Lick the light switch

I am a huge political junkie and I have been closely following Europe and US politics for more than 5 years. After this time and several disappointments, I have to admit that Obama is the first truly inspirational politician I have seen (listen to the Yes We Can song based on his New Hampshire speech).

Some of his detractors dismiss his speeches as lousy, empty or vague, but you just have to listen to a couple of them to see that he is genuinely smart (such as the one about faith and atheism or the interview at Google).

He doesn’t only take the right stance on most issues that I care about (Iraq, foreign policy, ethics, net neutrality, …), but he does it in a sincere way. Obama just gets it. I have got this impression from watching several of his speeches and interviews, but Marc Andreessen had the chance to spend an hour and a half with him a year ago and got the very same feeling.

The main argument against Barack Obama nowadays is his alleged lack of experience. “Watch how I run my campaign”, Barack said to Marc when inquired about that. It’s obvious that running a primary campaign isn’t the same as being POTUS, but being the president’s wife isn’t exactly the same either.

So if we compare the Obama and Hillary campaigns we can easily see Hillary’s experience as an “old school” politician. She overstates, lies, accepts loads of money from lobbies (because “they represent people too”, haha), resorts to fear-mongering (”Obama is not a muslim, …, as far as I know”, 3 a.m. ad), sides with McCain if needed to get some extra votes, surrounds herself with nitwits, … . To summarize, she uses every dirty trick she has learned in these years in Washington, and that’s exactly what I am so sick of right now.

On the other hand, Obama’s campaign hasn’t just been one of the best organized and executed campaigns I have ever seen, but also the cleanest one. He has managed to overcome double-digit Hillary leads in most states without having to resort to any of these experienced politician’s dirty tricks. If I have to trust one of the two to run a country, the decision is obvious.

If I didn’t manage to convince you, I hope Lawrence Lessig and xkcd’s Randall Munroe do.

Obama is leading and almost there, he just needs the final push. Please, do the right thing.

Wow, the pilot of Californication, a new TV series starring David Duchovny (from X-Files hall of fame), is awesome!

Quoting Wikipedia, the show is about “a troubled novelist whose obsessions with sex and drugs interfere with his personal and professional lives”.

It was created by Showtime and it will begin airing on August 13th but the preair was leaked some days ago. It’s really cool and full of memorable quotes, I hope the rest of the episodes are as nice as the pilot. Go watch it!

Several of my workmates and I are regular listeners of technology-related podcasts like Diggnation, TWiT or FLOSS Weekly (which BTW is as “weekly” as the Halley comet).

Some days ago we realized that there weren’t similar podcasts in Spanish (or at least we didn’t know about them), so we thought that creating one would be cool.

During this week we recorded our pilot, we had some problems with sound and I spoke a bit too fast, but I think it’s nice overall, at least I would enjoy listening to it

Trying to emulate people like Kevin Rose or Leo Laporte (in the media business since 1991), who create podcasts professionally, is quite hard for amateurs like us, but we’ll do our best.

Be sure to check it at Foocast (sorry, Spanish only, that’s the whole point )

I’ve just watched this awesome video from the Colbert Report about gay people in the military.

It bashes the shameful Don’t ask, don’t tell policy in its usual satirical way.

Watch it!

My workmate Javier Uruen has just pointed me to Banned for George Bush T-shirt, a story about a guy that was banned from an airplane because he was wearing a “George W. Bush is world’s #1 terrorist” t-shirt.

He argued it was his right to express his opinion, while the airline said the t-shirt was offensive and he wouldn’t be able to flight unless he took it off. I can’t see how that shirt can be offensive for anyone besides George W. Bush and I guess nobody would have prevented a person from flying because of an “I love George W. Bush” t-shirt, and that is offensive. Freedom of speech seems to be in danger.

In brighter news, I’ve discovered that UC Berkeley freely offers video and audio for some lectures. I’ve been listening to some lectures from the Undergraduate Colloquium on Political Science and they rock. Allan Ross, the lecturer is awesome, I wish I would have had somebody like him in my university.

As you may know, the future of the US world is again at stake in two weeks. Elections for the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives will be held on November 7.

Most general indicators are favorable to the Democrats (only 40% approve Bush administration, 46% vs. 34% think that Democrats would handle Iraq better than the GOP, 55% think US shouldn’t have invaded Iraq), and it seems they will likely get a majority in the House (latest polls show a 13-18 seats Democratic lead).

Democratic Senate majority sounds far-fetched though. First of all, the members of the US Senate (which has 100 members, two per state, regardless of population) are elected by classes. The Senate is formed by three classes, so in this election only a third of the senators are challenged, which makes a turnover more difficult.

Right now the Senate is composed by 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 1 Independent (who usually caucuses with the Democrats). Only 15 out of the 33 contested seats are held by Republicans, so Democrats would have to gain 7 of those 15 to get a majority (as a tie is broken by the Senate President, who happens to be the Vicepresident of the US, Dick Cheney). There are four close races that should be taken into account (Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia and New Jersey). Democrats would need to win three out of these to achieve majority. The amazing fact is that according to the latest polls they can make it.

I’m not really fond of Democrats either (IMHO they are as right-winged as usual European right-winged parties), but lots of Dem Senate candidates are taking solid anti-war positions, which is quite good. In addition, I would say that anything that can take some power out of Bush hands it’s good news for the world. I just hope the anti-GOP wave is big enough.

So, please, fellow American reader, on November 7th, vote the GOP out of the Senate and the House

Jordi has just showed me a web with curious news called www.vaca.mu.

This is one of the better ones:

Sleepwalking woman had sex with strangers