OmegaMom

Time to bite fingernails.

I hope the friend who says she will eat a Milk Bone at the dog park on Friday if Romney wins won’t have to!

On a more serious note:  The arguments I presented in my previous two posts about the election were the logical, rational arguments.  On the other hand, I have some major emotional reasons to vote the way I did.  Some of them include the fact that I have a uterus, and my daughter has a uterus.  Some of them include the fact that I have (and have had) some family members who are gay, and I want them to be able to have the same marital rights as I do.  One is that I have become fed up with the extremism of today’s Republicans; the very notion that Obama is a socialist just boggles my mind.  I cannot imagine a world where skin color is a reason to vote against Obama (check out the early tweets on #VoteWhite, sigh).  And more… 

I voted straight Democratic today (the first time I have ever done so), and I deliberately didn’t vote for Republicans who were running unopposed.

We shall see.

Three words:  President Paul Ryan.

Two words:  Financial de-regulation.

One word:  Choice.

On the first point:  Paul Ryan’s budget plan is a disaster for every aspect of the government except for the military.  Under his plan, non-defense discretionary spending (that would be spending on, say, the USDA, NOAA, USGS, NIH, CDC, NASA, etc.) would be cut by $1.17 billion dollars.  It would be roughly cut in half by 2021. 

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that there’s a helluva lot of Good Stuff™ coming out of agencies such as these.  (Conflict of interest note:  That would include my husband’s salary, benefits, and retirement, too.)  To use just a couple of examples, NOAA is the agency that correctly predicted that Hurricane Sandy would take a sharp turn to the west and head inland at New Jersey, and that it would combine with a strong nor’easter.  USGS is the agency that does volcano monitoring, which may not be a big deal in general, but in Alaska is a big deal.

Paul Ryan’s budget plan would also cut funding for federal disaster relief, Pell grants, and “revisit” the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform.

Which leads us to point number two, financial de-regulation, which Mitt Romney has said he is for.

Can I just say “ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR BLOODY EVER-LIVING MINDS?!?!”

Look.  You know what caused the greatest recession since the Great Depression?  Repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.  The Great Depression was caused by wild amounts of gambling on the stock market with borrowed money which was backed by…the expected gains from the gambling on the stock market.  Somewhere along the line, suddenly people realized that there was nothing backing up those loans, so they were essentially worth nothing.  The onset of the Great Recession was caused by the realization that the wild amounts of gambling on the housing market with borrowed money that was backed by…the expected gains from the gambling on the housing market was all a chimera, a game of smoke and mirrors.

I remember watching with open-mouthed amazement the prices of houses in our little Hippy Dippy Enclave In the Woods as they rose…and rose…and rose yet again.  At that point, I started following several “housing bust” blogs.  Some of them were written by wild-eyed end-of-the-world doomsayers, but some were written by economists or housing market analysts who were taking a clear look at the fun-house-mirror world of NINJA (no income, no job) loans, house flipping, mortgage derivatives, and derivatives of the mortgage derivatives.  When it all caved in, I wasn’t surprised.

For those of you who don’t really remember what it was like…there was a rumor that Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury, actually got down on his knees and begged Nancy Pelosi and other powerful congresscritters in a secret meeting in September 2008 to save Wall Street and the banking industry.

It was that bad.

While I don’t like George W. Bush and think his presidency was awful, I have to hand it to him and the congresscritters:  they hunkered down, put forth a bailout bill, and when it was shot down, put it out again and pulled in all their congressional IOUs to get it passed.  It was highly unpopular.  But I feel it was also highly necessary.  TARP was the first step in saving our country from the Grander Depression, in my opinion, with Obama’s economic stimulus the second step.

And all of this was started by financial deregulation.

Mitt Romney joked in one of the debates that he wasn’t talking about allowing people to start banks in their garages.

That’s not what I’m worried about.  I’m worried about another stupid round of high-rolling gambling suckering the U.S. into yet another round of wild “prosperity” that is founded upon…nothing.  And then staring into the financial abyss yet again, when my husband and I are retired and living on a fixed income.

My third point is choice.  I have a daughter.  I have a daughter adopted from China.  I have a daughter adopted from China because her parents had no choice.  Whether it was economic, whether it was seeking a boy-child, whatever—the entire cultural situation in China that produced the situations where there were “extra” girl babies being abandoned, backed by, in some cases, forced abortions…well…

I want my daughter to be able to have a choice when she becomes sexually active and (please no!) accidentally gets pregnant.  I want her to be able to decide what is best for her.  If she decides to have a baby and keep it, that’s cool.  If she decides to have a baby and relinquish it for adoption, that’s cool.  If she decides not to have a baby, and has an abortion, it is her choice.

I don’t want her choice to be dictated by old white men who think a few cells is equivalent to a living, breathing human being.

As recently as during the Republican primaries, Romney said he “absolutely supports” a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.  Paul Ryan, his running mate, is the author of the “personhood” bill.  Both have said they want to defund Planned Parenthood.  Both have supported laws that would allow companies to deny their employees coverage for birth control and abortion due to moral or religious beliefs. 

My personal belief is that my employer has no right to limit what female reproductive services my insurance dollars pay for.

Now, since the Republican primaries, Mr. Romney has backtracked on most of these positions.  He is attempting to re-position himself as a centrist to appeal to the independent and moderate voters. 

Which Romney should I believe?  The one who ran for governor of Massachusetts claiming he was pro-choice, then in 2005 vetoed a law expanding access to emergency contraception, then claimed he would support revoking Roe v. Wade in the Republican primaries, then claimed there was no legislation regarding abortion in his presidential agenda?  The Romney who was quite the hawk during the Republican primaries, or the one who pretty much nodded and said, “What he said!” to all of President Obama’s positions during the third presidential debate?  The one who favors financial de-regulation, or the one who said “Well, of course we need some regulation!” during the second debate?

The Des Moines Register seems to have fallen for Romney’s shift-to-the-middle stance, which they cited in their endorsement editorial.  But I can tell you from experience that hoping a right-wing candidate will actually be more centrist than he sounds is a Bad Idea.  I voted for George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes.  (Please don’t hit me!)  I voted for him thinking he couldn’t possibly be as right as he sounded, and that he was probably going to be a pragmatic centrist.  I thought Al Gore was too liberal.

Hah.  Look what I got.  You can believe I did not vote for George W. Bush in 2004.  I’m not going to fall for another “shift-to-the-center-now-that-I’ve-got-the-nomination” ploy again.  Besides which, as I stated in yesterday’s post, I am fully satisfied with Barack Obama as president.

Four years ago, during his campaign and during the presidential debates, Barack Obama promised a few things.

He promised to focus on Al Qaeda and responding to those who attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

He delivered.  Osama bin Laden is dead; the leadership of Al Qaeda is in tatters.

He promised to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

In December 2011, the last U.S. troops left Iraq.

He promised to put together a national health care plan.

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act into law.  It isn’t the sun, moon, and stars we were all hoping for (I particularly wanted a public option), but it is a start.

He promised to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for U.S. military servicemen.

On September 30, 2011, that policy was ended.  Amazingly enough, our military forces are not in disarray as a result, and the world has not ended.

He did try to close Guantanamo; the prison is still open because…well, there are still prisoners, and Congress refused to pass a bill to cover the costs to transfer the prisoners to a facility in the U.S.

He did try to pass a cap-and-trade bill, but once again this was obstructed by Congress.

He has instructed the Justice Department to stop enforcing The Defense Of Marriage Act.

He signed the Lily Ledbetter Act into law shortly after he was inaugurated.

When President Obama was elected four years ago, the economy was in freefall.  The stock market hit its low in March, 2009, two months after Obama was inaugurated, but had done the majority of its fall the previous year.  The high of 14,164  for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was hit in October 2007; by late October 2008, it was already down to 8,451, and it wavered around that point for the remainder of the year.  Now?  The DJIA is back up around 13,000.  By the end of 2008, the U.S. GDP was plummeting by almost 9% for the last quarter of the year.  Starting with the third quarter of 2009, the GDP has been positive again.  By late 2008, the U.S. had lost 2.6 million jobs for the year.  Job losses continued, though slowing down, until March 2010, and have been on a continuous upward trend since October 2010.  Even though faced with a recalcitrant Congress, President Obama managed to get a jobs stimulus bill passed in 2009, and economists agree that without it, unemployment would currently be much higher and GDP much lower.

The world economy tanked in 2008.  There are countries out there—ironically enough, many European countries that Republicans consider “socialist”—that followed the austerity path, rather than the economic stimulus path.  Those countries are now still mired in deep recession and high levels of political unrest (Greece, for instance, is facing unemployment of 25%).

Climate change is on everyone’s mind right now (even though there was no mention of it during the presidential debates), what with Hurricane Sandy’s recent hit on the Northeastern U.S.  Barack Obama is aware of and his administration is quietly working on dealing with global climate change. The U.S.’s carbon emissions have dropped to a 20-year low, natural gas and renewable energy resources have become much more prevalent as energy sources for the U.S. during his administration, and U.S. auto MPG rates have been ramped up, with the most recent requirement going up to 54 mpg (average) by 2025.

I think Barack Obama did a hell of a job given the mess he walked into.  When he was elected, the Onion’s headline was “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.  Why he still wants it is anyone’s guess (my personal opinion is that his poor performance during the first presidential debate this year was that he was wondering if he really wanted to deal with this shit for four more years).  But since he wants it, I’m going to vote that he gets it.

New Mexico, here we come!

OmegaDad accepted a position in Big City, NM, yesterday.  The job starts in about 8 weeks.  We took OmegaDotter out to dinner after her team gymnastics for the day and told her…

She cried.

Sigh.  I remember what it was like for her when we moved here to Suburban Alaska, those first few weeks when she didn’t know anyone at all, and I spent time cuddling her every day after school for a week while she processed being away from her One And Only True Love and her friends from Arizona.

Now she has to go through that again.

Oh, I know quite well that within a year, she’ll have new buddies galore, and thanks to the Miracles Of Modern Technology she will be able to keep in touch with her old buddies.  But for a few months, it will be very difficult for her.

