So what is below is only of historical interest ... maybe with some suggestions for changing the voting system here.
The Romney-Ryan ticket came out with some data saying that "Nearly half of all publicly held debt is held by foreign countries, led by China. When countries that don’t have our best interests at heart own this much of our debt, our independence is threatened."
The "debt held by public" numbers increased from 1970 from 0.28 tr$ to 2.4 tr$ in 1990 and reaching 11.1 tr$ mid-year 2012. It is interesting that starting with Nixon in 1969, Reps had 7 four-year periods and Dems so far only 4 in office, and Clinton ended with a budget surplus. What does that tell us about reckless spending?
There is another thing, unrelated to this but equally indicative of misdirection, that strikes me as curious: In the proposal to change Medicare and Social Security benefits, Romney states that the excellent system he will implement as president will not be applied to seniors above the age of 55 -- so that no one who is already, or soon going to be, using the current system will have to change.
Well, why not? If it's so much better, then especially those people who are using it should be the first to benefit from the better system ... Why deprive them of the advantages of the voucher system under which public health would improve? Can we get any specifics on that -- perhaps tonight at the first presidential debate.
Well, that debate was sort of a flop for the Dems. The vice-presidential debate was much better, and the second and third debate clearly showed that Obama is the superior person one would like to have as president. His reposte to Romney's suggestion that the state of our Navy had declined since there are now fewer ships than there were in 1916 has become a classic: "We also have fewer horses and bayonets. ..." (I paraphrase - it's on the interent) and went on to explain that there are airplane carriers where planes can start and land, and there are submarines -- it was a beautiful moment.
And then there came Sandy, the hurricane that was downgraded to a huge tropical storm(more than 1000 miles in diameter) by the time it made landfall on the New Jersey shore. She put nearly 10 million households in the dark and later flooded Manhattan with seawater 4.2 m above normal. The best effect was that for the first time after such a disaster commentators and analysts on radio and tv talked about the neglected infrastructure of the country: Why can a storm cut so many power lines? - Why did the emergency power generators malfunction? And for the first time the USA was compared to a a third-world country that is helpless after a natural catastrophe.
Then Mayor Bloomberg from NYC declared himself a supporter of Obama because he now feels the current president can handle the effects of global warming, man-made or other, better than Romney. The unspoken thought behind it was, of course, that the majority of Republicans and their 'leaders' do not think that (i) global warming is really happening, and (ii) if it does, it's certainly not man-made, and even if there were some effect there, it is really (iii) not related to the burning of fossil fuel and the generation of carbon monoxide. The rest of the world is sadly amused.
What the world thinks though about which US leader it would prefer to deal with in the next four years has been dug up by a poll conducted by BBC World News in 21 countries: Only in Pakistan more people would like to see Romney than Obama as the next president. The link is to one of NPR's blogs where the results and source information is available. Here is one salient result:
Typically, Poland gives Romney the second most points, directly behind Kenya.
