Tick Tock Tick Tock

Election day is upon us (well, in Japan anyway), and I know I'm not the only one pacing back and forth while biting my nails at the possible outcomes.

It's been quite the remarkable campaign season. I've learned more about my friends' and relatives' political and religious opinions than I ever cared to know. For some, I was pleasantly surprised. For others, I was appalled. I now understand the old adage that family and politics don't mix well (in this case, family/friends and politics).

I look forward to the end of this race. Not only has it added stress to my relationships, but it has greatly shaken my faith - in people, mostly. At the same time though, I think this process has been healthy. It's good to shake things up a bit - to find where people stand, and why they stand there. It's been uplifting seeing apathy change to awareness. It's been inspiring watching people become politically active and trying to educate themselves on the issues and fight for what they think is right. Way to go, America! We did something right!

By the same token, I also look forward to forgetting what everyone's political opinions are. :) And not receiving campaign email forwards like:

"Obama Not Born in the US"
"Surprise Gay Day in California Kindergarten"
"The Church and Prop 8"
"Huntley Brown -- Why I Can't Vote for Obama"

If you want to share your political opinion with me, let's chat. But please don't use my email to send me this nonsense! Trust me, I'll be much more likely to listen if you just talk to me. If it's important enough to you, say it yourself, don't let "forward politics" say it for you. I'll most likely delete it or send it to my junk mail anyway.

Obama has a good chance of winning. I can stop pacing about that. But if Proposition 8 passes, I will be devastated to say the least. Will civil rights triumph over religious bias? Or will dogmatism, fanaticism and injustice run rampant across the nation once again?

Only time will tell.

VP Debate - Biden my time to BaRACK ON!!!

I was much more impressed by the VP debate than the presidential debate. Questions were still avoided (more on Palin’s part than Biden’s), but a lot more was discussed. They even hit on gay rights! My impression at the end of the debate, actually, was that BIDEN should be the one running for president. We’ll see how Obama pulls through in the next month.

I was going to give a lot of opinions in a long, drawn-out play-by-play, but you don’t want to read that. Simply said, Obama and Biden will win this election. If they don’t, then America is even more masochistic than I thought, and I probably won’t be returning to live there any time in the next 4-8 years. I appreciated Biden sticking to the facts, and even pointing out where he and Palin agreed. I thought it funny, though, when Palin was SO vague in her stance on gay rights that Biden capitalized on the opportunity and said they agreed on that one, when they both knew they didn’t. Palin has said before that same-sex couples shouldn’t receive state health benefits, whereas Biden and Obama support giving them visitation rights in the hospital, rights of joint property ownership, and rights of health and life insurance. Am I to understand, then, that treating same-sex couples like normal human beings and average US citizens is actually OPTIONAL? Scary.

All in all, I learned a lot more from these two than Obama and McCain. Palin has a hard time covering up her inadequacy in any topic other than Alaska, and even THAT is questionable. Biden is your average politician, able to spin any sentence on a moment’s notice. I have to give props to Biden, Obama and McCain – campaigning for the presidency as members of senate is SO much harder than running as a Governer, especially when your voting record is out there for all the world to see.

Waiting for my absentee ballot to arrive in the mail….

Political Thoughts

I waited until I could watch the debate and do some thinking before sharing my thoughts on the presidential race. While I don't consider myself highly educated in politics (I am married to Hans), I do have opinions on the current issues.

Before you start reading this, I should let you know where I stand so, if you hate the things I say, you can find another blog to read. :) I'm a liberal person. I think health care should be universal. I believe in gay rights and support gay marriage. I try every day to be more aware of the environment. I think global warming is a serious, human-created issue. I believe offshore drilling is an atrocity, that dumping 90,000 tons of drilling fluid and metal cuttings into the ocean PER OIL RIG is a sin. I also believe in stricter gun laws, the separation of church and state and the rights of women to choose. I think "Pro-life Feminist" is an oxymoron. I am against capital punishment and uneducated preemptive military action.

First, the debate. I was highly disappointed in both parties. Politicians are very good at saying a lot about nothing. They are well-practiced in the art of question-avoidance. This debate was supposed to be all about foreign policy and the war in Iraq, and instead half of the time was taken up in tax banter. Now, I know that the United States' current economic crisis is a HUGE matter, and not to be handled lightly. But I was ready to hear about the war, and frankly, I was disappointed in Jim Lehrer (a journalist I grew up watching with my father) for diverting the topic to money in his first question.

Once we got past all of the raised-taxes, lowered-taxes, pork-barrel spending, earmarking, subprime lending, free market vs. governmental regulations talk, most of which went over my head (maybe I should be reading along on Hans' online economics course), there was only a short time for the candidates to discuss the things that matter to me: health care and foreign policy. While Obama mentioned our needing a fixed-healthcare system, McCain didn't touch that one with a ten-foot pole. I don't think his medicare subsidies are the answer. I live in a country right now with socialized medicine and it works enormously better than anything I've ever experienced in the world of private health care. I also liked Obama's comment on making college more affordable, though I believe the arts to be every bit as important as math and science.

And finally, foreign policy. The only thing we learned from this is that McCain would have us send MORE troops to Iraq, and Obama can't stop talking about how we never should have gone to Iraq in the first place (Naturally, Obama, but how are YOU going to fix it?). Obama believes non-preconditioned dialogues with world leaders will improve diplomacy in our foreign relations. I agree. We shouldn't say "I'm not going to talk to you unless you agree, right now, to do what I ask you to do." McCain believes a league of democracies will put the pressure on Iran to cooperate, but he excludes non-democacy-run countries such as Russia and China in that league. Hmmm, those are pretty big, important countries to not include in your little club, McCain....

After the Eve Ensler essay, I decided to learn more about Ms. Palin. She is accused of calling for censorship in her local public library, which would have me ranting and railing, were it true. She is "reported to have said" that a certain book, Daddy's Roommate, "shouldn't be in the library," but she never wrote a formal request to have the book removed. Darn. And I SO wanted to accuse her of book-banning too!! Oh, and by the way, Daddy's Roommate is a children's book about the children of lesbian and gay parents, and I've added it to my "to read" list. Just goes to show what censorship can do!

And the wolves. Yeeshk. She signed a policy that allows the hunting of wolves from helicopters, and even offered a bounty of $150 per wolf killed. Are. You. KIDDING ME?!?!?! Her intention was to increase the moose population with this "predator control program." Funny enough, do you know what one of her favorite pasttimes is? You got it, moose hunting!! So DIE WOLVES, DIE! How DARE you take all of the good game!

Here is the rest of the list of her record:

Lifetime member of the NRA
Supports capital punishment
Opposes same-sex marriage
Supports denying state health benefits to same-sex couples
Pro-life, including cases of rape and incest (which McCain disagrees with, oddly)
Member of "Feminists for Life" (the oxymoron)
Wants to remove polar bears AND beluga whales from threatened species list
Supports drilling and building of pipelines in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Says global warming isn't man-made, but later said "We gotta do something about it!"
Supports preemptive military action

All in all, Sarah Palin is for everything I am against, and against everything I am for. So, Eve Ensler, I applaud you.

Sarah Palin

Written by Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues"

"I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story — connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country choose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan.

She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is there to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, ‘It was a task from God.’

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or not. She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and health care or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, ‘Drill Drill Drill.’ I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?"