although, in retrospect, maybe the “mccain is unacceptable!” factor only needs one datum in order to be understood — i find him not completely unacceptable, myself. if liberals like him (despite him being completely batshit insane, natch), then clearly he is EBIL!

(and, hey, dear ann coulter — very funny hannity & colmes segment (and y’all won’t hear me use that particular f-word as regards ann coulter often, so savor it) aside: nobody actually believes that you will campaign or vote for hillary. there are limits on the amounts of disbelief even big ole sci-fi dorks such as myself can suspend.)

but anyways. so, i think i’ve mentioned this, i’m voting obama on tuesday. (i decided against voting early. i could’ve done so, and lent that voice to early returns gossipping, but i decided i would really prefer to take part in SUPER DUPER ULTRA MEGA FANTASTIC! tuesday festivities. maybe this will be the time i am finally selected to take part in an exit poll, my lifelong ambition! (come on! you know that wicker park is going to be highly contested! COUNT THE HIPSTER VOTE, GALLUP!) … also, the early voting polling place was much farther away from my house than my regular polling place, and y’all, i am very lazy.) i’ve been a little bit conflicted about my choices. i liked bill richardson, but he dropped out (boo!). that pretty much left clinton and obama. (edwards is too shrill about THE MINERS!!!!!, and kucinich is too batshit crazy, and everybody else (who?) was too irrelevant (who???). so there you go. election by moderately short attention span.)

now clinton, i’ve been saying for ages, since i was still pissed off about Bush v. Gore, that i looked forward to voting for her for president. however, i take it back. she’s really irritating the crap out of me, and i think she’s being somewhat unkind, and i think she expects women to vote for her as her due. which, just, no. also, bill is rapidly losing what respect and goodwill i had for him (and i still have my Clinton/Gore ’92 campaign buttons up on the wall behind me; i was an original signatory for MoveOn’s original purpose (long since abandoned and gotten shriekier and far more annoying; you all know it’s true); i happily voted for him in ’96 and loved him pretty much unquestioningly up until about six months ago.). what nastiness hillary refuses to emit, he takes care of. the “fairy tale” remark was just plain meanspirited — and for someone who campaigned to the music of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow),” hypocritical. he’s behaving like a spoiled brat, and i don’t really much care for that. and if hillary and her handlers are refusing to rein him in now, i have no trust that he would remain in the East Wing… and i’m just not interested in flushing away the twenty-second amendment. so, sorry, hill, i guess i changed my mind, at least for now.

also, hillary, no one is buying the ’35 years of experience’ thing. 35 years of work experience, sure — 35 years of leading the free world, not so much. you kinda blew it with that one.

i was a little slow to get behind obama, too, though. i honestly still have not gotten over his saying, when elected to the senate, that he wouldn’t run for president in 2008. i’m still a little peeved about that. listen, we’ve just gotten hastert out of the house and people are betting on Das Oberfuehrer taking his seat (dude, don’t give me shit about hyperbolizing to make that joke either; he is such a fucking Nazi i can’t even buy his ice cream, and i am not a boycott-prone person); i don’t want to see illinois lose federal democratic representation, and if obama runs for president and resigns his seat or damages his chances for either his reelection, or replacing him with another democrat, before eventually losing the election, i am going to be omigodsopissed. (i mean, i liked peter fitzgerald; he disagreed with me on most everything, and every time i wrote him a letter asking him to do something he wrote me one back explaining why he’d done exactly the opposite, but at least he had some sort of, you know, integrity and sense of personal accountability, and weird stuff like that which is unusual in the united states congress, so that was nice. but anyways, i don’t expect to get another decent republican like him any time soon. seems the trend is towards shrill and shouty ones who pretty much want liberals to all die in a fire. dang… now i want to write fitzgerald fan mail.) anyhoo. i shall be very cranky if obama screws illinois over in a failed attempt to become president.

that said… i think he’d make a pretty good president. i really enjoy watching him speak; he’s very well-spoken and sort of human. (i was reading something recently where someone was off-put initially by his pausing during off-the-cuff responses, as opposed to hillary’s polished and immediate responses, but then he realized that obama was actually thinking out a response as he went rather than spouting a pre-planned statement, and changed his mind, saying he preferred obama’s method. i like it, too.) i don’t agree with everything on his platform — specifically and most significantly, his view that “civil unions are okay but gay marriages are not” (which is about as close to being a single-issue voter as i get; i intensely dislike the hypocrisy of the federal government allegedly not being in the business of enforcing religious standards and yet the only single bar to entry to a legal state marriage for otherwise-qualified adults is in effect a religious one), though that’s at least much more progressive than the right. (don’t even get me started on mike huckabee.) i think he’s pretty reasonable in most areas, though, and perhaps the most important distinction for me is even if i don’t necessarily agree (and, unlike a lot of people, apparently, i think it’s okay to vote for a person who isn’t 100% in line with me on everything) with his position, at least i’m reasonably sure he put some thought into it, personally, rather than just picking up some talking points memorandum and memorizing it. i can trust obama to think issues through, consider consequences, clearly communicate about them, and come to a conclusion that is more acceptable to me than other candidates. honestly, as sad as it makes me, i just don’t trust hillary to do that. and, on a personal note, i vastly prefer his high road approach to dealing with all the incessant attack bullshit; clinton’s campaign has flung so much shit and yet he remains, apart from the odd snark here and there, above the fray — in one-on-one interviews where the reporter tries to feed him lines to make him catty about clinton, which he uniformly dodges, but especially with regard to clinton’s “but she’s a GIIIIRRRRRRRL” and “OMG obama’s a cokehead drug dealer ‘cos he’s BLACK!” out-of-control campaign staff. seriously, hill, i don’t know which is worse, if you are doing this deliberately-and-yet-incompetently, or if you cannot control your people, but either way, i want none of it.

