The letter-writing initiative was launched by the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which says roughly 1,400 of its members and supporters have contacted 24 leading toy companies and retailers to express concern about ads aimed at kids.

“Unfortunately, I will not be able to purchase many of the toys that my sons have asked for; we simply don’t have the money,” wrote Todd Helmkamp of Hudson, Ind. “By bombarding them with advertisements … you are placing parents like me in the unenviable position of having to tell our children that we can’t afford the toys you promote.”

This is absurd on so many levels, I almost don’t know where to start. First, toy companies have to sell toys, and to do that, they have to advertise. I ask you, who else besides kids are toy ad supposed to target? Personally, I don’t know a lot of adults who play with Barbies and Legos.

Second, since when do parents have to buy their kids every toy the kids see advertised? My mom told me no plenty of times when I was a kid and wanted some toy or other. Sometimes it was, “No, we can’t afford it,” and sometimes it was just plain old “No.” Imagine, telling your child no. What a concept. Apparently, it’s more than some parents these days can handle. According to the AP story:

“Parents have trouble saying no,” said Allison Pugh, a University of Virginia sociology professor. She says parents often buy toys to avoid guilt and ensure their children feel in sync with school classmates.

“Even under circumstances of dire financial straits, that’s the last thing parents give up,” said Pugh. “They’ll contain their own buying for themselves before they’ll make their child feel different at school.”

Amanda Almodovar says she encounters such families in her work as an elementary school social worker in Alamance County, N.C., where homelessness and unemployment are rising.

“I had one parent who said she’d prostitute herself to get what her child wants,” Almodovar said. “It’s heartbreaking. They feel inadequate as parents.

Heartbreaking isn’t the word that came immediately to my mind.

“I want an American Girl doll now, Mommy!”

“All right, dear. Mommy’ll just give this nice man a BJ and I’ll have the money in a jif.”

I really hope I wake up tomorrow and find that I dreamed this article.

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But maybe I’m just being elitist. I guess a toaster oven on sale is to some people what Gaul was to Caesar, Persia to Alexander, or that airline to Gordon Gekko.

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That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the belly to have moist, succulent white meat but possibly to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageously oversalted drippings? Or to take arms against a sea of gravy troubles by roasting a dried-out bird unbrined? Either way, there will be tryptophan enough to make us sleep. To sleep? perchance, to dream. Aye, there’s the rub.

The rub - indeed. I’ll rub instead of brine. All the TV and cookbook chefs insist you simply must brine, and a quick blog search suggests a lot of home cooks are doing the same, like this one, this one, and this mother of — are you ready?? — 12.

I did brine the turkey one year, but it didn’t really seem all that much better than the army of unbrined birds I’d cooked in years past, and it was a bit too salty for my taste. And yes, I followed the instructions exactly as to the ratio of salt to water. So I’m going to thumb my nose at all those epicurean experts and cook the bird the way my grandma always did in the days before anybody’d heard of bird-brining. Given a choice between perfect turkey and perfect gravy, I’ll choose perfect gravy. My kids are mad for gravy, and for them, everything else is something to pour gravy over.

This lady is having a “Turk-off” with her husband, cooking hers unbrined while he cooks his brined, and then seeing whose is better. I’ll be checking back to see the results.

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Moreover, getting rid of Richardson means that instead of a race between two non-incumbents in 2010, the Republican candidate will face an incumbent Democrat in the person of Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, who already has a campaign war chest of more than a million dollars. Could be that the economy will tank so badly between now and then that our moronic electorate will be mad enough to demand “The Change We Need” and vote Republican.

Then again, Val Kilmer might make good on the hints he’s been dropping and throw his hat in the race. I believe he’s currently registered as an independent, but that could change before the filing date. Kilmer says that Governor Richardson told him that he (Kilmer) would make a good governor, but Richardson has no recollection (something that used to happen to Clinton Cabinet folks quite often) of having said so.

As I wrote in my above-linked post, Americans these days like to elect The Cool Guy:

Reagan, Clinton, and Jack Kennedy were the cool guys. So is Barack Obama, which is why he was able to pluck the nomination from Hillary’s grasp after all the pundits had declared it to be hers before the race had even started. Unfortunately, we Republicans don’t have a cool guy on our ticket. Those of us with firm principles will vote for McCain anyway, even if he wasn’t our choice in the primary (he wasn’t mine, but none of the others were all that inspiring either), because he shares more of our core political values than the cool guy does. Back in high school, when all the sheep voted for the cool guy for student body president, it didn’t really matter. But we’re not in high school anymore, and now it really does matter. Unfortunately, all too many Americans have never matured past their stupid, shallow, high school mentality, and are choosing the person who will lead the most powerful nation in the world the same way they chose a homecoming king when they were 17.

And celebrities, of course, are the Coolest Guys of All. My former home state elected a bodybuilder turned movie star governor, and it’s equally possible my current home state will elect this guy as ours. If they do, will Danny Cabeza de Calabazo change the name of his blog from Fat Bill and Me (I’m not kidding; go ahead — follow the link) to Fat Val and Me? That photo of Kilmer, by the way, though it’s been posted quite a bit online, isn’t, I think, a representative one. I was in line behind Kilmer at a store in Los Angeles earlier this year, around the same time that picture was circulating, and he looked very slim and fit at the time.

None of which ought to be at all relevant to the question of whether he should be governor, of course. Better we should ask, does he have sufficient gravitas? Hmm, maybe not. Then again, maybe so.

But to an electorate that acts like it’s picking a prom king, who cares about gravitas? All he’s got to be is cool.

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Which led to a brief discussion of homeschooling, which Elisabeth Hasselbeck alone defended (surprise) and which former public schoolteacher Joy Behar denounced as making a lot of the kids “demented.”

As I’m sitting at the computer reading this (I have better things to do with my time than watch The View, and only hear about the asinine – or should I say demented? – things Joy and Company say when they make the news or blogs) my own demented homeschooled kids are playing the rhyming game. They’re doing –ard words, like hard, card, etc. They exhaust all the ones they know, and move on to made up words like nard, zard and bard.

