Cheryl Katz

BBC NEWS | Americas | 106-year-old voter chooses Obama.

This is as close as we’ll get to a confirmation of the divine endorsement Obama (“the One”) has seemed to have.

OK, well actually it just made me smile.  Yay voting!  (Especially for Obama.)

It was bound to happen, sometime during the bumpy road that is potty training.  We’re early on in the process here, and in fact no successful potty-deposits have yet been made by the diaper-wearing members of our household.  But today was the day; it happened.

My child crapped on the floor.

Here’s how it went: I got tired of waiting for her on the potty and went to the kitchen to refill my mug of coffee.  In as long as it took for me to go 15 ft to the kitchen, I heard her start to root in a toy bin in her room.  I thought nothing of this… she’s been trusted to run around diaperless for five minutes or less in the past, without incident.

By the time I made it into her room not another 20 seconds later, it was done.  I cleaned her up and diapered her, did a quick flush of the goods and sanitized the floor, and we were good to go.

Let this be a lesson to the pre-potty age moms out there – it happens faster than you think.  I’ve certainly learned my lesson.

…at the very least, I want to know what he’s saying.

Op-Ed Contributor – Buy American. I Am. – NYTimes.com.

Last night Ben and I watched clips of Senators Obama and McCain roasting each other at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner.  Both of them were absolutely hilarious, but to be perfectly honest, McCain’s was funnier.  Maybe he’s just had more experience working in comedy, maybe he’s just a funnier guy (perhaps his whole calamity campaign was really a big misunderstood joke?)

What struck me about McCain’s roast was how genuine and good natured it seemed.  It was a tone I haven’t seen in his campaign, but wish I had.  He also spoke honestly and non-comedically about the accomplishments of Obama, a gesture that was so poignant that it made the comedic parts seem even funnier.  It was a nod to the very real possibility that he will lose, and a very graceful move.

It reminded me of the John McCain who got eaten by the Bush-Rove machine in 2000.  It gave me a glimpse of what people liked about the (more) moderate, decent-seeming guy who ran an honest campaign and got his ass handed to him by a dirty smear campaign.  And if we’d seen more grace like that in his campaign (or a different running mate), perhaps he wouldn’t be lagging so soundly in the polls right now.

But instead he ran a campaign that resorted really early in the game to tactics like this:

TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Latest McCain Robocall Alleges That Obama Denied Babies Medical Care.

It’s TPM, so clearly there’s a leftish bias behind the reporting, but they have audio of the call and it is appalling.  Even after the “campaign reboot” it’s the same old BS, a twisting of facts in attempt to smear Obama.

It doesn’t surprise me, exactly, but the juxtaposition of the two McCains is just really disturbing.

Oh well; on to Election Day!

Sarah Palin to appear on SNL – CNN.com.

Nothing… good… could come of this….  Except maybe some life imitating art.

I think I just meta-exploded my brain.

Obama is leading in every national poll now by at least 8%.  FiveThirtyEight.com has his chance of victory at over 95%. I think many signs look optimistic for an Obama victory on November 4 (my birthday!  Guess what I would like for my birthday….)

So why am I (still) afraid to feel hopeful about this year’s presidential election?

Hate speech has become a scary but real part of the McCain-Palin rallies.  McCain made one reserved effort to set his supporters straight about Obama, saying he was “not someone to be afraid of as President.”  But supporters are still yelling, “Kill him!” at Palin speeches, and the incidents go unrebuked.

Race is clearly still a factor in this campaign.  I thought we had effectively moved on from it after the whole Reverend Wright saga of the summer, but it has come back, and uglier than ever.

I know that the people yelling slurs – hell, the people who attend rallies at all, especially to see Sarah Palin – are wingnuts who are coming out to see someone with views as extreme as their own.  Somehow, this doesn’t help me feel more settled about the whole thing.

I came across this idea of the Bradley Effect.  It hadn’t occurred to me, and yet makes some sense, that polls might not indicate the way people will actually vote, when race is a factor in a campaign, because who would want to admit out loud to a pollster that they are racist?  I really think that far more people have racist thoughts than are willing to admit to them – which in a sense is good; it’s good to have a filter on racist behaviour!  And yet, not so much at the polls.  However, a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post questions whether the Bradley Effect ever really existed at all.

Whether or not it is a real factor, it certainly does seem plausible.  People can be scary and unreasonable about issues like race.  And I am so scared that if enough people are lying, all the polls could be reversed.

I read a good piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s hard sell to working class white people.  It goes to show how far removed even I am from a working-class mentality that it would never occur to me to be suspicious of Barack Obama’s pledged policies because they seemed too good to be true.  The first case study featured is a woman who works two jobs to support herself and her nieces, for whom she is the primary caretaker.  She specifically was suspicious of his tax plan, saying that the $250,000 threshold for the higher tax rate seemed like “someone who had won the lottery” and that she thought eventually that threshold would be lowered.

