About an hour ago I went to the website of Alcalde & Fay, McCain's probable paramour's lobbying firm.  I clicked on "Meet the Firm" and perused the alphabetical listing of names of the staff.  Since I'm pretty familiar with the alphabet, I knew Iseman should appear between Charlotte Hrncir (I kid you not) and Maurice J. Kurland.  But wait, there was no name between those two.  Maybe Iseman doesn't work there any more or maybe she's such a minor player that they don't list her?
Nope -- she was there earlier in the day.  TPM has a link to her page on the firm's website.  
http://web.archive.org/...

Last night we celebrated the Chinese New Year by having dinner with two of the families who traveled with us in China in 2001 when we all adopted our daughters.  We decorated our house with banners and lanterns.  We had a whole chicken, a whole fish and a platter of dumplings (and lots of other food).  The girls were dressed in fancy Chinese dresses or jackets and played non-stop (and without a single argument).  And the adults talked for hours about family and friends and life.  Out of the blue, one of the other mothers said "I've decided I'm supporting Obama."  And this was a major surprise since both of these families are Republican.

I only made my decision to support Obama a few weeks ago.  And I was thinking today about why I made that decision.  
It's not about Hillary-hatred.  I like Hillary Clinton a great deal and think she has an excellent history of supporting the causes I believe in (so Obama supporters looking forward to some Hillary-trashing, don't bother to read further).  If she wins the nomination, I will not only be out there working for her, I'll be enthusiastic about it.
My gripe with Hillary over the Iraq vote, the more recent Iran vote and the bankruptcy vote is in the context of years of making the right choices and standing up for children and families.  So Obama is not the "not-Hillary" for me, although his voting record is slightly better (but shorter) than hers.

During the Iowa caucuses, I finally realized that I had already made up my mind about the Democratic nomination.  I cheered the numbers for Obama showing up on the screen and cried (and felt like an idiot doing it) during his victory speech.  My husband put an Obama sticker on our good car (the Prius, not on the gas guzzling minivan) and we wake each other up in the morning, interrupt each other's quiet reading time, call each other during the day with good news about the Obama campaign (new support from the Hispanic community; his terrific response to Bill Clinton's Jesse Jackson remarks).  So how come I end up spending so much of my commenting time on Dkos defending Hillary Clinton?

Day after MLK day, and I'm on my way to work, half asleep and thinking grumpily about what I have to accomplish today.  But loud voices and crowds at the Metro (subway) station wake me up.  Milling groups of young teens with their school names on jackets, hats or backpacks.  Oh no! I forgot that this is the week we're inundated with parochial school children dragged to Washington D.C. by their priests, pastors, teachers or administrators to protest a woman's right to choose.  
Most of these kids haven't the slightest interest in the subject of their trip to Washington.  Listen in on their conversations and you hear the standard fare of 11-16 year olds.  Who likes who.  What Jenny bought at the mall.  Will they be able to go to the Air and Space Museum?  When they going to get their driver's license.  What Ryan said to Courtney.  Not a word about the "unborn" or dead babies.  They're not here because of what they believe or care about.  They're here because their school instructs them what to believe and obliges them to parade those beliefs.

I'm an Obama supporter, but I like & respect Hillary and John Edwards and would be happy with any of the 3 as President.  However, I think Obama is the most inspiring of the candidates, could bring the most excitement to the campaign and would bring in both young voters and independents to make the Democrats a much stronger majority.  Since on policy issues the 3 front-runners are very close, I can afford to choose on the basis of emotion.  So I admit that a great part of my support for Obama is because he can bring me to tears when he speaks.  But that's practical also -- that skill will be tremendously helpful when running against the Repubs.
But the ongoing skirmishes between the Obama Campaign and the Clinton Campaign, the trading of accusations of sexism and racism, is exaggerated and overplayed.  Much of this mess is caused by our lovely media's desire for a story.  Can't find a real story, well just go out and make one up!

Yesterday nyceve wrote an impassioned diary about the villainy of the health insurance companies. http://www.dailykos.com/...
My son's tragic life is yet another example of how truly despicable these companies are.  He had a major stroke on Thanksgiving of 1986 when he was 3, and died about 1 month short of his seventh birthday.  For the 4 years he survived after his stroke, he was in similar medical shape to David Denney (described in nyceve's diary) -- couldn't walk or control his body, couldn't talk, smile, swallow; had to be fed with a feeding tube; needed respiratory therapy every morning (which was mainly done by my husband because the insurance company would only pay for it twice/week).  