“Bard’s a real word,” I interrupt, and tell them what it means.

I go back to surfing the web and they go back to jard, vard, dard, mard.

“And retard,” I add under my breath, because I’m now reading the comments on a Daily Kos post.

“What?” Their little ears perk right up. They know by now that when mom says something sotto voce, it’s likely to be something juicy.

“Nothing.”

“What’s a retard?”

“If you heard me, why’d you say ‘what’?”

Ignoring me, intent on getting the goods. “What’s a retard?”

So I explain what retarded (stress on second syllable) is, and how retard (stress on first) is a horribly mean name that schoolkids used to use as an insult meaning “dummy” when I was in school, but which isn’t at all nice, and which they must never call anyone.

“So it means nincompoop?” That’s their favorite name to call each other at the moment.

“Yes, but remember, you don’t call people retard. Or nincompoop, either, really. But retard’s worse.”

“Or imbecile.” They like that one, too, but not as much as nincompoop. Though thanks to me and my big mouth, both will probably give way to retard now.

It occurs to me that what Joy Behar meant by “demented” might include being so socially maladjusted as to not be able to call someone a retard. If my kids were in school, surely they’d be calling each other retard instead of nincompoop. If they were in school, they’d have classmates with older siblings who watch South Park and could call each other a lot worse than retard or nincompoop.

They’re winding down on the –ard words now. “And retard!” my eldest repeats gleefully as they finish.

“But remember,” I say, “you don’t ever call anyone retard.”

If they ever happen to meet Joy Behar, however, I may make an exception.

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But that’s the historian talking. To the granddaughter, 69 was far too young for my grandmother to have been taken from me. She meant more to me than words can say. I wish my daughters could have known her. That’s one of the terrible things about having children late in life: your children don’t get to know their great-grandparents. And in not knowing my Grandma Betty, my girls really did miss out on something special.

I’m crying as I write this. Nearly two decades later, I’m still crying. I miss her so.

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Trying to organize my desk and all my homeschooling papers. Organization shall set you free – except when you are a truly sick OCD sufferer like myself, in which case it enslaves you.

Fantasizing. No, not that kind of fantasizing. The School Bus Fantasy. You know, where a big yellow bus pulls up outside the door and takes my kids away to school. Out of the house. For seven hours at a stretch.

Reading blogs. It’s a sickness. But I can do it more comfortably than I can read actual printed material with my stupid bifocals on.

Reading an actual book, now that I’ve more or less gotten the glasses thing sorted out. For short stretches of reading, I use the reading glasses portion of the bifocals, but to really enjoy a long stretch of reading, I switch to plain old reading glasses. But then I have to watch the regular glasses to make sure none they don’t get knocked onto the floor and stepped on (again). The actual book, by the way, is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which I’m very much liking, word nerd that I am.

Reading to my kids, which is easier since the print is bigger and I can read it with the regular glasses no problem.

Practicing the piano. I always wanted to learn, envied as a child my friends who complained about having to practice, wished I could have had lessons too. Well, we bought a used piano las summer, and the two oldest girls are taking lessons, and so am I. I can now play the chorus of “Jingle Bells” and the right hand treble staff part sounds okay, although I’m still shaky on the bass clef chords that you play with the left hand. Not too impressive for a woman my age, I realize, but a few months ago I couldn’t have found Middle C (as opposed to Mittelsee, which is what Middle C made me think of at first) if my life depended on it.

Perfecting my pizza crust. The girls now like mine just as much as Dion’s. I’m more critical, so am willing to say the crust is almost as good as Dion’s. Once it was every bit as good, if not better, but I haven’t been able to produce the same result every single time, so I’m still working on it.

Wondering why I can’t upload pictures to my blog anymore. I had such a good one for the bug post.

Wishing I were brave enough to download WordPress 2.6.3 and update my blog, but (a) I don’t want to go back and read a bunch of WordPress how-to technobabble, and (b) I have this paralyzing fear of messing everything up and having the blog disappear into a black hole in cyberspace.

Thinking about divorce. No, not getting one. Other people’s. Within the last month or two, I’ve learned of three couples I knew back in LA who are divorcing after many years of marriage. Two of them have grown children, and one has children who are still quite young. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad this makes me.

Trying not to think about The Future of the Republican Party, about which the punditocracy cannot shut up. I had been planning one of my long, thoughtful posts about it, but (a) am too depressed about it, and (b) need to think it through some more. Therefore I’ll be posting my thoughts on it until long after everyone else has gotten bored and moved on to something else.

Trying not to think about corporate bail-outs. Hey, speaking of which, there’s a gym here in Santa Fe that just went out of business. How about we bail them out? Jobs will be lost and all that. Plus my babysitter’s mom is really bummed that she’s got to find a new gym. Besides, it’ll be a drop in the bucket next to GM, right?

Arranging Portia’s baptism. Yes, I know, she should have been baptized ages ago. All my other kids were baptized by two months, and Portia’s already four months old. But we’ve been having some technical difficulties. Due to the intransigence of the church lady apparatchiki in our Santa Fe parish office (we are parish members in good standing, but…never mind, long story) we have decided to make an end run around them and have Portia baptized at our old church in Pacific Palisades when we visit in January. Hah! Take that, church ladies!

Cleaning up messes. Especially yogurt messes. Tess goes through something like half a dozen cartons in a day if I don’t hide them behind tall things in the fridge. Sometimes she drops the cartons (full, of course) on the floor and the yogurt splatters everywhere. Not so bad if I find it when it’s still wet and can just wipe it up. Truly ugly if it’s already gotten gummy or God forbid dry.

Thanking God nobody in the house is sick at the moment, and saying a little prayer that it stays that way.

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I am not afraid of snakes, or mice, or rats, or spiders. Anything that slithers or crawls is a matter of no concern. But I have a fear of flying insects that is nothing short of pathological. It’s worse if they sting, but I have a horror of even those flying insects that don’t. My phobia is so extreme that I start in horror even when I see a photograph of a wasp or jellow-jacket. When the boys in my grammar school class found this out, they delighted in leaving the science book on my desk, open to the page with the close-up of a bee. When I read that part of 1984 where Winston Smith’s darkest fear, his dread of rats, is used to break him, I broke out in a cold sweat, knowing just how O’Brien could make me love Big Brother in a heartbeat.