In the meantime, I have been struck—quite unexpectedly!—by sadness at leaving Alaska.  While I will never, EVER miss the long, cold, dark dark dark winters, which leave me dull and depressed and miserable, I will miss the mountains, the long summer days, the fun of having daylight change so rapidly from short to long to short again.  I will miss the chance to see the northern lights.  (Alas, last night, when the latest wowza geomagnetic storm hit, it was overcast here and the almost-full-moon was shining behind the overcast.  So we got a lovely pearlescent sky, but none of it was the northern lights, wah!).  I will miss having actual seasons.  I will miss the thick, sweet, peaty smell of the wet boreal woods, which is so different from the light, dusty, vanilla scent of dry ponderosa forests.

I will also miss that odd plus to living in Alaska, the yearly PFD check.  While we should have banked it, we used it for such things as flying down to…the Southwest!…right around Christmas, or, last year, out to the Southeast.  Those trips were something that kept me sane during the darkest days near winter solstice.

I don’t have many friends here, myself; we managed to deposit ourselves squarely into the Bible Belt of Alaska, filled with conservatives.  I remember during the last presidential campaign arriving at the dotter’s gymnastics facility to be greeted with a bleacher full of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” pins.  On the other hand, our next door neighbor is a lovely liberal lady with her equally liberal female partner (who has had to deal with some really ugly experiences as a result); I will miss her and her family dearly.  Also, the family of OmegaDotter’s dearest friend are liberal and laidback; I’ll miss them too.

But it’s a new adventure!  Onwards!

Let’s say your political party has campaigned against the Rising Tide of Eeevul Librulism and managed to get a sound majority in the U.S. House of Representatives (but not in the Senate).

Let’s say your political party has claimed it is for reducing the U.S. deficit, for smaller government, against the Eeeevul Librul Conspiracy of Anthropogenic Climate Change, against abortion, against the encroaching immorality of the librul Public Broadcasting System.

You need to show your voting constituents that you are Working Hard to win the culture war and save the United States as it was designed by the (cue angelic choir) Founding Fathers.

You take a look at the U.S. federal budget.

You could take a whack at military funding, which is huge (20% of the federal budget, not counting percentage of Department of Energy costs aimed at military spending, and not counting the percentage of Veterans Administration costs aimed at medical care for military members wounded in the recent wars).  But that would look bad to your constituents, as you also campaigned on a strong U.S. military presence around the globe, and standing strong in the War on Terror.  Besides, you know those sneaky Democrats in control of the Senate might actually agree with those cuts and leave them in!  So leave that out.

You could take a whack at Social Security (20% of the federal budget).  But while it might look good to your constituents, you know that a large number of them are actually using Social Security.  Start cutting there, and your constituents will start suffering and blame you.

You could take a whack at Medicare/Medicaid (23% of the budget).  But, once again, your constituents are adamant that the government not mess with their Medicare.  Maybe there’s a way to fiddle with Medicaid…

But look at all these other things to cut that would fire up the base!

Hey!  There’s funding for Title X—reproductive health and family planning, and—OMG!—Planned Parenthood!  That’s ripe for the cutting, and boy howdy, will your constituents love that!  Cut the whole thing!

Oooh!  There’s funding for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio!  Yeehaw, let’s cut that puppy down!  Another eeevul librul program bites the dust.  Real Americans, hard working, red-blooded, blue-collar Americans, they don’t watch PBS or listen to NPR.

Ahh!  What about the IPCC?  (What’s that, you say?  That’s the funding for the U.S. portion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)  Ooooh, yeah, that’ll play perfectly with your constituents!  Global warming, shhhyeah, right—what about all that cold and snowy weather on the north coast of the United States?!  Yeah, yeah, the Antarctic is showing temps that are up to 10 degrees higher than normal on a regular basis, permafrost is melting all over the place in Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia, but, hey, that’s not here, where regular folks live.

We are on a roll, here, folks!  The EPA?  A bunch of overly regulating bureaucratic flunkies whose main purpose in existence is to impose restrictions on good, hard-working businesses.  Let’s put the axe there, too!

While you’re at it, make sure you ensure that funding for advertising the military at NASCAR races is kept in.

Because, you see…you know very well that this stuff plays well with your base.  You can fire them up, have them nodding their heads as they watch Fox News, pumping their fists, and know quite well that none of it is going to go through, so you don’t have to deal with any…oh…repercussions of these kinds of cuts.  Because you know quite well that the Democrats who control the U.S. Senate won’t pass any of these cuts.  Because you know quite well that even if the cuts did pass the Senate, President Obama would veto them.

The only problem in this entire thing is that it might—just might—anger the centrists and liberals in the U.S. enough to cause problems in the next elections.  But, hey.  Given all the stuff that’s been going on over the past ten years, it’s pretty obvious that the centrists and liberals in the U.S. aren’t going to stay angry enough to actually do anything, especially if these cuts don’t pass.

So it’s a win-win situation all around, right?

OmegaDotter is off spending the night at a friend’s house, so OmegaDad and I took the opportunity to Get Things Done. 

What this consisted of this evening is me wielding a hair dryer to warm up wax paper stuck to slabs of chocolate Rice Krispie treats, and OmegaDad carefully cutting and gluing them together with buttercream frosting.

Why?

It is time for OmegaDad’s Christmas gingerbread house.  This time, he is doing a pagoda on top of a Guilin-esque hill, beside a stream.  The great secret behind many a creation here is the structural use of Rice Krispie treats; in this case, the hill is made of layers of them.  He had made three cookie sheets full, then covered them with wax paper while they “cured”; the problem is that the wax paper had adhered completely.  The first slab, we picked the wax paper off veeeerrrry carefully.  Then OmegaDad had his flash of brilliance, scurried off to the bathroom, returned with my hair dryer, and voila, the deed was done quickly and handily.

Now, I realize that many adult adoptees will cringe at the decor ideas for this year’s gingerbread fantasy, but keep in mind that these particular ideas come straight from OmegaDotter:

There will be pandas made of fondant.  Here’s one of the pandas, already made:

Isn’t he squee-fully cute?!

Then, OmegaDotter insisted that there be ninjas.  She likes ninjas, so ninjas there will be.  She and OmegaDad spent a happy evening researching how to make fondant ninjas on Google images.

There will be a stream of vivid blue rock sugar.

There may be a Chinese-style bridge over the stream.  It is in the plans, but OmegaDad sounds kind of dubious about it.

The pagoda will be a round pagoda, somewhat like this hexagonal one.

OmegaDad told me this afternoon, while surrounded by heaps of dirty dishes and carrying the last slab off to the dining table, that The Food Network was letting everyone down, because their Cake Challenge show never showed the immense work that had to be done in the background to allow the stars to do their stylin’ cakes—the people who made the fondant, the royal icing, the buttercream, the layers of cake.  All you see is the finished pieces being carved and put together, but behind all that is the unsung work of many others.

And while we were doing that, the Senate was voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It’s about time!  And both of Alaska’s senators voted for the repeal—yay!

• OmegaDad had the tools to make the turkey because…he went out and bought them.  Well, not the Dremel, that has been his man-toy for quite a while now.  But the dried wheat stalks and the Indian corn and the turban squash and the (om nom nom!) dried apricots were all purchased Sunday afternoon to pursue the pumpkin turkey dream.
• School was out today, due to the ice.  School is going to be out tomorrow, because of the ice.  (Except at this point I think there may not be any “ice” left, because we’re basking in 39F temperatures at ten minutes to midnight in late November in Alaska, and it was pouring down rain half an hour ago.  All our cold weather has gone south, blasting down the West Coast and dumping snow and ice in Washington and Oregon.  I mean, really, folks:  Did you have to steal our –15F weather?
• 3cmum asked what I’m reading on the Kindle.  Right now, I’m reading Blackout, by Connie Willis.  Next up in my mental queue is Condoleeza Rice’s autobiography, because I read a review of it that sounded very interesting.  And if Jeanne Marie Laskas’ Fifty Acres and a Poodle is available on Kindle, I recommend it—it’s a heartwarming chick-lit autobiography type book from a lady who writes (wrote?) an ongoing column for a major newspaper.  She also happens to have adopted from China, too.  (After writing a few columns about infertility that made my infertility email list buds back in 1990 gasp, groan, and feel inspired to write letters to the editor.  Ah, me.  Those were the days!)
• Joe Miller has re-filed his lawsuit after being told—in no uncertain terms—by the federal judge that he had filed his lawsuit in the wrong court, that it needed to be heard on the state level as this was state law he was challenging, and that the federal court couldn’t do anything with it until it was settled (or not) in a state court.
• North Korea and South Korea.  WTF?!  Anyone have any ideas why it suddenly blew up like that?
• If you’re interested in a hilarious, touching, thought-provoking fantasy web-comic, go check out Digger.  It may take a few pages to get into, but it’s well worth it.  I am in the midst of re-reading the whole thing.

Lisa Murkowski now has a 2,247-vote lead over Joe Miller, without the challenged ballots.  That is, Ms. Murkowski managed to get 92,715 hand-written, properly spelled, properly formatted, oval-filled-in ballots from Alaskans around the state.

I think that’s amazing.

There’s another 8,153 ballots that have been challenged by the Miller campaign that were counted by the state Board of Elections which are awaiting a judgment in a previously filed lawsuit.  From what has been written, those write-ins were mostly questioned on smudges, misplaced commas, dubious penmanship, and a certain number where the name was written in the same format used for the printed candidate names (e.g., “Murkowski, Lisa  Republican”).

But wait—!!!

Hold the presses!!!

Joe Miller has filed a lawsuit requesting a hand recount of his own votes.  Because he mistrusts the electronic voting machines.

Well, hey, I can understand that; I have a deep mistrust of the electronic voting machines myself, given my knowledge of computer programming and all the details that can (and do) go wrong.

I just think it’s amusing, that’s all.

(Alert readers will look at the headline of the story I linked and say, “Hey!  They say Murkowski has a 10,000 vote lead!  What’s the deal?!”  I merely say, re-read the details of my own post.)

That would be me.

Tomorrow’s post will be a round-up.  Tonight’s is just…well, we’re having “control issues” here, and I think A Scene is coming up.  Bah.  The end result:  no desires for fun posts tonight.

