Obama wins.  I am not surprised.  Right message, right time.  Now let's see what we can do.  McCain gave a great speech this evening.  Very humble, very heartfelt.  Regardless of my political views, the awesomeness of seeing someone besides a white male in office is powerful!  It will be  an interesting four years and I will enjoying watching it unfold.

There is a great book I read a few years ago called, "BIAS", which was written by a reporter for CBS.  http://www.google.com/books?id=vOrLY-HXnzYC&dq=book+bias&pg=PP1&ots=NqkzeqLwXx&source=bn&sig=_s0tWy0elC7MR3D1GylVvb93OXY   It basically, says that the media in the U.S. is very liberal, but doesn't realize it, becuase they feel that liberal is the norm, so in there mind they are very normal and average.   It was an interesting read.

I tend to get my news from all over, but mostly, CNN.com, DrudgeReport.com (to balance out CNN) and the BBC to get the world perspective.

From watching a lot of vlogs that come from the west coast it certainly appears to me that the view from the coasts of the U.S. is that there is California and New York and everything else is corn and doesn't matter.   Sort of dishearting since I live smack dab in the middle of it :)  

I spent some time this summer in Germany, Austria and Switzerland visting a friend and travelling with my wife (around Lake Constance oder der Bodensee), it was great getting to speak with people.  My wife teaches German and speaks German well.  She did all of the talking and they weren't sure where she was from but as soon as she turned to me in English and said, "they said Germany plays in the Euro Cup at 7 tonight", they were like, "OH! Are you from Great Britain?".   This cracked me up, since the whole British accent, but how would they know the difference, I can only determine a German accent when I travel from Hamburg to Switzerland with the whole Swiss German thing.  

Anyway, I am rambling now, but I say all of this to say that I got in a lot of conversations with people and it seemed uniformally that people were scared to travel in the U.S.   It was like they thought it was the wild west and that they would be shot or killed if they came and went outside of New York.   I think this is a huge shame as I think American's especially us Mid-Westerners are some of the most friendly people you will meet.   Just as everyone wanted to know all about the U.S. and Obama, we want to know everything about your country.

Well Obama is starting to talk now, so I will stop rambling, so I will cut this off.

Stuart

As I stood in line to vote this morning, I happened to overhear some of the conversations of my fellow citizens. Some where discussing personal issues tied to poor economic conditions, rumors of pending layoffs at their work, and other similar topics. What really scares me is the general notion that the “evil” corporations are the source of all problems, somehow the “us vs. them” mentality is really taking hold of general population at least in the rust-belt area of Ohio.

I thought to myself, should I be punished for operating my business, employing people and aspiring to be successful? Should my hard earned money be taxed even more to spread the crumbs of wealth to the needy?  Perhaps I’m selfish for wanting put my three kids through college or wanting a bigger house and boat. Should the government mandate who I hire and fire in my own private business? Ultimately, what will inspire individuals to achieve something if the material incentives are coerced away from the people that take risks and succeed?

These are the kind of thoughts I have had recently. I’m not “Joe The Plumber”, I’m just a small business owner in a great state of Ohio, and according to Obama I will need to share the wealth around to help others. I just hope our new president will point all of us to a direction where we can get more of that “wealth” so that it can be shared with the needy. Otherwise I see more layoffs in the future.

Anyways, great thread and good luck to us all.

I think the point he was trying to make was that if your customers were bankrupt they won't buy your products any longer. I think it touched a blind spot in capitalist ideology. All we're even told is 'trickle down'. If the rich get richer, then they'll buy more stuff and this benefits all. But this assumes the rich turn all their wealth into something that benefits the masses. A basic economic truth (digging deep into memories of economics class at school) is that if you give a tax cut to the poor you get a bigger economic stimulus than a tax cut for the rich. The reasoning behind it being that poor people will spend all of that increased wealth, whereas the rich won't. I think when you listen closely to the response given to Joe you will hear that.

Here small businesses have other issues to worry about. Labor laws make it a big gamble to hire someone. This is why I prefer to work in networks of independent contractors. In any case DNN module programming is such a specialist work that it is near impossible to find someone in your own region to work with. I'd need to spend a year training and then that person could take off and say thank you for the training, I think I'll start my own consultancy now.

Good luck with your business and may it prosper. I've checked out your site and it looks like a good deal to host with you guys.

Peter