A Political Glimpse from Ireland

Obama Looking Forward

Well since I implemented Akismet on this blog, I seem to have caught 189 spam comments. I have to say I don’t mind email spam but blog spam really does get on my nerves. I was reading up on how to combat blog spam and they suggested reporting the site and the IP to the requisite ISP, can you imagine making 4 - 5 calls each day to report such spam? Hell will freeze before I make calls like that; hopefully they will come out with a better solution for the burgeoning blogging sector.

I finally got accepted at the redlasso.com beta today, I found a great clip (apologies for the player, redlasso is still in beta), on what hopefully will be the tone of the election from now on. Hope being the operative word here since having looked at some Hillary sites, they seem to be waiting to jump on the West Virginia bandwagon “indicating” that Hillary Clinton is the only person who can compete against John McCain. That couldn’t be further from the truth; Senator Obama has adopted the approach of focusing on John McCain which I think is awesome but I am urging all the Clinton people and the Senator herself to focus on Senator McCain regardless of your win today.

She could win all 28 delegates and it still wouldn’t make a difference because Senator Obama has the lead in Superdelegates as well as pledged delegates. Watching Meet the Press this past week, I have come to realize that the last hope for Senator Clinton is the meeting on May 31st where she hopes she will be able to seat the delegates from MI and FL. Tim Russert makes an excellent point that she agreed to the rules so if the DNC does bow down to the Clintons… I won’t have any words for that….Well not really

Bloggers United For Human Rights

I was browsing around the internet today when I came upon RR’s homepage and the badge on the right hand pane. I am a member of Blog Catalog but in all honesty I joined the place because I had seen the icon on alot of blogs around the internet. To my astonishment, the people at Blog Catalog in conjunction with Amnesty International are making May 15th: “Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day.” I am a firm believer in Human Rights having being born into a country where the color of my skin made me a second class citizen for a long time however in the present day I am lucky enough to live in a country where I am free to express my views no matter how crazy they may be.

Many of us living in the  Western Hemisphere forget how lucky we are; countries like China employ over 30,000 people to actively censor blogs like this one. This was proven to me earlier on this year when I tried to send the link to my blog to two friends of mine in China who cannot access it to this day. This kind of censorship is wrong as all people are entitled to read, express and voice their views on any subject. 2008 is  the 60th anniversary of the U.N declaration of human rights therefore I hope many of the other bloggers that I know will blog about this issue on Thursday. Some topics for consideration:

1. The wrongful imprisonment of journalists covering assemblies.
2. Governments that ignore the plight of citizens left to the mercy of gangs.
3. The censorship of the Internet in order to prevent freedom of expression.
4. Harsh punishments that include torture, forced labor, and starvation.
5. Sexual assault against women by members of military or militia.