Offshore Opinions of Our Election and Candidates

[texastoast]

I'd like to get a thread going so we can see what the other parts of the world are saying about our election. I'm getting the distinct feeling that they are a bit mortified over the slightest possibility that the United States wouldn't be smart enough to elect Obama. Obama is who the whole world is crying out for.

Please all of our expats, post your stuff.

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Here's a start.

Letters to the editor from the UK

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-sarah-palin-920833.html Full article at link

Would-be world leader who backs shooting wildlife from the air

Saturday, 6 September 2008

The media seems obsessed with Sarah Palin's family affairs. More importantly, she enjoys and is obsessed with personally killing wildlife and promotes the aerial shooting of wolves in Alaska and calls this a "safari". Wolves are chased by light planes and killed. Palin proposes paying a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf and has approved a $400,000 state-funded propaganda campaign to promote aerial hunting. She has introduced legislation to make it even easier to use aircraft to hunt wolves and bears.


She has lobbied aggressively to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, pushed for more drilling off Alaska's coasts, and put special interests above science. Ms Palin has made it clear through her actions that she is unwilling to do even as much as the Bush administration to address the impacts of global warming. Her most recent effort has been to sue the US Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the polar bear from the endangered species list, putting Big Oil before sound science.

Is this what Americans want for a Vice President? The woman is an environmental disaster and a serial killer of wildlife.

Sharon Hopkins

Oxford


From Australia:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7864 Full article at link

Sarah Palin a change? What change?
By Ruby Hamad - posted Friday, 5 September 2008


The article by Ben-Peter Terpstra’s On Line Opinion article on Sarah Palin, “Girl power is back”, highlights the two main fallacies that have arisen since the tapping of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as Republican John McCain’s running mate. First, there is the claim that the nomination of a female vice president is automatically an indicator of “change”. Second, there is the patronising assumption that Hillary Clinton supporters will simply switch their support to Palin because she is a woman. These two separate issues are related by the fact that they are united by a single underlying mechanism: overt sexism.

That the article is to be riddled with blatant sexism is immediately apparent in the title; “Girl power is back”. Really? Girl power? We are not even into the actual article yet and already the female subject is belittled before our eyes. (Ed’s note: to be fair to Ben-Peter Terpstra I chose the title from a phrase in his article.)