The young woman who said she was sexually assaulted by a 6'4" black man who carved a B (for Obama?) into her face because she has a McCain sticker on her car, has now been charged with making a false police report.

And it turns out she is a paid staffer for . . . the College Republican National Committee.

It has been just over 5 years since my mother died. She lived 76 years and influenced me for almost 53. I think about her every day. I see people doing things that remind me of her. We make her recipes, we use some of her pans, I have flowers in her vase in the music room. She is ever present in my decisions.

It's pretty clear that at least 1/2 the registered voters in my county will have voted before election day. It stood at 36% a week before and the lines were long at all the polls, all day yesterday and presumably will be so every day. I remember hearing one woman say that yesterday was her only chance to vote. Every other day she would be working during the voting hours. If there is a three or four hour (seven hours in Cobb County, GA a few days ago) wait and you work and have children, you just can't vote. That isn't right.

We need even more opportunities to vote. More locations, more machines, more workers.

We also had to vote on those horrible touch screen machines that give no receipt, even after it is clear that they can be sabatoged, corrupted, and rigged, with no way to check the results. It is horrible.

The past quarter for America's economic industry seems to have been the worst in my memory (which admittedly only goes back about half a century). Yet Exxon Mobil yesterday reported the largest quarterly profits for any company at any time in history.

There IS something wrong with that.

Thanks Sarah for the terrific presentation of the issues in this national political campaign in your recent blog. I think you have a thorough understanding of the important issues and agreed with you point for point. Mrs. G and I went and voted early today, so our voices have been added to the over 36% that have already voted in Georgia. We waited in line for just under an hour.

Barack Obama probably has no chance in Georgia, a solidly repub leaning state, but we took our stand for him anyway.

You may not remember what a scandal it was in the newspapers when John Edwards paid $400 for 2 haircuts during the presidential primary campaign. It apparently showed how out of touch he was with reality. That's about 10 times as much as I pay for a haircut.

Sarah Palin's hairdresser is being paid $5000 a week to fix her hair. She spent $150,000 on clothes for the campaign, provided by the Repubican National Committee. I usually pay a maximum of $35 for a shirt, but go crazy and say I found some reeeeeeally nice shirts at $75. Let's get 15 of those suckers. That's $1125 for shirts!!!!! And hey I'd be wearing suits and might need, going crazy, 15 suits. Let's go beserk and buy $750 suits. That's $11,250. So I have $137,625 left for shoes and ties. I'll have to be a careful shopper.

According to the Republican Party, if I notice that Sarah has spent money wildly on clothes, I am a sexist. If Sarah is this wild on her outfits, imagine what she would do with the U.S. treasury to play with.

I've curtailed my blogging to a large degree because I'm overwhelmed with trying to process what is going on in the country.

At this point I do believe that Barack Obama will soon be the President of the United States. That at least is good.

I'm appalled at the Republican voter suppression effort that must be costing them millions of dollars. I can't imagine what it will be like for a first time voter when they go to the polls and some Repub hack standing behind the poll worker says, "No. We challenge this registration." Literally millions of voters are going to go to the poll on election day and find that Repubs have removed them from the voting lists. In some cases, whole streets of voters have been removed. On the basis of some government record that shows you at an old address, or because you've moved across the street, or there seems to be a slight change in your signature from a recorded signature five years before, your registration can be challenged or has already been removed. You have to see this article in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Greg Palast. Or watch the video.

Forgive the stream of consciousness that follows. Back to being overwhelmed. It's not by the failed Bush presidency, now acknowleged to be the worst in history. But what about the crash on Wall Street. A big ouch for me since I'm three years from retirement. Does the bailout make it better, or reward the rich for their bad judgement? Why doesn't the 700 billion go to the people being forclosed on so they can pay their mortgages instead of letting them be kicked out on to the street and reimbursing mortgage lenders for their losses? Isn't something wrong with this? If the home buyers (poor democrats) made a judgement error, didn't the lenders (rich repubs) make the same judgement error?

How about a major candidate choosing someone like Sarah Palin and all she represents, and spending $150,000 on clothes for her (talk about putting lipstick on a pig). About all the illegal things that Palin has done as governor, taking per diem for working at home, doing state business via personal email to shield her dealings from open records requests, firing people who won't do personal vedettas for her? About having two "D" students running at the top of a ticket. I can only surmise that good Republican candidates just wouldn't run this year because there was no chance of winning.

It is about voter suppression. It's about Afghanistan. It's about health care. It's about firing attorneys general who won't abuse the law for political purposes. It's about screaming "baby killer" and "socialist" and "muslim" and "kill him" at rallies. Its about people saying "I could never vote for a black man."

I'll tell you what I want. I want 350 electoral votes. I want 61 senators (so we can kiss Joe Lieberman goodbye). I want Iraq to be over. I want Osama hunted down and killed. I want health care for all Americans. I want the right to vote for all Americans. I want a graduated tax system that doesn't tap out while still in the middle class. We have had tax rates in the past as high as 94% on the uber rich, 91% during the Eisenhower administration (the definition of the good old days). It is currently 36% on the uber rich with loads of loopholes. Poor school teachers are paying 28%. I'll tell you, there is more than 8% difference in our salaries, but not in our tax rates.

Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber, Can I call you Joe?

