Women in Tuesday's Primary Elections

Last Tuesday’s primary elections across many states in the country showed, what I would call, interesting results.
We should say that it was a great night for women.
In Nevada Sharron Angle won the primary for the Republican Party. Let’s look closely at this candidate that will challenge the majority leader next November. She is the Tea Party candidate. She supports the elimination of the Department of Education and the elimination of Social Security. This last program is arguably the best program that the United States has, covering many senior citizens.
She defeated the chicken candidate, the woman who believed in bartering for health care with chickens.
In California two women were elected to the Republican Party, one to run for governor and the other to run for the senate.
Meg Whitman, former CEO of Ebay, who spent at an average of almost $50 per vote in the primary of her own money will be a formidable candidate against Mr. Brown, as she is worth almost 1 billion dollars.
Carly Fiorina on the other hand, who won the primary last Tuesday for the Senate seat, and who will run against incumbent Barbara Boxer, is a different story. She was arguably the worst CEO HP ever had, to the point that she was fired by their board. She outsourced to Asia over 5000 jobs. She merged HP and Compaq in what was questionably the worst decision during a period when other companies were shrinking in labor force. That was the reason why the board fired her. She is running as a very conservative in a fairly blue state, she is pro-life in a state that is very pro-choice. She will still be a tough candidate because of the mid-term election, and primarily because of a climate of uncertainty, high unemployment and apathy in the electorate.
In South Carolina Nikki Haley almost won the gubernatorial candidacy as she finished with 49%. There will be a runoff in South Carolina because no candidate reached the 50% threshold, and Nikki Haley will possibly win that primary, and therefore, will likely be the next governor, as South Carolina is a very conservative state.
And I left Blanche Lincoln for last. I did so purposely. She won easily in the runoff even though she had the unions, the White House and many progressives against her because she is considered a “corporate democrat”, and because she was one of the few democrats who voted against the public option. I was one of the ones who wanted her out because of that vote. She will have her work cut out for herself in a state that Obama lost heavily in 2008, and that in this midterm election is full of unhappy people voting against incumbents, so it is very possible that she will not be reelected to the Senate for Arkansas. Nevertheless she will have the party behind her including figures such as Bill Clinton, just like she did during the runoff election, and anything can happen between now and November.

FIFA Soccer World Cup 2010

Today the FIFA World Cup 2010 starts in South Africa. It will be the first time that the event takes place in the African continent. Soccer is the number one sport in the world. Possibly the only exception to that rule is the United States, where baseball is the number one sport.
It is the event with the largest following in the world. People across the globe will be connected watching the 32 national teams that reach the finals.
We always talk about the World Series for baseball, when there are only two countries playing baseball in Major League Baseball, and really only one team from the second country, Canada, that team being the Toronto Blue Jays. All the other teams are from the United States. Calling it the World Series is just as amusing as when we call the winner of the Super Bowl the World Champions. In Football it’s even more ironic as the teams are only Americans.
We also tend to think of the Super Bowl as the most viewed event of the world with a viewing of less the 200 million worldwide. The final game of the world cup on the other hand is viewed by more than 1 billion people.
You can draw your own conclusion with that comparison.
The only event with comparable viewership to the Soccer World Cup is the Summer Olympics.
Both events share the same sentiment of competitiveness and camaraderie.
Let us hope that these games are free of any terrorist incidents.

Israel and its power in the region

As we see the tapes and read what seemed to have happened off of the coast of Gaza we need to stop and take a step back before we have a rushed opinion.
It looks like the Israelis attacked a group of ships and boats with Turkish flags. They were in international waters. If that is the case and Israel had no proof that its security was being threatened the international community should be just as harsh on them as they are on the Palestinians when they blow themselves up.
Netanyahu says that it will stop any shipments sent to Gaza in order to avoid Iran arming Hamas. I agree that Israel should be able to defend itself, but there is a difference between defending itself and attacking ships from one of the nations that support Israel such as Turkey.
Israel’s policy sounds very much the same as former president Bush’s policy of attacking first. That is a dangerous policy and instead of gaining the support to its cause, you have the international community saying that what Israel did was not the right thing; instead of being more secure this will guarantee its insecurity.
Conservatives in the United States say that president Obama is not supporting the stability and security of Israel. Not only this is not true, it is just simple politics. We should support Israel when they are right and point out when they do things like they did the other day, or when they invade neighboring countries such as Lebanon. This is not anti-Semitism, it may be anti-Zionism. We should not confuse them.
The United States needs to start taking a position that is good for its citizens and not for the interests of Israel, unless they coincide.