In keeping with my mood, Joe Miller has started filing his lawsuits.

Last night, I was reading election results on the web and just waiting, waiting, waiting for 8 p.m. to roll around so the Alaska polls would close and we could start getting our very own election results.

I thought long and hard about this senate race.  Lisa Murkowski—the incumbent—had been defeated in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, a Tea Party Candidate.  Miller had two things going for him in the primary:  a parental-notification proposition, which brought out the conservative pro-life voters, and the fact that Murkowski’s typical followers viewed the primary win as a sure thing.

Oops.  It wasn’t, and Joe won.

Lisa gave a concession speech, but then there were appalled moderate Republicans and independent voters across the state who begged her to find a way to run in the general election—run as a Libertarian! some cried.  Others said, run as a write-in candidate!  Save us from Joe Miller! most said.

Three and a half weeks later, Lisa announced that she was running as a write-in candidate.  Miller supporters sneered at her for being such a “sore loser”.  Democrats winced—they had hoped to garner votes for Scott McAdams from the vast Oh-No-Not-Joe! group of voters, but Lisa had name value, both as an incumbent and as the “heir” to Frank Murkowski, former senator of Alaska, who handed his senate seat off to her when he won the governorship of the state.

Anyway, it was a very interesting election season here.

As I said, I thought long and hard.  I knew I would never vote for Joe, but should I vote for McAdams—the one I wanted to vote for—or should I vote for Murkowski—the one I thought would win?

Decisions, decisions.

Lots of Alaskans faced that same choice.

In the meantime, Miller was doing lots of things that just made people very uncomfortable (such as having a reporter handcuffed and “citizen arrested” for “trespassing” at a Town Hall meeting), refusing to talk to reporters, arrogantly heading off to DC to check out apartments and look at decor options for his (presumed) senate office…

I ended up voting for McAdams, as did OmegaDad.

But yesterday enough people voted for someone so that Lisa Murkowski made history (or so we all assume):  “Write-ins” won 41% of the vote, Miller got 34%, and (alas) McAdams got 24%.

Of course Miller’s campaign has immediately lawyered-up, and the fight will be on.  Hopefully, it won’t be as long and drawn out and divisive as the Franken vote count was; in the Franken case, it was Republican against Democrat, and the RNC was backing its man with all the lawyers and challenges money could buy.  In this case, however, it’s Tea Party Republican against (relatively) moderate Republican, and the RNC wins either way.  There will, of course, be challenges and spats over “voter intent” left and right, but 16% of the write-ins need to be either not Murkowski or tossed out for Miller to win.

As I said on Facebook late last night, “I can live with Lisa. Would prefer McAdams, but Lisa Murkowski is better than Joe Miller.”

While I sit here alternately reading election returns and berating myself for reading election returns (“Why are you hitting your head against the wall?”  “Because it feels so good when it stops!”), I thought I would put together a post on our Halloween shenanigans.

Mostly, our annual Halloween haunted gingerbread house.  This was last year’s version.  This year, OmegaDad decided that we needed a haunted movie theater.  It would have a movie screen, and various ghouls and ghosties and witches and whatnot sitting in the audience, and you would only be able to see it through holes in the decorated walls…

First, he and OmegaDotter decided on a movie to be playing (Monsters Versus Aliens), and then the dotter produced a sketch of what should be showing on screen  (I like the “Dude!”):

While OmegaDad was putting together the walls, the dotter worked on translating her sketch to the royal icing movie screen:

With this as the end result:

Note that working with edible ink pens on royal icing is, frankly, a pain in the butt.  She’s great with pencil on paper, and good with markers on paper, but the edible ink pens/royal icing combo was killer for her.

Then she and OmegaDad spent a while creating theater seats and various monsters to inhabit the seats.  At the front, you will see three ghosts, a Frankenstein, and a witch off to the side; behind them are tombstones and the beginnings of two Candy Corn Creatures.  OmegaDad is working on the movie house framework and, I believe, beginning to populate the theater:

The inside was completed, and before they put the roof on and finished the outside, I took a photo:

I love the candy corn wall sconces!

And then they really got to working.  I present to you—The Boojou Theatre!

This is the front.  Note the movie poster for Monsters Versus Aliens, the skeletal booth attendant, and the Candy Corn Creature.  (OmegaDad downloaded a variety of monster movie posters, shrunk them, printed them out, and then plastered them onto slabs of royal icing.)  A close-up of the front:

The left side, with "The Creature From The Black Lagoon”, “The Giant Gila Monster”, ghosts, tombstones, Candy Corn Critter, and a view inside, and the back, with a monstrous spider, glowy-eyeball black cats, and another movie poster:

A view of the right side.  The movie poster is “Beach Girls and the Monster”.  You can see the movie “playing” inside:

So, it was grand and grand fun.  On the whole, however, both OmegaDad and I preferred last year’s creation.  He is already planning next year’s, which currently is slated to be a haunted disco, and titled “BOOgie Nights”.  Har!

OmegaDotter was a sorceress for Halloween, with a grand black-and-white wig which she very carefully styled into a sixties-style hairdo.  There was purple eye shadow and purple lips, and a splendid staff made of black painted PVC with a purple/pink painted wiffle ball and glowsticks inserted inside. 

She insisted that I dress up a bit, so we scampered around Sunday afternoon and pulled together a Mama Bunny look:

We both discovered that the face paint itched like crazy after a while.

So that was our Halloween!

Now…back to reading ::sob!:: election returns.

Specifically, Alaska politics.

Specifically, Lisa Murkowski’s announcement that she’s going to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate.

Whoa.

To give some history to non-U.S.A.ians:  The Alaska Senate primaries (in which the various parties decide upon who is going to run as the official candidate) produced a Democratic nominee, Scott McAdams, and a surprise upset on the Republican side.  Lisa Murkowski, a well-known and generally respected 8-year-senator, was beaten (narrowly, by 1% of the primary vote) by a Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller.

How did that happen?

Well, there was this proposition on the ballot, too, Proposition 2.  Proposition 2 was a measure to require parental notification whenever a girl under 18 attempted to get an abortion.  And, boy howdy, did the religious right come out in droves to vote against it.

At the same time, they voted for Joe Miller.

Now, my husband and I marched off to vote against Proposition 2.  We didn’t bother to vote in any of the senatorial primaries, though we could have (both being registered as independents, I believe), partly because we just assumed Lisa Murkowski would get the nod.  See, we didn’t even think about the relationship between Prop 2 and the senatorial primary. 

The day after the primary, Joe Miller was in the lead by 2,000 votes.

A few days later, with more ballots counted, his lead was narrowed, but he was still ahead.

A few days later, Lisa Murkowski conceded the Republican nomination to him.

Moderate Republicans and state Democrats were shocked.  It was a major upset.

Then there were a couple of weeks of dancing around, with questions as to whether Murkowski would run on the Libertarian ticket (they said no).  And then there were a week or two of dancing with the question as to whether Murkowski would run on a write-in candidacy, with all the associated pluses and minuses.  Could she do it legally?  (Yes.)  If she did, would she alienate some Republican voters by “not abiding by the Will Of The People”?  (Yes.)  If she did, would she be able to get some Democrats to vote for her, plus enough independents, to win?  (Goodness only knows.)  If she did, would that split the Republican vote and allow the Democrat (a very long shot by a previously fairly unknown mayor of Sitka)?  (Goodness only knows.

Well, she went ahead and did it.  It’s quite a surprise.  She came out swinging at Miller and the Tea Party (“extremist”, “outsider”, “the gloves are off”), with a mild sideswipe at McAdams (“inexperienced”).

The next 45 days are gonna be interesting here.

Our fair state’s governor, Sarah Palin, announced her coming resignation while the dotter and I were frolicking in Arizona.  I actually heard about it moments after it was announced, because I was sitting in the office with my boss and my replacement trying to fix things (which I bollixed up), and my boss was cruisin’ the news sites.

And what a surprise it was!  Whoa!  Our very own Joan of Arc, our crusader for Truth, Justice, and the Amurrikan Way, quitting?!  I thought she wasn’t a quitter?!

There was a flurry of speculation as to why.  She was tired of people taking potshots at her kid, Trig, via photoshopping–though the people were actually taking potshots at her. She was tired of “frivolous ethics complaints”–even though the one that was most serious and cost the most was initiated by Palin herself.  She was tired of being a media punching bag–even conservative media and Republican pundits were on the bandwagon.  There was rumor of a possible indictment, but that one got cleared up right away, with the FBI taking the unusual step of actually commenting on the possibility, or lack thereof.  She wanted to position herself for a presidential run in 2012.  (Given something she said in her final speech today, I think this one is on the money.)  And on and on.

She says she wanted to write a book and make money, and be the focal point of a New Conservative Coalition.  (Sound the trumpets!)

Well, today is the big day.  After a farewell tour of Alaska–I think she saw more of Alaska in the past two weeks than she had in the prior year and a half–and a trio of farewell barbecues, one in Anchorage, one in her hometown of Wasilla, and one in Fairbanks, she is officially no longer the governor, and Sean Parnell is in.

Sean who?!

I’m sure he won’t be as entertaining, though he supposedly espouses the same viewpoints as Sarah herself.

Sarah will still be on Twitter under a different account starting tomorrow; rumor has it that the new account is AKSarahPalin.  Currently, the account is protected.

Life has been busy here, Chez OmegaFamily.  I have tales of the China Camp finale, the sad tale of how Ruby the duckling died, the rockin’ and rollin’ earthquake (5.4 magnitude) we had this morning that actually caused me to duck down beneath my desk, the bunny that OmegaDotter and her neighborhood girlfriends found, and further progress on the villa/greenhouse complex.

But right now, I just want to protest.

Remember how I gushed about Mr. L., the elementary school music teacher who is leaving for greener pastures, and how worried I am about who will replace him?  Well, we have now encountered a music teacher who is diametrically opposed to him in personality. 

