Whiskey Jacques is a great place in Sun Valley to go and and listen to live music.

This video about Rawlins Wyoming shows a town whose main lines of work according to a very nice woman who sold me a coffee there are the refinery or the penitentiary.

What a paradox to leave Aspen where the average home is $6 million and this trailer park in a place nearby.

What you will see in this video, is that what movies show about America…is actually true.

Is America really under attack to the point that the life of American citizens has to be so hard? This morning I had the horrible experience of taking my son Tom to renew his passport to the American Consulate in Madrid, and ordeal that took three hours and it´s not finished. My son is a US Citizen and his passport had just expired. My son is also a Spanish citizen, so I have recently been exposed to the process of renewing both his passports and I am sorry to say that the American system is both awful and humiliating.

First of all, the access to the American Consulate in Madrid is a mission impossible in itself. Forget about WiFi access at the consulate. Not only is there no WiFi there, but there´s no phone usage because the Americans are so terrified of terrorists that they don´t allow you to bring any electronic devices into the consulate, not even a Nokia phone. Moreover, once you come in, Americans and non Americans are thrown into one small room –that is probably unsafe in case of fire– in which consulate employees only appear as animals in the zoo out of glass cages. I wanted to photograph or film this crowded for my blog, but, of course, I couldn´t as that in itself would constitute a security threat so there´s no way the overcrowded conditions can be reported other than by my description.

And once in, what you have to do to renovate a simple expired passport is out of this world. In the case of my son we failed to get his passport renewed because my presence, his presence and his expired passport –which was of course all that was needed in Spain to renew his Spanish passport– was not enough. The American Consulate requires that his mother had to come as well, that we had the social security card and birth certificate and both his mother and I had to swear in front of a consul (who is behind the thickest bullet proof glass that I have seen in my life) that all we said was true. This American swearing thing just drives me nuts. Why is just signing not enough?

In the meantime, the application for the passport renewal is very confusing itself. Nobody helps you to fill it up. All embassy employees are in glass cages so they cannot see very well what you have if you show it to them and there are so many people waiting that the whole place feels like a crowded subway that is not moving.

Will America one day learn not to be terrorized anymore? Will America learn to stop seeing most people as potential enemies? I certainly hope that Barack Obama not only wins the election, but changes the rethoric of fear of George W Bush that has hurt USA so much.

Image via WikipediaI just read that 406 people have been arrested in the States by the FBI in “Operation Malicious Mortgage”. Just in case there were any doubts, this was part of the announcement:

“To people who have committed fraud or are contemplating doing so, FBI Director Robert Mueller said: ‘We will find you, you will be investigated and you will be prosecuted’.”

And I guess he means it because 406 people is a huge amount of detainees. According to Wikipedia USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world, one in 32 grown ups are in jail or parole. I lived in the States for 18 years and I was sorry to see how popular it was to be tough on crime, rather relying on education and prevention. Having lived in Europe for over 10 years now I believe that, even though we err on the side of leniency, it is best to invest in education rather than incarceration.

I find it hard to believe that when the FBI arrests 406 people that they make no mistakes. I keep hearing horror stories of friends of mine who get arrested for hours just trying to enter USA, generally for cases of mistaken identities. And then there are the cases of people who were executed or on death row and found innocent. I know that in USA people think of justice more as a form of revenge than a chance to readjust people to society and I know that the subprime scandal has led to enormous losses, but if they are really going to put people in jail, how about starting with the people at the Federal Reserve who were asleep at the wheel?

I recently posted my personal rule for my kids when it comes to having boyfriends or girlfriends sleep over: they have to be dating for at least one year. If that happens to be at the age of 16, then so be it. If they’re going to have sex, I prefer they do it in the safety of our home. But when I spoke with an American friend of mine about this the other day, he said that in the United States, I could be put in jail for that. I was shocked. He explained that in the U.S, there are laws that, for example, make it illegal for two 17-year-olds to have sex, and who if caught in the act, could be arrested. After finding out that for a simple blog post I could be considered an accessory to this crime, I wanted some more answers. I asked Maria Frick to help me research the topic, and she found that apparently U.S law has stayed true to its Puritan roots, though what Americans do behind closed doors, or on Spring Break vacations, is another story.
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Friends of mine who have met Barack Obama are raving about him and they say that I will be as impressed when I meet him. I am a trustee of the Clinton Foundation and still think that the world was a better place when the Clinton´s were mostly running it and would like to see that happen again. Having said this I am intrigued about Obama and it´s a testimonial of the power of the internet today that the only contact I have had with him so far has come through Youtube and lately because he accepted me as a friend in Twitter.

Between the widespread availbility of firearms and mass murders.