Yusufaddie, Asalamu Alaykum brother. Still living in the Caribbean?????? Welcome back to Somalia Online.

Ilaahay ha u naxariisto walaal. Samir iyo iimaan.

I am in Tampa, Florida for a conference and I see excited Obama supporters everywhere I go. Obama is running serious ads in the Sunshine State and Governor Crist has just extended the early voting hours to 12 which is a dreadful news for McCain. I have been seeing enormous lines at voting spots. It is just astounding. Obama's only enemy at this point is complacency. McCain may still prevail in Florida as this is a state with complex demographics, but I can honestly say the old man will not have it easy. If this new "VIDEO" doesn't damage his campaign in the next few days, Obama seems almost certain for a win. PS: "Bradley Effect" is a myth.

BREAKING NEWS Obama to preempt coming McCain assault McCain officials had said early in the weekend that they plan to begin advertising after Tuesday’s debate that will tie Obama to convicted money launderer Tony Rezko and former Weathermen radical William Ayers. But Obama isn’t waiting to respond. His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: “Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject.

My internals shows Obama leading by 1. For the next few weeks (starting today) the McCain camp is going to throw the kitchen sink at Obama. We seek safe harbor. Anyways, how about a train methapor for the candidates. By the way, the Gray Lady has a nice article on Obama's new fortunes. Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds Having said that, McCain has a new plan and this will be seen in the next few days Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said. With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain's team has decided that its emphasis on the senator's biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan's campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls. "We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity. washingtonpost.com

Some background ... How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War by Michael Lind America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians. Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies – such as the selection rather than election of George W. Bush, and Sept. 11 – the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment. The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers. Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians. The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neocons are ideologues, not opportunists. The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority." The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government. Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots – odd as it seems – in the British Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox television network. His magazine, the Weekly Standard – edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice president, 1989-1993) – acts as a mouthpiece for defense intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-1994) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada. Strangest of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times – owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung Moon – which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghostwriter for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, and its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement. The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favorite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied. How did the neocon defense intellectuals – a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic – manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first – a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process – and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination. Then they had a stroke of luck – Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby. The neocons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and vice president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a northeastern moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to Southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the Southern culture. The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: Last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the U.N. It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with U.S. attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the U.S. The neocons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far greater problem. So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion. For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of the Rev. Ian Paisley, extreme Euroskeptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types – all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird. http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html