I have been taking OmegaDotter in to summer camp around 9 a.m.  The first day of the second week of camp, as I chivvied the dotter in to the facility, we were greeted by all the kiddos lined up, hands on their hearts, and a middle-aged battle-axe of a lady playing the national anthem on the piano.  Now, I have little against the national anthem aside from the fact that it’s horrible to sing, and it actually makes me sad to hear it played so…so…mechanically is not quite the word I am looking for, but it comes close.  Every note played perfectly, but no rhythm, no swing, no soul.  Give me a musician who botches notes left and right, but does it with verve and joy any day!

I stood there with the dotter, feeling somewhat awkward, while the kids and counselors sang.  Then this lady moved right into a lecture about how it’s our duty to remember all the sacrifices Our Men In The Service have made, and that they have fought for the Right To Sing This Song.  And then she led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I am not what you would call a highly patriotic person in the normal sense of the word.  I really love my country.  I love the fact that we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness (in general*), and regard countries such as Italy (which had something like 40 governments within the space of six years at one point) with pop-eyed sympathy and a genteel shudder about the instability of it all.  I don’t like totalitarian governments, and cheered with everyone else when the Berlin Wall fell.

But bombastic “My country, right or wrong!”, “America!  Love it or leave it!” patriotism just isn’t my schtick.

So Miss Liza has two strikes against her in my book from the get-go:  she radiates rigid self-righteous belief in country, and she massacres music.  She sets my teeth on edge.

In other words, I took an immediate and violent dislike to the woman.

The problem is, it turns out that she is the “music teacher” for half an hour every morning at camp.

I am hoping and praying that she doesn’t kill all the joy in music for these children while she has them in her oh-so-patriotic clutches.

Today was the dotter’s first day back at her regular summer camp.  There was a handout next to the sign-in book.  I grabbed one and glanced at it.  It was a letter from Miss Liza.  It ensured that I think not only is she an uptight bitch who slaughters music, she’s pompous to boot and can’t write well (though she probably thinks she can).

The subject of this letter was first off how “we are gaining an understanding of rhythm and melody, by taking notice of the various applications and integrations, of those two fundamentals”, and how important music is in our lives.  So she asks that children bring in a CD each week to share with the class (just part of one song).  BUT…Miss Liza will judge the appropriateness of the music, and expects parents to help out by making sure their children avoid music with “inappropriate language, or subject content”.  This includes such things as (of course) drugs and alcohol, and also “mutilation” or “death”.  THEN she adds that they are “exploring musically the area of service and the effect it has had in shaping our country”, so the kids are asked to bring in pictures of family members who have been in service in some way.

Well.

I’m sorry, folks.  A lot of these are things that I think are just fine and dandy–that I agree with if presented thoughtfully and allowing questions–but this woman has set my back up and the entire tone of this letter set the hackles on my neck rising.  So of course, I had to show it to OmegaDad.

Have I mentioned how much I love this guy?

Y’know why?  The very first thing he did after reading it was to tell me we needed a good selection of protest songs to send in with the dotter.  Then he googled “protest music for kids”.  Then we spent an hour batting around songs that we thought we might be able to get in past the “inappropriate language” taboo (alas, they probably wouldn’t make it past the “mutilation or death” filter).  We thought of some classic folk songs from the 30s, war protest songs from the 60s and 70s, I tossed in U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and Midnight Oil.

OmegaDad really wants to do this.  I just feel like withdrawing the dotter from camp…

(*Yes, there’s a certain amount of irony in that “we change governments every four to eight years with an overall smoothness” statement coupled with a protest video portraying the Chicago riots in 1968.  But–hey.  Look.  The riots died down, people voted, Nixon won, and America went on.  And when Nixon was brought down by Watergate, the country didn’t dissolve into chaos–Jerry Ford moved into the White House, Chevy Chase made a fortune with his “bumbling Jerry” routine on SNL, and America went on.  Part of what made it go on–perhaps–were these very protests.)

Big City has a proposed ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.  Today is the city council review, with a public comment period.  Big City’s Big Preacher has bussed in bunches of folks from Suburban Alaska to oppose the proposed ordinance.  There are hundreds of people there; the streaming media of the session is overwhelmed; and there is commentary on the Big City Newspaper’s article on the affair.

Amongst the comments are a bunch akin to “Hey, I don’t care what you do in private!  Just don’t flaunt your sexuality at me!”

No doubt, they’re really against overt PDAs, but I also think they count “normal” behavior as “flaunting” when it’s applied to homosexuals.

If I were to walk down the street hand-in-hand with OmegaDad, no-one would think I was “flaunting” anything.  If Joe and Jim, in a gay relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be getting the hairy eyeball about “forcing your sexuality on others!”

If I drop my husband off at work, peck him on the cheek, and say, “Bye, Babe!”, no-one in the parking lot there would bat an eye.  If Lois and Louise, in a lesbian relationship of equal length to ours, were to do the same thing, they’d be considered to be “flaunting their sexuality”.

If I put a picture of me and my husband at our wedding on my desk at work, it would be an opening for (a) people to say “Oh, what a lovely daughter you have!” (this actually happened to me once, grrr), (b) people to ask where we got married, (c) people to ooh and ahh at how cute we were, (d) requests for advice on weddings.  Bill or Bert, having married in New Hampshire or Iowa, are often afraid to do the same thing for fear of being fired.

If I call OmegaDad’s office and someone else picks up the phone, I can leave a message for him to call home, or have him say “I love you” to me in closing without any repercussions.  A gay or lesbian couple can’t do the same thing, for fear of responses from homophobic coworkers.

The folks who rant about homosexuality being a sin and a perversion, anti-discrimination ordinances being “special rights”, gays holding hands to be “flaunting” it, and homosexual marriage “devaluing” normal marriage just don’t get it. 

First off, I’ve said before, and will say again, that I think people who are afraid of promiscuity and the instability of modern households should be all for homosexual marriage–they’re settling down, they’re promising to love each other and cleave unto each other.  Wouldn’t that promote stability?  Doesn’t the desire for marriage for homosexuals imply that marriage is something special to them that they would cherish?  Aren’t two-income families better for the economy?  Don’t they have more disposable income?

As for “special rights”.  Sheesh.  All they want is to be able to do normal, everyday things–things that every heterosexual takes for granted so much that it isn’t even noticed, without being fired, or banned, or shunned.

And the “flaunting” question?  My god.  Homosexuals are faced every day with evidence of heterosexuals’ sexual relationships–in-your-face evidence. Few heterosexuals consider it “flaunting” unless it’s homosexuals doing the same thing.

I think that the people who were bussed in to protest it should be allowed to speak, but their opinions shouldn’t count in council members’ considerations of the ordinance.  They’ve got every right to their opinion, but they don’t live where the ordinance applies.  Their actions are akin to the out-of-staters who financed the “No on Prop 8″ group in California.  Let the people who are affected by such ordinances be the people to speak out and make the decisions.

A few months ago, yet another TED talk came across my radar.  This one was given by Aimee Mullins, a young lady who was born with missing fibula bones and had her legs amputated at age one.  Mullins went on from there to become a super-achiever–she received a full scholarship from the Department of Defense to attend Georgetown University, and became a record-winning athlete in Georgetown’s track team.  She competed in the paralympics, received modeling contracts, has acted in motion pictures, and is a motivational speaker.

At the TED talk, she spoke of disability being a chance to be “more”:

I came away from this video excited, thrilled, wondering “what’s next?!”

At the same, time, however, in the midst of all the gosh-gee-golly-wow that I felt, there was also an overwhelming feeling that this woman’s excitement for the future of prosthetics and the possibilities they open up for her and other was…well…a function of a position of privilege.

See, she’s young, she’s beautiful, she’s obviously wildly intelligent and vividly motivated.  She has people falling all over themselves to show her their latest-and-greatest prosthetic advances so that she can be a spokesman–albeit tangentially–for their new product.

Let’s look at a different amputee, shall we?

Let’s talk about D.  D. came down with diabetes–severely–in his thirties.  It could have been due to his addiction to Dr Pepper (doubtful, but it was a serious addiction!); one version is that his diabetes was caused by a severe blow to his abdomen from his on-again, off-again common-law wife and mother of his children, which deposited him in the hospital with trauma to (among other things) his pancreas.  But diabetes definitely runs in his family; his father had Type II, his grandmother had Type II, his cousin developed it in his forties, and no doubt there will be others.

Although the doctors were–as I understand it–overwhelming in their insistence that he needed to care for himself as a severe diabetic, including watching his blood sugar with an eagle eye, D. lived in denial, continuing his Dr Pepper addiction and sort of waving the diabetes away.  In his forties, he began getting severe foot infections.  He didn’t take care of one, and didn’t go to the doctor for a long time, and then there was a question of whether his doctor was a quack (one point of view) or whether he just wasn’t following doctor’s instructions very well (another point of view).  Anyway, as is common among diabetics, the infection in his toe turned gangrenous, it had to be amputated, and then things didn’t heal, so he had to have the foot amputated.

A year or so later, the other foot had to come off too.

D. was on Medicaid (I believe).  The insurers were reluctant to purchase prosthetics that were any good; oh, they’d buy the cheapest of the lot, but those (as I understand it) didn’t fit very well, were hard to walk with, and, what with one thing or another, D. ended up wheelchair-bound.

D. was not young.  He was not attractive–not ugly, but not attractive.  He was definitely intelligent, but rather than being a go-getter, he was the kind of guy who was always looking out for ways to “get around”, “get by”.  (This was, I must say, a severe frustration for the remainder of his family.)  He was the kind of guy who was irritated by other people trying to make him do things, like, say, the cops; but when someone else trespassed on his turf, he was indignant when the cops didn’t do anything.  Nobody was pounding on his doors offering him bigger-better-faster-more prosthetics.  And his insurance certainly wouldn’t offer anything but the basic.  In the end, his being wheelchair-bound cost him his life; his house was set on fire, he was upstairs and unable to escape, and he died.

