When a friend becomes a fan of the Roman Catholic Church

For some reason, I have profiles on Facebook and MySpace. I really don't know why. It has been a way for people from my past to contact me, but the other day I realized something: almost none of these people know me anymore.

Chances are that if you met me before high school and haven't seen me since, you really don't know me anymore. I am not that person you knew in elementary or junior high.

If you met me in high school, I'm not sure you really know me all that well, either. My political leanings have changed, my willingness to take risks, my tastes in music (which expanded)...you'd have a lot of catching up to do if we met now.

If you knew me in college or after, you pretty much know me as I am today. I have matured, I've settled down, but I went through some radical philosophical changes around age 19 that solidifed at around age 21, and I haven't been the same since.

All of this intro brings me to the title of this entry. I went into Facebook the other day, and I found that one of my friends became a fan of the Roman Catholic Church.

Wow.

I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church. I went to Catholic schools from K through 9, was an altar boy, read in church, and even wanted to become a priest at one point (just before puberty hit, in fact). I had doubts from at the age of eight at the latest, asking, "If God created everything, who created God?" I was told I had to accept on faith that this "God" character is eternal, and that I shouldn't question. Well, if I shouldn't question, why was curiosity so much a part of my nature? In any case, my questions were silenced, and I went along with the religion thing. I kept doubting myself, kept thinking that there just had to be proof out there of the existence of this deity, and that something must be wrong with me because everyone around me believed in this stuff. I did pray, but as I got older, as I became used to none of my prayers being answered--not one damned prayer--they began to start with "Jesus[/God], if you're there..." I was teased endlessly by my peers in Catholic school, and no matter how much I prayed for that to stop, or for me to have the strength to endure it, or for my life to change, it only stopped when I made the changes myself.

I can hear the apologists now: "Oh, you had it in yourself to change; that's why God didn't force it," or "Your prayers were all about you, and that's selfish." Yeah? Well explain why my Uncle Ronnie died at 36 when I prayed for his cancer to go away so my mom wouldn't have to see her younger brother suffer. Explain why my prayers for world peace were answered with more war. Explain...nah, forget it. If you're an apologist, you'll come up with some lame reason why my prayers weren't answered, or you'll tell me that they were, and I just wasn't paying attention, or you'll tell me that they will be, or you'll tell me, as the song goes, "Sometimes God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers." Gag.

Oh, and you know what I changed the most about myself? I tried very, very hard to show no outward signs that I am an intelligent person. I always stood out like a sore thumb in that regard. When I dumbed myself down superficially, I gained friends. Great change, huh? But it made my life more tolerable.

The bottom line is that I read the Bible more than most people have, in various versions, and what I got from it, at least the parts were Jesus was involved, was that faith could move mountains and prayers would be answered--even if someone had faith "as a grain of mustard seed." Well, I did have at least that much, and it never worked for me. Faith has never been useful in my life, so I discarded it eventually.

The first thing that made me turn from the Catholic Church in particular was confession. I hated confession, and the reason I hated confession was that I rarely did anything that could be considered sinful. I was a good kid--ask my parents! Still, when I told this to the nun who took us to confession for the first time, she told me to think hard, because everyone was a sinner, and I had to have done something. I went in and gave the priest a really lame excuse for a sin. He was probably laughing on the inside. The penance was a pittance.

What you don't want to do is tell a priest that you don't have anything to confess, that they're just making you go. I tried that, and the priest gave me a major penance for "lying". Damn it, I really was a good kid! I always tried to help people. Always. Still do. Unfortunately, that willingness to help sometimes comes off as arrogance; some people see me stepping in to help them as a comment on their capabilities or lack thereof, and feel insulted that I would think they would need help. That's another story, though. The bottom line is that if you're a Catholic, you are guilty until proven innocent, and even then, you're guilty. You're a sinner. No way around it.

