I Voted

I voted for John Kerry this morning. It's time for change. The current administration has not only made mistakes, but they've taken steps to avoid taking responsibility for those mistakes. In many cases, they've tried to distort the truth. In others, they've obnoxiously and arrogantly refused to even consider that they've made a mistake, even in the face of irrefutable facts.

I could fill a dozen pages here with a post about the things I dislike most about the Bush administration. Instead, I'll try to boil it down to basic points:

• Financial enrichment of big business, the very rich and administration cronies at the expense of the rest of the country.
• Economic policy that turned a huge surplus into a huge deficit.
• Promoting a culture of fear in our country that encourages people to make important decisions based on their fear of another 9/11.
• Knowingly making a plan for an unjust war a forgone conclusion, even with the knowledge that our country had other, more important strategic priorities.
• Failing miserably to make Iraq safe for democracy
• Doing the same in Afghanistan
• Failing to finish the job of hunting down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Insistence upon staying the course, despite strong, irrefutable evidence that current policy is failing us. And doing so arrogantly.
• Attacking the separation of church and state.
• Assaulting the personal freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

John Kerry is not perfect, but he represents our best chance to change our direction appropriately when we're confronted with evidence that the current administration has made mistakes. George Bush has, for the past four years, deliberately refused to make necessary adjustments in his policies to ensure that America is doing the right thing. When so many critical decisions face us as Americans, we cannot afford to have a commander in chief who insists on staying the course when the course he's selected is wrong. Moreover, we can't afford to have a commander in chief who willingly blinds himself to the facts and arrogantly insists that we should plod forward with no change to existing policies, out of fear that any change in direction represents weakness.

We have a weak leader currently in office. I've voted to change that.

The GOP Thanks Osama Bin Laden

This lovely gem, quoted just about everywhere...

"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.

You have to be joking. Is the GOP so desperate to get its candidate elected that they're willing to give Bin Laden props for issuing another tape? If that's the case, any doubts you might have had about the promotion of a culture of fear by the Republicans should now be thoroughly dispelled.

Trick Or Treat! (Not.)

The past several Halloweens have been, well, weird. I remember when my block was teeming with kids and Halloween meant trading shifts with my mom and my sister standing near the front door handing out treats. Invariably, we used to have to run out to the store for more peanut butter cups or Snickers bars, because they'd get glommed up pretty quickly.

This year, we didn't even manage to get rid of the jar full of Atomic Fireballs I got from a sales rep. Only half a dozen groups of kids came by.

I was beginning to think that maybe our house had turned into the house that kids skipped every year because we gave out lame treats. But I don't think that's it. I think there just aren't enough kids in the neighborhood.

You don't see kids on my block diverting cars so they can play street hockey. No backyard games of Wiffle Ball or touch football. I think that maybe the neighborhood is pretty much devoid of kids these days.

Most of the folks that live around the block are older couples whose children are grown and out of the house. Most of the rest are older DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids). The older couples who raised their kids here are fleeing at the rate of a few a year - they sell their houses to the DINKs and move down south to retire.

The DINKs are the only ones that can afford their houses. The folks next door have been trying to sell their house for at least nine months now and they're holding out for $560K - the house is smaller than ours, doesn't have a pool and probably needs about as much work as our place does. What young couple just getting started out can afford that?

There are hardly any trick or treaters. Until the housing bubble pops, there won't likely be many. Having been raised there, one day I'd like to see the streets teeming with kids playing street hockey again.

Missing Explosives. - WTF?

Can somebody explain to me how W. is getting away with saying John Kerry is jumping the gun on the missing explosives in Iraq? If this story is true, then we know the explosives weren't moved by Saddam Hussein before the war started. Yet Bush continues to accuse Kerry of jumping the gun and Dick Cheney is continuing to parrot his theory that Saddam moved the explosives before we got there.

How can this not be considered a complete distortion of the facts on the part of the administration?