There are 80,000 to 84,000 foot amputations each year in the U.S. due to diabetes.  A basic leg prosthesis starts at $2,000, with additional costs from physicians and prosthetic specialists raising the cost up to $10,000.  As someone commented on a Digg posting about Mullins’ TED talk, “most of her prostheses are likely already on the market (all except the arty ones, which appear to be custom designed). no prosthesis is “mass produced” they all have to be individually fitted and cast, sometimes more than once… below the knee prostheses average $8,000 - $16,000. the ones that are for running start at around $22,500. prosthetic limbs are horrendously expensive. an above the knee prosthesis can cost as much as $32,000. it is a huge problem facing the disabled community because health insurance almost never fully covers it or repairs, alot of coverage is as low as a $1,500 annual limit for prosthetics, which in most cases doesn’t even cover repairs.”  Steve, at My New Leg, takes you through the process of (a) getting a new prosthesis, (b) the complications, (c) dealing with insurance; his process starts here.  All the comments I read from either amputees with prosthetics or health professionals who deal with them made it very clear that it’s very expensive to get good prosthetics and it’s very difficult to get insurance to actually cover it.

Aimee Mullins is excited by the possibilities in prosthetics.  She has twelve pairs of legs; she can switch between any pair any day she wants.  (Which sort of reminds me of Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz (chapter here), who was able to switch heads depending on what she wanted to look like each morning–Langwidere wanted Dorothy’s head for her collection…)  Mullins is passionate about the future, about how people who need prosthetics can pick and choose what their new abilities are going to be.  But in her talk, she glosses over–actually, she leaves out entirely–the fact that her situation is far from the norm; she, by virtue of her go-getter personality and good looks, has a much better prognosis, prosthetics-wise, than, oh, 98% of the amputees out there.  My brother D. was one of those 98% who live in the real world.

Other commenters on the issue…

Reminds me

Tea parties have been in the news; they were organized to occur on April 15–Income tax day.  “TEA” in this case stands for “taxed enough already”, and the intent was to riff off the Boston Tea Party.  There’s been lots of discussion in the ol’ blogosphere, so I thought I’d just chime in.  (Those of my readers who have already read my post on the subject on the debate board can skip this, even though I’ve fleshed it out considerably.)

A bud on a board wanted folks to view the protestors’ views as “equally valid”. 

Some (most) of the folks at these “tea parties” were protesting bailouts. I happen to agree with this, thinking that the big banks, financial companies, and insurers were allowed to grow too big in an unregulated manner, and it’s a cryin’ shame that these companies are now considered “too big to fail”. I also think the banks that were teetering on the brink should have been allowed to go over that brink.

Unfortunately, if that were done, a helluva lot of people would be seriously hurt as a result, much more seriously than the general populace is hurting at the moment.  Pretend that Bank of America went under.  And Citibank.  And Goldman Sachs.  And some others.  These are big financial institutions; the FDIC would be paying out boatloads of money to depositors; there would be panic in the streets and riots and disruptions of trade in basic staples and OMG NO DEBIT CARDS WORKING–EEEK!  Much though it pains me to say it, I think throwing the TARP money at the banks and financial institutions has smoothed the disastrous results out.

So right now, what we’re getting is a lot of smoke and mirrors that claims the banks are profitable, but then you take a look at how much they got in TARP $$ (which began under Bush) and you realize that the “profit” is illusory.  One example:  there’s this cute and funny little thing about assets and liabilities where you can either “mark-to-market” (i.e., assume in your spreadsheets that these various assets and liabilities are worth what the current market says they are) or you can “mark-to-the-future” (i.e., assume that your assets and liabilities are worth…oh…whatever you think they should be worth).  Seems that the Financial Accounting Standards Board “eased” the rules early in April, allowing banks and other financial institutions the ability to track the market more closely when things are going well, but less closely when things aren’t going so well.  Which means, in the end, that the banks and financial institutions can decide that their devalued assets aren’t so devalued after all.

Another example:  Wells Fargo rejiggered its fiscal year, and just dropped December–it’s worst month ever–from its calculations for first quarter results.

The bailouts began under Bush, as I noted…No-one was organizing big protests then. Small protests, yes, and a groundswell of emails, phone calls, and letters stopped Congress from agreeing to Paulson’s attempt to run a three-page, oversight-free bailout bill past them–thank heavens. But no more protests after that until now; why when Obama does it, but not when Bush did? Our kids will be paying for this for a long time.

Some (most) of these folks were protesting the stimulus dollars.  I think the stimulus bill was either too much (it should have been zero) or too little (it’s not gonna be enough to accomplish what it set out to do).  In any case, once again, I think our kids will be paying for this for a long time.

Some (most) of these folks were protesting higher taxes.  It leaves me wondering why, because from everything I’ve heard, ninety-five percent of the people out there will get lowered income taxes as a result of Obama’s tax plan, and it’s only businesses that make a profit of $250,000 or more  and people with incomes of more than $250,000 that will see higher taxes.  I have read commentary from folks who are trying to curtail their earnings so they don’t go over the $250,000 threshold, and it just baffles me that they’d deliberately take a (in some cases) steep pay cut to avoid paying a little more in taxes.  Kinda like cutting off your nose to spite your face, IMO.

Some (most, it seems like) of these folks got angry only when the bailouts started including assistance to people who were getting foreclosed on. It appears that to them it was okay that corporations got bailed out, that’s okay, but when you start talking about your next-door neighbor losing his house, well, gosh-darn it, that’s socialism!  Or, perhaps they’re not thinking it’s their next-door neighbors, but “those people” in the poorer parts of town.  I gots news for them:  latest reports in California say that foreclosures are moving up the market ladder, hitting higher-priced areas of town.

Some of these folks are wanting to “go Galt”.  Oy.  Let ‘em.  If they were providing an essential service and made lots of money from that, if they go away, some other bright-eyed, bushy-tailed entrepreneurs will step up and take their place.  I mean, really.  Let’s be realistic here.  They think that they are irreplaceable.  No-one is irreplaceable.

And then…Some–not a lot, but enough–of these folks paraded around with signs that say things like:

• “Stand idly by while some Kenyan tries to destroy America? Wap! (in comic-strip style POW cloud) I don’t think so! Homey don’t play dat!”  The birthers are insane.  Really.  Or just dreadfully deluded.  Seriously:  Do people think that the Republican Party wouldn’t have been all over that if it were true?!
• “My tax dollars pay for illegal immigration”…um…and for that hundreds-of-miles-long border fence, but, hey, let’s not confuse people.
• “Constitution = Liberty Not National Socializm” and “The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s Oven” and “The new face of Hitler”  These are the Obama-is-Hitler-born-again folks.
• “Obama Bin-Lyin Free The Market Not the Terrorists”  Guantanamo was A Good Thing, dammit!
• “One nation–UNDER GOD!!”  “Speak for yourself OBAMA - We are a Christian Nation!”  Let’s just ignore the Jews, the atheists, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Ba’hais, and the rest.  They (we) don’t count.
• Bitching about Obama (eek!  gasp!) bowing to the Saudi king.  Let’s not mention Bush kissing the Saudi king, y’know.
• The ones who want to secede from the union.
• The ones who claim that Obama is going to take away their guns and ammo…which he hasn’t done yet, surprise, surprise!  (News flash!  Obama “will not seek the reinstatement of a U.S. assault weapons ban“) 

So. Some of these experiences and grievances are, in my mind, “equally valid”.  SOME. But I’ve got a helluva lot of scorn for many of these folks who are protesting. Especially since they were all yelling and cheering when the framework of all the disastrous economic policies were being enacted towards the end of Clinton’s presidency (with a Republican Congress–remember that?! In 1994?!) and the regulations were being cut to the bone early in Bush’s presidency and the SEC was gutted by Bush’s administration and the FBI was told it was more important to investigate terrorism than organized, systemic mortgage fraud and on and on and on…

Let’s put it this way: Eight years of Bush’s policies helped fuel this grotesque economic meltdown.  Where were all these tax-party protestors when it all started?  I’m so glad they’re protesting the guy who got voted in to clean things up.  Gosh, golly, he’s only been in office for 96 days and hasn’t solved things and we’re still spending billions upon billions of dollars to prop up the banks and financial companies and insurance companies that got into this mess…when did things start to fall apart? Oh, yes.  Starting in late 2006.  That’s when the folks who had been told that they could afford half-a-million dollar shacks in California by using no-down, Alt-A, pick-a-payment loans and then selling in a year or two when their property value went up (because everyone knows property values always rise)–that’s when they suddenly discovered that they couldn’t sell their houses and, oh, by the way, the bank is about to jack up your payments.  Which sent the whole stupid deck of cards tumbling to the ground.

But, yeah, for some it’s all Obama’s fault. That damned Kenyan socialist Hitler-wannabe.

Look.  When the Omega Family went to wave signs on a busy highway in Suburban Alaska to support Obama, we made damned sure to not make signs that denigrated the opponents.  I’d appreciate it if the new-wave protestors did the same.  Protest the policies, please.

Some asides–I note that in all the pictures I’ve seen (Flickr, blogs, etc.) I have seen a noticeable dearth of people of color, remarkable considering where some of these protests were held (D.C.?  Atlanta? Memphis?).  Folks…yeah, I know you’ll say I’m “playing the color card”…but Jeez Louise, it’s pretty hard to miss, kinda like the National Republican Convention was.  Just sayin’…The folks in Oceanside actually purchased real bags of loose-leaf tea and dumped them into the ocean.  Woot!  Now that’s authenticity!…I liked the folks whose signs indicated that it was both Democrats and Republicans who have voted for the bailouts.

I am no longer “forty-mumble” years old.  Today I hit the official half-century mark.

I can remember years ago, when I hit twenty-five, having a phone conversation with my dad.  I told him I didn’t feel like it was possible that I was twenty-five.  At the time, it seemed “old”…He told me that he couldn’t imagine being in his fifties, and that all the time he felt like he was still in his 20s or 30s.  Now I know how he felt.

What has gone on in those years?

