puts it, I'm not entirely sure that you can invade a country based upon a "hypothetical"...
In an effort to combat HIV/AIDS in Tanzania the World Bank in collaboration with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Population Reference Bureau and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund, are offering cash to Tanzanian to stop them from having sex!
The designers of the Tanzanian programme believe that payments of $45 when combined with careful counselling could play an important role in reducing HIV infection, especially for vulnerable young women.
The study will be conducted by the Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre in Tanzania, in conjunction with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Francisco and the World Bank.
The Tanzanian trial programme, which is still subject to fine-tuning and ethical approval, will not specifically test for HIV, which is costly and already widely conducted in the country. It will use proxies including gonorrhoea, and guarantees any participant found to be infected receives state treatment.
So there is a need for us to get this one right... It is an anti-HIV/AIDS programme, that doesn't test for HIV? An interesting notion I guess...
LONDON: The British military admitted Thursday that some of its troops breached the human rights of an Iraqi man who died in custody and of eight other detained Iraqis.
The Ministry of Defense said it expects to negotiate compensation for the survivors of the dead man, Baha Mousa, and with the eight former detainees.
The nine were taken into custody as suspected insurgents, then were held in stress positions and deprived of sleep for about two days in extreme heat at a British army barracks near the southern Iraqi city of Basra in September 2003, prosecutors told a British military court. Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist, died from asphyxia after soldiers restrained him following an escape attempt.
One soldier, Cpl. Donald Payne, 35, was convicted of inhumane treatment in that case, making him the first British soldier to plead guilty to a war crime under international law.
In a statement that apologized for the abuses, Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth stressed that nearly all of the 120,000 British soldiers who have served in Iraq behaved properly. "But this does not excuse that during 2003 and 2004 a very small minority committed acts of abuse and we condemn their actions," Ainsworth said.
Britain's highest court, the House of Lords, ruled in June that prisoners held by British troops are protected by European human rights law.
In Mousa's case, the Ministry of Defense admitted "a substantive breach" of a provision in the European Convention on Human Rights that recognizes the right to life and another that prohibits torture. It said the torture ban was violated for the eight other detainees.
"The Ministry of Defense further accepts that the admitted substantive breaches of the convention give rise to claims for compensation," it said.
