Is there a presidential vote you regret casting?
(Fess up, Reagan voters!)
I can't say that there's a vote I regret. In '92, the year I turned 18 and ergo my first election, I voted for Clinton. In '96, I didn't feel like I could cast an affirmative vote for him in good conscience, so I didn't cast a presidential vote that year. Voted for Gore in '00 (and while I lament having to vote for Lieberman, I don't regret voting for Gore), and voted for Kerry in '04 pretty happily, though he wasn't my first choice in the primaries.
Actually, Gore is the only first-choice candidate for which I've ever been able to cast a vote, and he picked a veep candidate I couldn't stand, lol. I've never had much luck with finding an opportunity to cast a vote without reservation.
Sorry for the paucity of posts today and for skipping the blogaround. I went to vote today, which took a lot longer than I thought it was going to. It was the most horrendous voting experience I've ever had in my life—not only did I have to wait in line for hours, but in line behind me was a group of fucking hateful dumbasses who wiled away the time regurgitating every possible prejudice and rightwing talking point about Barack Obama, and managing to get the details of the already wrongity-wrong bullshit even wronger.
It was like someone cloned Rush Limbaugh four times, badly, gave each slightly damaged clone a lobotomy, sent them to the Sean Hannity School of International Fuckneckery, where they each received a degree in Coulterology, and then stood them in line behind me to talk absolute shite until I wanted to stick my own head in a meat grinder just to ease the pain.
[UPDATE: I should have mentioned this originally, I guess, but of course I couldn't keep my big fat QCoFM mouth shut. As I said in comments, I did turn around and politely correct a few misconceptions. And when they got out of control, Iain—who patiently waited with me that whole time, bless him—started saying to me things like: "I heard Obama's birth certificate says his real father is Darth Vader," to which I would retort with things like: "I heard he's going to train an army of gay babies and feminazis to destroy the Real America." If they didn't get the message, it's because they were too. fucking. stupid. Which, admittedly, is an actual possibility.]
Anyway…
In my ongoing bid to help John McCain get elected, I voted for Barack Obama.*
Bring on the bitter disappointment!
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* And because I evidently need to say this for the nine gazillionth time: No, I do not think he is a perfect candidate. Yes, I feel like complete rubbish that I cast an affirmative vote for an election strategy that included benefiting from misogyny and homophobia. Yes, I nonetheless concurrently feel excited about casting an affirmative vote for Obama, for reasons well documented, including being first and foremost an economy voter who believes genuinely with the whole of my being that the economy lies at the root of every. single. progressive. issue. No, this was not a decision I took lightly; this was a hard goddamned election season for me, which began, after all, with my being at the center of one of its first controversies—something that only made me take even more seriously the right and responsibility of voting, and made even more important to me my vote; mine. And yes, as with every vote I ever cast, I now hope beyond measure my candidate wins, view with trepidation a possible future under hir leadership, and ask Maude to imbue hir with an obligation to progress. Dear Maude: Let it be so.
Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died.
I am so heartsick, I don't even know what to say.
For the sake of argument, let's just say that McCain really is the mav'rick he claims to be: He really has been for the last quarter century dedicated to reform in our nation's capitol. He's taken shots from his own party and certainly from the other party, all to make Washington, and the country, a better place. You know, for all the Joe the Plumber types out there.
If that is true, if McCain is that heroic reformer and bringer of change, and the country is in the shape it's in now, then there is only one conclusion to make: McCain's efforts have been a complete failure. McCain is a complete failure. Because if he's spent the last twenty-six years trying to change the face of Washington for the better, he's accomplished fuck all in that regard.
Last week as I left the house to go to work, I stopped in my driveway to pick up some litter from the street. It was still dark out and I had the car lights on, so I took a moment to walk around the station wagon and make sure that all the lights were working: side markers, headlights, taillights, and license plate. They were, and I got back in the car thinking that it has been a while since I had to change out a headlight... and a good thing, too. It is a procedure that requires removing the grille and then taking out the entire headlight assembly to get to the lamp itself. The lamps are halogens, and while they're not terribly expensive, they're delicate; you're not supposed to touch the lamp with your bare fingers because your skin oil can cause the lamp to heat unevenly and then break. I couldn't remember the last time I replaced a lamp, though; it must have been at least ten years -- and one new grille -- ago.
Well, I'll bet you know what happened this morning. Yep. I got in the car, turned on the lights in the garage, and noticed the driver's side low-beam headlight was out. (There are four headlights; two high, two low.) Drat. I live in a suburb that is known for having very vigilant police who don't like to see cars going around with only one headlight. (I'm surprised I haven't been pulled over for driving a 21-year-old car with a big CDN oval on the back. It's there because while I'm a U.S. citizen, the car itself was built in Canada.) So during lunch I popped over to my local Advance Auto Parts store and bought two new lamps (they usually go out in tandem) and spent about fifteen minutes doing some shade tree mechanics.
I am always amazed at the power of the human mind; I can make a light bulb burn out just by thinking about it.
(Cross-posted.)
Speaking of huge, bloviating megadouches, Ben Affleck hosted SNL this weekend, and one of the sketches featured Affleck doing Keith Olbermann, keying into his penchant for what I'll understatedly refer to as insufferable hyperbole. Leaving aside that he tended to drift into an almost British accent at times, he had Olbermann's mannerisms and speech patterns down pretty well.
Never one to miss an opportunity to confirm his status as a ginormous wankstain,"edgy" "comedian" Bill Maher threw out another of his standard homophobic jokes over the weekend. During a photo op with "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest, wherein Seacrest suggested the photographer "get the boys in the picture," Maher retorted with the oh-so-clever "Get with the boys - that's your department, Ryan." Hilarious.
