Historic Election

Well...we did it! We elected the nation's very first black president! We stayed up last night and watched the entire thing..start to finish! Obama had a wonderful acceptance speech and, I must say, I was proud of McCain. His speech was just wonderful. Now I hope this country can pull together and get back on it's feet.

The crowds poured in to Grant Park in Chicago and into the streets all over America including Times Square in jubilation. Many people never thought they'd ever live to see a black president elected.

Obama has some very smart people to advise him and I am sure he will put a lot of thought and planning into the makeup of his cabinet.

"By electing Obama, the American people have emphatically rejected the selfishness, masquerading as freedom and rugged individualism, that has been the calling card of the American right wing since Barry Goldwater. In its place, they are calling not just for a new and expanded vision of government's role in American life but for a new vision of American society." Salon

Election Day

Well, it's election day and we are all very interested in what will happen when the results come in. We will be watching PBS tonight to follow the results. Jerod, our grandson, did not vote...did not get registered to vote while he was out on the Arctic Circle with the Coast Guard. But the rest of us even voted early to avoid any lines.

This afternoon, we will go to see how our son-in-law and daughter's house is coming along. They are both interested in seeing it.

Last week I applied for a part time job at the library. They won't begin their interviews until next week but I probably won't get it anyhow. They have a way of hiding age discrimination.

But...nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Our son and grandson are leaving in the morning. They will go back to Ft. Leonard Wood to rest up a day before he takes Jerod back to catch his plane in St. Louis.

Jerod will be going to California for his school.

Busy Monday

We are expecting our son, Scott, and grandson, Jerod, at lunchtime. They were supposed to have come over the weekend but American Airlines lost Jerod's luggage so they sat around all weekend and waited for it to be found. It still isn't found but American Airlines says there is a 98% chance they will find it. We will see. All Jerod's uniforms are in that luggage.

I fixed chili for lunch. That's what Scott wanted.

They are about 30 miles away right now and will be coming in by noon, I figure.

It will be interesting to see Jerod now. I haven't seen him since Christmas. I wonder if the Coast Guard is making him keep his hair short?

New Health Problem

This has been a busy Sunday as usual. We went out to church a little early just to check if it was clean and neat. It was. After church we went to Sirloin Stockade for lunch. Bob has to be very careful what he eats. We are trying to get his sugar down. Friday he was diagnosed with diabetes. He had a reading of 400. It is down to 267 this evening. We are trying to get it below 100. It may take awhile.

After lunch, I did my notes. Then we went to the market to find some things Bob can eat. I have a lot to learn about diabetes. I have no experience with it at all. Until my sister was diagnosed with it last fall, we had no one in our family with it and for that matter, Bob has had no one in his family with it either. And this is a man 5 foot 10 inches tall who weighs 153. Go figure!

I still think our use in this country of high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar in nearly everything on the grocery shelves is the culprit. Our pancreas cannot process high fructose corn syrup. It does not cause that organ to produce insulin.

Neither Mexico nor Canada uses high fructose corn syrup. There is a message in that.

How long do you think it will it be until our government figures this out?

Corruption

I was reading the Washington Post this morning and they report the 'speech or debate' clause that was was created to protect Congress from interference from frivolous lawsuits, is increasingly broadly interpreted and is making it difficult for the Justice Department to pursue corruption charges against several members of Congress. A court decision regarding an investigation targeting Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., expanded the scope of protection under the clause, making many kinds of communications off limits for prosecutors.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, tried to use the clause to have evidence against him thrown out but has so far been unsuccessful. Stevens was found guilty of lying about accepting favors last week but has vowed to fight on, both in the courtroom and the campaign trail. The NYT says leading Republicans have denounced Stevens and many believe he would be expelled from the Senate even if he were re-elected.

But then there is still Rick Renzi, (R), the latest member of congress to be investigated for corruption, and John Doolittle (R), Ton DeLay (R), Jerry Lewis (R), Jack Kingston (R),and former legislator Dennis Hastert (R) all being investigated for corruption and all using this obscure clause to try to avoid prosecution.

Something to Think About from AlterNet and Me - An Overview

"How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president?

How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?" Palin attended five colleges to receive a degree and John McCain graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. The level of ignorance in America is unbelievable.

On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many U.S. citizens become so dumb and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of U.S. politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion -- in particular fundamentalist religion -- makes you stupid. The United States is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

And the United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South," Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

But this is true not only in the South, but nation wide. Try to have an intelligent political conversation with most anyone anywhere in America and you encounter folks who never do their homework but just take the words of right wing talk show hosts as gospel.

"The specter of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the elections of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite -- like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush -- has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an overeducated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the right-wing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.

Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance."

And if there's anything we need in these perilous times, it's an intelligent president. Just look at all the damage an ignorant one has managed to wreak in just eight years.

George Monbiot is the author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article in it's entirety originally appeared in the Guardian.

Early Voting

Well, we did it! We voted early today. We went to Cherryvale and met our friends, Tony and Gay, for lunch and afterward we stopped off at Independence at the courthouse and voted early. And we both voted for Obama. We don't believe there will be any surprises that would have induced us to change our vote anyhow. Scott, our son, and Jerod, our grandson, will be here over the weekend for awhile and we were going to be very busy and did not know how long the lines were going to be at the polls.

John McCain is very angry and is making a big deal about Obama backing out of public financing.

Here's "the rest of the story":

The hoopla over campaign financing is very frustrating because Obama knew the thing that killed Kerry in 2004 was the "527 groups," who pumped huge dollars running Swift Boat ads, bypassing financing laws. Obama's position was that he would take public financing IF McCain would reel them in. McCain refused. Of course, we never hear that in 'the rest of the story". McCain didn't want to do that.

Unfortunately for McCain, T. Boone Pickens and other 527 funders lost a lot of money on Wall Street this year ($2 billion for Pickens), plus they don't particularly care for McCain, so this money never materialized for McCain. They were smart enough to know not to back a loser. So McCain is furious with Obama for having that kind of foresight.

When we voted, we voted against any incumbent. That's our personal protest against the mess we are all in now.

Afterward we came on home and met the appliance repairman who repaired our range. It had a short in the switch. The range was bought in 1993 and after fifteen years, this is the first repair. Not bad for an appliance that's used every day.

Bob is gone to a Red Cross meeting tonight but will be back in about an hour or so.