Well, good riddance to my involvement with the Catholic Church. I'm still altruistic to a fault, and even though I have my moments that could be considered "sin" by you, I'll be the judge of that, not you. I am NOT one of your FANS!! I know my own flaws, and I am answerable to myself. I am my own worst critic, and I am a harsh one. I feel guilty if I hurt people because I have empathy, not because someone is threatening with eternal hellfire, pergatory, or any other bullshit you try to heap on people. I also feel good when I help people, because I know what it feels like to be helped--by other people, for motives having nothing to do with Catholic guilt.

Here's the thing: I probably wouldn't unload on the Catholic Church at all right now if it weren't for the pedophilia scandal. I know the caricature of the pedophile priest is a running joke right now, but what makes me mad is that the Catholic Church actively worked to cover up child rape. That's what it is. Let's not be so damned clinical about it. They were raping kids. Raping. These priests raped children, and the Catholic Church would sometimes move them from parish to parish, with no oversight regarding what sort of activities they would engage in at their new homes.

It's so insidious, I get nauseous writing about it. Before the pedophillia scandal, priests were well-respected and trusted, because they were "men of the cloth", doing the work of "the Lord" and such. Let's apply what happened with the Catholic Church to another institution where people are generally trusted with our kids: the education system. Image if you will that the same percentage of teachers were involved in child rape within our school systems. Now, imagine the school catching them, then simply relocating the offending teachers to other schools in other parts of the country, never turning them in to the authorities. First, it was just the teachers who were guilty; now, school administrators are complicit. Would you or would you not have their heads, figuratively speaking?

A lot of people left the Catholic Church after the pedophilia scandal, but they're still the largest sect in the United States, even after losing thirty-eight percent of their parishoners here. The Pope let priests get away with child rape, and people still attend Catholic mass. The Pope, his cardinals, and his bishops let priests get away with child rape, and people still tithe--still give ten percent of their earnings to the Church. The Church hierarchy let priests get away with child rape, and they are still in business.

I don't understand why anyone would want to be a fan. I am sure she has to be blissfully unaware of how much the Catholic Church knew about the pedophilia going on at the priest level, but I am not sure I'm comfortable having her name on my Facebook page anymore.

Testing for Autism During Pregnancy

Recently, there has been a controversy regarding the possibility of a test for autism during pregnancy. With this information in hand, the parent(s) can make an informed decision on whether to continue the pregnancy, or else prepare for a challenging life as (a) parent(s) of a child with autism.

My problem with this approach is that it presumes that autism most definitely has a genetic marker, and that set of genes alone is responsible. Did they arrive at this conclusion only by analyzing the DNA of people with autism, or did they have a control group of randomly-sampled neurotypical people? Perhaps the genetic marker is really a way to tell whether a person is more susceptible to heavy metal poisioning or gluten/casein allergies, and the cause is partially environmental. The evidence that caused me to form my hypothesis that both are to blame involves a recent study that demonstrates a correlation between rainfall and the number of cases of autism in a given area. The more rainfall there is, the higher the number of cases of autism there are. To me, this correlation (though correlation is not necessarily causation) leads to the possibility that some pollutant (mercury from coal-fired power plants?) is getting into the ground water, then into our children's bodies. Some children can process this pollutant; some cannot.

Parents keep bringing up vaccines as a possible cause for autism. Many "know" that it's the cause. The contradictory evidence comes from a study done on children who have received the MMR combination vaccine. This evidence ignores the fact that there is no safe recommended dose of mercury for children under six months, and many vaccinations are given long before MMR. In the first six months of my daughter's life, she received twenty-six vaccines. Did any of them contain thimersol, a mercury-based preservative, or another, aluminum-based one? I don't know. It's worth studying. I'm betting on the atmospheric mercury from coal-fired power plants combined with moderate to heavy rainfall, but vaccines could still play a role. The way to tell is first demonstrate that cases of autism occur more frequently in places affected by pollution from coal (follow the acid rain path for this data; sulfuric acid raid is directly caused by coal's SO2 pollution, and mercury would follow the same direction), then follow it up by demonstrating that even more children have autism who have had vaccinations in these areas.

The bottom line for me is that no test for autism during pregnancy is valid until someone can show me that the sole cause is genetic.