How wrong priorities hurt the people with no voice

A couple of months ago my wife and me, the case manager of the school where my son goes to, and the case manager of the district where we live had our annual IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting in which we go over the plans for what Ian will be trained and/or educated during the next school year.
Due to the fact that there was an issue with the 20 hours that the district has paid for the last 8 o 9 years we had to go to mediation. Now we are not talking about thousands of dollars, we are talking about around one thousand dollars.
So two weeks ago we had our mediation. Our next door neighbor is our attorney, she has for quite some time and we have been very happy. The district hired a very tough attorney. They probably spent more on the attorney than what that it would have cost to pay for the hours in august that he receives as re-enforcement. We decided not to pursue any legal action because the benefits would not have justified the cost of it.
This leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. The districts position is that they don’t have to go any further than what to law says.
What I find amazing is that the district has only one regional school shared by three towns with a superintendent, a principal, a vice-principal and a business administrator, all bureaucrats with high incomes. The superintendent makes $120,000, the principal makes over $133,000, the vice-principal over $115,000 and the business administrator makes $80,000. That is for the proposed budget 2010-2011. There are only 836 students under the umbrella of the school. That should insult most people’s intelligence. Without counting teachers we are already spending $448,000. That does not give those students anything. I can find $1,000 for my son’s 20 hours very easily right there.
The new Governor that the citizens of this state voted for, the flagship of the Republican Party, somebody who campaigned under the promise of not cutting teachers, has decided to do away with this promise and has gone after the teachers viciously. Just in Paterson almost 900 will be made dispensable as of July 01. This will only force more kids per classrooms, in a system that is already over burdened. Going after teachers that make $45,000 will not resolve the budget issues. There are many other places to cut. We have too many layers of government, too many bureaucrats that don’t produce anything.
Through my job as a realtor I have been exposed to people who live on section 8, and one of the institutions that coaches, protects them, the Passaic County Public Housing. We are not helping people by providing free or assisted rent. Many of the people that I have met are, in the words of Winston Churchill, disingenuous about the people that will live in the house. They only mention a wife with two small kids, and many times they have a husband or a lover living in the house, grown kids in age for living, all living at the taxpayers’ expense. I am a liberal who believes in a second, and third chance, but when we have people living who for many years at the expense of others, with excuses for not working, and/or not being truthful about their present marital conditions, they become a burden to the rest of us, and because of them we end up losing valuable resources that could be put to good use.

