Month: October 2008

Will Al Franken pull it out in Minnesota?

For all you Gilbert & Sullivan fans, Family Guy creator Seth MaCFarlane shows us that revenge can be very funny as well as sweet:

The really funny thing is that both these men work for Rupert Murdoch in the entertainment business, and specifically comedy. Billo’s the expert at farce and self parody. Poor Seth MacFarlane must content himself merely with satire.

I don’t know how much you read Daily Kos, but Markos has been calling for his ranks to ‘leave everything on the road’ in an effort to win every last available seat in Congress. The Arizona Republic characterizes his attitude as having the “unseemly scent of wild-eyed vengeance.” Markos has raised over two million dollars for House and Senate races.

I have been quietly uncomfortable with Markos’ tone as he asks for total decimation of the Republican caucus. I haven’t said anything because I agree with him, totally. What the Arizona Republic, and other conservatives, need to understand is that the hunger for justice can easily bleed into a hunger for revenge. And Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and Santorum have left Washington DC as one giant crime scene which, come January 20th, should be literally festooned with yellow police tape. But it won’t be.

There is too much complicity on the Democratic side. There are too many denizens of the Village that value forgiveness (in the name of nonpartisanship) over the law and the Constitution. Barack Obama has too many big problems to tackle to get sidetracked with a truth and reconciliation project. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached. They weren’t, and they almost definitely will not be. That means that our only real source of justice is at the ballot box on Tuesday. Election Day is the day when the American people can pass their verdict on the crimes, corruption, and incompetence of the Bush administration and of conservatism in general. Either the people send a loud and resounding message, or we’ll never truly let the world know that we understand what we let happen to our country on our watch and that we condemn it.

Most people have spent the last four years working hard trying to feed their families, save for college, make a little extra for retirement, and enjoy the little things in life. Others of us have spent the last four years, every single day, documenting the atrocities of the Bush/Cheney administration and the Frist/DeLay Congress, and screaming ‘No, No, No, that is illegal, that is immoral, that is a LIE.’ We know the crime scene better than anyone, and we thirst for justice. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. That is the universal underlying faith of the blogosphere and the activist left. We know the crimes, but we also know the shortcomings of the bipartisan consensus in Washington. We know they are incapable of giving us the full measure of justice.

To be sure, the commentariat of the Beltway no longer argues with us. They have conceded that we were right all along. There were no WMD. The war in Iraq was a costly lie and a moral monstrosity. Guantanamo was wrong. Torture is wrong. We were being spied on. The Republicans are incompetent and corrupt. And Bush is the worst president ever. We have won the argument, but we will still be denied justice. And because we know we won’t get justice, our only outlet is to defeat those the Establishment won’t convict.

They should hope as many Republicans lose as possible. Perhaps then, our thirst will be sated.

Thank God Ashley Todd is free at last!

A McCain campaign volunteer accused of making up a story about being robbed and assaulted in Pittsburgh by a man who disliked her McCain bumper sticker will enter a program for first-time offenders.

Under the deal announced in court Thursday, 20-year-old Ashley Todd will be released from jail and required to undergo mental health treatment. Her record eventually will be expunged as long as she goes to treatment, stays out of trouble and keeps authorities apprised of her whereabouts.

Todd, of College Station, Texas, has been jailed since Oct. 24, when police say she admitted making up a story about being robbed near a Pittsburgh bank and then assaulted a man who scraped a backward letter “B” into her cheek.

Todd, who was charged with making a false police report, did not have to enter a plea.

Police say Todd couldn’t explain why she invented the story.

Maybe her therapist can help her explain why she did it. My guesses are either multiple personality disorder or transient global amnesia. Severe mental trauma like the impending election of our first black president could trigger that you know. That might be enough to make anyone carve backwards letters on their face and imagine a rape fantasy with a large menacing black male thug.

But in any event, at least she won’t have a criminal record hanging over her head for the rest of her life, and isn’t that the most important thing? And she won’t have to miss mid terms or this weekend’s kegger! Who says there’s no good news out there in the world anymore?

Welcome to Friday Foto Flogging, a place to share your photos and photography news. We were inspired by the folks at European Tribune who post a regular Friday Photoblog series to try the same on this side of the virtual Atlantic. We also thought foto folks would enjoy seeing some other websites so each week we’ll introduce a different photo website.