Joe the Plumber questions Barack Obama's loyalty to America.
Christine Durbin, the oldest daughter of Sen. Dick Durbin and his wife, Loretta, died Saturday of complications from a congenital heart condition in a Washington-area hospital, the senator's Washington office announced.As many readers here already know, I absolutely love Durbin, and I'm so proud to have him as my senator (he's got a big billboard off 90/94 here in Chicago that I wave to every time I drive by). This is just heartbreaking, and I send my most sincere condolences to him and his family. I was excitedly bubbling to Melissa on Thursday that I was so happy to vote for him again; it's so sad that his inevitable victory will include this tragedy.
Christine Durbin was one of three children in the Illinois senator's family and had worked for 16 years in the Department of Agriculture's emerging markets division in Washington. Christine Durbin also is survived by a brother, Paul; a sister, Jennifer; her husband, Marty Johnson; and a son, Alex.
"Chris Durbin, 40, fought a heroic, lifelong battle with heart disease and our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Durbin family," the senator's office said in a statement.
Her death comes days before Durbin, who ranks second in the Senate Democratic leadership, seeks re-election Tuesday. Durbin's office said funeral arrangements were pending.
Friday night, Iain and I attended the Obama rally in Highland, IN, with a crowd estimated to have reached 40,000. I haven't had a chance to upload images or video yet, but here's a news photo of the event...
Iain and I are sitting here watching CNN, and we just saw Cindy McCain's Monday interview with Larry King teased with the line: "Why she thinks her husband can come from behind."
In January 2007, word got out that Barack Obama was forming an exploratory committee for his run for the presidency. This is what I wrote at the time.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Obama '08?
It's not a big surprise that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has decided to form an exploratory committee to consider running for president in 2008. (Keith Olbermann said last night that using the term "exploratory" is ridiculous; of course he's going to run.)
The pundits are making a big deal out of this; not because Mr. Obama is a dynamic and commanding speaker, charismatic to the point of stellar, and has the refreshing pedigree that is as old as America but never before seen as a serious contender for the nomination. No, they're painting it as a tabloid-level battle between him and Sen. Hillary Clinton; CNN even went so far as to put up a caption of "Hillary vs. Obama," being slightly un-PC by referring to Ms. Clinton by her first name and Mr. Obama by his last. The way Wolf Blitzer discussed it on "The Situation Room" made me think I was watching an episode of "Access: Hollywood."
The right-wingers will have a tough time trashing Mr. Obama without coming across as racists, although that hasn't stopped nutballs like Debbie Schlussel from attacking him for something he has no control over such as his name and his father's ancestry. They will go after his lack of experience in government and foreign policy, although they will have a little trouble doing it with a straight face given the current occupant of the Oval Office. (Mr. Obama has said he will address that issue immediately by launching his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, the home and burial site of Abraham Lincoln, who served all of two years in Congress before becoming president.) They will dig up the fact that he once used cocaine, but Mr. Obama already brought up that issue several years ago in his own book and actually uses it as a talking point for showing how a young man on the road to ruin can turn himself around. Again, he's inoculated himself against attacks by the likes of well-known vice admirals like Rush Limbaugh (although rank hypocrisy and self-inflicted irony has never stopped him before) and Bill Bennett.
Then they will play their last card and do a big build-up to ask the most irrelevant yet brow-furrowing question of all: Is America Ready for a President Obama? Ah, the open-ended question; leaving it up to the responder to define what being "ready" means: are we ready for a black man in the White House? Are we ready for a president whose middle name is Hussein and whose last name ends with a vowel?
The answer is that it's a bullshit question and the only reason they ask it is because they can't come up with anything else that doesn't sound racist, trivial or just plain stupid. The questions about whether or not Sen. Obama should become the next president should be based on his leadership and the ability to use his skills and intelligence to guide the country and balance the politics with his vision. He has to rely on other people to tell him what to do and surround himself with smart people who may disagree with him, and he has to be able to listen to them. He has to be able to perform the job recognizing the fact that a president is both a partisan politician and the leader of the whole country, including the people who voted for someone else. It's a delicate balance, so throwing in trivialities such as his ancestry or the origins of his cognomen do nothing but skew the scale, and we might as well throw aside all pretense of considered debate and elect the next president using the same technique as they do on American Idol. If we'd asked those questions of several candidates in the past (and at least one that I can think of right now) and assuming that the electorate had paid attention to the answers, we might have gotten far different results.
What Steve said.
My first question when I heard this was: "Was she even denied asylum for anything resembling an appropriate reason, or, like many female asylum-seekers, was she denied asylum because little things like rape, genital mutilation, and forced marriage are (generally) considered a state of womanhood so normal that they don't qualify women for sanctuary from that 'normalcy'?"
And my second: "Who in the Bush administration acted unethically, and quite possibly criminally, to make this information public, anyway?"
"[John McCain] is a man who has looked in the face of evil and not flinched...he's earned our support and confidence and the time is now for him to be our next president."—Vice President and Dark Overlord Dick Cheney, endorsing GOP nominee John McCain in Wyoming, today.
"I'd like to congratulate Sen. McCain on this endorsement, because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy. George Bush may be in an undisclosed location now, but Dick Cheney's out there on the campaign trail because he'd be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain. He knows that with John McCain, you get a twofer: George Bush's economic policy and Dick Cheney's foreign policy."—Senator and Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, on the campaign trail this afternoon in Colorado.
