This and that

[Update: While I appreciate comments from everyone, including with different opinions, if any get to the nasty point, which I have seen more other places than here, I will delete them. Everyone here deserves to have their opinion respected and should respect those of others. Also if someone posts the same thing multiple places, it will only stay in the latest blog, not everywhere. This is a very hot election season and I understand the passion people feel about their opinions. I would hate to have to stop allowing anonymous commenters, or monitoring, but I will if I have to do so. We don't all agree and that's healthy and okay, but we can do so civilly.]

Although I said the next blog would be on what my recent trip meant to me, and although I am working on it (it's not easy), the real world keeps intruding and other thoughts run this way and that in my head.

Yesterday was a beautiful day in the Northwest, a feeling of just a bit of fall in the air, temps in the low 80s, blue skies and made even better when our son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons came out to the farm in the afternoon. That was the beautiful side of life. We all sat under the big oak trees and discussed politics, the kids, life; then waded the creek to pick blackberries for them to take home. It was ordinary and special all at the same time.

This morning I woke to see the latest polls are showing McCain/Palin even more ahead-- 10 points in the USA Today likely voter poll. Depressed? You bet. I can't understand it and yet 8 years of Bush has made me understand what seems right to me does not to a lot of other people.

Gritting my teeth, I know I might have to once again accept that the majority of Americans don't think like me. I have to recognize our history has had many such moments and not just ours but around the world. I still have hope, but it's hard. I also have questions.

How do people bounce around so much on what they think in these polls? What impacts a voter to answer one way last week and another this? Is it all thinking Palin will actually be the president?

Yes, having read around the blog world, I do know how many are chortling over those same numbers and feeling relieved that now they will be safe, god will be pleased, and their taxes won't go up. No matter how many times Obama says he would not raise taxes on the middle class, too many voters don't believe him. They relate more to the rich than the poor.

I haven't given up but it's definitely not a happy thing to see today in the papers. Yesterday was a happy day, although with a kind of heavy cloud over it as our kids see the political situation as we do.

You can't believe how much I'd like to say this won't matter in the long run, get a grip, but wouldn't a draft matter to those of us with grandchildren or kids young enough to be caught up in it? Won't destruction of the environment matter to those of us who don't value dollars higher than anything else? What about endless wars around the world where our budget is further destroyed?

People who vote for Bush/McCain appear to worry more about welfare moms than wars. Welfare and aid to families is a tiny fraction of where our budget goes. Do such people really believe we can fight all these wars with no cost??? Why has it been okay with them to borrow the money to fund them making us more vulnerable in the world and now with a financial crisis that has not yet been handled, only delayed. How much do you think the government can really pick up if more banks start to fail? That guarantee is only good when the government has money to fund the losses. You think that can go on forever at the rate we are leaking money to wars overseas?

Are those who favor McCain aware how much his friend and adviser, Phil Gramm, had to do with these sub-prime mortgage failures? To make the economy look good for awhile, they allowed a lot of loans that never should have gone out but don't worry. They made money on it!

Since issues don't seem to trouble most voters, here's another question: I keep hearing how voters relate to Palin because she's like they are. when did it become good in this country to vote for ordinary people? When did being a good guy at a barbecue or a good mother become a reason to want them leading the government?

When did we stop wanting Thomas Jeffersons and begin to want George Bushes. The new George Bush with a beehive and glasses wears those to look ordinary, or so she says, just as Bush wore his boots, cowboy hat, and bought a little ranch, to look like a cowboy.

It's all about images and somehow a bi-racial and cultural man with a Harvard education and a brilliant mind just isn't ordinary to too many voters. Would it have helped if he'd graduated at the bottom of his class instead of being president of the Harvard Law Review?

And on that good mom thing, since I am writing stream of consciousness. Sarah Palin is supposed to be one; but their family was such that she kept from her own children the fact that she was pregnant until she was 7 months along. If you read the recent article [Fusing Politics and Motherhood in a new way], it shows how she eventually told her children about her pregnancy but still withheld the news of Downs Syndrome.

Inside Ms. Palin’s room, her daughter Willow, 14, immediately noticed her new brother’s condition, according to People magazine. “He looks like he has Down syndrome,” Willow said. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

I understand having a child born with a disability is not something you want or need to share with everybody. As the article indicates, it was a lot for them to absorb (although given their religious views it had to be from god); but their own children, when it would impact them so greatly, why not tell them? With that lack of communication from the parents, it's not surprising their daughter would wait until she was 5 months pregnant to tell her mother. So tell me, is lack of communication a right wing family virtue???

And no, it doesn't impact her ability to be president. It doesn't change what her political values are. Shaking my head. I really do need to take a vacation. Oh wait, I just did :)