This week’s theme is All Things Halloween. Spooky things, dressed-up things, candy things, orange things, Thing things … 😉

Website of the Week: Yes We Carve — what happens when people like Obama and carving pumpkins.

olivia's Scary Stuff

	Walk in the woods Click image for larger version
	Pumpkin … Click image for larger version
	… at night Click image for larger version
	Carcassonne Click image for larger version

AndiF’s Halloween Scenes

	Headless Horseman coming to Sleepy Hollow? Click image for larger version
	Home of the Great Pumpkin? Click image for larger version
	Haunted Gas Station? Click image for larger version

• Next Week’s Theme: Light: Presence, absence, bright, dim, straight, bent … anyway you want to shine a little bit of it on us.

Info on Posting Photos

When you post your photos, please keep the width at 500 or less for the sake of our Bootribers who are on dial-up. If you want to post clickable thumbnails but aren’t sure how, check out this diary:
Clickable Thumbnails. If you haven’t yet joined a photo-hosting site, here are some to consider: Photobucket, Flickr, ImageShack, and Picasa.

Previous Friday Foto Flogs

Inaugural Foto Flog	Song Titles, Song Lyrics	Favorite Things
Red	Jest for Fun
Critters!	In the Frame
Silhouettes and Shadows	Water

While “Joe the Dumber” sleeps, dreaming of Republican’t paranoia, there goes a lobbyist, turning again to Washington in order to relieve…

hi  sc   li   en    to     fb      il       li        on         so          of           de            bt             wi              th               yo                 ur               money           body armor               budget                levies                healthcare               FEMA             education

CBS/NYT Poll:

Mr. Obama continues to have a significant advantage on such crucial issues as the economy, health care, and the war in Iraq.

The survey found that opinions of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have hardened considerably, as 9 in 10 voters who said that they had settled on a candidate indicated that their minds were made up; a growing number of them called it “extremely important” that their candidate win the election on Tuesday.

About half of each of the candidate’s supporters said that they were “scared” of what the other candidate would do if elected. Just 4 percent of voters were undecided, and when they were pressed to say whom they were leaning toward, the shape of the race remained essentially the same.

Bolstered by the fiscal crisis and deep concerns about the direction of the country, Mr. Obama has seemed to solidify the support he has gained in recent months. When likely voters were asked whom they would vote for in an expanded field that included several third-party candidates, Mr. Obama got the support of 52 percent of them, Mr. McCain 39 percent, former Senator Bob Barr of Georgia 1 percent, and Ralph Nader 2 percent.

Obama over 50%, McCain under 40%? I will frikking take it!!

Got any predictions?

Yes, you read me right. No, I am not out of my mind. In fact when I filled out my ballot and sent it in, I felt better about that decision than I have about pretty much any decision since I married my wife.

But it’s true. I didn’t vote for Barack Obama.

Well, who did I vote for?

You’ll have to come inside and hear the story to find out . . .
Meet Meredith*. She’s bright, funny, intelligent, irreverent, sometimes lazy, occasionally makes mistakes and has me wrapped around her finger.

I voted for Meredith  She is eleven years old, and my wife and I are her legal guardians.

Merry’s mother Brittney was a cousin of some people who used to live in our apartment complex. My son Jeff started dating her when she was 15.  As time went on, we started to learn a bit more about Britney. Her mother was murdered when Brittney was very young. She didn’t know her father. She passed from relative to relative, never staying with any one relative for any length of time. She never really had a sense of family or stable home. As I understand it, it’s not uncommon for girls in situations like that to have babies so they can have someone who will love them and they can feel a family bond with. I don’t know if that was in Brittney’s mind, but one day our son came to us with a couple of startling facts:

First, Brittney was pregnant.

Second, he wasn’t the father.

Third, there was “a good chance” the baby’s father was black.

Needless to say we hadn’t been expecting news like this, but we coped. We took Brittney in, gave her a place to stay, went to the hospital with her. The picture of Jeff holding this newborn girl in his arms is still on our wall. Brittney named the baby after her slain mother.