At another section of the article, Packer quotes a lifelong Democrat and former Hillary supporter as saying, “I really don’t want an African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

I have never understood racism.  I wasn’t raised in a bubble, in a fantasy world with no biases, but I was raised to treat people with basic respect.  So I not only can’t fathom not wanting to vote for a qualified candidate who happens to be black, but I can’t fathom extending my fear to the possibility that he might seek retribution for previous generations’ grievances on behalf of an entire demographic of our country.

We don’t know anything for absolutely sure yet, I think, about the state of hatred in this country.  I want to believe, and I hope, that America is a country that can elect a black man to be President.  I’m a little petrified about what happens if we aren’t ready, and it’s McCain-Palin sworn in on 1-21-09.

So here’s hoping that the white working class can cast off any remaining doubts, if not that Obama is the perfect solution, then that he is by far more on their side than McCain is.  And here’s hoping that the polls outstandingly in Obama’s favor speak for real progress in American “race” relations.  (“Race” because… we are one human race.)

Come on, America – let’s do this one right.

I know I’m a card-carrying Liberal with a capital L and all that jazz, but when I try to keep up with top stories by using Digg’s politics page and Reddit, it really irks me that all the political stories appear to be left-leaning.

Specifically, I’m tired of weeding through piles of Huffington Post articles, which are generally opinion pieces posted as news.  I like my slanted liberal feeds as much as the next leftie, but for the love I would actually like to know how conservatives view the news as well.  (There has to be something out there besides Fox News.)

Is this because Internet users tend to lean left, and therefore to be expected of any user-driven content engine?

Where do you go when you want either balanced, or biased in a right-leaning way, news?

$700 billion…  and it’s not working….

I haven’t posted since the markets went to hell because, truthfully, I don’t really understand what is happening.  I understand only in basic basic terms, but I can’t take an 18% stock market crash and turn it into information about how my experience or anyone’s experience feels the impact.  Perhaps it’s too soon for the real effects to get to the individual level.

So, global economic crisis.  John McCain thinks more deregulation and more oversight are the correct response to this.  Obama thinks oversight is a good response.  I agree with Obama, but only to the extent that I really understand what’s going on.  Which is not much.  It seems that there should be checks in place to make sure that risk is being appropriately analyzed before banks do major things – but you’d think that the free market would actually encourage such a thing. It seems like any business enterprise would be well served to research its transactions, examine the credit of loan applicants, check out the security of the mountains of loans it wants to buy, BEFORE entering into these transactions.  Call me crazy.

Did government intervention really bring huge financial institutions to give risky loans to risky borrowers without concern for the risks involved?  And even if the government pushed for loans to be more widely and riskily available to credit-unworthy applicants, then did government make banks buy packages of risky loans from other lenders without fully examining the risks?  I don’t think so, but I really don’t know for sure.

It seems to me the answer is reasonable but not excessive government oversight of business?  My husband asks me, where is the line?  And that’s a good question.  I’ve been getting twisted and feeling ill trying to figure out how to answer that very question.  It seems like regulatory conditions are set as a reaction to past events, not in any kind of forward-looking way.  It also does seem like in some ways, regulations can be harmful because they allow businesses to stop thinking about what is safe, or what is best for consumers and instead to focus on what they CAN do within the scope of regulation.

*sigh*  I’m getting a headache and upset just trying to talk about this.  I have no vocabulary for economics.

It occurred to me, what if voting for Obama IS the wrong answer for the economy?  I don’t know, but I don’t think this is the case.  It’s possible that he will attempt to implement too much regulation, but this seems like a better answer than McCain’s “deregulate!” response.

Take the economy out of the picture (this takes a big imagination, but anyway…) and of course I’ll vote for Obama.  (This is not seriously in question, but the subject of the economy is so abstract for me that I had to examine the possibility that Obama might not have the answer.)  I agree with most of Obama’s policies, and on the one area I really don’t understand, I think his solution sounds more reasonable.  So… I rest on my previous decision.

And that’s about all I can write on the subject.  I will now return to my previous state of confused silence.  Good day!

If John McCain really knows how to get Osama bin Laden, then why doesn’t he share this info with the people who can go do it RIGHT NOW?

“Country First” is some BS when you have this great and valuable information and will only share it if and when elected.

That is all.

Make-Believe Maverick : Rolling Stone

This is possibly the closest examination I’ve seen of McCain’s life and career that I’ve seen.  I have to say, if Rolling Stone can pull out a well researched article, why can’t the rest of the mainstream media?  If even half of this article is true, well… jeebus.

I’d like to see a similarly scrutinizing article about Obama, just to know what it would turn up.