U.S. Senate candidates

So far this year we seem to be having some very interesting candidates on both sides of the aisle running for the senate.
On the democrat side we have a candidate in Connecticut that has talked about his career in Vietnam even though he never left the shores of the United States. This should not be a surprise as he would not be the first politician that talks about a military career that never took place. If we just go back to the previous president he has never been able to justify where he was during his period as a reserve pilot. So this seems to be the ordinary, not the unusual, thing with politicians. They like to take credit for stuff that they never did.
Let’s turn to the republican side and look at some of their candidates.
In Utah a conservative incumbent that had supported the bailout of the banks proposed by President Bush was voted out. In his place a tea party choice was elected to run as candidate next November.
In Kentucky Rand Paul, a libertarian, was elected in the primary. He is also a choice of the tea party movement. The interesting part of this is that Mr. Paul, right after the primary, starting stating his points of view, which are not in the mainstream of the country. He says that if he would have had to vote for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 he would have voted for most of it, except for the fact that private business cannot discriminate who walks through their doors. This is a fundamental condition as African Americans were denied entrance at privately owned businesses such as Wolworth. Mr. Paul compares this part of the bill to the idea that owners are entitled to decide if customers can bring guns to a privately owned business.
This comparison makes absolutely no sense at all, as he is comparing gun possession with race discrimination. Other senators are now saying that he was very naive with the “liberal media”, and that he is not a professional politician, so he needs coaching.
Nevada has also an unusual candidate. Sue Lowden said that we should be able to reduce health care by bartering. She made a statement that said that we should be able, like in the past, to barter with doctors by given them chickens. First she stood by her statement and then, at the last debate, she said that she was not standing by it, and that she had been taken out of context. I really admire her point of view, but I don’t think that my doctor would accept bartering. I don’t chickens or painting her house or office is going to do the trick.
Now republicans say that Blumenthal, the Connecticut democratic candidate for senate, and his “misspeaking” about is role in Vietnam, and Ron Paul’s idea of doing away with part of the Civil Rights Act are the same. I have to disagree because the Civil Rights Act has served us well for almost half a century, allowing the same rights to African Americans that the white population have enjoyed since the founding of this nation. The Vietnam conflict has been over for over 30 years. It left nothing but bitterness and pain, 58 thousand Americans dead, over 1 million Vietnamese dead, and a memorial on the Washington DC Mall.
I’m not going even include in this comparison the Nevada candidate because she must live in a different world than the rest of us. I don't think I have to add anything to what she has already said.
Let’s hope that people at the voting booth can vote for the USA and not for the divisions that have had a stronghold on our government for the many years.

Family values

As we see the people who tried to impeach President Clinton in the ‘90s resign in disgrace we stop and think what really happened to these people.
Many of them were elected in the midterm elections of ’94 with the slogan of Contract with America, and with the concept of “family values”, as if it belonged to a particular party.
I always look at the impeachment that took place over a decade ago as the drug dealers being jury of a drug addict. My savior said two thousand years ago “he who’s without sin cast the first stone”.
Many of the members of congress involved in the impeachment had children out of wedlock like Henry Hyde; others were having affairs during the impeachment process such as the Former Speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, and Congressman Bob Barr.
Now we here that Congressman Mark Souder from Indiana resigned for having an extra marital affair, even though a matter of which he is not proud of, at least we can say he has the honor of making the right decision based on his conservative beliefs, not like other members that campaigned in ’94 under the same “values” and have had affairs such as Senator Ensign from Nevada and Senator David Vitter from Louisiana.
The party that thinks they own the “family value” label will have to do a better job in not only campaigning about it but actually living it.

The explosion of the oil rig and its implications

After weeks of the explosion of the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico we still see on TV the disaster that it is causing to the environment with no end of the spill in the foreseen future.
We have had BP first say that the leakage was 5000 barrels a day when it looks that in reality it was more like 70000 barrels a day.
In the meantime the chairman of BP has said that this is a minor problem.
Rush Limbaugh said first that the sea will take care of the leakage, then a few days later he said “where is the oil” referring to oil spillage hitting the coast of the states on the Gulf of Mexico, and lately he says that the Sierra Club should be paying for the damages that BP, Transocean and Halliburton have caused, alleging that institutions like the Sierra Club have caused deep oil exploration. He is not the only media figure to say "where is the oil" as Britt Humes has said the same. They should go to Key West and to Louisiana to see oil washing on the shores.
Unfortunately you have politicians of both sides of the aisle who still believe that drilling off the coasts of the US is safe.
Americans have been misled for a long time into believing that the only way of having or maintaining a certain standard of living is by destroying the habitat in which we live in by burning fossil fuels provoking global warming, polluting the seas and rivers that surround us and cutting forests that produce oxygen.
The only way that we will survive in this world is by finding alternatives such as solar power and wind turbines.
It is appalling that the United States cannot break this vice with oil, when other countries that are not considered industrialized are using other combustibles such as ethanol from sugar cane for Brazil and Natural gas for Argentina to fuel automobiles.
I always tell my kids that addictions and bad habits are meant to be broken. The addiction is so strong here that we are willing to bankrupt the country into wars just for oil, not realizing that in reality we are funding the same “enemies” that we are fighting by purchasing the oil that they produce.
We are stuck in the past holding on to a technology of the mid 20th century instead of taking the leadership and moving the country into the 21st century, and not allowing another opportunity to go to waste.