Merry spent the first eighteen moths of her life in our house. Even after Jeff and Brittney broke up, Brittney lived in our basement and raised Merry there. Merry called us “Grandpa” and “Grandma.” But eventually Brittney’s rootlessness caught up with her, and she moved on, but we still saw Merry almost every weekend for years. At the start it was just a visit for a few hours. Then she would stay the weekend. Then she stayed three days, four days at a time. And on a May day about six years ago, she came to visit and just stayed. We did’t mind at all. In fact we enjoyed having her, but we were concerned because she was there with no legal status. What if she needed medical care? What if our whitebread family decided to take her on vacation and had to try to explain the presence of this dark-skinned girl with a different last name?

One day Merry and I were walking home from the library, a distance of a little over a quarter mile. I had just gotten inside the house and we’d taken our shoes off when there was a knock on the door. I opened it and found myself face to face with one of Seattle’s finest. I don’t remember exactly what questions he asked, but the basis for his visit was that someone had seen us walking  and was “concerned” that I might . . . well let’s not put too fine a point on it, they were worried that I had kidnapped Merry. I don’t remember what I said to the officer, but it satisfied him and he went about his business. But I still worried what would have happened if he had decided I had something nefarious in mind.

In those days Brittney would come visit on the weekends. Sometimes she’d show up every weekend, sometimes she would skip a week, and as time went on her visits grew less and less regular. Finally my wife and I spoke to a lawyer friend who agreed to draw up non-parental custodial papers. We would be responsible for Merry and could legally put her on our insurance, but in no way did we want to take Merry away from Brittney, because in some way I think we realized she was about all Brittney had left. We were careful to say no, we were not adopting Merry, we loved having her in our home, but we needed to do this to provide legal protection for ourselves, for Merry, and for Brittney. Brittney would still be her mother and we would never block access to her, and if Brittney ever was in a situation where she could take Merry and care for her again, we would go back to being weekends-only grandparents.

Brittney signed the custodial papers. She visited twice after that, and from the day of that second visit to this we have not seen her again.

So Merry has grown up in our house, with our values. She thinks George Bush is “stupid,” which is a catch-all phrase for “I don’t like this.” She doesn’t like John McCain either. See, I told you she was smart! She is as much our daughter as our own daughter, who she knows as Auntie Lizzie. She still thinks of Jeff as “Daddy,” and in fact is a very lucky girl because through the non-custodial parent process we got to meet her biological father, who has turned into a family man with two other children. He lives about 50 miles away and comes to see Merry whenever he can. So she has two daddies!

Now, you may wonder why I dragged you through Merry’s history and what this has to do with the election.

Merry is the daughter of a teen mother with a troubled childhood of her own. Statistics say that children with a background like that often fall into similar circumstances. We did not want that to happen to Merry. She is very bright and very talented and a natural-born leader in school and on the playground. (We call her “Merry, Your Cruise Director,” a hat tip to Lauren Tewes’ character on the TV series The Love Boat because she’s always organizing some kind of activity among her peers.) It would be a complete shame to lose her to the streets when we had it in our power to do something about it.

Yes, I filled in the little oval next to Barack Obama’s name, but I was really voting for Merry. I was voting so she could look at the president of the United States, who also had a black father and a white mother, and could see a role model who could show her that, yes, she can be anything she wants to be if she works for it. So far she has luckily been spared the sting of racism in her personal life, and I want her to grow up in a country where that is the norm rather than something that has to be qualified by saying, “but maybe that’s because we live in Seattle and we don’t have much of that here.” I want her to grow up in a world where neither her origins, nor her gender, nor the color of her skin, nor anything else about her holds her back.

I’m casting my vote for Barack Obama, but I’m doing it for Merry, so she will grow up in a better world than I’ve had, even though in many ways my life has been pretty good.

And I’m voting for Max, Jeff’s oldest son. He’s seven years old and loves to come up with reasons why I can’t just turn into a zombie and eat his brains if I feel like it. (“It has to be night outside!” is his favorite so far.) Max is a great kid, but he has some anger management issues that he’s working through. I’m voting for Max so he can receive the help he needs when he needs it to grow out of the anger.

And I’m voting for Janice and Rita, my sons’ daughters, both four years old. Not only did I fill in the oval for Obama and Biden, I did the same for Christine Gregoire for Washington governor. I want my granddaughters — all three of them — to grow up with strong woman who can serve as role models for them. Women like Gregoire, or Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, our two senators, or Darcy Burner, who excelled at Microsoft before she decided to take on Dave Reichert. Or, of course, Michelle Obama, a successful woman in her own right.

