Nothing he says or does or is or stands for as a politican, but his campaign team need a punch in the face. I emailed them months ago now offering them a free copy of the game, I am NOT a supporter of his, a member of his party, a donor or even a flipping US citizen.
yet they automatically stuck me on his mailing list and refuse to remove me, despite my last email which said “LISTEN DUMBASS THIS IS SPAM I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR CAMPAIGN OK??”
Anyway, nice to see that googles gmail now automatically filters out everything from obama as spam by default.
Nice work campaign team!
Are you serious? gmail is considering obama’s campaign team email as spam?
It is on my account, and I never spammed it, I made a point of following unsubscribe instructions instead. I guess a lot of people did spam it though.
Whoa, that’s a big deal. Thanks for sharing.
I wonder if you’d get a genuine (as in human) response if you offered the game to someone who was a fellow Brit, a politician, and also an Obama supporter. Not sure whom that would be, but you would know best.
If you believe the American Media, everyone in Europe is a fan of Barack Obama.
tbh, I’ve given up believing the US or UK media on anything. They keep trying to spin Georgia as the poor innocent underdog that’s been cruelly invaded by a war-mad russia…
What did happen then?
from what I’ve read, this was Georgia taking advantage of the distraction of the olympics so send an army to go crush some rebels and separatists who were Russian citizens. Russia then rolled its tanks in to push the Georgians back and prevent them slaughtering what it saw as it’s citizens.
No doubt Georgia has a right to deal with rebels in its own country, but if those were very recently Russian citizens and still have Russian passports (apparently), you can’t expect Russia not to take steps to defend them.
Georgia is being used by the west as a way to get at a newly-resurgent and powerful Russia. The presidential candidate visits, the aid being given by the US, it’s all completely out of the ordinary for what is a dispute between two bordering countries.
Image in Mexico started shooting pro-US citizens by the USA border, and US marines moved in to defend them. Can you imagine Russia sending putin with money to Mexico and denouncing the US?
maybe I’ve read a one-sided view of it all?
You can go to his website and unsubscribe your e-mail, you know.
Oh yes I know, it doesn’t seem to make any difference 
This isn’t really Barack Obama’s fault, more of his campaign e-mail team.
This isn’t really helping him out here in the US, either.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7606100.stm
Most of our voters couldn’t find half of these countries on a map…
1/5th can’t find the US on a map. Makes me want to move. I’m actually excellent with geography, even know where the smallest of countries are, such as Malta.
I always think that it’s rather unfair to criticise Americans for not being able to find, say, European countries on a map - how many Europeans could find American states on a map? Many American states are far bigger than and have far bigger populations than most European countries, yet you’d be lucky if most people in Europe could even name more than, say, five or ten of them, let alone find them on a map.
Do you think that the average European can name more European countries than the average American can name states? I’m actually curious if that’s true or not, but my money is that it is. One of the big reasons I think that would be true is the different languages. There’s a reason to be able to speak more than one language in Europe; you can travel through at least half a dozen countries in a day, and they would probably speak at least four different languages in those countries. If you can speak the language, chances are pretty good you know the name of the country it is from.
Quick aside - When I was in Venice as a college student, I had someone ask me what I was doing. I knew enough Italian (at the time) to answer the basic questions, but he starting asking me other stuff that I didn’t understand. He tried at least three or four different languages before it clicked that “This guy is a stupid American,” so he switched to English. Meanwhile, two pairs of American tourists thought that I was a “Venetian bum” on two separate occasions, and said so very loudly, not even thinking that I would be able to understand them. The first time it happened, I was too dumbstruck to say anything. The second time this happened, I told that pair that I was actually an American Student studying in Venice for the semester. That shut them up quickly.
Here in America, even though there are a lot of different accents, the language is English for the most part. There are some differences in regions (soda vs pop, grinders vs subs, etc.) but the language is still pretty much the same. It may be difficult to understand what the other person is saying because of their accents…but it’s English.
I’ll also guess that there are a lot of Americans who would have trouble placing more than a dozen or so states correctly on a map of the USA…especially in the northeast (lots of small states in New England) and central US (lots of rectangle-like shaped states).
On the Obama unsubscribe failure: That’s a major issue, for the campaign if nothing else. Though I suspect they don’t even realise how much bad blood unwanted emails can create, in a very short order.
And now, for Georgia.
While my view of events matches yours, there is some background missing. Yes, Georgia made a military play for South Ossetia. But South Ossetia is, and has been for a while, an ongoing provocation by Russia. While many of the South Ossetian residents are ethnic Russians, most of the ones holding Russian citizenship now did not have it back in 1992, when the territory declared its autonomy. To top it all off, South Ossetia is controlled by ex-KGB officers, and let me tell you – if there was one thing that the KGB has always lacked, it’s liberal, understanding, democratic people.
All this adds up to a huge thorn in Georgia’s side, but not enough to justify an invasion. That, as so many other things, came down to money. Georgia’s economy is in a horrific state, and Saakashvili needed a distraction. A successful mission in South Ossetia would have had the Georgian army rapidly take Tskhinvali, entrench, and make digging them out too slow and expensive politically for Russia to attempt. The end result if the plan had worked would have been similar to what it is right now: Massive support from NATO countries for Georgia, but no bombed out ports, military bases, and factories.
As an aside, comparative readings of Wikipedia’s entry on Saakashvili in English and in Russian are quite intriguing. It’s not so much the difference in facts and sources as in the emphasis.
The email thing is a problem. No excuse for that; if the unsubscribe option is broken, the Obama email team screwed up pretty badly and needs to correct it ASAP.
Re: South Ossetia: I view Russia’s initial response as entirely justified. Repelling Georgian incursions into the breakaway provinces was appropriate. Russia then took the opportunity to cripple Georgia, perhaps to send a message to Washington that Russia is not joking when it talks about “tactical, not diplomatic” responses to NATO expansion and NMD. Tensions right now seem, objectively, worse than many of the calmer periods of the Cold War, but now that Russia is capitalist I guess the media’s tolerance for US-Russian relations degradation is higher. At any rate, the US’ backing of Georgia now is bothersome.
Palin’s comment in her first ever national interview about Georgia is even more troublesome. She says that Georgia and Ukraine should “absolutely” be admitted to NATO, and confirmed specifically that this could mean war with Russia if they were to invade a NATO Georgia. McCain won’t back down on Bush’s NMD plans and seems almost giddy to provoke Russia, suggesting to kick them out of the G8 and making all sorts of hardliner comments about “Russian aggression” in even the early stages of the Georgia conflict. Combined with his promise of “more wars to come” and his seeming fixation with bombing Iran (and perhaps Syria)… To say that McCain scares me in the realm of foreign policy is an understatement.
It’s interesting how the Israelis view Obama. He receives much support
both from Jewish liberals and arguably the right-wing AIPAC, but his
middle name bothers Israelis a lot. Also, there are doubts whether he is
really a Muslim apostate. Here is an article which analyzes Obama’s
similarity to early Zionists:
samsonblinded.org/blog/obama-aga … shness.htm What do you think of the parallels?