April 5th, 2013 at 6:37 pm » Comments (8)

Here is another good story about the efforts Koreans will go through to honor the memory of Korean War veterans: SEOUL — Kathleen Mischke remembers her father, always a soldier, teaching her to make a bed so tightly that a nickel would bounce off it. She remembers him teaching her to roller skate and singing funny songs, and how he could whistle louder than anybody she knew. She also remembers travelling to Fort Lewis, Wash., with her family to say goodbye as he deployed to South Korea, where he would
Read the Rest…

December 20th, 2012 at 7:28 am » Comments (4)

Below is a South Korean election map that shows that Park Geun-hye pretty much won in every district outside Cholla-do and just barely losing in Seoul: Image from Yonhap News via the Marmot’s Hole. For those that cannot read Korean the red shows Park’s vote percentage and yellow shows Moon Jae-in’s vote percentage.

December 19th, 2012 at 5:26 am » Comments (14)

Yonhap is reporting that exit polling is showing that conservative Korean Presidential candidate Park Geun-hye is likely to win the election by a small margin: SEOUL, Dec. 19 (Yonhap) — Park Geun-hye, the presidential candidate of the ruling conservative Saenuri Party, is expected to win this year’s presidential race by a slim margin Wednesday by securing approximately 50.1 percent of the vote, the nation’s three major broadcasters’ joint exit poll forecast, though other surveys predicted an extremely tight race or a possible win for opposition candidate Moon Jae-in. The joint
Read the Rest…

December 17th, 2012 at 11:53 am » Comments (4)

I won’t hold my breath waiting for the Moon Jae-in campaign to apologize for defaming this woman and launching a siege of her apartment: SEOUL, Dec. 16 (Yonhap) — Police said Sunday that they have failed to find evidence of alleged anti-opposition online comments by a female agent of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), who has come under fire over allegations that she repeatedly made negative comments in cyberspace about main opposition presidential candidate Moon Jae-in over the past three months from her home in southern Seoul to influence the
Read the Rest…

December 15th, 2012 at 6:53 pm » Comments (1)

Considering how Moon Jae-in has been down in the polls against Park Geun-hye it figures that his campaign would have to create some kind of sideshow to stop Park’s momentum: The bitter campaign between presidential candidates Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in turned uglier Friday after the country’s election body filed a lawsuit with prosecutors against Park’s Saenuri Party for employing dirty tricks online. Park, the daughter of the authoritarian President Park Chung-hee and representing conservative hopes of retaining Korea’s most powerful office, vehemently denied the accusations and declared a war
Read the Rest…

December 8th, 2012 at 1:57 am » Comments (21)

It appears that the attacks by the North Korean candidate for the ROK Presidency did nothing to stop Park Geun-hye’s rise in the polls: A KBS survey indicates that ruling Saenuri Party presidential candidate Park Geun-hye is ahead of main opposition Democratic United Party presidential candidate Moon Jae-in in terms of approval rating by a gap wider than the margin of error. According to the survey conducted on 15-hundred adults nationwide, Park polled at 44-point-nine percent in terms of approval rating. That’s seven-and-a-half percentage points higher than Moon who scored
Read the Rest…

December 5th, 2012 at 8:22 am » Comments (10)

Tom Coyner in the Korea Economic Reader has some good commentary on the recent Korean presidential debate: It’s a CAT FIGHT!!  Meow!  Phhhht! Hissss! Hisss! Wow!  What a night!  I was expecting to witness something as dreary as the US presidential debates.  And boy oh boy, did I get that one wrong! Here we had two real and one make-believe presidential candidates on stage, helpfully seated from left to right, as if according to their political leanings.  On the far, far, far-out-of-sight left sat Lee Jung-hee of the Unified Progressive
Read the Rest…

December 3rd, 2012 at 7:41 am » Comments (4)

I am not surprised that the North Koreans are causing another provocation to test the reaction of the US government since the election is over, but I figured they would wait until the ROK election was over December 19th before starting another provocation: Russia and China urged North Korea on Monday not to go ahead with a plan for its second rocket launch of 2012, with Moscow saying the launch would violate restrictions imposed by the U.N. Security Council. North Korea’s state news agency on Saturday announced the decision to
Read the Rest…

November 15th, 2012 at 6:35 am » Comments (1)

It looks like there is a lot of trouble between the two South Korean liberal Presidential candidates as talks between Ahn Cheol-soo and Moon Jae-in have broke down due to squabbling: Liberal presidential candidates and their campaign staff squared off Thursday over how to resume negotiations to pick a single candidate to compete against the ruling conservative hopeful in the December election. Independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo, who suspended ongoing talks the day before and accused the main opposition Democratic United Party (DUP) of trying to manipulate the selection process by
Read the Rest…

November 6th, 2012 at 7:50 am » Comments (14)

I have to wonder after the recent news posted below if Moon Jae-in had anything to do with Seoul National University investigating Korean Presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo for plagiarism? Main opposition Democratic United Party presidential candidate Moon Jae-in and independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo have agreed to field a single contender before the candidate registration on November 25th and 26th. Spokesmen for the two contenders said that Moon and Ahn held one-on-one talks Tuesday evening at Kim Koo Museum and Library in Seoul and reached an agreement of seven points,
Read the Rest…