Before I had kids, if there was a bee or wasp in the house, I would just trap it in a room that had a door and not open the door, or, failing that, leave the house until my husband could come home and kill it for me. I’m not kidding. But now, with my husband out of town a lot, and four little ones who have only big, cowardly me to protect them from wasps, that isn’t an option.

A couple of weeks ago we started had a wasp infestation in the house. I was killing two or three of them a day. I had cold sweat, felt like Winston with the rat cage on, but my little girls were trusting Mom to fix things, so I had no choice. I had to be like the bug-slaying soldiers in Starship Troopers instead of like Winston Smith melting down in the face of the Beast.

I lit fires in all the fireplaces, thinking they might have a nest in one of the chimneys, and possibly they did, because the enemy in the Great Wasp War retreated. Then yesterday there was another incursion, albeit a small one. And you know what? The fear wasn’t as great. I had that initial stab of panic, that sick feeling, but it wasn’t as strong as it used to be. My heart wasn’t racing quite as fast as before when I killed it, cleaned up the Raid mess, and went on with my day.

It may not sound like a big deal, but to me it was. I still don’t like flying insects, but I feel as though I’ve taken the first step toward conquering my irrational, paralyzing fear of them. And it’s motherhood that did it. Because you know what? When you’re a mom, you really only have one fear, and that fear trumps all other fears of snakes, bugs, rats, high places, whatever. I speak, of course, of the fear that something bad will happen to one of your precious children.

I am the Great Bug-Killing Mother. Hear me roar.

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Literally, I’ve been down with a brutal stomach flu, hence no posts in the last few days. As luck would have it, my husband was out of town, so I was on my own with the kids, and pretty much let the three eldest run wild and trash the house, and only dragged myself out of bed when the baby needed to be fed or changed. At least I didn’t get sick at the same time the kids were sick (they had it in the days before I did), which is what happened last time.

Figuratively, this whole bail-out debacle is becoming a truly sick nightmare. I just got finished watching President Bush say in his news conference,

I’m a market-oriented guy, but not when faced with an international economic meltdown.

Or words to that effect; I typed it from memory after watching it on TV rather than getting it from an online transcript. But anyway, that was the gist of it. Sort of like saying,

I’m a Christian, except that I don’t go to church because I’d rather watch football on Sundays, I live with my girlfriend because I’m not ready to get married yet, and I don’t give anything to charity because I couldn’t afford a new Wii, i-pod and cell phone if I did.

Sort of like saying,

I believe in personal responsibility, except that I shouldn’t have to live like a pauper so I can pay off all this credit card debt I ran up buying clothes and electronics and restaurant meals and booze in bars.

This whole bail-out mess makes me feel almost as sick as the flu did. President Bush makes me feel sick when he spouts off about the free market even as his policies are undermining it faster than those of any president in U.S. history, Democrat or Republican. Treasury Secretary Paulson makes me feel sick just because he and I exist on the same planet. John McCain makes me feel sick because he jumped on the bail-out bandwagon instead of being a real maverick (I hate that word now) and denouncing it for the headlong dash down the slippery slope to socialism that it was. Every Republican in either house of Congress who voted for either one of the bail-out bills makes me sick. Just about all of the talking heads on TV news — with the exception of the incredibly insightful and brilliant Neil Cavuto — make me sick for not calling a spade a spade.

I need to go lie down. I’m not sure if it’s the tail end of the virus or the toxic economic poison that’s doing it, but I really do feel sick.

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Okay, let me get this straight. We are not supposed to put the partisan rhetoric of the election behind us, graciously accept the will of the electorate, and give Mr. Obama a chance to prove that he means what he says about being our president, too? I guess Mr. Rutenberg wants those of us on the right to do what leftists did in 2004, slapping “He’s not MY President” and “Buck Fush” bumper stickers on their cars, and calling the President a lying, warmonging, borderline retard who resembles a chimpanzee.

Sorry, Mr. Rutenberg, but that’s just not our style. We’re not going to make it easy for you to belittle us by getting down in the gutter and being poor sports. Our electorate may be misguided, but they’re still the electorate, and they have made their choice. Our accepting that choice with grace and a spirit of conciliation upsets leftists because it make it more difficult for them to demonize us.

They like to call us hypocrites who spout Christian values but do not live by them. Sorry, Mr. Rutenberg, but some of us do live by them. You don’t have to like it, but you can’t change it.

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Unlike so many disgruntled Gore and Kerry voters in 2000 and 2004, I will not say, “He isn’t my president.” Unlike the furious Democrats who raged that they wanted to move to France or Canada or anyplace but Bushworld, I will never say that an America under an Obama Administration is still not the greatest country in the world. Unlike the leftists who savagely mocked John McCain and especially Sarah Palin in this campaign, and who have belittled and insulted President Bush for the past eight years, I will never stoop to that level in speaking of you, President-elect Obama. I will criticize many of your policies, I have no doubt, but I will never question your intelligence, your faith, or your patriotism.

Those on the left like to paint conservatives as bigots. Have some of my fellow conservatives engaged in racism and religious bigotry during this campaign? Undoubtedly some of them have. But it is equally true that the majority of us have not. Did some people vote against you simply because you were black? Undoubtedly some did. But it is equally true that there were others who voted for you because of your race, and that there were many more people like me, who voted for your opponent because we agree with his policy positions rather than yours, for whom values matter and race does not.

I was encouraged to read similar sentiments on a number of other conservative blogs this morning. Hugh Hewitt wrote:

It is an extraordinary thing, an achievement that will be recognized a hundred years hence, that Barack Obama has won the White House. Even those of us who opposed him, and who will no doubt be opposed to many of his policy objectives over the next four years, must pause and say congratulations on an improbable, amazing rise.