And I’m voting for DJ, my youngest grandchild. He’s barely a year old and doesn’t do much of anything but eat, sleep, cry, walk a little and soil his diapers a lot, so we have no idea what his future is going to be like, but whatever it is, I want it to be the best possible.

And I’m voting for Sam, one of my co-workers, who just took the oath of American citizenship a few days ago. Unfortunately due to some bureaucratic snafu she was not able to register to vote, which she was very much looking forward to. So this vote is for Sam too, in the hope that people won’t look down on her or her daughters just because Sam was born thousands of miles away and doesn’t speak fluent, idiomatic English.

And I’m voting for Rita, my mother. She passed away just before New Years’ after being in a nursing home for over a year because of a stroke she was never going to recover from. We knew it, she knew it, the people at the nursing home knew it. This vote is in her memory so that people in her situation can get the health care they need and not have to put my sister through financial hell to figure out how to pay for the care. It could be me someday. It could be you.

And finally, I’ll admit to voting for myself. I got out of apathy and into the political process because I could see the damage Bush and his crime family were doing to the country. So I can’t wait for us to get started undoing the damage of the last eight years. But I’m also doing it because I have diabetes. I’ve had it for years, and while I haven’t suffered anything worse than a bit of diminished sensation in my feet so far, I know that in some ways I’m living on borrowed time. Even if we start on January 21st to open up lines of stem cell research and other therapies that are currently blocked by our Luddite administration, I have to hope sufficient progress will be made toward a cure before the diabetes irreversibly damages my body. I would like to be able to bore DJ’s grandkids with stories of what it was like in the old days. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance, but I know that under Republican rule the odds go down every day.

Yes, I cast my ballot to elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. And yes, I voted for myself, but I also voted for those I know and those I love who can’t do it for themselves.

* All the names in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

Like others I know, I have been vacillating between certainty that McCain can’t win and fear that he will.  Mostly I believe the long Republican nightmare is over – Obama is too good a candidate to lose to such a pathetic figure as John Sidney McCain.  But to help control my anxiety over the next few days, I have constructed a formula that will tell me when I really have something to worry about, and I thought I would share it with you.

Everyday (yes, more than once) I look at one or two websites that does a ‘poll of polls’.  I like TalkingPointsMemo.com best because they weight the polls by sample size.  I look at the crucial “battleground” states that pollsters have not already assumed will be won by one candidate or the other.  I assume McCain will win every one of those that Obama is trailing or has a lead of five points or less.  (For instance, TPM shows Obama ahead in Florida by 47 to 44.7.  Since that lead is less than 5, I assume McCain will win it.)  I tell myself I will only get anxious when McCain has enough states under this formula to bring Obama below the 270 electoral votes required to win.  For now, I am happy to report, this seems a long way off.

There are scenarios where Obama could lose Pennsylvania and still get to 270, but McCain is so far behind there now (57.7 to 41.7), I am assuming Obama wins Pennsylvania.  Including Pennsylvania and all the other safe Obama states gets to 259 electoral votes.  Thus, to get to 270, Obama only needs 11 electoral votes from among these states: Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9), Missouri (11), Montana (3), North Dakota (3), Indiana (11), North Carolina (15), Virginia (13), Ohio (20), and Florida (27).  Obviously there are a lot of ways to get 11 electoral votes from those possibilities.  But applying my formula, I give McCain Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, (several of which Obama leads, but by less than 5 percent).

Obama’s leads in the remaining battlegrounds are: Nevada – 8%; New Mexico – 10%; Colorado – 6%; and Virginia – 5.7%.

Any one of Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, or Florida would secure Obama 270 electoral votes, but he could lose all of those and still get to 270 with Colorado and either New Mexico or Nevada.

But it seems very likely that Obama will win Virginia, and if he wins both Pennsylvania and Virginia, he wins the election.  Those are the states I am currently focused on for anxiety reduction.  The polls close in Virginia at 7pm eastern time and in Pennsylvania at 8 (7pm in Indiana, 7:30 in Ohio and North Carolina, 8 in Florida and Missouri]).  So it could be an early election night, even if we don’t trust exit poll-based projections and wait for actual vote counts!