-TSS-

He has really aged. He even looks like his age, which couldn't be said of his years in office.

2.5m is a lot of people but out of the population of the USA it is still less than 1%. Wait till you get to the European levels of muslim-population, 5-10% or even more, and let's then return to this topic.

The Economist always thinks that reducing the taxes of super wealthy people is a good idea. A classical example of thinking that if you let the rich revel at the table as much as they wish some crumbs will fall off the table for the poor to eat too. Having said that, the top-tax for the wealthy in France, 75%, advocated by their new President is way over the top of any reasonable level.

One anomaly of the US elections is that because of the time-zones the votes are already being counted and results being published from the east while people are still going out to vote in the west. I guess that in a very clear election like in 1984 or in 1972 the winner had already collected enough electoral college votes before the polls were closed in the west.

I'm sure that Romney is not very happy to hear statements like this one in these days when millions of hesitant voters have not made up their minds about which one of the candidates to vote for. People who agree with statements like this one are the ones who are very unlikely to vote for Democratics in the first place.

The storm has caused that much damage in the East-Coast that even postponing the election-day is not ruled out. However, that would have to be decided by Congress.

The idea of a state church is really an absurd one and most countries which have had such a system are moving away from it. Not least because it would be wrong towards citizens who want to have nothing to do with the religion of the so-called established church and would end up supporting it indirectly by their tax money.

What are the latest predictions for the Senate and House of Representative elections? I mean, how likely is it that the winner of the presidential election ends up being a lame duck unable to do really anything because the opposing party controls Congress?

In the Scandinavian countries it is easy to keep track of how many adherents the main religion has as the church is like a club where you either belong and pay the membership-fee or don't belong and don't have to pay anything. In many other countries, in almost all other countries to be more precise, the church counts you as an adherent to their religion if you were born to parents who are adherents to the religion. It doesn't matter how religious or irreligios you are.

What I find truly amazing, or perhaps worrying is a more fitting word, is that 80% of the population here in Finland pay 1% or even more of their annual income just to support the so-called established church. I find it truly amazing, I really do, don't you too?

I would like to know what is the situation regarding this issue over there in Canada and the USA. Namely, we in the Scandinavian countries traditionally belong to the Evangeligal-Lutheran church which levies taxes or we can opt out of it, which I have done as I turned 18, but the taxes amount to 1,00-1,70% of the annual income and amazingly over 80% of the population still pay that price. I know that a lot of Scandinavians have settled in Canada and northern United States and they are traditioanlly Lutherans. Do their churches have this tax-collection system or do the churches have to find their finances elsewhere? TBH, I can't really fathom out how can churches which don't levy taxes finance themselves. I know that the Catholic Church is a huge worldwide institution with a lot of wealth and it can finance its sub-branches elsewhere in the world but how do other churches finance themselves if they don't collect taxes? Here in Finland the church-taxes are anywhere between 1-1.7% of your annual income depending on the congregation. I just can't believe that the majority of the population readily pay such an amount of money just to throw it away to things like paying the bishops' wages.

If any president helps to create a society where religion does not play as big a role as it still does in the USA then that president is worth all the support he gets. Unfortunately, such a president is still somewhere there in the future.

You are a westerner and therefore your mindset is like that of a westerner. However, vast chunks of this planets are not what we would call west and the attitudes to everything in life differ very much. We in the west (yes, I do consider Finland to belong to the west) take it for granted that adults can make up their mind about their religious adherence no matter which religion they were introduced into as children. That's how it should be all over the world. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that. You can be the President of the United States, the most powerful country on Earth, but if you are born a muslim then you are a muslim, or an apostate.

You completely miss the point. In religions even babies are members and they are not asked if they want to be members or not. It wasn't that long ago, only 100 years or so, that in Christianity if you were baptized into one religion that was your stigma for life, no matter what you thought about religion when you were grown up. Fortunately we are past that phase in the countries where the Christian faith is still the largest one. The same development will happen in the Muslim-countries as well. Whether it takes 10,20,50 or 100 years is anyone's guess.

He's a muslim as he was born as a muslim. No matter what you say later in life. If you are born a muslim then you are a muslim. Of course you can become an apostate but that is a bit more serious issue.

