It saddens me that while near the town I grew up in, you can’t drive down a road without seeing homes foreclosed upon, and businesses shuttered, yet you are still unwilling to talk to us about issues like the economy. Why? Why do you want to “turn the page” so desperately?

What is your plan to help my neighbors? I want to hear it, as I have heard nothing from you yet about our economy. Something needs to change, and if you are going to tell me that continuing the economic policy of the previous administration is the best course, I ain’t buying it. Try telling that to my community member whose house is for sale.

Instead of substantive debate on the issues, your side continues to engage in the derisive politics of yore. Instead of talking about the economy, you deride by turning a phrase used to talk about a policy into a slur when your own candidate has used the same phrase beforehand. You bring up old tired dirty politics, when you yourself had some questionable connections in the past — McCain as a member of the Keating Five, and Palin in her connection the the successionist Alaska Freedom Party (whom you’ve supported, and your husband was a member of), and to a preacher who deemed a woman a WITCH (!?) only a few years ago. In both cases, the “pig” is bad policy, and to politicize it otherwise is an affront to our country’s intelligence, plain and simple.

We are smarter than that. I’m not just talking about me. I’m talking about the whole of the US.

Instead of talking about how to fix our problems, your negative, divisive politics force us to spend time defending – starving the country of the discussion we need – about what it is we need to do to right this ship.

Don’t call us unpatriotic. It offends me that you would dare to claim we love our country less than anyone else. I for one love this country, as all democrats and Obama supporters do. Why would we spend so much time campaigning and trying to bring our message of change if we didn’t want to make the country we love better. We will defend our borders against attacks against the freedoms we hold dear to the bitter end… to preserve the rights our forefathers established for us, and to ensure the safety and well being of our fellow countrymen. Calling us unpatriotic is simply untrue, an unfortunate casualy in this war against those who have or may attack you.

Let’s bring this back to a discussion about issues and solutions and let the public decide.

30k for 30 well funded days

I happen to be Christian. That is the faith prism through which I view the world. It was my understanding that it was Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin’s prism as well. For the sake of argument, let us look at the allegations that surround Sen. Obama and Mr. Ayers taking for fact that which the Republican ticket says is true: Sen. Obama was “palling around” with a man who was a 1970’s domestic terrorist. That man admitted his involvement in a terrorist organization, gave himself up to his community, and sought to make himself a productive member of society. He has since become a professor in Illinois, where he served on a Public Service Board with then-Mr. Obama and then later helped Sen. Obama kick off his campaign.

My question is: what would Jesus have done?

This simple question should be at the forefront of every Christian’s actions at all times. But again, it shows how far the Republican ticket has strayed from their virtues. The suggestion is that Sen. Obama should never have shared a room, a meal, whatever, with someone with such a history. Even if that would have flown in the face of every moral teaching of Christ.

Christ “palled around” with all sorts of sinners. His message of “go and sin no more” seems to be lost on this particular ticket.

Sen. Obama, being a devout Christian, IF he even knew Mr. Ayers history as it is being alleged, did exactly what Christ would have done: he forgave him. He accepted Mr. Ayers’ repentance, and accepted his service to society.

To assert he should have done otherwise is against the theological and moral teachings of Christ.

Now, having said that, take a look at the contrasting answers given by each VP candidate to Katie Couric this past week in regards to Row v Wade, quite possibly one of the most famous, and often argued Supreme Court case. It almost always comes up in major political debate and this is no exception. You’d think of ANY Supreme Court case that the McCain camp would have prepped Palin in, it would have been this one.

Watch for yourself and decide who seems to be more versed on the matter.

I’ve never been this excited for the first Vice Presidential debate. When was the last time that anyone cared THIS much about the VP debate? Sure, Gore/Cheney and Edwards/Cheney were somewhat entertaining. But this particular debate, I believe, will decide the elections. All those “hockey mom’s” that were so excited for Palin are finally going to realize what an idiot Palin really is. I want to like Palin, I really do.  She’s brash. The mom next door. She’d make a great PTO council member. But Vice President over the largest economy (as of now as least) and the greatest military army in the world? Palin and McCain aren’t even on the same page on foreign policy.

And when’s the last time you saw the Presidential candidate practically hold the VP hand during an interview? Um… is she 5, or 45?

Al I know is that there’s going to be many many more Tina Fey appearances after this Thursday.

It’s difficult not to get dejected. There have been a lot of political let-downs for this country in the last 8 years, a lot of terror, a lot of pain. Even the Democrats who were, by all accounts, elected in 2006 to get us out of Iraq, have disappointed us. This political system is getting harder and harder to invest in, not the contrary.

However, now is when we need you most. Its stellar that you read, write, or talk about politics. But right now, these next 43 days, is when the country really needs to see us rise up and stand up for what we believe in. To take back our rights as citizens to have a system that represents us and is accountable in its operation. To have a government that will bring us together to accomplish the best, rather than pit us against each other to leave the worst off stranded on their own.

So I ask this question, a question that I ask every supporter in our swing state, “What are you, personally, doing to make sure that this election is not lost, to make sure that we don’t suffer another defeat?” This is a democracy. It is by and for the people, but also OF the people. If not you, then who? If not now, when?

Yes, voting for the candidate of choice is crucial. We need that, let there be no question. But campaigns are not run alone on the backs of a handful of young staffers and genius political strategists. When you get down to it, campaigns are won or lost based on the number of voters we can contact and we can convince that Sen. Obama is the real deal.

Not everyone can work 12+ hours a day on the campaign. We get that. But if each and every Obama supporter were to put in just 4hours of volunteering between now and the election, we could truly rock this country.

So, once again, I ask: “What are you, personally, doing to make sure that we win this election?”

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama”

“She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel said in an interview published Thursday by the Omaha World-Herald. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

Could Palin lead the country if GOP presidential nominee John McCain could not?

“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.

McCain and other Republicans have defended Palin’s qualifications, citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia. Palin told ABC News, “They’re our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Hagel took issue with that argument. “I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,”‘ he said. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”

Hagel, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In July, Hagel traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Though he didn’t expect to be asked, Hagel had said he would have considered serving as Obama’s running mate.

Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 6,500, before becoming Alaska’s governor in December 2006.

Palin visited soldiers in Kuwait and Germany last year and said in an interview with ABC News that her only other foreign travel had been to Mexico and Canada. She also said she had never met a foreign head of state.

Hagel told the newspaper that other governors have been elected to serve in the White House without experience in Washington. He said judgment and character were also important for the job.

“But I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world,” Hagel said. “I think that’s just a requirement.”

Consider voting the absentee ballot for a couple of reasons.

1. Your vote is cast on a traceable paper ballot and not on an electronic machine which can be easily tampered with.

2. You can avoid the long lines associated with the last two elections.

3. You will be free on Election Day to help out at your local Democratic office, help drive older voters to the polls, patrol the polls to keep an eye on the Republicans, etc.

Call or visit the local office in your area that oversees the election and ask them to send or give you a request for an absentee ballot. (In my town it’s the county clerk.) Tell them you plan to do volunteer work with your party on Election Day. They won’t even question you and you can fill out the ballot at your leisure.

It’s fast and very easy. Pass this on to your friends. They’ll thank you.

Vince