Election Day

It's going to be an historic election, regardless of who wins (and I'm really hoping that the McPalin ticket loses). I have the luxury of being able to continue voting third party, since I live in a foregone-conclusion state. If I were still in PA, or maybe in FL, I might have to vote in an effort to push the conservatives out. This group has overstayed their welcome.

Fox News is reporting about voter intimidation in Philadelphia. If true, it is inexcusable. Anyone intimidating voters should go directly to jail for the next four-eight years, depending, and forfeit their right to participate in this election and maybe the next. If the Black Panthers, or the Klan, or anyone else, are stupid enough to be there intimidating anyone, poll workers, voters, whoever, they need to be thrown in jail pronto, and anyone who was so intimidated that they left needs to file a complaint and be allowed to vote, tomorrow if necessary. Seriously, they are in Philadelphia — have these morons forgotten MOVE? And no bullshit about how a guy in a para-military outfit holding a billy club isn't meant to be intimidating — would the same be said if he was in a white sheet and hood holding that same billy club?

I just read the David Brooks Op-Ed in the NY Times. What a jackass. Maybe if a masochistic mood strikes, I'll elaborate more fully. Suffice to say he continues with the lame conservative diatribe of whining about how Obama is a child of privilege, one of the dreaded “upscale educated class” ill-suited to be President, while McCain is “an old warrior with a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue.” He leaves out the parts about philandering and gambling. McCain is to be revered, Obama is to be feared.

Brooks writes that this country is coming to the end of a “long boom” economically, which tells me he is one of the feared upper-class richie riches, completely clueless how the majority of people in this country have lived over the last thirty years.

Perhaps he has made an inadvertent point, however. Early in the article, when he is describing the perfect storm of ending eras in which we find ourselves, he writes, “Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980.” He concludes with

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.

And who's fault is that?