It is interesting how the neocons are betting all their hopes on a John McCain win and the "surge". 5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neoconservatives also known as "Neocons" By Jacob Heilbrunn Sunday, February 10, 2008; Page B03 As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan. So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow. 1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right. This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals. The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia. After World War II convinced them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the 1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and champion their ideas. 2 The neocons are Israeli lackeys. Bunk. The neocon saga couldn't be more American. It's a tempestuous drama of Jewish assimilation, from immigrant obscurity on the Lower East Side to the rise of a new foreign policy establishment that sees the United States as the avatar of democracy and foe of genocide. What truly animates the neocons is what they see as the lesson of the Holocaust: that it could have been avoided if the Western democracies had found the courage to stop Hitler in the late 1930s. This helps explain Perle's and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith's antipathy toward the State Department, which tried to stymie U.S. recognition of Israel at its founding in 1948. Neocons such as Norman Podhoretz scorn the State Department as filled with WASPs who seek to cozy up to the Arab states instead of recognizing Israel's strategic value and moral importance as a bastion of democracy in a sea of tyranny. What's more, the neocons are often to the right of Israel's government. Feith and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams scoffed at the idea of land-for-peace talks with the Palestinians, for instance, and Wolfowitz pushed for an invasion of Iraq for which even Ariel Sharon demonstrated no particular enthusiasm. The neocons aren't Israel's best advocates, either: The Iraq war has emboldened Iran, fanned the flames of jihadism and made Israel less, not more, secure. Contrary to Wolfowitz's arguments, the road to peace in Israel turned out not to run through Baghdad. 3 The neocons had too much power and took over Bush's brain. In fact, President Bush used the neocons for his own purposes and then dumped many of them overboard. (Of course, many liberals think Bush doesn't have a brain to take over in the first place, but leave that aside.) On the campaign trail in 2000, Bush was a realist in the mold of his father. But under the appalling pressure of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush became the leading neocon in his own administration -- which is why he didn't need them around anymore once they had done their job as lightning rods. What's more, he never gave any of them Cabinet-level positions. Neither Vice President Cheney nor former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- the men who made the real decisions with Bush in the Oval Office -- has ever been a neocon. They are Republican unilateralists who believe in deploying U.S. power whenever and wherever the executive branch sees fit, regardless of what U.S. allies want. Cheney and Rumsfeld used Wolfowitz and other neocons to provide an intellectual patina of justification for war against Iraq, much as Cheney has been trying to do with Iran today. (One reason there was no serious postwar plan for Iraq was that no one in Cheney's office could ever decide whether the administration should have one.) Lacking a real base in the Republican Party, the neocons got picked off as soon as Bush's handling of the war seemed to falter. They didn't have too much power; ultimately, they had too little to implement their schemes. The result has been finger-pointing and self-exculpatory memoirs from the likes of Feith. Meanwhile, the CIA (which the neocons loathe) has outflanked them on Iran by declaring that it isn't building nuclear weapons. And one of the most prominent surviving neocons, the NSC's Abrams, has proved unable to stop Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. 4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy traditions. Militant? Sure. But alien? Baloney. In fact, the neocons' worldview melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion. This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror. 5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons. This could be the biggest whopper of them all. Now that the "surge" in Iraq has brought levels of violence down somewhat, the neocons are already claiming vindication. As Iraq fades from the front pages, the neocons' hero, Arizona Sen. John McCain, is poised to become the Republican standard-bearer in 2008. (The neocons also would have happily flocked around Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recruited Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz as a senior adviser.) The truth is that the neocons have been repeatedly declared dead before -- and, to the chagrin of their enemies on the left and the right, bounced back. At the end of the Cold War, the arch-realist George H.W. Bush relegated them to the sidelines; then the triangulating Bill Clinton seemed to deprive them of their biggest foreign and domestic policy issues. If they came back from that, they can come back from anything. Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol (who seems not to be discredited in the eyes of the New York Times, which just made him a columnist) and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback. If they make a hash of foreign policy by 2011, perhaps the familiar cycle of public scorn and rebirth might even start all over again. jheilbrunn@nationalinterest.org Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons."

Last time I remember, brother Castro was in Houston, Texas. The city is now devastated by hurricane Ike and it is under curfew to prevent widespread looting. Our thoughts and prayers are with our brother and his family. I hope that he is doing great, and his family is safe and well. This is a tough Ramadan for all of you out in the coast area.

Isn't it Bursaliid?

Norf, Hambalyo inadeer adiga iyo xaaska. Barwaaqo iyo bash bash for you all in the future.

Nephy, out of context walaashiis. Biden was responding to one Hillary hater who said he was glad Hillary wasn't picked. It was Biden's way of trying to tell the questioner "shut the F up". Little humility helps party unity.