In no real particular order:  Sputnik.  The JFK assassination.  Martin Luther King Jr. being shot.  The Civil Rights movement.  The Apollo program and the moon landing.  The Summer of Love.  Riots.  Woodstock.  Kent State.  Watergate.  Gas lines.  Jimmy Carter sitting in the White House wearing a cardigan sweater.  Huge computer rooms filled with spinning tapes morphing into 8-1/4″ floppy drives morphing into boxy 10-MB hard drives morphing into the first Apples and PCs morphing into desktops and laptops and netbooks; cabling turning into wi-fi.  IBM Selectrics being perfected and then *poof* disappearing into the mists of time.  Reagan being shot.  The first shuttle take-off and landing.  Saturday Night Live.  The Iran hostage crisis.  Northwestern University, Loyola University, community college in Arizona, California State University.  The Blue Angels performing in Chicago, and San Francisco.  Three loves and one husband.  MTV.  A shuttle exploding.  Another shuttle exploding.  The Loma Prieta earthquake.  The Oakland Firestorm.  Usenet.  Mosaic.  Netscape Navigator.  The Internet.  Bulletin boards.  YouTube, Twitter, blogs.  The dot-com crash.  Bush I.  Dubya.  Clinton.  9/11.  Weddings.  Births.  Funerals.  Amazon.com.  Chicago, Arizona, the Bay Area, Lubbock, Arizona, Alaska.  The invention of in-vitro fertilization.  The Beatles, the Who, Jefferson Starship.  Heavy metal.  Punk.  Rap.  Hip-hop.  Grunge.  Us trying IVF.  Adoption from Korea fading, adoption from China growing.  Us adopting from China.  Gay rights.  The first black president of the U.S.  The Segway.  Hybrid automobiles.  Hubble telescope.  Katrina.  Glasses, contacts, LASIK.  Mini skirts, maxi skirts, the Marcia Brady look, tunic sweaters with legwarmers and straight-leg jeans.  Star Wars.  Cell phones as a status symbol turning into cell phones in the grocery store checkout line.  Mix tapes turning into Walkmen turning into iPods.  Sushi, tapas bars, Pop-Tarts and GoGurt.  The Food Network, Bobby Flay, Rachel Ray.  Congresscritters Twittering.  Three hundred and forty four extra-solar planets known so far.

It’s a weird, wonderful world.  I wonder what the next 50 years will bring?

My mom blasted me with a series of “happy birthday” YouTubes in my email today.  She was born shortly after TV was invented.  I have a seven-year-old; who knows what she will see in the years to come?

Fifty years ago, a long-distance phone call was expensive.  Yesterday, I was able to share a scary moment with friends across the world, and they were able to reply to me in seconds, minutes, hours. 

I’ve been anonymously blogging for about three and a half years now.  I was anonymous on boards and listservs before that.  Oh, not anonymous anonymous–anyone who really wants to figure out who I am and where I live can probably do it.  Part of it has been a general sense of “there are some Real Whackos out there, so it’s a good idea to keep the whackdom at arm’s length”, and since I started blogging the main reason for the anonymity is so that the dotter won’t find her name spread far and wide on the ‘net when she starts googling it.  (Also so her friends and enemies in high school won’t find same and start the taunting circuitry a-jangling.)

There are plenty of good reasons for people to be anonymous on the internet.  I have encountered at least three situations that made it plain why:

1. Case A - blogger who was adopting from China realizes she has a problem with drinking, announces her joining AA and doing outpatient therapy on her blog, someone forwards that info to her agency (this was prior to China having a stated policy against same), and her agency dumps her and her husband like a hot potato.
2. Case B - blogger who was adopting from China riles up a reader by posting pictures of equipment used in the adolescent sex education classes she taught years prior; said reader tracks down her info, contacts her agency saying she’s “unfit to be an adoptive mother”, and, as a result, the blogger’s adoption is put on hold while she undergoes extensive additional interviews by a hostile social worker.
3. Case C - This is an amalgam of at least four cases I know of where someone with an ax to grind called CPS on someone who was posting on boards, and it took forever for those situations to be sorted out.

There’s always Dooce as another reason; to be “dooced” is to be fired from your job due to something you’ve written on your blog.

Then there are angry or crazy ex-spouses, or ex-in-laws, or former lovers, or just plain sick stalker types who, when finding clues about their former spouse/in-law/lover/victim, are quite avid to return to their prior ways.

On the whole, my approach when reading a blog is to first check the quality of writing, then to check the quality of the thinking behind the writing, and then to see how well that first impression is maintained as time goes on.  In other words, I judge a blogger by his or her output, not by whether the blogger posts using a pseudonym or a “real” name.  I gained great respect for CalculatedRisk long before his name was revealed, and the same for his (alas, now deceased) co-blogger Tanta, because of their excellent writing and news summaries on the real estate bubble, its inevitable bust, and the inner workings of the mortgage industry.  The Rumor Queen got my respect with similar clarity and detail about what was going on as the wait in Chinese adoptions grew longer and longer.  I never knew who Miss Snark was, but I learned a helluva lot about the business of being a book agent from her blog while it was extant (do yourself a favor–go read her blog in its entirety…I was devastated when she closed up shop).  I have no idea what Johnny’s real name is, but I always find him an interesting read and know that he says what he means and means what he says when he posts.

I discovered AKMuckraker’s blog, The Mudflats, back when Sarah Palin was first announced as John McCain’s running mate.  I wanted to know what reactions were to the nomination in my own state–Sarah Palin’s state.  I figured I knew, but I’d check anyway.  And lo and behold, there was a well-written, well-thought-out series of posts by this anonymous blogger.  I subscribed, and kept reading, and nothing ever tarnished my impression of that blogger as interesting, funny, pretty even-handed.  AKM helped spearhead a coordinated relief effort for the villagers of western Alaska when nothing was being done by Alaska’s elected officials.  I respected AKM, and respected his/her decision to remain anonymous.  Not only respected it, but understood it completely.

All of this is in preface to the sad news that Democratic State Representative Mike Doogan of Alaska has taken it upon himself to first discover, and then publish in his legislative newsletter, the identity of the person behind The Mudflats. 

In correspondence with a constituent, Rep. Doogan further compared AKMuckraker to a member of the KKK because of her anonymity.  Rep. Doogan’s rationale for the outing was: “My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name.”  

Um.

Okay.

I’m sure the people who decided to make the ballot secret can see the wisdom in that…

I’m sure that Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, an anonymous tract against the political rulers of the day, was in agreement…

I’m sure that Publius, anonymous author of the Federalist Papers (revealed afterwards to be Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay), thought the same…

I’m sure that the medical researchers being harassed and targeted at universities across the country are in total sympathy with the outing and publicizing of their names to PETA forums and other such places, the same sort of thing that Rep. Doogan has done here…

Politics is an emotional topic.  Things can get very heated when it comes to Palinistas versus Obamanauts.  When you’re a member of a minority political group in a sea of the others (a Democrat in a sea of Republicans, in this area of Alaska), it’s very easy to be a target, and intimidated.  Perhaps Rep. Doogan, safe as he is in more-progressive Juneau, doesn’t realize what kind of atmosphere it is when one is the lone Democratic voter in, say, a set of gymnastics bleachers, surrounded by hordes of women wearing “Prayer Warrior for Sarah!” buttons.  Having stood out in the rain and cold waving an Obama placard on a very busy road in Suburban Alaska, I’m quite aware of some of the frothing anger against Democrats from a small subset of people.  I’m hoping that that frothing anger doesn’t get turned against AKMuckraker as a result of Rep. Doogan’s actions.

I’m not a Fan of Sarah.

Yes, Alaska, strike me dead now:  I repeat, I am not a Fan of Sarah.

The latest real issue I have with our dearly beloved Momma Grizzly is that (according to rumor) she and the state legislators had worked out exactly what the state was going to accept and not going to accept in terms of the federal stimulus package, everyone was in agreement, and then, 24 hours later, she came out with a grand fanfare saying she was going to reject a heckuva lot more–as in 30% of the package offered to Alaska.  “In essence we say no to operating funds for more positions in government,” quoth Sarah.

The rumor mill claims that she did this last-minute change of heart at the behest of SarahPAC, the group that is positioning her to run for President in 2012–rejecting gobs of the stimulus money would look good for GOP voters in the upcoming election, as would playing up “rejecting” big government.

Then there’s the fact that it took six weeks of effort from bloggers, local legislators, and eventually some spots on CNN, to move our Momma Grizzly to actually take some notice of the problems that western Alaska villages were facing due to high fuel costs, low fuel supplies, and an intense and long cold snap.

Not to mention the stonewalling on state scientists’ positions on how warming is affecting the polar bear population…

And Troopergate, which really does provide some interesting insights into how the Alaska First Family likes to operate…

And charging the state to provide transportation dollars for her kiddos to trek along with her as she swung around the U.S. “promoting Alaska” and (oh, by the way) promoting her VP candidacy.

So:  No love lost here.

But, really, this latest “ethics complaint” just leaves me rolling my eyes. 

So, here’s the story: Momma Grizzly’s hunka hunka burnin’ love, First Dude Todd, gets sponsored by Arctic Cat for his IronDog snowmachine competition to the tune of $5,000.  And Momma Grizzly shows up at the opening of the race to drop the flag clad in a “Team Arctic” jacket, with the Arctic Cat logo emblazoned on it.

That’s it.

In a nutshell.

WTFOMGBBQ!!!!  Strike her down now!  Evil, evil woman, accepting money and advertising while acting as governor!

Um.

Excuse me if I’m not prostrate in horror at this egregious lapse of ethics.

I mean, c’mon, folks.

We have better things to rant about.

I’m pretty sure the majority of Alaskans–Sarah Fans or no–can quite easily separate the “excited wife of many-time IronDog winner” from “high-level government official”.  In other words, cut Sarah some slack; she wasn’t advertising Arctic Cat–she was advertising First Dude Todd.  She wasn’t endorsing Arctic Cat as The Official Snowmachine Of The State of Alaska.

This is a waste of money.  On both sides.  And a waste of judicial time and energy.  On both sides.

In other news, the volcano has simmered down, and the weather has warmed up.  It was above 40F today Chez Omega, and the snow is melting swiftly.  I’z a happy camper, dudes.

I think.

But I’m not sure.

Dayum, the man is giving me whiplash!

Oh, no, it’s not OmegaDad!  It’s President Obama.

I’ll admit–even though I don’t think the man is the Messiah, the Second Coming, The One, and all that, I was hoping that he’d sweep into office with a full-fledged economic plan ready to go on Day One.

He didn’t.  I frowned.