Suggestion for the first 100 days

There's so much on the plate for soon-to-be-President Obama, it's a bit overwhelming. However, there are some things he can do in the first 100 days to improve our international standing and get the ball rolling domestically.

The very first thing he can do is make sure that every person the United States has confined around the world is transferred to a prison within the United States and brought to trial. If they are being held without charge or evidence, they must be released immediately. He can make this move entirely through executive order. Through this gesture, he will be showing the world that his administration will be a change from that of George W. Bush (and I'm sure we'll see many more examples!).

Some Republicans will see this maneuver as "giving civil rights to terrorists". However, holding people without charge or trial not only denies the American people closure regarding the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11/2001, but also makes the United States look as though we've taken people prisoner to make it look like we're doing something about terrorism. Furthermore, it makes people suspicious that we have taken innocent people into custody. If we have potentially dangerous people imprisoned, they must be brought to trial and sentenced. If we have innocent people in prison, they must be released. It's that simple.

Besides, giving all incarcerated people the right to a fair and speedy trial is in the Constitution, and the President's duty is to uphold it.

Next, President Obama should work with Congress on infrastructure projects, starting with the construction of a new levy system in New Orleans. Infrastructure projects--not done with contracted, cheap labor, but with people given a living wage for the work--will provide the seed money necessary to get the economy moving again in areas where the infrastructure has deteriorated. New Orleans is a port city, and port cities are vital for trade and national security. It's not the only city we should rebuild, but the victims of Hurricane Katrina, who soon after became the victims of a derelict President and the FEMA people under his direction, need to get the hand up they needed three years ago.

The third thing President Obama should do is work out the redeployment plan for the troops in Iraq. Whether they are transferred to Afghanistan or put on a base in an allied country, they should be out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Finally, the new President's Cabinet members, after they are approved, must each be given a top priority issue to work on immediately:

• Secretary of State: The new Secretary of State should meet immediately with our allies and formulate diplomatic strategies with countries who are not.
• Secretary of the Treasury: The newly appointed head of the Department of the Treasury should meet with the nation's--if not the world's--top economists to figure out the best way out of our financial crisis.
• Secretary of Defense: The first task of the new Secretary of Defense should be to enumerate programs that are obsolete and cut them out of the budget.
• Attorney General: The Attorney General should immediately identify any Bush appointees who have litigated based on partisanship and replace them promptly. The next order of business should be to investigate whether war crimes have been committed and prosecute those who have committed them.
• Secretary of the Interior: The first order of business for this department is to get industry lobbyists out of the department and undo any damage that has been done to our public land.
• Secretary of Agriculture: Restore the export of food from the United States and end the import of it from China, in light of all of the harmful substances that have been found in that food. We have historically produced more food than we could possibly consume here; we should not be importing anything from anywhere unless it is not native to this country. It raises my hackles every time I see apple juice with "PRODUCT OF CHINA" stamped on it.
• Secretary of Commerce: This department head should focus on identifying markets where the United States could fill gaps in the world's supply chains with new manufacturing jobs.
• Secretary of Labor: The Secretary of Labor should identify the real numbers of unemployed and under-employed people in the United States, then make recommendations regarding the community service for education program. This program should be implemented in areas of the country where the most people are unemployed or not making a living wage.
• Secretary of Health and Human Services: This Secretary should identify ways to cut the costs of Medicare (renegotiating pharmaceutical prices, for a start) and how to bring the uninsured and underinsured into the program economically.
• Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: The immediate act that should be addressed by this appointee should be to put an end to HUD funds being routed to church remodeling and reconstruction. The intent of this money and this department is to make sure that people who need low-income housing get their needs served, not serving the needs of churches with empty pew syndrome.
• Secretary of Transportation: The Secretary of Transportation should identify areas where our highway infrastructure needs the most work and develop projects to rebuild that infrastructure, beginning with any major bridges that need report (we don't need another incident like the one in Minnesota).
• Secretary of Energy: Under Spencer Abraham (now it is Bodman, but Abraham was first), the energy infrastructure of the United States was tied together far too closely, causing more energy waste and the possibility of shutting down power for entire regions of the United States (remember the power outage that affected the Great Lakes region a few years back?). The first act of this department should be to come up with a plan to localize energy, preferably through a new infrastructure of green technologies. It's not just a matter of energy savings; it's a matter of national security. One accident or attack at one power plant should not be able to deprive an entire region of electricity.
• Secretary of Education: The head of this department should work out a four-year plan to get our students competitive with students around the world in areas where we're lagging behind (as in math, science, geography--and, well, everything else).
• Secretary of Veterans' Affairs: This Cabinet member should immediate work on de-privatizing the veteran hospitals system and make certain that every veteran who needs care is getting it.
• Secretary of Homeland Security: This department is the biggest bureaucracy in the Cabinet. As such, the new Secretary should work on how best to keep from duplicating efforts across intelligence agencies. Either that, or the department should be abolished altogether. I would also like the DEA rolled into some other department. We need to begin treating drugs as a health issue, rather than a criminal issue. We spend ridiculous amounts of money--billions of dollars--on drug law enforcement. If drugs were legal and we treated abuse as a health issue, rather than a criminal issue, and if we stopped treating all use as abuse, we could save billions a year in enforcement costs and in prisoner maintenance.

