But alas all I hear are the same old polarised politics – Christians so convinced that Jesus would vote Republican that they don’t even stop to think about who to vote for.

Or they make it all about a few select moral issues – abortion, gay marriage etc. Now I’m as opposed to abortion anyone, but abortion didn’t disappear during the last 8 years of Bush’s presidency. Very little changed. And isn’t it a moral issue when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or when the poorest members of society struggle to afford basic health care?

Or the protests of “he’ll raise our taxes!”, as if that would be the worst thing in the world. Putting aside the fact that Obama has now pledged to cut taxes for 95% of working families, and that Americans generally pay much less tax than their European counterparts, maybe Jesus wants to see the rich pay more tax.

Once upon a time God gave a group of people a very detailed set of instructions for how their society should function. He instructed them to treat every 50th year as a special year – a year of Jubilee, and on that year all land had to be given back to its original owners. Does that sound like free-market capitalism? If a politician suggested that we’d call them a communist!

So my plea is as simple as this -take some time to think about who you are going to vote for.

People in Europe generally like to hate the states, look down on it, blame it for everything. But I find it refreshing. Everything is new. There is space to breath. There is more of a “go for it” attitude. And everything is so cheap compared to the UK! You can eat out more often, and when you do you get way better service. You can buy a camera lens (Sigma EX 10-20mm) and not feel so guilty.

I might have blogged sooner but my laptop is a little broke at the moment. I used to happily dual boot Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. But a few days ago Vista started refusing to boot on account of a hard drive issue that I suspect was caused by Vista’s inability to share a PC with another OS. If Adobe made Photoshop and Dreamweaver for Linux I would ditch Windows in a breath.

The latest news on the Rwandan job is that I’ll be heading out there at the end of August.