Change machine

"Change we can believe in," is the Barack Obama promise, and a spoof video pictured a young female supporter coming up to Obama and demanding change ... for her dollar. Remember when ODS was demanding change? It, too, based its election campaign on grand promises. What voters didn't know was that, once elected, ODS would mainly be demanding change from investors' billions of dollars. Rumor has it that one prominent ODS politician hosted a party recently to celebrate how much of this loose change has accumulated in his foreign bank account. ODS is also producing another change machine at Czech Railways by converting it into the second ČEZ - a gift for politicians that keeps on giving. Where does all this lead? To an embarrassing defeat in the elections for ODS, probably, and to a victory by Social Democrats who are demanding - you got it - change. But will they want the Obama kind of change, or the infectious ODS version? [Czech Republic České dráhy United States of America ČSSD]