Someone please call 911

911 Centre: 9.1.1 Michelle speaking…

John McCain: Hello my name is John McCain and I desperately need your urgent help

911 Centre: Please tell us exactly what you need sir

John McCain: I need a financial bailout please

911 Centre: WHAT! I thought they just packaged $700 billion for you guys

John McCain: NO, NO, NO, that was not me. That was George.

911 Centre: Oh, well we can't tell both of you apart. Anyway we don't deal with this kind of query here but I know one guy who can lend you some money, I'm not sure if he will though

John McCain: I don't mind any lender; please make this happen ASAP I have only 4 days to go

911 Centre: Oh, please take this number down, 917-300-1111, his name is Barack Obama

John McCain: Damn it!

That is a picture of how desperate and frasustrated Senator John McCain sounded yesterday, Thursday the 30^th of October in Ohio – a key battleground state. It's four days before his make or break election and John McCain appeared cold, exhausted and out-of-source. On the other hand, Sarah Palin is on the loose, preaching her own doctrine and steering away from the scripts. Joe the [fake] plumber had gone AWOL and then he was everywhere a moment later. Meanwhile a day before, Senator Barack Obama appeared alongside President Bill Clinton in Kissimmee Florida, looking fresh, energised and re-invigorated. That same night, Obama became the owner of US airwaves for a good half an hour to air his 30-minutes infomercial. It was one of those days when you would remember and embrace a part of the bible that says "money answereth all things". To buy 7 big TV stations' airtime in the US you would agree with me is no joke, and you bet your pocket better be deep. However, that's no problem for the Senator from Illinois, who spent a reported $5Million on the 30-minutes Obama-Infomercial.

A day after Obama had shown that he was every bit a bigger man than McCain even in spending big, the Arizona Senator cried out for help to his faithful. It was a 911 call for another financial bailout. In an email to supporters, John wrote: "I'm asking for your financial support today to help us respond to attacks against our entire ticket. This election is not over and we need everyone's hard work in the coming days to be victorious."

You see what Mr. McCain forgot is that his friend's policies have led to something called credit crisis and every one of his hard-core financial powerhouses is feeling the pinch as well. So making an emergency call for finance with only 4 days to go before the Election Day might be too little too late. One thing he also forgot is that these guys are investors who expect returns on every investment they make. To them their contribution is an investment that must pay dividend. But McCain is down an average of 7 points in almost every major opinion poll, the chances of him pulling this one off is becoming slimmer and slimmer as the days go by. I guess his supporters are now trying to obey the golden rule, "put your money where mouth is".

Anyway, as the McCain camp rightly said, this battle is not over and I agree. The math favours Obama so well at the moment and he's enjoying it, but the battle of the key battleground states might still prove bloody. As we draw to the end of what seems to be a never-ending campaign and the whole world waits in anticipation, McCain needs money (boy, how he needs it!) and Obama needs votes (lots of it), both men aiming for one price; to become the most powerful man on the planet.

Please don't forget to leave your comments below, and watch out for my next blog on "There will be blood!"

I blog, you read.

Palin around with pigs

We’ve heard about a gentleman that was allegedly palling around with terrorists. But it seems like someone else has being palling around too? Not with terrorists this time though, no no that would be wrong, but with pigs. And she has, without preconditions…

Remember this statement, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig”? If you’ve been following the US Presidential Election closely, I’m sure it’ll ring a bell. It was one of the two major gaffes during one of the many heated periods of the campaign. In fact they were the words of Barack Obama, just days after John McCain chose an unknown figure in Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate. At the time, this popular American expression was seen by the republican as a major blunder from the very mouth of a man they almost labelled a sexist. Subsequently, Obama came out to defend his comment as being just about McCain’s policies rather than about his much talked about running mate; Sarah Palin. Even though most hardcore republican didn’t buy that argument, the inferno died down anyway.

But perhaps Obama’s use of that idiom had more to it than he admitted. As you all know, this guy rarely says anything that he hasn’t quite thought through, and he’s too calculated a guy to drop such a bombshell by mistake. Well, it came to pass as reports began to filter out early last week that the Republican Party had spent $150,000 on Palin’s image makeover, lipstick on a pig didn’t sound to me as just about policies anymore. It’s quite remarkable actually, considering that that she was already a governor, and she still needed $150k worth of image makeover, she must have been in pretty messy state – not easy to govern the great state of Alaska I guess but that’s still a lot of lipsticks all the same.

Moreover, I suppose what her party forgot to do was a character makeover of this moose riding, bird shooting, hockey playing woman from freezing cold Alaska who thinks Russia is just a stone-throw from her living room. Reason being, I thought the true values of Christianity were values like decency, fairness, purity, morality, love etc. Christianity means you can disagree with someone in every way, but not necessarily have to brand and paint them evil or change their second name to Lucifer. True Christianity I used to think was that you pursue your ambition and fight for it in every way, but never forget the golden rule; “do unto others as you want done unto you”.

However, none of these values have shone through this “Christian” woman so far in this campaign. Rather, her mouth has been filled with somewhat bigotry and to some extent uncouth words. I guess her political ambition somehow made her forget her Christian values. It’s ok for her to say she’s against homosexuality, abortion, divorce etc but then she could not pass a simple message of “abstinence” to her daughter who is now pregnant at age 19. So who’s she to teach the world ethics?

Maybe then Obama saw it coming. Think about it, one main character known with pigs is that no matter how you make them up, they will still find a way to get dirty. So when Obama said you can put a lipstick on pig but it’s still a pig, maybe what he really was saying is you can spend $150K or more on Sarah Palin’s image but she’s still Sarah Palin – a dirty governor of Alaska. We might never find the true meaning of that expression, but it seems like Palin has been palling around with pigs all the same.