so, on super duper ultra uber fantastico amazing tuesday, i shall be standing in line to cast my vote for barack obama. i don’t think i’ll be alone.

sincerely,
–sabrina.

tuned in a bit late to watch all of the republican debate, but got in most of it. damn, everybody is on the “smack down romney” train now, aren’t they? i think they were all just waiting for the moderators to turn their backs so they could leap over their desks and eat him. (well, except fred thompson, who appeared to be stoned and/or asleep at at least a couple of junctures. i keep reading comments in which people say “wow, he did well last night!” and i have to wonder if that was in the first half of the debate, which i missed, because in the parts that i watched, he was all short answers and hardly spoke up at all. in fact, there was one part where i cracked up because someone asked him a direct question about the profits of oil companies and he just said, “Well, I take note of those profits, and I take note of the losses when they’ve had them,” and immediately clammed up again for a couple of seconds before someone prompted him some more.) and except ron paul, who was rather agilely avoiding direct attacks at people and was instead ripping apart policy. i have to say, i quite enjoyed when paul went off on the whole “tamperproof ID for illegals” issue. he really hasn’t got a prayer (pun! ha! i so funny.) but it’s nice to see someone out there espousing reasonably civil-libertarian views. the problem with paul is, as D. pointed out, he sits there and points out the problems, especially with what his opponents are proposing, but says very little as to how he would solve them. john mccain did better than i had expected from him — having been expecting him to have a whole crazy breakdown for a while, i was disappointed when i only got a few mad cackles about Mittens. actually, there was a lot of cackling at Mittens. it must suck to be up there at a podium and not only half the country doesn’t wanna listen to you, but your compadres are all one-upping each other on who can oh snap! you best. if he weren’t so smug, i’d almost feel sorry for him.

side note: i want a nickel for every time any candidate said something about what “voters right here in new hampshire!!” want. dude, there are 14 people who live in new hampshire, and the only reason the rest of us let them hold first-in-the-nation primaries is because it’s frigging cold there and we don’t want to have to live next door to police standoffs with the crazy tax evaders. (p.s. i’ve been to your state. it’s very nice. you should pay your taxes so it continues to be so; otherwise, you will end up with michigan. thxu!)

i went into debate overload at some point during an edwards response in the second half of the democratic debate, and had to make the nice tivo save the rest of it for me to watch later. (haven’t yet. but: YAY TIVO. 8-second rewind, best thing ever for live debates!) damn, john edwards gets a fire lit under his ass sometimes, doesn’t he? dude was pissed about people working hard, sacrificing for their kids, and not having health insurance. (strategic cuts to elizabeth, in the audience, not looking so well, as can be expected. sad. :( ) also, just as it was “beat up on Mittens” night at the GOP table, it was pretty “IDK, my BFF John?” night on the Dem side. everybody was all “i love john edwards and we have cosy fireside chats ALL THE TIME!” were they going to do yearbook autographs after it was over? obama seemed a little off his game, he was answering well but some of the polish was off. not sure what was up with that; perhaps he was tired. whatever, he’s dreamy enough that it only makes us love him all the more. hillary was alternating between defensive and attacking, with very little middle ground, though her remark about “well, that kind of hurts my feelings” when asked how she would overcome her perceived unlikeability problem was, i thought, rather charming and humorous instead of coming off as pitiful or offended, so that was a win for her.

also, fyi charlie gibson: at a table with three senators and one governor, you need to stop calling on individuals with just the word “Senator,” ‘cos nobody knows which one you are talking to.

i did like the relative hawkishness on the Dem side on the idea of nuclear proliferation. richardson was pretty typically “diplomacy first, bitches!” which was nice to hear as well, but everybody seemed pretty much “you don’t get to have nukes if you are crazy and either harbor or are bad people, for we are still big and powerful and will take you out.” i was a little surprised it got as much of the conversation as it did, actually, since i don’t think “how will you militarily take down baddies” is a traditionally Democratic callout. and i think everyone did pretty well with the “you guys all said ‘no surge,’ yet violence is down, so you were totally wrong, weren’t you?” responses. violence down == good, still stuck there == bad. other than that, it seemed a lot like “my change is changier than yours!” i wasn’t really inclined to change any of my support, though i was reminded of why i like bill richardson.

so, in summary: republicans want to either throw mexicans out of the country or charge them rent, give us spiffy national ID cards, cut taxes, eat Mittens; democrats want to go get bin laden, change things up, and make us all get health care in one way or another. nobody wants to touch social security with a ten-foot pole. cast your votes now — time is running out!

