Is it over?

Is it over?
John McCain must be having one of his worst days during the campaign. George Bush's Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005, Colin Powell, has endorsed Barack Obama only days before the presidential election. Powell's decision comes in the best time it could for the Obama campaign, which now has all in its favor to win the election in November. Obama raised more than $150 million USD just in September and has enough resources to buy advertisements in key states and quickly answer to any attacks from the Republican candidate, who has limited monetary resources as he chose to have his campaign financed with public money. Obama decided not to take public money for his campaign so there are no limits in the amounts that can be donated to his campaign.

The poor state of the economy, the terrible choice McCain made of choosing the inexperienced (that may be a very soft word to define her) Sarah Palin, and the continuous attacks the Republicans make on the person of Obama, while not focusing on explaining their position on the real issues they would face in office, have paved the way for Senator Barack Obama to become the next president of the United States, who in Colin Powells words "would be a transformational president".

Se habla español (Spanish spoken here)

45 million people speak Spanish as their first language in the United States (without counting the illegal immigrants!). If the undocumented workers were also counted, the figure would undoubtedly rise. Now that the election day approaches in the USA, this figure shows the importance of the Hispanic voters, who may actually decide the election.
Both candidates have done something which is not uncommon in that country, advertising their campaigns in Spanish throughout the media (watch Obama's ad in Spanish), (there are 55 TV networks and more than 500 radio stations that broadcast in Spanish in the USA). They have also been very careful on the issue of immigration, which of course is very sensible to this large group.
But as El Pais (Spanish newspaper) reports (see article in Spanish), by year 2050 the USA could be the country with more Spanish-speaking people in the world, title hold now by Mexico with more than 100 million speakers. So the melting pot theory, which states that the USA is a country formed by immigrants coming from different cultures who use the same language (English) and form a new culture (The American) is rejected by this stunning figure.
Of course someone could argue that many of those Spanish-speaking people also speak English, but for most of them the language spoken at home and in their social groups remains Spanish.
So both candidates should draw more attention to this target group of voters in the final weeks of the campaigning stage or assume the consequences...

Correcting the market's mistakes....2000 apple pies

Most of the right wing politicians and free market supporters were wrong: The invisible hand is not that invisible and the market cannot regulate itself, proof of that is the 700billion USD bail out plan to rescue the banks and financial companies that started to lend money without considering that maybe more than 2 customers wouldn't gonna be able to pay those loans....
Now taxpayers will have to absorb that cost (as CNN explained, with those 700billion EACH American-more than 300 million people- could buy 2000 Mc Donald's pies, although most of them would surely die after the 20th pie, mmm not healthy.. ). As Roger Cohen points out in his NYTimes editorial, that amount of money sounds familiar, yes people, that's the amount of money Bush & Friends have spent on Iraq.
So let's see if Paulson's miracle plan is finally approved, it would be very nice, because Wall Street executives could now be relaxed again, thinking about their next mistake that the people in Main Street will have to solve for them.