The UK. election

”If the Libdem are to decide in my opinion they are closer to the Conservative party then the Labour party!”

A new general election is coming up in Britain, and it looks like we're going to have a draw between the Conservatives and the Labourers. This means that the Liberal Democrats now have a lot of power, as a coalition between the Liberal Democrats and any other party will basically mean success.

I personally think that the Liberal Democrats will form a government with the Conservatives because even though they are on different sides of the political spectrum, they still have common interests such as the economy, health care and how to rule. The Laborers haven't recovered from their horrendous term, and that is another reason for the Liberal Democrats to go with the Conservatives.

Senior Project

This spring semester we were asked to write a senior project, a final big assignment that plays a vital role to our grade in this subject. I chose to write about the increasing teen drug abuse in the US. I would like to share some of the things I learned while working with this project.

During the working process of this project I learned a lot of interesting facts about teen drug abuse in the United States. I started out with a few questions, and my main question was why drugs like marijuana have become so “popular” amongst kids in the United States. As I mentioned earlier, the number of teens using drugs has tripled over the last ten years. The most common drug amongst teenagers is Marijuana. Teens get a mixed message about marijuana, some say it’s dangerous and destroying, others try to proof the opposite. The documentary “The Union” tries to convince us of the opposite. The creators of this film are expressing an almost positive attitude to marijuana, and uses every argument to proof that the drug is as harmless as coffee. For teenagers in the United States, where the age limit for buying alcohol is 21 in most states, believing that marijuana is harmless, may often lead them to “the easiest” way to having fun. My friend who studies in New York asked some of the students at her school about what they thought was the reason for this escalating problem. They said the main reason probably was the strict age limit for buying alcohol. The next question I asked myself was what the American society could do to stop this negative “trend”. Parents caring, taking initiative and control is probably the best way to start. It is also another important reason for this problem to be taken seriously. It is a fact that a lot of young people admire the US, and US “trends” are often picked up by young Europeans. If this problem is not handled carefully, it will make reputational damage to the US abroad.

"The Blind Side"

Last Tuesday we watched å movie in class called "The blind side". The movie is based on the true story of Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher. Michael, a.k.a. Big Mike, is practically homeless when he meets Leigh Anne Tuohy and her familly. Leigh Anne finds him walking the streets in the rain, and she invites him into their home for the night. Slowly, Michael starts becoming a part of the Tuohy family. SJ, the son in the familly, and Michael become good buddies. Leigh Anne goes to the school about Michael's academic performance, and is surprised to learn that even though he has scored low in almost every aspect, he scored in the 98th percentile in protective instincts. Her husband, Sean, talks to the school coach to get Michael enrolled in the football team. Michael performs exceptionally on the field and catches the eye of many college coaches from around the state. We did not get to see the whole movie that day, because it was too long. The last thing we saw was that Michael confronts Leigh Anne; he asks her if she only took him in so that he would play football for her alma mater. Michael goes back to his birth mother's apartment in the projects, where his old friends welcome him. It will be exiting to see how this goes, since Micheal's old friends and inviornment seem to have a negative impact on him. We will se the rest of the movie the upcomming Tueasday, where I also will update you on the end of the movie.

UK politics - two articles

Today in class, we were assigned the tas to act as journalists reporting from the Question Time on February 24th. Karoline and I chose to represent a newspaper that supported the labour pary.

Task 1.


In British politics it is common that the members of parliament, usually shortened down to MPs, meets the Government Ministers to ask questions concerning various political subjects. These questions are known as "oral questions" and takes place at the start of business on a daily basis, in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. In the lower house (House of Commons), each government department are obligated to answer questions according to a rota called the Order of Oral Questions. The difference between the Question Time in the two houses are that the questions from the Lords are to the government as a whole, but the questions from the Commons goes to the particular government departments. This is due to the division of power in the two houses; the House of Commons has more power than the House of Lords.

Every Wednesday, the Prime Minister participates in Question Time in the House of Commons for half an hour. The questions from the MPs are dropped at least three days in advance. The session starts with a question from one of the MPs about the Prime Minister's engagements. Following the Prime Minister's answer, the MP can raise a question concerning a particular political issue, usually of a current significance. The leader of the Opposition are then allowed to follow up on either this topic, or change to another topic.