Every American ought to pray for wisdom and judgment for President-elect Obama, for his safety and the safety of his country, and for the continued prosperity and greatness of America.

AllahPundit observed:

I’ll never be a fan, but I swear I’ll never take a nutroots posture either in relishing his failures because it helps my party. Like it or not, he’s my president. As a great man once said, country first.

Slublog chimed in:

After a brief bout with Obama Derangement Syndrome as the results came in, I decided I couldn’t do it. Sure, I’ll photoshop stupid pictures, criticize our new president with vigor and joy, and work to ensure that conservatives are a thorn in his side, but like I said last night, I won’t hate him for a simple reason.

I love this country too much to do to President-Elect Obama what the left did to President Bush, John McCain and Sarah Palin. I hope my fellow conservatives will do the same - demonization is not essential to opposition. I plan to spend the next four years like I spent the last four - being a husband, dad and reluctant taxpayer. I’m going to disagree with the president a lot, but I don’t see that as a license to hate. I’ve spent far too much time criticizing the left to become like them.

Over the next four years, I am sure other conservatives will say and write things about you that will embarrass me. I will doubtless see t-shirts and bumper stickers that belittle you but in reality only make my side look bad. Still, something tells me I will not see quite as many of them as I have seen the past eight years ridiculing President Bush with profanity and vicious ad hominem attacks. On this blog, I will continue to write satire, as I have in the past, but it will not cross the line of decency. There will be ugliness, Mr. President, but know this: most of us who disagree with you and did not vote for you do not condone it. Most of us agree with you on one thing:

You will be our president, too.

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As passionately as I wanted John McCain to win the presidency, I’m feeling remarkably tranquil in the wake of an Obama victory. Maybe it’s just the calm before the storm. Maybe it’s the booze. Maybe it’s a combination of the following:

1) I won’t have to listen to Democrats caterwauling about how the racist Republicans stole the election. Republicans accept defeat gracefully.

2) Maybe leftists will finally stop bemoaning what a racist country the U.S. is. After all, won’t electing Barack Obama pretty much bury that argument? I fear not, alas. Maybe they’ll accept that white Democrats aren’t all bigots, but they can continue to reassure themselves about how racist all of us who didn’t vote for Obama are.

3) It will be nice to have Leno and Letterman and all the rest pick on a Democrat again. Ah, how I’ve missed Bill Clinton! Though something tells me they won’t be half so hard on Obama as they’ve been on Bush, and Obama seems far too circumspect to give them anything like the sort of comic fodder Clinton did.

4) Maybe people will leave Sarah Palin in peace. It’s become truly painful watching the feeding frenzy.

5) The economy is going to blow up in the next president’s face, and it won’t be a Republican face.

6) At least it was Obama-Biden, not Biden-Obama. Let’s be thankful for what we can — and let’s all say a Hail Mary or two (or two thousand) for Mr. Obama’s continued excellent health.

I really am trying to be a good sport about this. But the fact remains, President Obama and his Democratic super-majority in Congress are going to tax the living daylights out of their fellow Americans. You happy Democrats out there are saying, “You bet your assets he is — time for those fat cat capitalists to pay their fair share!” But it just isn’t that simple.

More frighteningly, Vice President-elect Biden was right (for once) when he said that those who hate America would be sure to test President Obama. Test him they will, and we can only pray that responding to the challenge and protecting those of us who elected him, along with those of us who didn’t, will not prove to be above his pay grade.

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I well recall the fury of the left in 2000, when the popular vote was a toss-up but Bush won the electoral vote. There was a lot of talk about how elitist, how unfair, how disenfranchising, blah, blah, the electoral college was. It will be interesting in the extreme to hear the reaction if the popular vote this time is a dead heat while Obama coasts to an easy electoral victory. I predict that what we will hear will be, in fact, a deafening silence.

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I remember sitting glued to the TV news on election nights as a young woman, and poring over the detailed breakdowns in the paper the next morning. Newspapers can no longer hope to keep up with the flow of information, and a political junkie can get her fix far more easily from the computer than from TV. Don’t get me wrong; I still have Brit Hume talking in the background, but I’m running the numbers on my own online too. There is a staggering amount of information available on the internet. Those interactive maps provide an amazing amount of detail to those of us addicts whose drug of choice is politics.

Polls just closed here in New Mexico, and most of the swing states are still too close to call. McCain still has a fighting chance, but it’s looking pretty grim across the board for the Republican candidates for Senate. Our own long-time GOP stalwart Pete Domenici did not run for re-election due to health problems, and it’s been pretty much assumed on all sides that my fellow New Mexicans are going to send Tom Udall to join the appalling Jeff Bingaman (shameless proponent of the ironically named Fairness Doctrine) in our now 100% Democrat Senate delegation.

Speak of the devil. Fox just called it: Udall beat Pearce. I have no idea whose picture they had up as Tom Udall (maybe it was his cousin Mark Udall, who’s running for Senate in Colorado?) but it wasn’t my Congressman and Senator-elect. The national GOP had left Pearce high, dry and penniless, and he spent a lot of his money in the primary against Heather Wilson. So what we have here is a bloodbath: Domenici’s seat gone, Pearce and Wilson both giving up their seats to bleed each other dry in the senatorial primary, only to lose to Udall. Udall’s House seat will go easily to Ben Ray Lujan, partly because people in northern NM can’t see beyond the big (D) and partly because Lujan’s dad, also named Ben Lujan, is a big time NM politico and a lot of ignoramus voters probably think they’re voting for the dad instead of the kid. Pearce’s seat will probably stay Republican. Heather Wilson’s seat is still up for grabs, hotly contested between salt-of-the-earth sheriff Darren White (R) and pretty-boy city councilman Martin Heinrich (D).

Stay tuned for more election night blogging from the woman the Santa Fe Reporter calls “New Mexico’s #1 Sarah Palin expert.” That might not be worth much after tomorrow, I realize, but let me bask in my fading glory for these last few hours.

Right now, I need a drink.