Rebuilding a nation JOHN GROBLER | LUANDA, ANGOLA Sep 06 2008 06:00 With $53-billion in foreign direct investment and with oil revenues estimated to increase to $20-billion by 2010, Angola's economic growth is galloping ahead at a whopping pace.The International Monetary Fund estimates that economic growth will top 40% over the next two years, making it one of the most happening economies in the world. According to the IMF in 2005 Angola recorded a GDP of $37,2-billion, with the economy growing at 20,6%, mostly due to huge foreign investment in its hydrocarbon industry, which has overtaken Nigeria's as Africa's biggest oil producer. Exports -- mostly hydrocarbons, diamonds, gas, coffee, sisal, fish, timber and cotton -- brought $24-billion into the economy, while imports of machinery, electronic equipment, vehicles, spares, medical supplies, military equipment, food and textiles cost $15,1-billion in 2005. But the economy is growing so fast that economic data is overtaken by reality as soon as it is published. Heavily subsidised fuel prices -- a litre of petrol costs about $0,50, and diesel $0,38 -- and an exchange rate that has remained stable for the past three years have contained, but could not completely suppress, the inflation rate, which is running at about 23%. Flush with cash from high oil prices and with an eye on elections, the Angolan government has embarked on a multibillion dollar rehabilitation of the country's war-ravaged infrastructure on a scale that is often breathtaking. Blessed with prodigious natural resources of oil, diamonds, and rich agricultural land, the country has the potential to become one of the richest nations in the world. Its ambitions in this regard are thought to be the main reason why Angola has so far declined to sign the SADC free-trade agreement. Not wishing to do so from a position of relative weakness, Angola fully intends to become a counterweight to regional economic juggernaut South Africa -- once it has built up the requisite economic muscle. Brand-new, dual-lane highways, built by Brazilian, Chinese and South Korean contractors, snake through the country, connecting Luanda with cities in the interior, which could once only be reached by airplane or days of bone-jarring driving over rutted roads. State-of-the-art fibre-optic telecommunications facilities are now being installed in most of the major cities. Where physical connections are not possible, smaller rural areas can now connect to the outside world via satellite-based communications systems. The government recently signed a $327-million agreement with a Russian company to put its own communications satellite into space, allowing it to beam national television programmes to even the smallest of villages. The most significant infrastructural development, and the one which has the greatest potential to affect a shift in the regional balances of power -- is the rehabilitation of the Benguela Railway Line. An estimated 30 000 Chinese workers have been imported to completely rebuild the line, originally built between 1899 and 1924 and which runs from the Atlanticport of Lobito to the highland plateau surrounding Huambo. By 1934 the line had been extended all the way into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and its immensely rich copper and cobalt deposits in southern Katanga. The Chinese, who in a separate deal a year ago extended a $500-million soft loan to Kinshasa to rehabilitate the Congolese section of the 3 500km-long railway line, clearly have big ambitions for the Congolese mining industry, and Angola expects to benefit handsomely. In Luanda, which is creaking under an overburdened and over-crowded infrastructure designed for 400 000 people but home to an estimated five-million Angolans, the scope of reconstruction borders on the audacious. To create more office space in the city centre, an international construction consortium is filling in half the Bay of Luanda while dredging the rest to accommodate cargo ships lined up 50-deep in the outside bay. To reduce the congestion and overcrowding in the city, a satellite city with thousands of apartments and houses is under construction outside Viana, on the south-eastern outskirts of the city, in an oil-for-financing agreement with Beijing. In just one such development an estimated 5 000 apartments in a dozen 20-storey blocks are rising from the raw red earth, resembling something from the sci-fi movie Brazil. The city itself resembles one huge construction site,with construction cranes -- manned by thousands of Chinese imported as part of the $8-billion oil-backed Chinese loan scheme -- racing to complete luxury office blocks, condominiums and recreational areas such as cinemas and gymnasiums. In anticipation of all these new homeowners, shops offering the latest in European interior decor and flat-screen television sets abound. Personal income taxes are setat a low 15%, but company taxes -- including fuel and consumption taxes -- are relatively high, at 35% per annum. While it has made real progress towards establishing a market economy, old habits die hard: Angola, a command economy until 1991, still has one of the most bureaucratic business regimes in the world. Development difficulties The non-profit Heritage House Foundation, which rates countries' economies for their freedom, gives Angola a low score of 36,5% mostly because of the restrictive national regulatory environment. Starting a business takes an average of 119 days, and obtaining a business licence takes longer than the global average of 19 procedures and 243 days, it said. Foreign investment in sectors such as defence, public and state security, certain aspects of banking and the running of ports and airports "remains somewhat off-limits" with the government increasingly insisting that Angolan nationals be hired. With a massive professional skills shortage, obtaining work permits for their expatriate labour remains a major headache for foreign companies. Although there are 15 commercial banks operating in the country's financial sector, financial services remain underdeveloped. Two of the largest state-owned banks, which in 2006, controlled about 45% of banking assets, are to be privatised. The private insurance sector remains heavily regulated and the formally constituted Angolan stock exchange is still not operational. Other structural problems remain. Although the government has broadly agreed to International Monetary Fund recommendations to refinance the central bank and national oil and diamond companies Sonangol and Endiama, progress has been slow. A key development would be to move the regulatory powers held by these companies into independent, statutory bodies that would comply with international standards of accountability and transparency. But with political patronage a major feature of these industries, the MPLA government appears to be dragging its heels. One of the biggest political headaches is the heavily subsidised fuel prices. Sonangol's ageing refinery, built during pre-independence days, cannot supply more than 24% of the country's growing fuel needs. This means that Sonangol has to import the balance, procured at international prices, from wherever it can. Fuel shortages, especially in smaller towns, remain a problem. Property rights, contract enforcement and general commercial rule of law also remain an obstacle to attracting private foreign investment. Foreign businesses' most common complaint is that it is nearly impossible to obtain land legally because of a confusing welter of pre-independence colonial laws and often arbitrary allotments of land to individuals by the politically powerful provincial governors. A new Land Act, promulgated in 2004 by President José Eduardo dos Santos has done little to clear up the red tape, apart from making it easier for government to appropriate communally-held land, local NGOs said. As a result, there is little faith in the Angolan judiciary's powers to enforce the law evenly. "The rule of law cannot be guaranteed by Angola's legal system, which suffers from political interference by vested interests and weak statutes," Heritage House said in its most recent report on the country. As result, the Angolan judicial system does not handle commercial disputes efficiently and, because of high legal fees, most such disputes are settled out of court, it noted. While labour costs are relatively low, Angola's previous dreams of creating a workers' paradisehave led to employment regulations that can make it prohibitively expensive to dismiss any worker. Not surprisingly, corruption is perceived to be pervasive, especially among high government officials and the MPLA leadership. In its most recent ranking, Transparency International placed Angola 142 out of 163 countries, a rating that has much to do with the fact that seven of the 10 richest people in Angola are top government officials. The richest is Dos Santos himself -- people joke that he is the third-richest man in Brazil who is known to have extensive commercial holdings via his wife and other family members in Portugal. guardian.com