The days passed.  I frowned some more.

Then the stimulus package got batted back and forth.  Things got added.  Things got taken away.  And here it is, signed into law.  It’s not what I wanted, but then, I didn’t have to try to herd 465 cats to get it put together.

But the thing that really concerned me…what I really wanted to see…was what he was going to do about The Banks.  My idea of the full-fledged economic plan ready to go on Day One included some serious housecleaning, an in-depth look at the “Too Big To Fail” banks and the next tier up, even–possibly–a bank holiday or nationalization or something that indicated that, yes, he knew it was a big bad problem.

So he and Geithner were working on Son of TARP:  Bank Bailout Two.  All the financial types were on tenterhooks, wanting to know what was involved in it.  A whole series of rumors were floated, and each one got approval or shot down immediately, and then seemed to vanish.  The plan was to be unveiled on Monday…but then, Monday, word came that it was postponed until Tuesday.  Commenters on various financial blogs groaned; surely this meant that THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE DOING!!!1!

I groaned, too; wiffling, waffling, lots of vagueness, postponements–ack!

In the meantime, a raft of economists and econobloggers and econoblog commenters were all saying WE NEED TO NATIONALIZE THE BANKS!!!  NOW!!!  None of the rumors floated about SOT had anything like that.  There was much moaning, groaning, and gnashing of teeth.  Weak!  They cried.  Wishy-washy!  OMG, he’s a failure already!  We’re circling the drain, and he’s fiddling around while Rome burns (or something like that).  We’re going to have a Lost Decade, just like Japan!  Or worse!

(Of course, they all acknowledged that nationalization would go over like a lead balloon.  And there hadn’t been any mention of such a thing in the mainstream media at all.  No articles saying it was a good idea, no articles saying it was a bad idea–just no mention.)

I moaned and groaned and gnashed, too.

But then…

Then, on Monday night, snippets of an interview of Obama to be aired on Tuesday’s Nightline started coming out.

In particular, Obama came right out and compared the current economic situation to…Japan and Sweden.  He pointed out that Japan kept pumping money into tottering banks, and the end result was The Lost Decade, an ongoing struggle to recuperate from a great crash in the early 1990s, which Japan still has not recovered from.  And then he pointed out that Sweden nationalized the banks and bounced back within years.  And then he sort of laughed and said that Sweden’s great advantage was that they had only five banks to deal with, and the U.S. has more, so obviously we can’t follow their path exactly.

But so far as I can tell, he didn’t say that the other choice was the right path, either.  And it’s the first time someone in the presidential administration has come right out and said something like this since the crisis began.  Out in the open.  Out there as a possibility.  Spoken by the president himself.  Like an imprimatur or something.

Then, on Tuesday, Geithner comes out with the much ballyhooed Son of TARP.  The thud was heard everywhere.  “That’s it?!  That’s all?!  That’s not a plan!  That’s an outline!” was the general response.  The market dropped.  The econobloggers and their commenters, and the financial writers all moaned and groaned some more.  More THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE DOING! hair tearing and shirt ripping occurred.  There was this one little item, though, that some folks seized on, the idea–written up in SOT–that the banks needed to be stress tested, so that everyone knew what the extent of the damage was.  But the moaners and groaners scoffed, saying “Get out the rubber stamps!  PASS!”

And then, on Wednesday, this little item showed up:  Bank Stress Test May Expand U.S. Regulators’ Role.  Lo and behold.  Obama had sent out the bank examiners the very next day.

And suddenly the word “nationalization” is showing up in all the mainstream media stories as a possibility.

And I am left with this impression that there is a distinct possibility that Mr. Pragmatism is crazy like a fox and has been orchestrating things so that within a few months, the nation as a whole will be on board with the idea of nationalization.

I’m not the only one; there’s a subgroup of the econoblog commenters who seem to feel the same way; and then there’s Andrew Sullivan and others at the Atlantic Monthly.

On the other hand, maybe he’s a complete noob who is going to flail around helplessly, tossing more hundreds of billions away without any oversight, just like the last administration.

Whiplash.  I’ll let you know in about a year, eh?

We have been here in Alaska now for a year and a half.

A while back, the dotter wanted to write a love note to One And Only True Love.  Remember him?

“Dear One And Only True Love:  I will love you forever and ever, OAOTL!  Yay!  OAOTL, you are so handsome!  Yay OAOTL!  I love you!”

Ahem.  Okay; we thought it was cute.  We put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it, and then I let it sit on the dresser by the front steps for quite a while.  Because, while it was cute, it was also a little bit overboard and I wasn’t sure how OAOTL’s mom would feel about such a…overwhelming…note.

Unbeknownst to me, OmegaDad popped it into the mail one day.

A few days ago, in the mail, there was a letter to OmegaDotter.  The return address?  OAOTL’s name and address.  Being Mean Mom, I made her do her homework and help with the chickens before I pointed it out to her, but as soon as she saw it, nothing else mattered.  She ripped it open.  There were pictures (one up above, from the preschool “graduation”–aren’t they cute?!).  There was a drawing of a beautiful rainbow and hearts.  There was a note.  OmegaDotter was walking on air.  She had to tape the pictures and letter up on her wall above her bed.  I was told–rather fiercely–not to tell anyone, especially not K., her current BFF.

I hang my head in shame:  My first thought was to let all my blog readers know. 

There was also a note from OAOTL’s mom (thank goodness!) in which she made it very clear she was immensely amused by the love letter.

So:  Love lasts forever, or at least more than a year and a half.

All of which brings me to a separate topic, yet related:  Surely, even the most rabid anti-Obama people must recognize that he and his wife are (still!) wildly in love with each other–and they really like each other, too!  Every picture of them together at the inauguration, and every picture of them together from prior to that, shows two people who are constantly touching, looking at each other, whispering, sharing, caring.  As someone said in one of the comments to the (many many) pictures of them dancing at the various inaugural balls, “They look like it’s their wedding night!”  And there were a great many “Awww!  They’re so cute!” comments, as well.

I find myself hoping that the dotter will find a similar relationship, one of partners and equals and friends.

(Photo:  REUTERS/Jason Reed)

I also find myself hoping that such an obviously loving and intimate marriage is an inspiration to others, especially people who find themselves in a relationship where they feel one-down, where one person obviously is more invested in the relationship than the other.  See?  There’s hope.  There are people out there who can find True Wuv, and so can you.

So I switched Feedburner over to Google, and everything seemed to go just fine.  But no-one has commented on my last blog post, which went out afterwards, so there’s this big question in OmegaLand:  Is anyone seeing this post?

Aside from that, I hear there was this big shingdig in D.C., some guy losing his job, some other guy replacing him?

Oh!  That would be the President of the United States?  AKA Barack Obama?  Right?

All kidding aside, OmegaDotter and I watched the oaths of office, and then scampered to get her dressed, hair combed, and off to the school bus in time.  An almost-seven-year-old just isn’t ready for more than a minute or two of speechifying, so I cut off the TV before she got too bored.  But there it is:  New president.  Yay.  (Really!)  Poor thing has to clean up the mess; I can’t imagine why he’d want the job now, and I’m sure that the picture of McCain grinning like a Cheshire Cat at the bipartisan dinner the other day is related to him thinking, “Whew!  Thank God I got out of that quagmire!”

Spare him some good thoughts; the next few years are going to be interesting.  Keep track of the gray in his hair in photos…

I’ve been using email and the Internet (in varying forms) since 1992.

While I’m really not good about replying to emails, I’m very good about sending snippets out and about, to OmegaDad, to GrannyJ, to varying friends and relatives.  A link here (”Oooh.  This is interesting!”), a photo there (”Hey.  Here’s the dotter’s school pic.”), reminders (”Pick up some milk on the way home, and we’re out of cat food.”), a kml file (”Look at the aurora map!”), a YouTube video (usually a funny one).

I read the news online; I have the local blatt bookmarked, so I know what’s going on around Small Alaska Suburb and Big City, I have Small Mountain University Town’s newspaper bookmarked (though I haven’t been reading it much lately, which is an indicator of finally moving on, I guess), I have MSNBC and CNN bookmarked.

Every morning, I check out Nielsen’s daily Top 40 news stories and Technorati’s “Popular in News” listing.

I am on IM during the working day, so I can communicate with my boss and coworkers.

When we move into a new home, one of the first things I do is set up the utilities.  These days, Internet access is a “utility” to me, and it has been for years.

All of that said, read about another child of the connected age, being forced to isolate himself from his connections.

Think about it.  You’re used to the connectivity.  You’re constantly in casual touch with friends, relatives, coworkers.  You’ve even gathered together a community that spearheaded your election victory with “MyBarackObama” social networking.

And now…now…your security officials are telling you you must give it up while you are the president.

Ooog.

I couldn’t do it.  Give up my email?  My IM?  My blog?  No more quick dips into the Internet stream to see what the daily zeitgeist is?  No zipping over to Los Angeles news sites to see what the status of the SoCal fires is?  No link to the weather?

It’s one thing to turn it all off while on vacation; that’s just a week or two.  But for four or eight years?!  Ack.  No.

You’ll get my Interwebs from me when you pry it (them?) from my cold, dead hands!

Well, bullshit.

Sorry to be so crude, but we’ve got two senate races now that are real squeakers–one right here in Alaska!–and a third that is still undecided.

Right now, Mark Begich is three votes ahead of Ted Stevens, he of the “tubes” description of the Internet.  Stevens is being called “convicTed” by liberal voters because of his recent conviction; I can tell you that our neighborhood was filled with “Republican for Mark Begich” signs, so that’s an indicator of some sort.  For some reason, Alaska still has not counted some 30,000 votes; they counted 60,000 or so today, all mailed in or provisional ballots.  Before this, Stevens was ahead by a few thousand.

In Minnesota, Al Franken and Norm Coleman are doing the do-si-do:  first one’s up, then the other, then the other.  Right now, Coleman is ahead by 204 votes, well within the required automatic recount that Minnesota law provides when races are closer than a certain margin.  The official recount begins next Wednesday, and is expected to last until December.

In Georgia, neither Saxby Chambliss (the Republican) nor Jim Martin has the required 50% plus one (the Libertarian candidate siphoned off the additional votes), and they are looking at a runoff election in December.