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What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Yes, we’re all a bunch of rednecks. We’re all a bunch of racists. We all think Obama is a Muslim. We all secretly want to shout “He’s a nigger!” at Palin rallies. We’re all just a bunch of dumb, racist, rednecks who are too stupid, too ignorant, too low-brow to read The New York Times:

Anyway, the Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify.

So what am I doing reading this column? Silly me, I didn’t realize moronic Republicans like myself weren’t supposed to read The New York Times, were too stupid to comprehend the fine points of political analysis in The New York Times. I had forgotten that we were just too stinkin’ redneck ever to take off our KKK hoods and read the illustrious The New York Times. I guess I’d better cancel my daily e-mail subscription. I wouldn’t want to cause any cognitive dissonance in Paul Krugman’s smug, elitist little world where all smart, cool, hip, intellectual people vote Democrat, and all Republicans would respond to the elevated discourse of The New York Times (assuming they read it which they don’t, being ignorant rednecks) with a look of utter bafflement much like this:

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Today, another farmer offers his assistance to his fellow Americans on the eve of a difficult election.

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But one day while Goldilocks was on Facebook, she stumbled onto a conversation about politics. Because one of the participants was this really hot guy in her sociology class, she decided to do a little web surfing outside her usual circuit of celebrity gossip and fashion sites so she could impress him. Here is what she learned:

There was one candidate who was way too rich. She found this quote from the candidate’s opponent on Politico:

Somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ And he said, I’m not sure. I’ll have to check with my staff. True quote: I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff …the answer is: John McCain has seven homes.

Nobody should be allowed to own seven houses when other people are homeless, Goldilocks decided. She would definitely not vote for Papa Bear.

There was another candidate who was just too low-class. She said things like “You betcha” and talked like those hicks in Fargo. Goldilocks found this post by Bob Cesca at the Huffington Post:

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is, by all indications, a bonafide hooplehead . . . she’s excusing her embarrassing television interviews and farcical candidacy as an historical breakthrough for “normal Joe Six-pack Americans.” . . . Do we really want a “normal Joe Six-pack American” sitting in the Oval Office?

Joe Sixpack indeed, said Goldilocks to herself. I don’t think so! She would not vote for Mama Bear either.

Then she found a candidate who liked arugula instead of beer, who shopped at Whole Foods instead of Wal-Mart but only owned one house. Sure, the house might have six bathrooms, but, well, at least it was only one house, right? Most of her girlfriends were going to vote for him, and more importantly, so was that hot guy in sociology. And speaking of hot, well, he was, sort of, if a guy in his forties can be hot. Anyway, hot or not, she had made up her mind: she would vote for Baby Bear.

When Goldilocks went home from college for a long weekend, she was excited about impressing her dad with how much she knew about politics. He ate, drank and breathed politics, and was always trying to get Goldilocks interested, but without success. Would he ever be surprised!

“So let’s get this straight,” her dad said. “John McCain with his seven houses is too rich to be president, but Sarah Palin with her white-trash, Joe-Sixpack family is too low class? We don’t want someone just like us but we don’t want someone who isn’t like us either, because he doesn’t understand where we’re coming from. Like George H. W. “Silver Foot in His Mouth” Bush, he doesn’t know the price of arugula at Whole Foods. Like John Kerry, he had the bad taste to choose an heiress for his second wife. Maybe a ketchup heiress is okay but a beer heiress isn’t. Or maybe it’s an older, plainer heiress that’s okay and a younger, sexier heiress that isn’t.”

Who is Joe Kerry, wondered Goldilocks, and what does ketchup have to do with any of this?

“There’s this very narrow band of ‘juuuuuust right’ between Six-Pack Sarah and Diamond John McCain,” her dad went on. “And thank God we can turn to Barack Obama, who is just right, with his big house – but only one house – and his wife’s big salary – but not big enough that the cost of those cute kids’ piano lessons don’t pinch their pocketbook..” He picked up his coffee cup and took a drink, and for a minute Goldilocks thought he was finished, but no such luck. “You know who else was ‘just right’ in terms of money and class, according to the new rules?” he asked.

Of course she didn’t, and what kind of crack had he been smoking to think she cared?

“Richard M. Nixon, that’s who,” he continued. “ And you know who was just too damned rich and out of touch to be able ever to understand the American people? John F. Kennedy, that’s who. And we all know that Tricky Dick was an infinitely better president than the Prince of Camelot, right? We all know that the well-bred and wealthy Franklin D. Roosevelt was a disaster for the country, as that out-of-touch multi-millionaire from Arizona would no doubt be. We know too what a terrible president was Harry S Truman, who didn’t have a college degree, even from a jerkwater school like Sarah Palin’s alma mater.”

Hairy-ass who? Never mind, she thought, I won’t ask, or he’ll never shut up.

“People made fun of the Trumans for their lowbrow tastes just they way they do the Bushes,” he went on.

Goldilocks could see he was just getting warmed up, and sorry, but she just couldn’t take it anymore. “Whatever,” she said, tossing her golden locks and flipping open her cell phone to see if the guy from sociology – whose name turned out to be Hunter – had texted her.

Election day came, and Goldilocks voted a straight Democratic ticket, then texted Hunter proudly to tell him. Election night came, and Keith Olbermann couldn’t have been more excited reporting the news if he’d had an MSNBC intern playing “Monica and Bill” under the desk. Goldilocks and Hunter did play “Monica and Bill” in a bathroom during an election night party.

Papa Bear flew to the nicest of his vacation homes, poured himself a very dry martini and tried not to think about what might have been.

Mama Bear took off her Valentino jacket, put on her L. L. Bean parka and went back to Alaska, flying commercial again and thinking maybe she shouldn’t have listed that state jet on e-Bay after all.

Baby Bear sat down with Harry Bear and Nancy Bear and got to work on a tax package that would spread so much wealth around it would make old Diamond John’s and Six-Pack Sarah’s heads spin.

Uncle Joe Bear said, “What’s the matter with you people? Can’t you count? There are four bears, not three. Four, four, FOUR! There’s a four-letter word for you people: s-t-u-p-i-d.”

