Category Archives: Politics: US: 2008 Elections

Don't vote (or, if you must, do)

Fill in a voter registration form online.

New Year's wishes, candidate style, forwarded by my mother.

Phone Atone

They're so popular, people steal them. Or something.

The Wall St. Journal reports on a sign-monitoring scheme: An Obama yard sign is being watched by dozens of viewers on Web in an effort to stop it from being stolen.

(thanks to df)

A few McCain yard signs have sprung up in the neighborhood, so I though I would retaliate. But it's not so simple.

Either the Obama people are having supply problems, or an awful lot of people were impressed with the Senator's performance in last night's debate.

Here's a closer look at the key part:

It's especially impressive in that it seems you have to pay for them — in past campaigns down here they've been giving the signs away.

So far this election, my parents have been great bellwethers: if they forward me an email it either is viral, or goes viral in no time.

So here's today's:

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight…..

• If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're “exotic, different.”
• Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, it's a quintessential American story.
• If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
• Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
• Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.
• Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.
• If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
• If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7, 000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
• If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
• If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
• If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
• If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
• If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
• If you're husband is nicknamed “First Dude”, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

In What Books on America Has Sarah Palin Read?, Steve Clemons of 'The Washington Note' pulls off the amazing feat of taking George Bush seriously as a political intellectual — and then asks if Sarah Palin makes (even) that grade.

It's a view of Bush I'm not prepared to embrace, but the questions he asks about Palin do seem like things one might like to know.