Some of the bigger events of the night…

It appears that John Locke isn’t, in fact, John Locke. Instead, he’s the counterpart to the infamous Jacob. And Jacob, apparently, is some omniscient do-gooder who tries to heal people and give them reassurance that they have free will. On the flip side, some entertainment websites claim that Jacob could be the evil one between he and Locke and that he is a type of puppet master. I’m not sure, though I think that Jacob falls more along the lines of the good being between he and Locke. My only sincere hope, though, is that the writers don’t blow the entire storyline to smithereens in the first episode of the next season. With the way television writers are today, you can never be sure.

We also saw Ben break out of his killingless-streak as he exacted some degree of revenge on Jacob for never allowing him a face-to-face meeting. There could be some legs to this particular part of the story because of the action of Jacob’s death. You’ll notice that he fell forward onto Ben as he was dying which showed one of the major themes that we see with Jacob throughout the episode – namely that he makes it a point to touch the Oceanic folks that he meets both before and after they are on the island.

I’m not sure what the touching means, but I do believe that it has something to do with his magic (or whatever you want to call it) being transferred to the touchee. The entertaining EW.com review of the episode compared Jacob’s touch to the horcruxes that represent Voldemort’s essence in the Harry Potter series. That’s an interesting concept. For those of you that don’t read Potter out there, in short this means that if all of the people that Jacob touched were to come together, they could recreate him. Interesting concept…

We also saw the probable demise of Juliet on the final episode of the season. I’m hoping that this isn’t true because I think she’s a sympathetic character and one that still has a lot of story left in her. However, she may have set off a chain of events that could possibly bring her back to life. I really don’t have much to say about the whole time warp thing and Faraday’s postulation that human are the inconstant variable that could change the course of history.

Whatever – I guess we’ll see what happens with that in the next season.

One more word on the season finale. I got the distinct impression that it’s going to be very hard for the writers to tie up all of the loose ends in the final season, which is set to begin airing next January.

This indicates that if the Big Three go bust it is their bosses, insular and stuck in their ways, who should be held most responsible. Put simply, for too long they had built bad cars, which were inefficient, unreliable and unattractive and Americans did not want to buy them.

The man makes a point. Everyone knows that foreign cars are much more fuel efficient, definitely more reliable, and usually more stylish than their American counterparts. Let’s put it this way, Ford didn’t earn the nickname of “Found On Road Dead” out of nowhere.

A few years ago (2002) I purchased a 1999 Chevy Blazer. The price was around $15,000 – give or take a few hundred bucks. First of all, the price was way too high for a three year old automobile. Second, since I purchased this machine, I’ve probably put an additional $15,000 into it in repairs. And of those repairs, about half of that expense was to pay for labor!

But the thing is, I’m one of many drivers who have had a financially negative experience with the American automakers. On the flip side, though, I’ve been borrowing my Mother’s spare 2000 Honda Civic for a few months now and not only does it get 31 – 33 miles to the gallon where the Blazer got 18 miles to the gallon, but I’ve not had one problem with it. I drive a lot for my job and since I borrowed the Civic I’ve put about 5,000 miles on it – no problems. With the Blazer, though, traveling that much almost certainly meant that I needed to stop at the shop one weekend for minor repairs.

American made cars are poor quality, energy inefficient, and cost way too much to manufacture. Unless these core problems change, they’ll never reclaim their former dominance in the market.

In terms of style and presentation, McCain is a better off-the-cuff speaker than Obama is – no questions there. This is why Obama refused the various town hall debates with McCain over the summer months. As a speaker, Obama is overly reliant on long pauses as well as “ummm,” “aaaahh,” and “ii…iii…iii,” sounds in between his statements. For those debaters out there, you know that this can sometimes be an unconscious reaction to an unclear mental state or a confusion in train of thought. Hell, I do it quite frequently while I teach! It happens and, unfortunately for Obama, I didn’t like the way he came off while saying it.

In terms of content, Obama had a great point when he said that McCain would give even greater tax breaks to the wealthy. On the flip side, McCain decimated Obama during the Iran discussion when he suggested that the American President would not sit down with the Iranian President without preconditions.

But when it got down to discussions of military strategy (not tactics, mind you), McCain trumped Obama on almost every point. I’m not saying that I agree with every single thing that McCain said, but he absolutely won the debate. To me, it seemed that Obama sometimes got caught in saying anything in order to win the immediate debate. In other words, I heard some contradictions in his speeches that I’m sure none of the media will bring up (as soon as a transcript is available, I’ll try to flesh some of this out in a future post).

In terms of actually putting policy specifics out on the table, Obama failed though this is par for his course. Obama never really speaks in specifics and that’s because he’s still trying to be all things to all people. He will do himself and his campaign a great favor when he starts laying out specifics in terms of his policy. Simply saying that everyone making $250,000 and above will have their taxes raised isn’t good enough. He has to acknowledge that the more you tax a business, the less chance that business has of hiring more employees and increasing the wages of its workers.

Oh, and did anyone notice that Obama suggested a few times throughout the night that he agreed with McCain’s stance on certain issues? McCain only said that Obama was too inexperienced or that he didn’t understand certain issues. Just something interesting that I picked up on.

There was another thing that I didn’t like (and this is really me scolding the country, not the politicians). At one point, Obama said that McCain was wrong when he supported going into Iraq and wrong about the weapons of mass destruction. Talk about a distortion of reality. First and foremost, weapons of mass destruction WERE found in Iraq! Nuclear weapons were not found, but hundreds of chemical weapons were found. These are also weapons of mass destruction! Second, let’s not forget that almost every national politician supported going into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003. To look back five years later and say, “What a bad decision,” does nothing to put the decision in a historical perspective.

The last thing that I’ll say about the debate is that Jim Lehrer did a decent job as moderator and I enjoyed the new back-and-forth format. Jim Lehrer is one of those old school newsmen who doesn’t realize that he’s blatantly partisan while on the air, but I thought he did a good job as moderator. Now, as for Ray Suarez who had the hosting duties on PBS – that’s another story! Talk about a biased, defeatist person…

Finally, I just wanted to point out that I tried to log-on to PickensPlan.com after the debate to be a part of his online chat room or discussion or whatever it was and I couldn’t get on his site! If you’re going to spend the money on airtime to promote an online discussion, then have the bandwidth to handle the capacity! Also, while I was flipping around the television after the debate, I found it funny that both ABC News and CNN were advertising their political coverage on FOX News. Kinda funny when you think about it.

Anyway – what do you think? Who won the debate?