The margin is so close at the moment that given the fact that the elctoral system favours the Republicans we might have another election where the candidate with fewer votes than his opponent wins the majority of the electoral college votes and is thereby elected. I hope that is not going to happen but the closer the margin is the more possible such an outcome would be.

The Chinese are little by little taking over the world.

Indeed, English is grammatically closer to even a language like Hindi than it is to Finnish. Having said all that, we in Finland used to think that our language must be one of the most difficult ones to learn, a kind of secret language that no outsider gets in on, and that opinion persisted until the 1990's when our country started receiving immigrants from all across the world and as a result many of them have learned the language because of living here but still destroying the myth of our language being impossible to learn with its 15 or 16 cases. Oh they must be very academic those people who learn such a difficult language? Not at all, ordinary workers from all walks of life but all of them have gone through the effort of learning the language. Sadly, there are a lot of immigrants who don't speak any language intelligible to Finnish people, be it Finnish, English or any European language. To their detriment, we don't speak Somali here in Finland.

Time and time again the Republicans fail to convince the Latinos to vote for them even though in many respects regarding values the Latinos are closer to the Republicans than the Democrats. It seems to be indelible in people's minds that as the Latinos are generally poorer than the US population on average so they are more at home voting for the Democrats. Florida, a state which is forecast to be the first in the US where the Latinos will become the single largest demographic-group, is going Obama's way even though as long as the Comunists are in power in Cuba one would expect it to go every time to the Republicans as they are deemed as tougher on Cuba.

I think it is wrong to tag all people who are against immigration as racists just because some of them are racist but; I dare say, a minority are against immigration because they fear that some mystical national unity or purity of the nation is under threat. The vast majority of people who are either against immigration or at least very sceptical towards it are so because of economic factors. The debate on immigration here in Europe differs a lot from that of yours in North-America simply because you are such a magnet for immigrants so you really have to do some picking and choosing, if you let anyone in who is willing to come to the USA or Canada you would be inundated with immigration. As you get to pick and choose you obviously choose the ones who are useful to your countries. I'm not saying that a country like Canada would not accept immigration on humanitarian grounds as well, on the contrary, but the work-based immigration easily outnumbers humanitarian immigration. here in Europe, especially in a country like Finland, we get a lot more of those immigrants who really contribute nothing and who are not seen as an asset to the society but a drain on it. As we do really have plenty of our own citizens who contribute nothing but we can't do anything about them, there is really no need to import more similar people.

Under the Canadian immigration-laws it is more than likely that your immigrants are generally better behaved and otherwise very welcomable(I wonder if there is such a word) than immigrants here in Europe. It would be a miracle if IT-engineers from India caused more trouble than the mainstream-population. Here in Europe we have illiterate peasants who want a sharia-law. They are probably the ones that Canada rejected.

In the current economic situation it would be quite an exception if Obama won the elction as people usually turn for the alternatives when things are not going well. This is what happened to Bush senior against Clinton 20 years ago. It is the economy, stupid, was the catchphrase of the time.

They should change the voting-system from the current winner-takes-all-system to a proportional system in every state. If I'm not completely mistaken, two states divide their electoral college-votes proportionally but the other 48 follow the winner-takes-all-system which encourages voting apathy especially if you happen to support a candidate who has no hope of a majority in the state you live in.

Canada is such a popular destination of immigration from all over the world that it can pick and choose which immigrants it wants and which ones it rejects. If Canada allowed everyone who would like to live in Canada to move to Canada its population would be 1bn so it is only understandable that very strict laws concerning immigration are in place. North-America attracts the best brains from all over the world, therefore xenophobia is rarer there than in Europe or at least it is based on different reasons. In Europe anti-immigration is often caused by a feeling that the immigrants in the European countries too often lack any skills that would contribute to the societies and immigrants are more of a liability or a drain on society rather than an asset.

I think it is funny that both Christianity and Islam implicitly hint that the life they offer is miserable as their reward of a paradise differs completely from this mundane existence. I wonder is there some sort of masochism-gene implanted in the human psyche as people take pride in telling how much they have suffered. Similar with religions; a cult which believes that the main-stream religion is too soft and that cult promises to make your life as miserable as possible with rewards of a better life after death enjoys a lot of popularity.