Happy Birthday Casper!

I am pessimistic. I don't want to be optimistic. 2004 almost killed me.

Me, too. So I don't know where my optimism is coming from.

Supposedly a lot of former Clinton supporters who now support McCain are not aware that McCain is anti-abortion.

A lot of them *are*, though, and even though they themselves are pro-choice, they truly believe that even under Obama, abortion rights won't be any better than they were under Bush.

And -- I hate to say this -- there's a demographic of Hillary supporters who claim to be voting for McCain who are past their reproductive years and therefore don't give 2 shits about the young women behind them who are going to get screwed HARD under a McCain administration.

After being in Ohio for a few days and catching commercials where McCain is making a huge play for Clinton supporters, I have to say, it might work.

I've worried and worried about Obama's chances here, but a couple of weekends ago I was at a festival down in the tiny town where my dad grew up. Understand, this town was -- and generally still is -- whiter than white, and horrifyingly racist. We knew who was in the Klan, and, well, you didn't fuck with them.

So at this festival, not only was there an Obama campaign booth, it was swamped with people wanting Obama swag, and driving through what I remember as a closed-minded little backwater, I saw Obama signs in people's front yards.

Is it enough? I don't know. But seeing support for Obama in a little hillbilly town that would have run him out on a rail 25 years ago was astonishing. I couldn't explain it well enough to The Boy, since he didn't grow up there, but when I told my brother, he had the same reaction I did -- his jaw dropped, and he was actually speechless for a moment (which is significant for him).

It's things like that which give me hope. I'm not saying the town has become a hotbed of liberalism, but maybe, just maybe, people are realizing that things have gotten so bad under Bush and McCain isn't going to make things better.

That's what I'm hanging on to.

but I think building up intelligence capabilities, working with other countries, and non-proliferation efforts are far more important

Commie

It's weird - the election is just a little more than two months away. Two months, and either I'll be incredibly happy or incredibly depressed.

If Obama is elected and the Cubs win the World Series, I swear my head will explode, as I won't be able to handle that much happiness....

Meanwhile, on NPR, they had a little piece on Cindy "I'm an only child" McCain's half-sister who not only is the first child from her father's first marriage, got a $10K bequest from his will (and Cindy got the millions). Classy family there.

The convention talk reminded me to program my DVR to record it. Good thing, my wife would not be happy if I forgot to set it tonight. How did I ever get along without a web enabled DVR?

This is the best expression of how I feel about McCain that I've come across so far. She just nails it.

My sneaking suspicion is that the PUMA movement was started (and is funded) by the McCain campaign and is decidedly NOT the grass-roots outraged-women-voters thing that they claim to be. And as such, that the numbers they're claiming are pure unadulterated bullshit. (I don't doubt at all that there are women out there who truly believe John McCain would be a better President than Barack Obama - I just don't believe that many of them are Democrats.)

I'm pessimistic about the election. McCain is going to carry the south, the pillar of red that runs down the middle of the country, and the usual suspects in the west. Obama is going to carry the usual blue areas. I think it will closer in some of those red states than expected, but not nearly enough to actually win. In the Obama strongholds, I think Obama will win big. I think Florida will go McCain, Missouri will barely go McCain, and that Ohio will barely go McCain. Hence my prediction that Obama wins the popular vote and McCain wins the election.

Great. Mail is likely to be down for several hours. Bye-bye productivity.

I think Obama might carry NC. I've been out of the liberal dot every weekend and, while the rural bumperstickers aren't trumpeting Obama there are an amazing lack of McCain signs. Also, Obama's registration people are saturating the state. They don't really bother with the Chapel Hill/Durham/Raleigh area anymore because it's so done—most of them are heading over to the blue collar areas like those around Burlington (where the factories used to be) and seeing a lot of support. I think the combination of Republican apathy and Democratic voter registration efforts among African Americans and the economically screwed could make NC an Obama state. (Might carry Hagan to the Senate, too.)

No idea what's happening in Alabama, though.