Wednesday, January 09, 2008

If I'd beaten Obama and Clinton and won the Democrat nomination for US President...

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I’m finding the US electoral process really interesting. It seems to have some real life in it these days. I’m a fairly regular listener to Simon Mayo’s program on Radio Five Live. The show’s session today on religion and US politics was fascinating. It revealed of course that it plays a significant role.

Assuming I'd won the Democrat nomination for US President against the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others (!!) and was generally as well qualified as my Republican opponent, 5 in 10 voters, according to polls, would then not vote for me because I don’t believe in god. Many more US voters would desert me than would desert a candidate because they were a woman, or black, a Mormon, Catholic, Jew or homosexual. No real surprise to me but it says a great deal about US people and politics.

Bristol 'UK green capital' would plan to sustain the total amount of open, green space not flog off millions of square metres

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Great comment on loss of Bristol's green spaces by Bluebaldee on the Bristol Blogger site - I agree with every word. The figures he quotes in this passage are very striking:

Bristolians are lucky enough to enjoy 38 square meters per capita of green space. The Bristol Quantity Standard proposes that Bristolians could get by with 27.8 sq m of green space - which allows a collossal 10 sq m per capita to be disposed of. My maths makes this: Population 400,000 x 10 sq m = 4 million sq m of land that could be sold for development.

I remember running wild in ‘low quality’ green space eg where Callington Rd and the Brislington Tesco now is, when I was a kid. There are a few other places within a few miles of me that were open/green but are now built over.

It seems that the council does not see sustaining the total amount of open, green space available as one key indicator of progress towards their ambition of being the ‘UK’s green capital’. So what does this ambition mean??

More praise for Pete Goodwin, Stockwood's excellent Green Campaigner

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I believe people of all political colours who really got to know Pete would agree with this posting made by the Bristol Blogger. Stockwood’s Pete Goodwin is indeed an excellent campaigner by any standard.

He has been asking questions of excellent quality on a wide range of extremely important topics for some time now and I have learned a lot from working with him. He deserves to be elected to the council where he would be in an even better position to keep this rotten, hypocritical council under pressure to do a better job.

He stood in Stockwood in 2007 and substantially raised the green vote to 20.49%, gaining second place ahead of the Lab and Lib candidates. This is a remarkable achievement given that before 2006 the Stockwood green vote was just 2.6%!!