If all three Republicans in these races end up losing…then the Democrats would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  (Whether this is a good thing or not I leave up to my readers to decide.  I, personally, do not want the FBPM; I like the checks and balances and negotiations that would be required to court the two independent senators or lure a Republican over.)

Your vote does count.  Yes, it does.

(ETA:  The difference is now Begich up 814 votes.)

The “lice incident” was not.  The school nurse moaned to me about how that class has driven her nuts because a few parents are paranoid about lice; the dotter’s reportage was garbled, thank heavens (she had said that Nurse Lady had found cocoons in her hair!!!!! ACK!).

The award was for creative writing and art.  No surprise there!

Obama had a press conference today which served to indicate a few things:  1) He is not president yet, which he reiterated three times to my counting; 2) he takes the economy issue very, very seriously; 3) Paul Volcker was standing to his left and was shown during almost the entire press conference, so that’s an indicator of the type of economic advisor he’s going to tap; 4) he’s not going to discuss his security briefings; and 5) the new White House dawg will need to be hypoallergenic.

Some fun stuff:

• Election cartograms, very kewl.
• Behind the scenes on the campaign trail, also very kewl.  Read all seven chapters.
• The Obama team is quite hip to the Internet:  Here’s the set of Creative Commons pics of election night; the team also had “Change.Gov” ready to go.  Remember, he plans to have a cabinet-level Chief Information Technology Officer to advise him.

I had other stuff to post, but can’t remember it.

Off to do some NyQuil.  Drugs are good.

It’s great.  It’s historic.  Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey teared up on national TV.  The first black American president.

He was my candidate.  I’m glad he won.  But…Now he’s stuck with the job. 

And here comes my cold-water, wet-blanket, pessimistic post.  Sorry.  If you’re still feeling giddy with happiness, go somewhere else and don’t read this post until a few months have passed; I don’t want to rain on your parade.

I had a draft post entitled “the Janitor-in-Chief” (based on John Mauldin’s column, “Electing the Janitor-in-Chief“) which I never published, all about my (usual) dismal outlook on the economy, and the mess that the president-elect (whoever he might be) would inherit, and I’m afraid that my pleasure in Obama’s victory is highly tempered by that outlook.

It’s a mess.  It’s a royal mess.  I reiterate my prediction that the new president will be a one-termer.  I hope not, but the economy is racing down the toilet, and there’s a helluva lot more bad economic news to come.  Auto industry executives have been quoted as saying it’s the worst their industry has seen since World War II; Goldman Sach’s investors’ outlook note leaked today says that they’re revising their unemployment estimate upwards from 250,000 jobs lost in October to 300,000, and they expect it to keep getting worse; commercial real estate investment is drying up; the ISM factory index is the lowest it’s been since 1982; real personal spending–which fuels 70% of U.S. GDP–plummeted at an annual rate of 3.9% in the month of September; and on and on and on.

I’d love to think that the hearts and flowers and joy and luv-luv-luv will win over the 53 million people who voted for McCain, but given some things I’ve read on the ‘net today, and some things I’ve heard on boards and in emails, we’ve got a whole slew of people out there who think that Obama is a Marxist/Leninist/socialist/communist/jack-booted thug who is out to tear down the structure of the United States and RUIN US ALL.

(Hey, it’s the right-wing’s version of the liberals’ dreaded October Surprise, the staged terrorist attack that would give BushCo the excuse to call for martial law and suspend the elections…)

Yup, Barack Obama, who the lefties think isn’t left enough, is too moderate and centrist, is a communist thug.  Sigh.

And I sit here thinking to myself:  What?!  Why on earth would anyone want the job?  Why on earth didn’t we let McCain take it, and have him get stuck with the tar and feathers, the anger and frustration and disillusionment that will greet the upcoming years of cleaning up the mess that BushCo left us with?

Gah.  Maybe I’m feeling like this because it’s November, and the light is vanishing fast, and it’s been cold as hell.  Or because some folks who I really love and respect are taking this…um…not well.

(Edited to add:  Okay.  That’s it.  The last.  I was so excited.  So happy.  So thrilled.  And realizing that intelligent, sensible people whom I know and love are scared just shocks me to the core and makes me want to cry.  I see hope; they see fear and hatred.  I see trying to change some of the gawd-awful stuff that BushCo has done; they see destruction.  I see an intelligent, moderate, quiet man who will do his best to do a competent job; they see a Hitler-like demagogue.  And I want to cry.)

Anyway, to read a better (less pessimistic) take that looks at the practicalities, go read John Scalzi’s post, “Reality Check“.

And really, truly, I’m very happy Obama won.  I watched the speech and teared up.  We made OmegaDotter watch with us, telling her it was a historic occasion that she would remember all her life.  It’s amazing that the U.S. was able to actually vote–clearly and decisively (though not a landslide, as some would claim)–for a black man as president.  Forty years ago, one would never have imagined this day.

I waited for OmegaDad to be done with work, then we schlepped over to OmegaDotter’s school to pick her up from “Mad Science!” class and vote.  No line, so we were in, voted, and out in no time at all…Not that it’s likely to make much of a difference here in Palinland. 

Also I delivered these red, white and blue cookies to the school election day bake sale first thing in the morning:

Now all that’s left is to bite my fingernails while waiting for the election results.  Actually, I think we’re going out to dinner, which will take an hour or so, and by then it will be called, I’m sure.

California’s Proposition 8–the “marriage is to be defined as one man and one woman” amendment to the state constitution–is running neck-and-neck (sigh).

So the Prop 8 folks have spent $$ on Google Ads to show up on blogs.

So far, I’ve run into three blogs, on wildly diverse subjects, that have had to post disclaimers about the ads, because they have no control over which ads show up on their blogs.

I thought it was interesting that enough readers complained that the bloggers had to do this.  Too bad all those people don’t live in California…

As for the proposition itself, and my feelings thereon?  In a word:  Ugh.  OmegaDad and I have been together now for 15 years (yes!).  The idea that giving someone who is gay or lesbian the same marital rights as we have will somehow destroy our marriage, cause our country to slide into moral decay, and lead to our dotter being OMG TEH GAY!!! just makes me roll my eyes.

I can’t remember where I read it, but it seems that the institution of heterosexual marriage is so devastated by having legalized gay marriages in one of the Scandinavian countries that…

…the heterosexual marriage rate has increased.

Whoa.  Those bad, bad gay folks!  Lookit what they’ve done!

John Scalzi, over at Whatever, has a number of good blog posts about the whole affair.

I watched Obama’s half-hour TV ad.

Then I bop online, and find people who were moved to tears.

I wasn’t.

I was irritated.

We saw families “down on their luck”…but not really down.  I’ve got to say, if my husband’s job were cut to one week out of every two, and I were laid off, why on earth would we be going out to eat?  Equally to the point:  why on earth would Obama’s campaign film a family in such straits doing such a thing??

Then there’s the fact that…um…look, I know they were playing to the moderate white vote, but my overwhelming feeling in this ad was…it was very white.  I suppose it wasn’t PC enough for me, har.

Then Obama says he voted for the bailout and is hoping to Do More.  Aaarrgghhh!  Right now I feel like the financial gurus are busy pulling cards out from under one side of a tottering house of cards to shore up a different side.  What we need is for the U.S.–and all the other countries who joined us on the drunken binge of borrowing and spending over the past ten years (dear lord, I am using Dubya’s very own phrase, just shoot me now)–should stop trying to get banks to loan and people to borrow, and start encouraging savings and investment in real goods.

Over the past six months, at an increasing tempo, the U.S. has flung fictional money this way and that, to the tune of:

• $700 Billion – The bailout bill; U.S. Treasury to purchase toxic mortgages and other non-performing assets from financial institutions.
• $50 Billion – To guarantee principal in money market mutual funds.
• $10 Billion+ – Treasury purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in September.
• $144 Billion – In additional MBS purchases by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac.  (With a limit of $850 billion…whoop-de-do).
• $85 Billion – AIG bridge loan giving the Fed a 79.9% controlling stake in the firm.
• $87 Billion – Repayments to JP Morgan for providing financing to underpin trades with the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers.
• $200 Billion – $100 billion capital infusion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the Treasury.
• $300 Billion – Provided to the FHA to refinance failing mortgages into new, reduced principal loans with a federal guarantee as part of the housing bill.
• $4 Billion – Provided to local communities to purchase and repair abandoned homes due to foreclosure.
• $29 Billion – Financing for JPM’s takeover of Bear Sterns. The Fed takes $30 billion in non-performing assets as collateral.  (Goodness only knows how much those “assets” are worth now.)
• $200 Billion – Currently outstanding loans to banks through the Fed’s Term Auction Facility.
• $150 Billion - Stimulus checks.  Remember those?
• Not to mention a whole slew of additional multi-billion-dollar chunks o’ change being handed out to GM and foreign countries…

Just where is all this money going to come from??  A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there…That’s almost two trillion dollars.  And now they’re talking about another $50 billion to guarantee up to 3 million mortgages where the mortgage-holders are underwater (more than a month late).

Look.  My husband and I aren’t poor, but we’re not rich.  We’re not the best money managers around, but we managed to put a fair amount down on this house, pay off debt, purchase two cars outright, and keep up with our mortgage payments.  We won’t see that help.  And that makes me angry.  Yes, there are people who were bamboozled into bad mortgages at the last minute, but the majority of the folks who are in foreclosure used funky mortgages to buy more house than they could really afford based on teaser rates and the assumption that their houses could only appreciate in value.  They get help; my husband and I, who deliberately looked at houses where we could afford the payments on a plain vanilla fixed-rate 30-year mortgage (even though we’d have loved to get more house) won’t.

I think I was looking for more of a “Fireside Chat” approach.  Something with more substance, and something that came straight out and said “The next few years are not going to be easy.  We’re all going to have to tighten our belts.”  What we got was fluff, violins playing, and warm-hearted shots of Obama shaking hands, giving and getting hugs, and holding babies.

It didn’t move me to tears.  Or at least, not in the way that the ad writers wanted.  And I’m voting for the man.