These are just my suggestions, based on my own observations. I could be missing some important issues. I would love to hear other people's opinions.

We did it!

Well, we did it--those of us who supported and worked for the Obama campaign, those of us who contributed, those of us who voted have put Barack Obama into the White House.

Tonight, we celebrate.

Tomorrow, we continue to work. We are going to have a Democratic President and Congress, so things can move very quickly; we just have to make sure they are the right things. So, people: what is on the agenda? Here are my suggestions:

• The economy: We have to restore the middle class. To do that, we have to look at rebuilding infrastructure to seed the economy with jobs that have a living wage. Those workers rebuilding infrastructure will allow entrepreneurs to make a living in areas where infrastructure has crumbled. In the meantime, we must rebuild our manufacturing base. The auto industry must build cars that run on alternative fuels and electricity. We must manufacture solar panels and wind turbines. We must put money into research and development, then take what we invent and manufacture it here, giving jobs to American workers--and we must do it where people aren't currently working. Regulations of the financial sector must be restored. I also think that every family that has lost a home to foreclosure should have loan terms renegotiated, if at all possible. The credit industry must no longer be able to charge outrageous interest rates to anyone.
• The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan must end.
• We must close all secret prisons and Guantanamo Bay, bringing every person in custody to trial, or releasing them if there is no real case.
• We must eliminate terrorist networks through intelligence efforts and clandestine operations involving international cooperation, not through occupation of countries.
• We absolutely must address climate change and the rapid extinction of this planet's organisms.
• We must have universal health care.
• We must fix Social Security and Medicare.

To do all of the things we must do, we have to organize, and we have to persist in our efforts to contact members of Congress. Obama can do a lot from the Oval Office, but the bills have to come across his desk. I am sure he will take initiative, but we have to support him in getting those initiatives passed in Congress. We can not sit idly by.

Now, there is one other thing we absolutely must address: we must come up with a uniform way to conduct elections, and we have to address issues such as voter caging, voter suppression, voter intimidation, and election fraud. I have no doubt that an enormous turnout is the only thing that saved us from another stolen election. Well, okay--Ohio may have fixed their problems since the 2004 fiasco, as well, and that helped, but there have been a great many reports of voters purged from the rolls, fliers having been distributed to confuse voters, private investigators dispatched to intimidate voters, and, of course, the electronic voting machines have not all been fixed.

I posted an entry here some time ago, when McCain was slightly ahead in the polls, about how the polls were skewed. I still believe that this is the case. If you look at the wide margins of victory in some states, then go back and look at the latest polls, my logic holds up. For example, if we look at Ohio, there was an 11 point victory for Obama there. No poll--no poll the media used, anyway--in the week before the election was within the margin of error. If you look at Georgia, however, it went completely the other way--eleven points in McCain's favor, outside of the margin of error. I think something fishy happened in Georgia. I could be wrong. The polls of Virginia voters turned out to be dead-on accurate--something I don't buy.