Baby Bear told him there was an important funeral in Uzbekistan he’d better get ready for.

April 15 came, and Harry Bear and Nancy Bear and Baby Bear spread a lot of Goldilocks’s dad’s wealth around. When the lease on the BMW convertible Goldilocks drove was up, her dad said he couldn’t afford to lease another one, and she’d have to drive the old Corolla the housekeeper used to drive. They’d had to let the housekeeper go, and from now on Goldilocks would have to do her own laundry, clean her own room, and help her mom with the rest of the housework.

“Oh well,” she shrugged, “I’m not home that much anyway.” But that was going to change too, since some of dad’s wealth that had been spread around included the tuition money for Goldilocks, and they were “too rich” to qualify for financial aid. She would just have to transfer to the state college nearby and move back home.

As Goldilocks was packing up her dorm room, she saw Hunter walk past the open door with a gorgeous brunette. No, Goldilocks thought, not her! It couldn’t be! She raced to the door and looked out. The brunette smiled at her. It was her – the president of the College Republicans. What on earth was Hunter doing with that right-wing harpy? Hunter grinned a little sheepishly, shrugged, and walked off with his arm around his politically incorrect but anatomically impressive new friend.

Goldilocks was putting the last of her boxes into the Corolla’s trunk when a poster on a bulletin board nearby caught her eye. It featured a smiling picture of President Obama. Goldilocks walked over, pulling a sharpie marker out of her purse. She glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and quickly crossed his eyes and blacked out two of his teeth. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You cost me a Beemer.”

And she lived resentfully ever after.

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A woman with whom I’ve been on an e-mail list for years, a woman who describes herself as somewhere between Democrat and Republican, who has been non-political all the 8 years I’ve known her, but who has been following this election closely and leaning toward McCain, wrote this morning:

I don’t like Obama but I want him to win now. McCain has been acting like a real jerk lately and his whole Joe the Plumber crap. Well, if you are making $250k, you are doing fine and don’t need more tax cuts. Let’s finally do something for the middle class!!!! Unless you are poor or really rich, you struggle. I am sick of it.

McCain simply isn’t good at articulating his differences with Obama, and Obama is, so people don’t understand what McCain ought to say but isn’t saying. Here’s the deal:

(1) Obama can’t give a tax cut to 95% of working families because a lot of them don’t PAY any Federal income tax now because they make too little. What he’s talking about is tax credits that they would get, in effect the Fed govt sending them a check. That isn’t a tax cut; that’s spending, and could not unreasonably be defined as welfare.

(2) Saying tax cuts on people above $250K won’t affect the rest of us is disingenuous. Take my husband: he makes less than $250K from his tutoring service, so he ought to be fine, right? Well, a lot of his clients make over $250K, and tutoring is discretionary spending. Tax them enough, and they cut out the tutoring, and my husband loses clients and therefore income. Also, some of his clients are small business owners who don’t themselves make a quarter of a million, but who also have a client base of $250K+ earners, and when those people start cutting back, my husband’s small business owning clients lose business, lose money, and stop hiring my husband. Some of them will also stop hiring the gardener and the cleaning woman, stop eating at as many restaurants and tipping as well when they do, stop hiring Joe the Plumber to remodel their bathroom and Stan the Electrician to put in recessed lighting and Susan the Designer to re-do their living room, and stop buying overpriced sheets and cookware at Bed, Bath & Beyond, where the husband of my above-quoted friend is a manager. Her husband doesn’t make $250K, but you can bet a lot of the people dropping $300 for a single Wusthof knife at his store do.

THAT is what John McCain should have been saying in his debates, and I was just about screaming and tearing my hair out because he wasn’t. The left-wing talking heads can mock “trickle-down” economics on MSNBC all they want, but the fact is that tax cuts and tax hikes do trickle down through the economic strata of society.

Barack Obama will not cut the taxes of 95% of working families, because 95% of working families aren’t even paying Federal income taxes. Barack Obama’s tax plan will NOT “have no effect on those of you making less than a quarter million dollars,” as Senator Obama loves to say, and Senator McCain neglects to correct in manner ordinary people can understand. The attractive young orator’s words beguile, but they are in reality nothing more than lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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Having made the decision to educate my children at home, I am committed to providing them the very best education that I can, and that makes it difficult to find time to read, exercise, keep up with the news and politics, check my e-mail, cook, keep the house from becoming a disaster area, work on my book and blog. It’s all too tempting to park them in front of Animal Planet or Tom and Jerry while I write or surf the internet or experiment with some complicated new recipe. For the record, the TV is off right now. They’re playing some sort of game that involves a lot of blankets, pillows, couch cushions and kitchen utensils. They do play independently quite a bit, which I think is good for them, but it goes in spurts, and there are times when all they want to do is play computer games or watch DVDs, and grumble when I say no.

At the risk of allowing Brigette Russell’s blog to sound like Bridget Jones’s Diary, I’ll also admit that I’m having a devil of a time taking off those last 6 or 8 lbs. of baby weight. I’m hovering between p + 6 and p + 8, with p = pre-Portia weight. (Can you tell I used to be an algebra teacher?) No Joanne Watson am I, clearly. I suppose 8 lbs. isn’t too bad after only a little over three months, but still, it’s frustrating when I spend all those hours on that cursed elliptical machine that I could use in so many other ways. Now, of course, I’m not doing it at all, since I’m sick. I’ve had laryngitis for days and literally cannot talk at all, can only whisper a few words at a time. Try making a housefull of small children mind when you can’t talk to them. I won’t even go there. Back to time…

I keep thinking, if only I could find the right schedule — no, the perfect schedule — then everything would fall into place. Except there isn’t any perfect schedule, and maybe not even a right schedule either. I realize that the answer is to prioritize, and eliminate those things that can be eliminated in order to do a better job on the rest, and this past week Moralia almost got prioritized away. It still isn’t completely out of danger, but I’m leaning toward clemency.

