Another Monday

Ah, Monday. Even though it's a Federal holiday, the kids have school today. Instead of getting today off, they have Election Day off. I'm not thrilled about having to drag them along to vote, especially since the lines will likely be very long.

A while back, my brother emailed me that he and his new girlfriend would be in the area in November, and asked if they could stay with us. I checked my calendar and it seemed ok. This morning, he emailed me to say that he'd gotten the month wrong. They'll be here tomorrow. Now, that's an entirely different matter. By November, all the sports have ended, so we're not running around all the time. Tomorrow happens to be one of those busy days, with both tennis AND baseball, and very little time in between. Great. Not what I had in mind for this week.

I've been doing some work on the Plum Lotus scarf, but not as much as I'd like. Here are some lousy pictures to give you an idea of how far I've gotten:



Election Babble

By all accounts, McCain's hopes for winning this election are slipping away fast. He is way down in the polls, not just nationally, but in key battleground states. Obama appears to be poised to win several states that haven't voted Democratic in years, including Virginia (yay!). Last week, he decided that the way to deal with his position was to "take the gloves off." He and Palin unleashed the low-down dirty attacks, the insinuations and innuendo that played on racist fears and hatreds. Obama "doesn't think like us," he "pals around with terrorists," etc. They did not flinch or hesitate when people in their audiences or on their behalf tried to paint Obama as a scary Muslim, a non-citizen, anti-American. Audiences at McCain/Palin rallies shouted racial epithets at news cameramen and death threats against Obama. They were beginning to look like lynch mobs.

Many people objected to this line of campaigning, including such respected figures as David Gergen. McCain said he would try to tone it down, and he did, somewhat, by telling a woman at one of his rallies who said she wouldn't vote for Obama because he was an Arab "No, no, he's a decent family man." (Arabs can't be decent family men?) Crowds booed him when he tried to show respect.

Rep. John Lewis, himself a respected veteran of the civil rights movement, whom McCain called one of his heroes back at the Saddleback Forum, called McCain on his campaign's actions, saying that crowds were getting riled up in much the same way that crowds listening to George Wallace used to get riled up.

This got McCain's dander up, and he declared that the OBAMA campaign was out of line (never mind that Rep. Lewis's comments were his own, and not on behalf of the campaign), beyond the pale, horrible, etc. and demanded that Obama denounce and reject the comments, etc. etc.

In other words, "How dare you infer what we're implying!"

One minute he swears he's going to run a campaign on the issues, while the next minute his campaign officials are releasing yet another smear. He's acting like a bully who's finally not getting his way.

McCain's really painted himself into a corner here. He's either responsible for the direction his campaign has taken, or he's lost control of it completely. Either way, it's reprehensible. I suspect he wants to play it both ways, declaring that he will take the honorable role ("I'm not a bad person"), while letting others do the dirty work ("but my opponent is! Did you know...") He's playing to the wingnuts and alienating virtually everyone else. Congressional candidates are avoiding him. He's plummeting in the polls.

If he turns around and tries to take the high road, he looks erratic and desperate. If he stays the course, he runs the risk of not only losing, but losing dishonorably. He also runs the risk of being responsible for letting loose some crazies, validating their hatreds and making them feel that it's imperative to act on those hatreds. No matter what he does, I'm not sure that he can get the worms back into the can.

Meanwhile, Obama is just sailing along, maintaining his dignity and speaking to the issues. How he maintains his cool in the face of the crap that's flung at him, I don't know.

McCain has pledged to hit at Obama hard in their final debate. He said that last time, too, but didn't seem to come out fighting.

I really can't wait for this election to be over. Three more weeks.