On February 24th, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown started the engagement talk with a tribute to the troops in Afghanistan. The tribute was followed with a discussion about the economy.
The question that were asked to the Prime Minister in this particular meeting were in general about health care and economy. The Leader of the Opposition (the Conservatives), David Cameron, stated that the GNP (Gross National Product) per capita is lower today than before Brown entered the role as Prime Minister, and that he thereby leaves the country poorer than when he entered the position. Cameron talked with a massive empathy and tried his best to gain the MPs support. It seemed that Brown had a more relaxed appearance than his opponent Cameron. Brown replied with saying that the total GNP per capita is higher now than in 1997. Cameron accused Gordon Brown for lying and asked him to stand up with a straight face and tell the audience that the statement actually was true. Brown replied that he had answered the question three times already. It was obvious that Cameron had not prepared himself well enough for the debate.

Task 2
The importance of TV debates in terms of politics

This year’s election in Britain will be different. Every Wednesday the U.K. prime minister meets the House of Commons for what they call a “Question Time”. In 2010 this debate will be sent on television all over Britain, and many people believe this will have a huge impact on the election.
Although intensive debates can help a candidate, once the contest begins, it is almost impossible for the candidates to hide their true character. An example is when McCain performed poorly on a debate sent on TV. Just as the camera had picked up McCain's nervous laughter, manic grin and habit of cutting his opponent off, many people lost some of their respect for the U.S. presidential candidate. In other words, these debates could be the best chance British voters have of experiencing a moment of truth during this campaign.
It has been set a lot of rules for this new type of question time. The BBC, ITV and Sky and the three main political parties have agreed on the rules for live prime ministerial debates in the run-up to the election of 2010. The three 90-minute sessions will begin by focusing on domestic policies, international affairs and the economy. The studio audiences will then be able to ask questions on any subject, with television viewers doing the same via e-mail. The Labor Partys Gordon Brown, Lib Dem Nick Clegg and Tory David Cameron have welcomed the news.
The first debate, focusing on domestic affairs, will be held in the north-west of England.
The second, themed on global issues, will take place in south-west England. The third debate will be dealing with the economy. The applause will be restricted to the beginning and end of the debates and the audience will not be allowed to respond to the leaders' answers. Some of the other rules that are set for these debates are that the audience will, as I mentioned above, have the opportunity to pose questions, but no heckling. The leaders will have to make a one minute opening statement on the theme of the debate. Further on they have one minute to answer each question, and one minute to respond to the answers. The leaders also have to shake hands at the end of the debate.

Television has influenced the presidential elections in the United States for many years, in both a good and bad way. The media circus around presidential elections has made candidates to pursue a better image, but as I mentioned above it also can affect them negatively. The candidates that look bad or for example get nervous in front of the cameras can loose a lot of votes this way, but on the opposite, TV performance naturally makes a positive turn for the candidates. President Clinton is a good example to mention. Many people did not know much about him, who he was or what he stood for, but he made a fantastic apperance on television and in the media: Great presence, a good looking guy, smart and friendly – these factors made a turning point in his career. The media loved him, and the American people started to pay more attention to him – this helped him to win two elections in a row.

Charlie Wilsons war..

Today in class we saw a movie named "Charlie Wilson's war", a film I strongly recommend everyone to see! Charlie Wilson was born June 1 1933, and died last week, February 10, 2010. He was a politician who represented Texas in the House of Representatives from 1973 to 1996. He made a huge difference in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and in the cold war.

In 1980, Wilson read an article describing the refugees fleeing Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. The communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had taken over power during the Afghan Civil War and asked the Soviet Union to help suppress resistance from the mujahedeen. Wilson called the staff of the House Appropriations Committee dealing with "black appropriations" and requested a two-fold appropriation increase for Afghanistan. Because Wilson had just been named to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense (which is responsible for funding CIA operations), his request went through. By the end of the 1980s, Wilson was directing covert funding of about $750 million a year to arm mujahedeen fighters, including the Stinger missiles that effectively shot down Soviet helicopters. What he did made, as I mentioned above, a huge difference not only in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but also in the cold war between America and the Soviet Union. The soviet soldiers left the Afghan border in 1989, and a short madder of time later the cold war was over.

