I still can't quite believe we elected a guy this awesome.

I took my family over to a friends house, where there was a small gathering of white-wine-sipping, arugula-eating Hollywood Liberals gathered to watch the election results. The adults watched MSNBC and talked shop (movies and real estate) while the kids watched Anchors Aweigh in the other room.

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For my fellow Californians, zodmicrobe reminds me that there is an important proposition on the ballot tomorrow, Proposition 8, which seeks to amend the California constitution to make gay people second-class citizens. This proposition was rammed into the ballot by the Mormon church, which has spent tens millions of dollars in misleading advertising to get people to vote for it. It's a might confusing in this season of "Yes We Can" to vote "No" on something, but there you have it, NO ON 8.

Non-Californians, disregard, and feel free to marry someone of your own sex (should it be legal in your state).

If Colin Powell's endorsement didn't sway you, if Obama's economic policies don't convince you, if his sure and steady demeanor in the face of crisis doesn't assure you, if his dedication to repairing our country's reputation doesn't inspire you, if his plan for combating global warming and reducing our dependence on foreign oil doesn't make you proud, if his soaring rhetoric doesn't thrill you, if his good looks and charisma don't attract you --

-- won't you at least please heed the call of the good people of Obama, Japan?

The Republicans aren't waiting for November to steal the election this time around -- they're attempting to do it right now, as you read this. For decades, the Republican philosophy has been: we will run as populists but rule as aristocrats. If people understand who we are, they will never vote for us, so we must lie to them about who we are. If they still don't vote for us, we will steal the election. If we can't steal enough votes to win the election, we will challenge the vote-counters to throw out all the Democratic votes we can. If it looks like even that won't be enough, we will, on no legal ground whatsoever, force the issue to a court we are confident will support us -- especially if the judges on that court were appointed by a Republican. If it looks like even that won't be enough, we will brazenly attempt to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters, using the most underhanded, dishonest, illegal tactics imaginable, all the while pretending that it is, in fact, we who are being wronged.  Finally, if all that fails and a Democrat actually wins an election by an overwhelming majority, we will immediately seek to remove that Democrat from office by any means necessary.  

(This is, of course, why Republicans hate Clinton -- after years of concentrated effort to remove him from office, he stubbornly refused to go.)
 

In 2000, I supported Gore, although he, like Dukakis, like Mondale, was a better man than he was a candidate. It was painful to watch the debates between him and Bush, with Bush stumbling over simple sentences and Gore tetchy and schoolmarmish. I didn't hold my nose when I voted for Gore, but I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about it. Bush horrified me from the very beginning. And hey, does anybody remember the John McCain of 2000? That guy might have had a shot. I remember seeing him on SNL in 2002 and thinking "Hey, this guy isn't so bad, if he had run against Gore that would have been a real contest."

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...great big piles of bullshit one day grow.

I don't want to make this an all-Rachel-Maddow-all-the-time blog (although I can think of many worse things for a blog to be), but the GOP is using the ACORN thing to try to steal the election before it even takes place.  It's an important story you will hear more of as the election moves forward, and you will find no better summary of the issues involved than this segment of Maddow's show where she discusses the whole thing with Jonathan Alter.

Seriously, as long as Rachel Maddow is on television, I may have a reason to turn it on now and again. I love this encounter with National Review guy David Frum, who decides, for some reason, to try to ambush Maddow on her own show. Maddow, obviously not one to be cowed, performs some admirable televisual ju-jitsu on Frum, easily deflecting his attack, turning it back on him and making him look like a complete idiot. Frum, after eight years of ramming his obscene neo-conservative agenda without the slightest question from the media, now warns that the media must clean up its act and stop all this bad feeling -- now that he's losing, he means.


This clip also, coincidentally, segues nicely into the next (hopefully last) part of my thing about why I'm voting for Obama, specifically regarding the national media's part in distorting our political picture.

UPDATE: For those interested in pursuing a more ongoing love affair with Ms. Maddow (televisually, anyway) MSNBC posts the best bits from her show every night right here.

In the middle of the Carter presidency, for reasons unrelated to national politics, my mother died and my family was bankrupted. I was sixteen, and almost overnight I went from living in a middle-class suburban household to living in my car, a 1971 Vega that was a hand-me-down from my brother. I ended up in a trailer in southern Illinois, starving and broke, and stayed there for five years.

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I am two months younger than Barack Obama.  I grew up in a Chicago suburb called Crystal Lake.

Whenever I asked my parents why they chose to live and raise their children in Crystal Lake, out of all the other possible bedroom communities, towns like Lake Forest and Dundee and Barrington and Woodstock, the answer was always the same: because of the schools.

It was the mid-1960s.  When you’re a child, you don’t know anything about current events.  I couldn’t have picked Lyndon Johnson out of a lineup.  I didn’t know there was a war in Vietnam until it was almost over, and I never heard a whisper about the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy.

I voted for my first president in 1968.  I was seven and in second grade.  We had a class election, with a little voting booth and everything.  I didn’t know anything about either candidate, so I voted for the guy I had heard of: Richard Nixon, who I had heard my father talking about at some point.  To this day, I clearly remember sitting on the front lawn of the school, waiting for the bus to come, when they announced on the loudspeaker that Nixon had won the school-wide election.  I remember cheering, not because I had any idea who Nixon was, but because I had somehow “guessed right.”  When it was announced later that night that Nixon had also won the national election, it felt anti-climactic.

