I’m English but I lived in America all through my early teens and have American relatives. Anyway I have found the American election so far to be extremely interesting and wondered what you Americans thought about certain aspects.

- John McCain, He is now the Republican nominee. What do you think of him? Personally I am quite a centrailist. My christianity compells me towards a socialist desire to help the poor and others but my christianity also means that I am conservative when it comes to my morals and standards. I quite like him as he seems reasonably liberal for a conservative.

McCain... IMHO he’s sounding better all the time, that’s for sure. Never did really like him, though some of the stuff that most conservatives are mad at him about I don’t quite figure why (probably because I wasn’t paying attention at the time). Wish Sen. Brownback (R-Kansas) had stayed in, and not just because I’m from Kansas, either....

-Obama, Clinton. What do you guys think of them? Who will win out? Could the loser run as viceP for the other? Even if you areRepublican which would you pick for pres if you had to have one of them?

They’re not going to be eachother’s VP. Despite all the happy-faces, I’m pretty sure they hate eachother.
I was expecting Obama to pull through, but now that someone in the media besides Hannity (who was pounding on this for months) has started talking about Obama’s preacher, he may take a huge hit. Don’t know what, if any, effect his speech will have yet.
Hillary... *shudder*

-The issues. Healthcare? The War? Illegal imigrants?
Healthcare... The last thing we want is to screw up healthcare even more. One of the biggest things we can do to improve things, including cost, is to kick the AMA out of it’s position of supreme arbiter of the Medical Profession with government power. Take away the gov’t power, because the AMA is not part of the government. They’re a dictatorial union which has monopolized healthcare and is actively seeking to control every aspect of the health market, including putting high-quality doctors out of business, because they hurt the business of lower-quality doctors with ties in the upper echelons of AMA.

The War: Cheez... half the idiots complaining about the war don’t comprehend the nature of this war. We’re not fighting an enemy with a "nerve center" there’s no single objective that we can take, no leader to capture. no general to force surrender on. We’re fighting a cellular, disunited enemy. Take out twenty terrorist cells, and none of the others even bat an eye. Their ties to the others are extremely limited. How can we speed it up? Take out more cells faster. How? More troops to take on more cells at once. Oh, wait.... I thought a surge wasn’t supposed to work? (it did work) On the other hand, we are never going to wipe out terrorism. That’s fighting an idea. You can’t destroy an idea. You can hide it, suppress it, but you cannot destroy it. Even if we were to take out every terrorist in the world, more would eventually show up.
As for being in Iraq,
1. We’re following UN mandate. Hussein defied the UN by refusing UN inspection of various facilities, and the UN ordered him to let them in or be invaded. He didn’t. The UN never sent it’s little blue-helmeted wanna-be soldiers, we went. Along with most of the rest of NATO.
2. There were weapons. The media throws a fit because "we have found no weapons." No, we didn’t find the weapons themselves, but we found the facilities, records of wmd production, paperwork for rushing the wmds out of Iraq into another country-- Syria, I think.
3. If we were after the oil, we’d have gotten every scrap of it a long time ago. In fact, we’ve probably spent more money on the war that we would’ve gotten from the oil in the first place.

Half of our illegal immigration problem is that no-one in Washington actually has a clue what our current policy is, let alone any interest in solving something that’s ripe for political exploitation. I’ve been studying this for Debate, and I’ve found contradictory statements from the same gov’t departments issued on the same day, neither of which was released as corrections to the other; they were just issued without any regard to the fact that they just said the exact opposite.My position: Immigration is a wonderful thing. Illegal immigration is not, primarily because we have no control over who gets in-- Juan the honest Mexican who just wants to feed his family, and is sometimes even willing to go back to Mexico once he’s worked enough to support his family, as opposed to bringing them here, or Tariq al-Terrorist, who wanders in from Mexico or Canada. We need to expand legal immigration substantially, especially employment-based immigration, which is currently limited to 5k permanent unskilled and 66k temporary skilled /unskilled people per year... when we need an estimated 400-500k employment-based immigrants just to keep the economy going.

-Torture. I have made a special section for this issue as it has been burning at me ever since Bush’s veto. What is your oppinion on the use of torture? Personally I believe it goes against everything America should be. It’s time America decided quite how far it’s willing to go down a dark path in the name of security and this could be the decisive issue.

The US should not torture. (Heck, no one should.) However rough interrogation.... that’s different. Even very rough interrogation. But somewhere, there’s a fuzzy line between beating the snot out of someone to try to save lives, and torturing someone. Better to use rough interrogation, but not so rough as to approach the line too closely. Waterboarding... I don’t know much about it, but from what I understand, it would be close to the line, but not too close. Of course, then one has to remember that there’s different pain thresholds. One person’s mild beating might be another’s torture, simply because the one can handle much more pain than the other.
A distressingly unclear and difficult point. I expect that there’s no real "brightline" that can be drawn here.

yes but the thing is, how often does someone who wants to rob a house or kill someone have say, blackmarket connections. I have no idea how I would find a gun illegally.

I think gun control does need to be strengthened somewhat responsible citizens with little or no criminal record and that can pass a psychiatric evaluation really should be able to have guns but others...

Mr. L, how the tech would they know whether you had a gun or not?