Actually, Obama’s middle name is Hussein, not Mohammed; he’s Christian, not Muslim; the church web site clearly says that “It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people” and that is why they celebrate a shared black background, not that white (or purple or pink) people are not allowed; the web site further states (at http://www.tucc.org/talking_points.htm, in direct response to the Hannity and Colmes show) that “African-centered thought, unlike Eurocentrism, does not assume superiority and look at everyone else as being inferior” which rules out that claim that the church is racist; I worked for the same University he taught at and lived in the same Chicago south side community, Hyde Park, he lives in, we probably even shopped at the same grocery store because there was only one in Hyde Park, and he had a good reputation as a kind man; and for the record, I plan to vote for him.

As for the middle name issue. Barack Obama’s middle name being Mohammed, or Hussein, or Fredericka De Ville is about as relevant to the Presidency of the United States of America as my cat’s name. My middle name is Lee, but that doesn’t mean I support Robert E. Lee and want the Confederate States of America to rise again. A name is just something our parents stuck us with.

I find this sort of message to be not just personally depressing but un-Christian in its judgmentalism and untruth, and I think if you re-read it you might see why I feel that way. It’s not up to us to judge. XXX, I love you, but please don’t forward me emails about politicians anymore. It upsets me to read messages like this from people I love and respect. I am basing my support of candidates on what I see and hear them say directly, not something I get third-hand from some author on the Internet somewhere who is too frightened to sign his own name to it. And one of the reasons I’m voting for Obama is because he’s not spreading malicious lies about the other candidates, and is genuinely turning the other cheek.

–sabrina

this is after i sat through watching Mike Huckabee tonight, whining about how Mitt Romney is mean and horrible and so on and so forth, and yesterday watched both Huckabee and Obama on “Face the Nation” from the other day — a broadcast in which every single damn time the interview tried to get Obama to say something nasty about Hillary Clinton, he not only did not do so but talked about his platform in the context of the question and how he would improve things.

for all the focus on christianity and religion it has, i think this election cycle could use a little less christianism and a little more Christlike behavior.

In a year that you have collected $2,120,000,000,000 ($2.12 trillion), “the most revenue any government in the history of the world has ever collected” … I don’t care if the government overspent its income by another $150bn:

I WANT MY 2006 REFUND BACK, ALREADY!

crankily,
–sabrina

WHEN YOU DISPLAY THE UNITED STATES FLAG ON A VEHICLE, SUCH AS AN AUTOMOBILE, THE UNION (that’s the blue part) GOES ON THE UPPER CORNER IN THE DIRECTION OF TRAVEL.

yes, i know it looks funny that way, when you have the flag “backwards” on the right side of a vehicle. but really, that’s correct. they even have a name for it. it’s the “reversed flag.” you see, the flag is supposed to look as though it is flying in the wind, and that means that the union is on an imaginary staff at the front of the car, boat, airplane, or CTA rail car, causing the “wind” (from the motion of the vehicle) to “blow” the flag backwards. if you don’t believe me, look at the starboard side of Air Force One, for god’s sake.

i am also really sick of people who put a flag on their car and let it fly in all conditions until it’s shredded to ribbons and destroyed, which is just completely wrong (and not to mention it’s a pretty obvious lack of respect, unlike the reverse flag which i suppose, if you didn’t grow up in illinois and weren’t forced to pass an exam on how to treat the flag in order to leave the 8th grade, you might conceivably have missed the memo on — unless you’re the guy who’s painting the flags on things, in which case you really ought to have read the freaking rules). and don’t get me started on people who fly their flags at night without lighting (also completely and obviously wrong).

i am just tired of people displaying the flag completely and flagrantly wrong. i think it’s nice that you like to show your support for the US by displaying the flag… but you gotta do it right, or it’s pointless and disrespectful, which was — i’m just guessing here — probably not your intent.

please. for pity’s sake. don’t make me come over there and sic the American Legion on you.

…[T]he discontent with the Bush presidency is broader and deeper among Republican lawmakers, some of whom seethe with anger. “Our members just wish this thing would be over,” said a senior House Republican who met with Bush recently. “People are tired of him.” Bush’s circle remains sealed tight, the lawmaker said. “There’s nobody there who can stand up to him and tell him, ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to do this. You’re wrong on this.’ There’s no adult supervision. It’s like he’s oblivious. Maybe that’s a defense mechanism.”
…
Horne said he is not a Bush supporter but was nonetheless struck by the president’s tranquility. “He was very friendly, very relaxed,” Horne said. “My God, he looked well. He looked like he came off a cruise in the Caribbean. He looked like he hadn’t a care in the world. It was amazing.”

Yeah, well. Considering he can just do whatever the hell he wants, why wouldn’t he be relaxed?

I still do not have adequate words to describe my sentiments. Pretty angry about the whole thing yesterday.

HE LIED. HE GOES TO JAIL!