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I wasn't that impressed or thrilled by the first presidential debate -- I honestly thought it was a draw. Even though I find myself in a rare consonance with many things Obama believes, I thought he was stiff and mysteriously unconvincing, and while I disagree with almost everything John McCain says, I thought he presented himself well, especially considering all the hysterical drama he had tried to manufacture surrounding the event.

This was different.

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I'm sure glad they passed that $700 billion-dollar bailout (with an added $150 billion pork attached). Now the economy is saved!

For those interested, below the fold is the text of the email I received in response from my senator Barbara Boxer:

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You know who I miss? Lloyd Bentsen. And Admiral Stockdale. Those guys were great.

Congratulations are due to governor Sarah Palin for recovering her poise -- it's much easier to watch her recite her fake homilies and Republican talking points than it was to watch George W. Bush fumble his way through simple sentences consisting of words of one syllable.

I've never actually seen Joe Biden ever do anything before tonight, and I was impressed with him as well -- his thinking is both fluid and pointed, and he looks exactly like someone you'd cast in the role of vice-president.

In general, I enjoyed last night's debate. Knockout blows like the ones delivered by Lloyd Bentsen twenty years ago seem to have been written out of debates these days, so they lack in drama -- Obama tends to shy away from appearing too angry about the past eight years of governmental mismanagement, McCain must keep his contempt for his opponent in check or risk appearing to look like a cranky old man, Biden is lucid but polite, Palin (last night, anyway) was polished but insubstantial. (And, for my younger readers, let me add that Lloyd Bentsen, despite mopping the floor with Dan Quayle, then wringing him out and hanging him up to dry, did not, after all, become vice-president.)

So Governor Palin informed us that gay people are so by choice, and that, as a governor, she must tolerate their presence. That's an honest, if politic, answer from a conservative fundamentalist, and if you feel similarly, go ahead and vote for her. Same with her views on global warming: she's not here to think about what caused it, she only knows what needs to be done about it, and that seems to involve doing absolutely nothing to stop the exploitation and burning of fossil fuels. Again, well-spoken and lucid, and if you feel similarly, go ahead and vote for her.  She also stated that she thinks that Dick Cheney missed a couple of opportunities to expand the powers of the vice presidency.  Which, you know, good for her, and if you want Sarah Palin to be more powerful than Dick Cheney is, go ahead and vote for her (that is, certainly, the hopes of the Republican base she is meant to energize).  She misidentified our troop leader in Afghanistan as General McClellan, which I think is an honest mistake to make -- if you, like McClellan, are an arch-conservative secessionist (to say nothing of the whole slavery thing).

Some people don't test well. I totally get it. If you point a camera at me and ask me to name a Supreme Court decision I disagreed with, I will probably blank too. (Well, not really -- the one that illegally installed Bush in the presidency is rarely far from my mind.) Maybe Sarah Palin is a wonderful executive, smart and canny, capable of inspiring others to their best work, able to negotiate complex networks of ever-shifting political alliances and directing huge forces of manpower and economic strength. Who knows? I don't.

Here's the thing:

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I was reading this article over at ABC News and came across this little item:

Bush's Disapproval Rating Highest in History

Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard Nixon and Harry Truman) than President Bush, and none has had higher disapproval in polls since 1938.
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This is, of course, not news, and certainly not around my house, where Bush's disapproval ratings have maintained their 100% level for eight years, even among the cats, who are staunch supply-siders. I only mention it because I was reading the article a little too fast and for a moment I thought it said "Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard III and Harry Truman)."

I'll say it again: I am not an economist and, unlike a lot of people skulking around the internet at this point in time, I won't pretend to be one. If there is anyone in my readership who can better illuminate the current economic situation, I would very much like to hear from you.

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"The sale [of Wachovia] would further concentrate Americans’ bank deposits in the hands of just three banks: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup."

Hey, consolidation of the nation's wealth into a whole three banks -- that can't be bad for consumers, can it? I can feel my $700 billion dollars growing already, it's the most awesomely effective bailout ever! I must be sure to forward my thanks to President Pinochet Bush!

And if you wrote to your representatives to stop this bill, why not go ahead and write to them again?  If Bush says it's an emergency, it cannot possibly be an emergency, and if the world economy is doomed to go into the shredder, this $700 billion give-away is not going to prevent it from doing so, and the middle class will end up screwed either way.

And Michael Moore agrees with me, so there. Nyah.

Teacher, pupil, kid at the back of the room napping.

In an airport in Tulsa yesterday with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine -- I had already finished my copy of Steve Martin's Born Standing Up. Little did I know that last year's bestseller would prove more informative than the morning's newspapers.  The thesis of the book is that certain economic policies can only be imposed in the wake of a shocking event, such as a flood or a coup or a bombing, and that, if these events do not occur on their own, they must be created by the people who wish to impose said policies.

The following I found on pp 105-106:

From the infamous, America-hating commie rag Forbes.com --

"In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

'It's not based on any particular data point,' a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. 'We just wanted to choose a really large number.'"

Mission accomplished!  That, keep in mind, is a Treasury spokeswoman.  That's not a leak, that's not someone talking out of school, that's an actual message to the press from a Treasury spokeswoman, speaking in full knowledge that she was talking to a national publication.  If that's their actual message they want people to know, then who knows what's really going on with these people?

So forgive me if I don't buy the administration's line on the necessity of this bailout.