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Of all the races for which the Republicans could neglect to nominate a candidate, they had to pick this one. On the other hand, if there was a Republican in the race, it would probably be just another unremarkable one in which a decent, qualified Republican loses to a Democrat riding on his dad’s name and nothing else, and no one would care. But because Block is opposed only by a Green Party candidate, the race has garnered more attention than it would have otherwise. The PRC is one of those “other” races people normally don’t pay much attention to, but they’re paying attention this time.

I had been saving newspaper articles to write a big, meaty post on the whole Block fiasco, but I just can’t seem to find the time, and besides, Dave Maass at the Santa Fe Reporter is doing a bang-up job of keeping us all informed, so I’ll simply refer you to one of his recent articles on Block and let you search the site for previous entries.  When he isn’t producing outstanding work on the Block story and a very fair-minded and intelligent response to Senator Jeff Bingaman’s attack on the free market in ideas, Maass spends a great deal of his time picking on Sarah Palin.

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But as I’m sitting on the couch watching the news and feeding Portia, Cordelia comes walking into the living room with a stack of books, plops them down on the coffee table and announces, “Can’t sleep.” Moreover, she’s hungry, and wants me to make her breakfast. Fat chance. I tell her to go back to bed. “Not sleepy,” she says. The baby has now been fed, changed and put back down to sleep again, and I’m dying to get back to sleep myself. Stupidly, I offer to let Cordelia come sleep with me, since her dad is out of town.

“Hungry,” she declares just as I’m starting to drift off again. If I ignore her, maybe she’ll go to sleep and stop bothering me. Or maybe not. “Want breakfast.” Although she’s been speaking in full sentences since she was a year and a half old, she has recently developed the annoying habit of truncating her sentences to the bare minimum of words needed to get the point across. Maybe she’s seen too many You Tube clips of The 300 with her dad, and is trying to be Laconic. Maybe she’s practicing for when she gets her own cell phone and will need to keep it short and sweet for text messaging. Maybe she’s just trying to annoy me.

Eventually she went to sleep and let me do the same. I think it was around 5:00. My alarm, of course, was set for 6:30 so I could get up as usual and do half an hour on the elliptical and as many abdominal exercises as possible before Portia wakes up, trying with desperate vanity to un-wreak the havoc wrought by a fourth pregnancy and c-section.

None of this is meant as a complaint, by the way. Having my four daughters has been the most wonderful thing ever to happen to me. They’re worth the lost sleep, the dieting and exercise, the cost of diapers and formula and pediatricians and piano lessons, the acres of pulverized Cheerios and dessicated Play-Doh I’ve swept up over the years, the endlessly repeated questions, the wasted food and the wasted time.

If I don’t get to sleep again tonight, well, that’s okay. They’re worth it.

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The answers are shocking, particularly one ignorant voter who says, “It’s in his blood lines.”

I hate to say it, but it sounds like McCain-Palin’s latest strategy is to fan the flames of hatred until some lunatic brings down Obama…in the wolf-from-a-helicopter sense.

I freely admit, there are ignorant people on both sides. There are mean-spirited and small-minded people on both sides. There are people on both sides willing to slander and libel those with whom they disagree. The folks at Democratic Underground and the Daily KOS spring to mind. Visiting the former to cut and paste the URL for this post, the first top listing under “Great Threads” on the main page caught my eye. I won’t post the title since I prefer not to use that sort of language on my blog, but if you click on it, it’ll take you to this example of cogently reasoned political discourse.

Dave Maass knows full well that I deplore the sort of “Obama is a Muslim/a terrorist/the Antichrist” nonsense that some on the right spout. If we’re going to engage in “jackasses support your candidate” games, well, I’d just bet that I could find some You Tube videos of ignorant leftists saying appalling things about McCain and Palin.

The claim that “McCain-Palin’s latest strategy is to fan the flames of hatred until some lunatic brings down Obama” is downright unfair. I don’t for a moment believe that either McCain or Palin is hoping some nut job is going to shoot Obama. I don’t believe either of them would be happy if such a crime were perpetrated. And I think it’s character assassination of the worst kind to allege that they do, and would.

Moreover, to call bringing up Obama’s connections to William Ayers “fanning the flames of hatred” is disingenuous. Obama does have connections to Ayers. Ayers did engage in domestic terrorism. Sorry, but those are facts. Stating facts is not tantamount to issuing a fatwa, and to say that it is — only in the case of Republicans, naturally, since we know that good leftists aren’t potential assassins — is really saying that Republicans had better not ever use any damaging material whatsoever against their opponents, for fear their own ignorant, racist, bigoted followers will grab a gun and shoot their opponents.

Good grief.

To his credit, Dave Maass updated his post after John McCain defended Obama at a town hall meeting, remarking, “Now, that’s the John McCain I remember.” Indeed. That’s the John McCain for whom I’ll be voting.

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Getting old is a cruel, sick joke. The only thing worse, of course, is the alternative.

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Dave Maass over at Swing State probably thinks I’m just hiding because Sarah has embarrassed my side so badly.  He sent me a link last week to his post about what a dummy she was for not knowing the names of any newspapers. I freely admit the Couric interview was an absolute train wreck, but I really don’t think Palin is so staggeringly uninformed that she could not come up with the name of even one newspaper she’s ever read. It seemed to me more like she thought Couric was being patronizing by pressing her for names of papers, and she wasn’t going to play along. She seemed to have recovered some of her composure by the VP debate, thankfully.

Speaking of debates, as much as I hate to say it, I think the smooth and suave Mr. Obama came, saw, and conquered at tonight’s. I suppose my husband will make some snide comment about how I’m wrong about this, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it. I still think McCain is the better candidate on substance, but on style — which is how so much of our shallow electorate judges its candidates — Obama came out on top.

The only substantive position on which I disagreed with McCain was his call for the government to buy up all the mortgages in foreclosure and renegotiate them at their “true value” today. All I can say is, boy oh, boy, did we miss a great opportunity when we bought our house. We should have scraped together some creative financing to buy this amazing house I looked at in Las Campanas and then defaulted on the mortgage so that the government could have given us a “do-over” and let us retroactively buy it at the current deflated price. But alas, we’re stuck instead with the house we could afford, and nobody’s going to give us a “do-over” and give us back the equity we’ve lost.