Last year I wrote a diary on my oldest daughter's birthday about giving her a better world for her birthday.  On this birthday I have some different thoughts.  
She would have been 27 today.  A few days after she turned six, on Thanksgiving day, her little brother had a massive stroke and became severely disabled.
She did not have a normal childhood after that.  She went from a tremendously social child to a child who shut herself in her room much of the time.  But this is not the story of a child doomed to bitterness and misery.  She shut herself in her room to write.  She became an amazing writer -- using words in ways I've never seen elsewhere.  She turned our family disaster into a new and creative way to deal with the world.

We don't have BIG cable (meaning all the stations).  No  MTV, no Nickelodeon, no SciFi (sigh), no CNN.  So at 8 pm on Thursday, I tuned into CNN online to watch the Dems.  At about 8:30 pm, my 7-year-old daughter walked in with her Harry Potter in hand (2nd book, yep, she's smart), ready for bed, and was immediately caught up by the debate.  She sat in my lap and watched for over an hour.

I'm really really trying to narrow down my choices.  But every time I think I've settled on someone, they do something I don't like, and the others look better.  It's a bit like ground and background!  I realize my expectations were probably too high.  Remember that when Gore ran, many of us (including me) got very annoyed at him.  Now he's a hero to the very people who were pretty underwhelmed during the 2004 election.
So I thought I'd go through pluses and minuses and invite other fence sitters to join in.  I'm starting with the three front runners because I know them the most, but I would welcome similar information on the rest of the Democratic field.

In response to Richard Cohen's stupid stupid column supporting the White House drive toward war with Iran I sent this letter to WaPo (which, needless to say, wasn't published):

Oh Richard, Richard, Richard.  Haven’t you learned that you need to tune up your skepticism meter?  Your column (Bush’s Legacy of Cynicism, 10/30/07) supports all the warmongering claims of this grossly warmongering administration, the very administration you supported right into the disastrous war in Iraq.

Is immigration the next wedge issue that the Republicans will use to successfully pummel us into oblivion?  E. J. Dionne thinks so and he's transmitted his anxiety to my husband.
This morning my husband handed me the WaPo, turned to Dionne's column. (Please forgive him, he can't help it that he's a 20th century man who still gets his news from actual newspapers.)  
"You've got to read this," he said.  "The Republicans couldn't get traction on the gay marriage issue, but they're going to bury us with the immigration issue."

My husband has been an enthusiastic supporter of Senator Obama's candidacy and has sent money to his campaign.  I've been vacillating between Edwards and Obama for some months now, liking certain things about each one.  But my days of indecision might be over because of the Obama campaign events in South Carolina.  If the Obama campaign goes ahead and has Donnie McClurkin on stage at his events, he's lost my vote, my husband's vote, our college daughter and her friends' votes (at the very large, very full of young voters University of Michigan campus), and many other people's support.

Greg Sargent over at Talking Points Memo has an excellent piece today on Maureen Dowd's column in the NYT.  

In her latest column on Hillary, Maureen Dowd quotes New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier as follows:

   'Others do not underestimate her relentlessness. As Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, once told me: "She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone."'

A while back, WaPo brought on two new comic strips, Candorville and Prickly City -- with the stated intention of representing the liberal and conservative political points of view.  Other than Doonesbury, which is located on another page during the week, these were the only openly political comic strips that I knew of.  But now another has entered the fray:  Today's "Get Fuzzy" breaks new, and vicious ground in attacking Democrats.

(Revised, with many thanks to mbayrob)
The U.S. Census Bureau had a press conference yesterday morning releasing new data on poverty/income and health insurance.  The MSM covered it to some degree.  What they missed out on completely is the fact that the number of children ages 0 through 18 without health coverage rose by more than 700,000 from 2005 to 2006.  There was an increase the year before also, but this most recent number is double the previous increase.  That means that one million more children are now uninsured than were uninsured 2 years ago.*

Winning in Iraq is easy.  All we need to do is redefine what we mean by "progress," and "success."  Once we do that, we simply can't lose -- everything that happens in Iraq will be evidence of progress and success.  And we have lots of conservatives and a a couple of military leaders (whoever's left after retirement of those with uncorrected vision) available as tour guides in this new world in which everything that happens in Iraq is just further proof that we're winning.  Here are just a few people we can count on in this endeavor.

This question about Barack Obama seems to be raised from both the right and the left, so let's apply a some simple tests, all of which assume he is unknown to the people observing him: