Say it ain't so, Barack

Muslim voters feel snubbed by Obama
My impression from this article is that many Muslims want to support Obama, but he or his campaign is declining their help out of fear of being associated with Islam. The article points out that he has done a few nice things and made some apologies, but I expect better out of Obama. He is supposed to be a leader, not a panderer. Lots of Americans are wrongly suspicious of anything or anyone connect to Islam. We need a real leader to step up and work to end this prejudice rather than shy away. When his website says that his being called a Muslim is a smear, that wording in itself is offensive to Muslims. If he is campaigning on unity, he needs to walk the walk.

Kudos to Jon Stewart for making fun of Obama for his recent fumblings, like his new campaign logo and the public campaign finance rejection.


It's good to see Stewart is still trying to be a straight shooter. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what's wrong with publicly financed campaigns, and I wish Obama would explain himself a little better on that issue. Had he said this and explained himself from the get-go rather than changing his mind after having a record fund-raising campaign in the primaries, it wouldn't be an issue. All of the clips of Democrats defending Obama's decision also fail to give explanation of why he declined public finance or explain how his decision is "reforming" public finance.

After a little research, perhaps this is why Obama has turned down public funding, although I still wish he would clarify it a bit more:
"Mr Obama's clear financial advantage over Mr McCain is offset in part by the resources of the Republican National Committee, which has far more money in the bank than the Democratic National Committee. Both national parties can spend money on behalf of the presidential candidates outside of public funding laws."

And lastly, for this post anyway, I'm a little bit concerned about Obama's close ties to ethanol, as written about in the NY Times. This may be an issue to follow more closely in the future as I'm not sure Obama has actually done anything wrong so far, though he appears to support corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel. I'm not entirely familiar with the economics and science behind this issue, but it seems to me that corn-based ethanol is not particularly efficient and may have played a role in the global rise in food prices this past year. Paul Krugman has written about the problems with corn-based ethanol. Sugarcane-based ethanol seems to be much more efficient, but currently all sugarcane ethanol imports are tariffed to protect American corn ethanol. McCain has the exact opposite stance on corn-based ethanol and wants to lift the tariffs on sugarcane ethanol. Although I'm still trying to make sense of all of this, I think that McCain may have a good point.