I’ve heard about this story before, both Charlie Wilson and what influence he had on the war in Afghanistan. What I didn’t know was that helping Afghanistan with weapons and winning the war may have had a large impact on the problems America has to day, by this I mean with Taliban. After Soviet was out of the picture, half of the people living in Afghanistan was under 14 years old. Wilson tried to say that the US had to help rebuild this destroyed country, with schools and so on. He saw the fact that these kids wouldn’t understand that America helped them winning the war, they had no access to newspaper or anything else to help them see the truth. When he tried to explain this to the others, most of them said that they where done in Afghanistan, and had to concentrate on Europe and the other projects they had going. I believe this was a big mistake. Raymond Smock, former House historian and director of the Robert C. Byrd center for legislative studies in Shepherdstown said the following about Wilson and his ideas of building up the country: “If we had kept up the work he had done, building those schools, maybe we wouldn’t have had the problems that we did”. By this he probably means with Taliban and tragedies like 9/11?

This movie really opened my eyes, and made me think twice about what America could have done differently in Afghanistan during the cold war. I think it’s terrible that they believed that when the war was over, they where done helping this destroyed country.

The Road

This semester our class got to choose a book to read in English. Most of us agreed on reading the book “The Road”, written by Cormac McCarthy. The story is about a father and his young son who walk alone through a burned and destroyed America. The two of them are heading for the coast, to be safe and warm, compared to their current situation. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the dangerous men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of food and each other.

I’ve now read the first 70 pages, and I’m still waiting for an explanation on why America is burning, and why the father and his son is so alone and scared. I am a very curious person, so I just had to do some research on the internet to find out what had happened to America in the book. Everywhere I read the explanation is that nuclear bombs has hit the country and destroyed it.

The author of this book writes in a very complicated way, and I thought it was hard to understand the story in the beginning. He does not use any comma most of the time, and each sentence is very long, so you really have to focus every second of the time you read. Here is an example: “He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup.”

The book starts with a father and his son (who actually remains nameless throughout the whole book) surveys the landscape, trying to decide where they will travel next. The father is unsure of the month and day, because “he hadn’t kept a calendar for years”. The scene before him reveals ash, probably from several nuclear bombs, falling from the sky and drifting across the landscape. The father and his son are survivors, fighting to live in a world that has been destroyed, with a result of chaos and confusion amongst the remaining people.

The boy and his father travel south for days and weeks to follow. They suffer from endless rain, snow and bitter cold. The father has flashbacks to his childhood, to fishing with his uncle, and to his wife, who likely killed herself because she could not bear living in this new and depressing world. They try to hide from the danger of cannibals and the other men who stalk “the road”.

I must admit that I disliked the book about the first 40 pages or so, but then it changed. Now it fascinates me, and the plot in this book has really caught my attention. It is a dark and almost depressing book, but when you “get to know” the two main characters you start to care about them, and now I really just want to know how the story of their lives ends.

I will post an entry about the book every week, but I really recommend that you read this fascinating story yourselves.

“We are the real Americans; Obama doesn’t know what he is talking about.”

We saw a documentary made by a democrat last week. It was about the republican people in the US thoughts and disappointment true the election in 2009. It was a very interesting documentary, where we got to see how "these people" believe that they're the only real Americans, and how they compare Barack Obama to both the devil and Adolf Hitler. They cried, they shouted and they where really upset when Obama won the election. Many of the republicans believed that the whole world would go under if he would become the new president of the United States.

One of the things that shocked me the most was when she interviewed a man from the south. He said that most of the people in America were too far ahead of the time, compared to what was realistic. "If it was up to me, you would not be able to vote yet" he said to the reported. "Why", she asked. "Because you're a woman" he answered light. He also mentioned, amongst with many of the other men she interviewed, that "we from the south are not ready for a black president".

It may be wrong to write this here, but in my opinion most of the men and women the interviewer talks to through the documentary seems crazy. They do not think outside the box, and lives many years back in time. The priest in one of the churches talked about Obama "killing" all babies, and I actually reacted strongly to the fact that a priest talks about politics in his own church. This seems unethick and wrong in my eyes.

I was in London last week, and started to talk with a man from South-Carolina. He was a Christian republican, but not at all as "crazy" as the people in this documentary. He said that many of the republican people reacted with tears and hate when Obama won the election, but many of them did not think of it that way at all. He was not against homosexuals or black people, and thought that both Obama and McCain were smart men with good intentions. The woman that created the documentary is a democrat, and of course she used the most extreme examples when she made this documentary. I think it is very important not to judge all republican people out of this film.