This mortgage crisis business is like some sick comedy of errors. The bail-out that started out as 4 pages and $700 billion ended up 400-plus pages and $800-plus billion — and the Dow took a nosedive anyway! And nobody’s supposed to talk about what Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines or the Community Reinvestment Act had to do with bringing it all about.

But looking on the bright side, the week hasn’t been a total disaster. I finally perfected my cilantro vinaigrette, which makes the one at Blue Corn Cafe taste like Wish Bone.

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You’d think with everyone bitching about the economy and high gas prices and how tough it is to make ends meet that people would actually show up to work when they got a job, wouldn’t you?

Ah, yes, the economy. The economy that’s going to go into the tank if Congress doesn’t pass a three quarter trillion bail-out so all those fat cat CEOs can keep their jobs at the companies they’ve run into the ground. And yes, I know that Congress is going to make sure there are no “golden parachutes” for these con artists with MBAs, going to make sure none of them get paid more than the President of the U.S., i.e., $400,000 a year. Frankly, I don’t think a guy who couldn’t keep his company out of bankruptcy is worth $40K, never mind $400K. A Japanese CEO who does that is more likely to submit his resignation — and possibly even commit hara-kiri — than to try to hang on to his old job at his old salary.

I realize some of you may think I sound like a Democrat rather than the Republican I am, as though I’m engaging in class warfare when I say executive salaries are out of control in this country, and that the culture of greed is destroying our society. But they are, and it is. The difference is, I don’t want government to legislate corporate salaries, and I don’t think government can do a damn thing about the epidemic of greed and laziness and consumerism that infects our culture. Can anyone or anything? A depression, maybe, but I doubt it. Back in the 1930s, Americans faced an economic trauma with courage and determination. Today I think people would just whine about it until the government gave in and borrowed enough money from future generations and Chinese banks so that people could go on buying on credit — and not showing up for work.

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But when you have a blog, and you blog about politics, you can’t just not blog about the debate, can you? So here goes, my very brief take on the first oratorical combat between the Maverick and the Lightworker.

The title of this post refers, of course, to the fact that throughout the debate McCain referred to Obama as “Senator Obama” while Obama occasionally said “Senator McCain” but referred to his opponent simply as “John” far more often. And why not? Surely they’ve been calling each other “John” and “Barack” for as long as they’ve served in the Senate together. But in the setting of a presidential debate, “Senator McCain” and “Senator Obama” seem the more natural forms of address. At least they seemed so to McCain, who as his ciritics are quick to point out (Did you know he’s, like, really, really old?) is from a generation that actually uses titles and surnames regularly. I say this, btw, as a person from Obama’s generation who prefers the antiquated mores of McCain’s. And I don’t intend it as an attack on Obama, but rather as a simple comment on one of the many ways our (his and my) generation differs from McCain’s.

Senator Obama was, as usual, eloquent. He has a wonderful speaking voice, deep and resonant, and his rhetorical style is impressive. Apart from the occasional unfortunate choice of words (”above my pay grade” springs to mind), he has a real gift for expressing himself. Senator McCain is not particularly eloquent. His oratorical endeavors aren’t fertile comedy fodder like those of poor old W, but he does not have Obama’s rhetorical gifts. This worried me going into the debate, but it needn’t have. McCain isn’t an orator, but he comes across as sincere, earnest and genuine. Moreover, he was unflappable. Though known for having a fiery temper, McCain betrayed no trace of irritation at anything Obama said about him, whereas quite a few of McCain’s remarks clearly upset Obama, who glowered, grimaced, smirked, signalled the moderator, and interrupted McCain to mutter, “That’s not true.”

Conservatives will probably think McCain won the debate, liberals will think Obama did, and most of the undecided swing voters will probably not be swung one way or the other. Neither candidate made a dreadful gaffe, nor did either score a pithy sound byte sure to be replayed ad nauseam tomorrow. Both will return to cross rhetorical swords another day, and may the best man win.

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A reader who commented on my blog wrote to tell me about her own blog, which is a spoof of the “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” called “Tom and Trix Plus Six.” I checked it out and found it quite clever, especially the three-part Trading Spouses spoof where Trix Googler (Kate Gosselin) trades places with Esther Goddard (Michelle Duggar). The spoof is satire, and not particularly mean-spirited, though the author said she’s received hate mail. This hardly surprises me, given my own experience.

Apologies to my husband, who likes long, meaty posts here at Moralia, but I have to get back to work now. I have a second grader to teach, a pot roast to make, and the incredibly depressing economic crisis news to watch during baby-feeding breaks. I still haven’t completely sorted out my own thoughts on the bail-out, but watching Harry Reid talk about it on CNN this morning, I do know that I don’t trust that guy as far as I could throw him.

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This morning my local paper carried a story (I think it was from the Washington Post or LA Times or some other big paper, as a lot of the New Mexican’s articles are; it’s too late and I’m too tired to look it up) that flat out accused John McCain of playing politics when he suggested postponing the debate and returning to Washington to get this dreadful financial mess sorted out.

What struck me about the article was (a) how a front-page story — ostensibly news reportage — was in truth a blatant opinion piece, and (b) how utterly unfathomable it was that the writer of the article would not even consider the possibility that McCain was in earnest.

This financial catastrophe is a national emergency. Why is it so inconceivable that John McCain would perceive it as such, and believe that his obligation as a U.S. Senator was to get back to Washington and do his job trying to resolve it?

I’m pretty cynical. I tend to look for the ulterior motive in all things. But this time, I really do think that John McCain is telling the truth: I think he’s concerned about our country, and doing what he thinks he ought to. Politically, what he did was foolish. When I heard it, I thought, “Oh, no! He can’t!” But he didn’t think about politics first; he thought about our country. Because of that, I’m glad he’s our nominee. I just hope it doesn’t cost us the election.

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Wilson opens her diatribe “Pissed about Palin” with the assertion, “Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman.” Peppering her remarks profusely with profanity an