Who goes to a political rally? Fans of the candidate, that's who! And, protesters. So we get this video sound bite of a plumber talking with the candidate on the ropeline saying how he works long hours and wanted to buy the plumbing company that he has worked for for many years, but with Obama's tax increases on small business, he cannot buy the company. Well the tax increase on small companies making over $250,000 a year is only going up three percent. And only 3% of small businesses make that much money.

When you check on Joe you find that:

1. He has no plumbers liscense at any level and he isn't even qualified to work legally in Toledo with a plumbing company.

2. He makes far less than $250K a year. His company does not make this amount either. His taxes are actually going to go down under Obama.

3. The company itself might cost Joe $250K if he were a plumber and could buy it.

Face it. Joe the plumber is a political plant. He was there to say his words to Obama on the line, get it recorded, and turn it over to the Repubs so McCain could use his name 25 times in the debate. It was supposed to anger small businessmen. It was all a lie. Joe doesn't like Barack Obama, but it isn't because of the reason he gave on camera. His real rationale remains a secret.

How about the ACORN accusations on Fox News. Now mentioned over 1200 times on this "news" channel. This group is supposedly stealing the election for Obama. This is nothing but crap. ACORN itself is identifying names that are registered and appear spurious. They have flagged about 1% of their new registrations, approximately 13 thousand of 1.3 million names. Nevertheless laws require that all the names be submitted to state registrars. Micky Mouse has been registered. While this is stupid, it will not result in voter fraud because Micky Mouse will not show up at the polls with identification and vote. It is clear that ACORN employees have found a way to get paid more by making false registrations, but making up names for a list does not constitute voter fraud. These made up names will not vote. It is just annoying.

The real travesty is that voter registration is so difficult to do that only 71% of qualified white Americans are registered, only 61% of black Americans, 50 and 40 % of Hispanic and Asian Americans. Now that is a story about voter suppression and election fraud. We need purple finger dye and no registrations so the people can vote.

Fox is busy pushing this story because it is now clear to them that Obama is going to win this election in a landslide. Their story will be that the greatest election fraud in American history has stolen the presidency. That is actually true. It happened in 2000.

Christopher Buckley, son of the late bastion of conservative thought, William F. Buckley, came out in the last week to say that he would be voting for Barack Obama for president. He said it will be his first vote ever for a democrat. Christopher Buckley is a novelist and was a speechwriter for George H.W. Bush.

Palin's unAmerican activities--deep ties to the Alaskan Independence Party, who favor violent overthrow of US government to make Alaska an independent country. They see Palin as a kindred spirit. Husband Todd was an active member of this party for 7 years. In the past, the AIP has sought help from the government of Iran.

Read it in Salon.

Sarah Palin is an empty suit. It was difficult to understand where she was going in her meandering answers to Gwen Ifill’s questions the other night, but at the time I thought I was having some attention deficit problems and I just wasn’t getting it. I was getting plenty of “Joe Sixpack, God bless her, Say it ain’t so, Joe, now doggone it, darn it,” and “aw hec,” with lots of winking at me. (Then I thought, she’s not winking at a person, she’s winking into a camera. Who does that?) As I have begun to read over the transcripts of what she said, I have discovered that there was nothing wrong with me. Her sentences didn’t make any sense.

This is an actual quote: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

The italics are mine. Reread the italics carefully. What does this sentence mean? And don’t you find the condescending comment about teachers offensive. It is like saying, “Well we aren’t going to pay you a decent wage, bless your heart, but surely God will take care of ya.” This is a load of crap.

If we had grabbed a bright kid from any local high school, spent 3 weeks coaching them, written all her answers on index cards, told her to disregard the questions that she didn’t have an answer for and just to give one of her programmed answers that she had on a card when they hit her with a puzzler, couldn’t an 18 year old girl have done better than Palin did? Anne Buckle would have been better by far. Craig Kleimeyer would have been better.

I’ve taken a few tests. Sometimes you sit down and open that college final exam and whew, the essay questions aren’t quite what you studied for. You have 4 or 5 great answers in your head, but the professor only asked 2 of those questions. The third question is from outer space. Ugh. You have to decide. Leave it blank? Write the two sentences you know about this question and try to fill in with a load of crap? Or Sarah Palin’s choice, just write down the answer to a different question, one that you knew the answer to.

When your knowledge base is grossly insufficient, you can’t discuss a subject coherently. This resulted in the deer in the headlights answers Governor Palin gave Katie Couric, “Well let’s see Katie, since I’ve never heard of any Supreme Court cases, I’ll just say there’s probably lot’s of them I don’t agree with . . . maybe.

You know Palin may be a nice person, even though she goes to a holy roller church and has taken blessings from witch chasers. Forgive her for her upbringing. She may be intelligent, even though it took her 6 years and 5 colleges to get a degree. There is no doubt she’s cute and folksy, has a bunch of kids with hippy names (aren’t you dying to find out what their middle names are?), and is a beauty queen. (Cue wolf whistle). But does any of that qualify her to run the United States of America. I’m pretty smart. I’m educated, keep up with current events, and have some time on my hands. But if Barack Obama came calling at my door and said “Billy Bob, I think you should be my Vice Presidential running mate,” I’d have smiled, gotten an autograph, and told him “Thank you, Barack, but no. This is way out of my area of expertise.” Sarah should have done the same when they came to her.

At some point John McCain sold his soul to the devil. He’s risking our world so he can be president. Please, God, don’t let them win.

See this link to Bob Herbert’s incisive commentary in the New York Times.