…Lindsey Miller, 23, votes at the same polling place as Obama. She said Secret Service agents were checking names off a list and using metal-detecting wands on some would-be voters as they entered the polling place. The line was around the block at 6 a.m., she said.

“A lot of people were in pajamas. I know I was — not the time you want to be on national TV,” the University of Chicago graduate student said.

so. you live near obama. in fact, you vote at the same polling place. you chose not to vote early, and you chose to vote early in the morning, when it was highly likely that this very highly-observed candidate for the highest office in the land would be on site casting his own vote. you have presumably watched television in the past and know that national television news likes to cover candidates casting their votes. you saw the line and the secret service agents. and … YOU COULDN’T PUT ON A PAIR OF JEANS BEFORE LEAVING THE HOUSE?

i mean. seriously. i am not a highly trendy person, but i think the time has come for america to start paying a little more attention to our dress habits. PAJAMAS, to vote at the same polling place at the same time as a person who is possibly going to become the next president of the united states? in what universe is that sartorially okay? pay attention! pay attention and wear pants!

(…and don’t even get me started on people on airplanes, man.)

i am, in particular, looking quite forward to having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE TRAFFIC, which i expect to be the very dictionary definition of wretched.

it’s a surprise goodie box, out of the blue! for no apparent reason! which makes it the best sort of surprise goodie box ever! :)

Kim sent me this package, which arrived yesterday. i promptly nommed the licorice (yum!) and crashed my computer trying to upload pictures off the camera (alas). but it recovered and now i have pics to post. such as a closeup of the awesome badge in there:

it is totally going on my bag right now, right next to my awesome new fave obama pin i just got today (supplanting my America’s First Family pin as fave, though that one is not less awesome), which is the infamous Terrorist Fist Jab! because Yes We Can, and Not Only That, But We Will Do It With Good Humor, Suckers!

but i digress. thank you kim! That was an awesome surprise. You rock. :)

hillary clinton’s candidacy has been a massive disappointment to me; starting from a point where i would have been just as pleased as punch if she were my democratic candidate, the campaign has done nothing more than progressively disillusion me. i posted in 2005 that “i think she’s a hell of a woman [and] i’d be happy to vote for her,” a sentiment which gradually shifted to “i think you kinda blew it”-style relative indifference as time and the primary campaign season passed, and has finally settled pretty firmly on “yeah, uh, no way.” the only mildly ironic part about it is that hillary’s campaign has done more to damage baby boomers, as a class (and especially classical Gloria Steinem-style feminists), in my eyes, than it actually has done to clinton herself. which just makes the hillbot comment more entertaining, considering she (i assume) (a) totally missed the point — OMG YOU DON’T HEART HILLARY, YOU ARE SUCH A MAN!!!!!!!!11!!1!1!!!!111!!!!! — and (b) was really, seriously, dude, just fucking whining. i mean, at the risk of being just another one of those latte-drinking intellectuals who don’t know what it’s like to be a real american (i guess my citizenship got downgraded when i went to college), what exactly makes you think one flavor of gender-bias is more acceptable than another? y’all people are messed up, and that’s why we’re not listening to you.

Cynthia Ruccia, 55, a sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics in Columbus, Ohio, is organizing a group, Clinton Supporters Count Too, of mostly women in swing states who plan to campaign against Mr. Obama in November. “We, the most loyal constituency, are being told to sit down, shut up and get to the back of the bus,” she said.

Grow up. I’m so fucking tired of reading how it’s the duty of all women everywhere to vote for Hillary because she’s got the same chromosomes. Yes, sexism is doubtlessly bad but it’s not the same as racism so quit making allusions to the back of the goddamn bus. Also, your candidate is losing because her platform sucks and she lies; get over it.

Geraldine Ferraro, you can bite my shiny metal GenX ass, but you won’t, because you’re too fucking busy whining.

no love, and just so you know, this is totally the sort of bullshit that drove me to quit supporting NOW,
–sabrina

Man, I’d like to buy you all a drink. 95% voter turnout? THAT SHIT IS BAD. ASS.

Also, way to pull out the last-minute edge-of-our-seat electoral excitement. :)

love,
–sabrina

From: Howard Dean
Subject: Now more than ever

Dear sabrina,

Our nominee can’t build an organization to take on John McCain yet, but we canJohn McCain is raising money and campaigning across the country — he’s looking at the White House.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are also raising money and campaigning across the country — but they’re still looking at the nomination.

Hillary and Barack can’t build an organization to take on John McCain directly yet, but we can. And we have to — it’s our responsibility as Democrats to make sure we’re prepared.

I need you to make a contribution now so we can make sure John McCain doesn’t get a free ride — Americans everywhere need to know the truth, and we’re going to make sure they get it. … [Contribute Now! blah blah blah]

…

From: sabrina
To: Democratic National Committee donor feedback
Subject: Re: Now more than ever

Oh my God, are you serious? The Democratic candidates are acting like 7 year olds squabbling over the last cookie in the jar, and it’s MY problem to defeat McCain???

I’ll donate to the fund that reschedules the nominating convention for the middle of April so we can get this excruciating insanity over with, but until then, you’re on your own.

Don’t unsubscribe me from the mailing list. I’m still a Democrat, even if it pains me to be this completely inept. But I wanted to at least pretend someone was listening.

–sabrina

this was sent the day of the university of chicago’s rebuttal to the ciinton campaign’s “he wasn’t even a professor!!!! that liar!!!!” claims, which went along the lines of: “yes, he was.” i was a little tired of this bullshit. i heroically refrained from laying most of the blame for said bullshit at the clinton campaign’s door, in the hopes of having someone think “hey, disgusted voter!” instead of “oh, another disgusted cultist.”

From: DNCMemberServices
Subject: Re: Re: Now more than ever

Sabrina,

Thank you for your recent email. We value your thoughts. Your comments have been forwarded to the Chairman’s office.

Thank you again.

DNC Member Services
Democratic National Committee
(202) 863-8000
DNCMemberServices@dnc.org

i’m shocked to have gotten a response. of course, i’d be more shocked if this ridiculous situation resolved itself somehow. i’m not holding my breath.

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.