I don't know about you guys but I think a 7 year old should have been taught by parents that playing with own saliva or using it as a hair gel is "uuuf" and "not good".

I saw it earlier today and this is a classic.

Originally posted by AAliyah416: Hayem Americans Chose Obama as a democratic presidential nominee. Hayem and Aliyah, the General Election is a different ball game as you are already aware. The democratic primary which is 30% black is not the same as the GE.

Obama's new ad after the beauty queen's pick. McCain still doesn't get it.

^^Don't you think white woman trumps a black man in the General Election? This is serious folks. McCain has played a very dangerous game and it may work for him. 1. He wanted to steal the media spotlight a day after Obama's great speech, and that seems to have worked. 2. He wants to appear as the candidate of change himself by putting a woman on the ticket. Time will tell. 3. He wants to court angry Hillary supporters. Wait and see ... It may get tough from here.

McCain Picks Sarah as his VP This is what I call pandering.

I remember the night I created this thread. After 8 long months, history is made again. Well done my skinny African. Let us get McSame now!

Yeey's sub-clan in Kismayo has completely joined Al-Shabaab as the planning was going on for months to cut ties with the TFG and embrace the Al-Shabaab doctrine. Will Yeey bomb the shyt out of the city? Probably not because Kismayo was never in his hand to begin with. It may get the attention of the Americans, but that usually depends on how the TFG pushes the issue. PS: We already know Xiin is a hardcore anti-TFG, but when Emperor, the other Kismayo-born nomad made that famous "rag iska-dhicin iyo Rabi-ka-cabsi" comment recently against the TFG in a reply to Nephtys, we knew he joined Al-Shabaab for good.

If one was tempted to make a guess, I am sure many would agree Cadoow lacks a broad base of support within the TFG ranks as most ministers and TFG parliamentarians see him as a bungling individual incapable of excelling in any front (war or peace) unlike Gheedi who was at least a security hawk. With that thought in mind, Meles will ,in all probability, order Gabre to stop running around with Axmed Abdisalaan and Co (read: bribery) and respect Yeey's desire to deal with this crisis. As strange as this may sound, I am hearing from insiders that Yeey doesn’t truly want the TFG to go through another PM/President debacle if Cadoow can be brought on board. Yeey’s pressing plan however is to neutralize, at whatever cost, a small number of what he calls “troublemakers” whom he believes have taken control of Nuur Cadde’s guiding principles. Ciyaar weyn ayaa socota ... We shall see where it ends in the coming weeks …

Inside sources say Dr Saleebaan of Buuhoodle may give the two a tough fight in the coming election. He has the "kingmakers" behind him secretly and he is keeping a low profile. We shall see if he can keep the "support" he has till the end. Cheering crowds say goodbye to the candidate as he leaves Galkacyo Airport.

Cirka ayay gashay. Hawada ka fiiri ayadoo lalaysa.

I think that picture is of Looyaan, Somalia's Ambassador to Tanzania?

Abdiraxmaan Lagadheere is indeed General Duke, but that was all in the open for many of us insiders. Having said that, saxib this "public figure" is still SOL nomad and that excuses him of getting his shirt dirtied through name calling. Good luck to Duke. I wonder how it feels to have lunch with the great Ahmedinajad.