My point is that we should not give up making sure that the elections are free and fair, just because we won. We can't rest at that, because the grassroots effort to suppress the vote still remains. We have to remain vigilant.

Why I Am Voting For Barack Obama Today

I am going to admit from the start that my decision was made on a single issue, as soon as I knew who the nominees were.

It was the occupation in Iraq that made my decision. I decided to vote for Obama because he wants to end that occupation.

I didn't know much about Barack Obama when I decided that he was getting my vote. Quite frankly, since all of the Democrats in the primaries supported an end to the occupation of Iraq, any of them would have gotten my vote anyway.

Now, things are different. Now, I know a lot more about Barack Obama.

There are a lot of smears out there about my chosen candidate. One of those smears is that he got into Harvard through affirmative action. I don't know the circumstances of his entry into Harvard, but I do know this: affirmative action doesn't make you the President of the Harvard Law Review, and affirmative action doesn't earn you a magna cum laude status at graduation. Obama earned those two honors through his own wit and effort.

Another smear--a smear that shouldn't be a smear at all--is that Barack Obama is a Muslim. He's not, but as Colin Powell pointed out, should being a Muslim prevent American children from dreaming that they could run for President someday? In any case, one thing is clear: Obama supports the separation of state and church, so no matter what his religion happens to be, he's not going to try to establish it as the national religion. He's also pro-science, which will be a welcome change from the last eight years.

As an aside on the whole Muslim thing: for people who believe it, are you fucking stupid? It's either that, or you're completely ignorant of Islam, or both. A devout Muslim will usually wear a beard. His wife will have a head covering, at the very least. He will stop to pray three times a day. He won't eat pork. Obama is so obviously NOT a Muslim that it hurts my head when people make this comment.

I like the fact that Obama will roll back the Bush tax cuts, increasing taxes on the people who can afford it most, while giving tax relief to people in the middle class, like me.
Obama will bring back diplomacy as a major tool in international relations, rather than saber-rattling.

Obama understands the value of education from early childhood through college. I like the offer of community service in exchange for a college education.

I have a lot more reasons I like Obama, but I have to go vote now. I will end by saying that for the first time in my life, I will be voting for someone who has inpired me to vote for him and inspired me in general, rather than the lesser of two evils. It's a great feeling.

GO VOTE! OBAMA '08!!

P.S.: If you're thinking about voting for McCain, please to to http://www.therealmccain.com and see why that decision isn't a good one.

Are the polls skewed?

Something's not adding up.

McCain is slightly ahead of Obama in the polls? I couldn't wrap my mind around it until I began to question poll methodology.

In normal times, Gallup's polling methods, as explained here, should work fairly well. However, we do not live in normal times. We are in an economic downturn, to put it mildly.

I heard on the news that one in four hundred and sixteen homeowners will be facing foreclosure this month. I have heard that seven thousand homes foreclose each month. I have heard two statistics on the total number of homeowners that either faced foreclosure or who are behind on mortgage payments, but the one I can source is 6.82%.

Do you think the people behind on their mortgage payments or who are in foreclosure are answering their phones? How likely are they to vote for a guy who can't remember how many homes he owns?

Then, I read another statistic today: one in five households is either behind on credit card payments or over the limit on at least one card. That's twenty percent of American households. Do you think those people are answering their phones?

Gallup says that they randomly generate phone numbers--cell phones included, according to their FAQ--but if people aren't answering their phones, which is common with people who are behind on their bills and have autodialers calling them nine times a day or so, the statistics have to be skewed, do they not?

How likely do you think that the twenty percent of households where autodialers are constantly calling are answering their phones for Gallup? The polling company says they call back numbers where they haven't reached anyone, but I have trouble believing that they reach a significant enough number of these households to keep their polls from straying well outside of the margin of error.

The document from Gallup was written in 1997, and said that 95% of homes had a telephone (15% of homes use cell phones only, according to Gallup). How many homes have phones today? How many wrong or disconnected numbers do they get before getting enough good ones in their random sample? Are ten percent of the homes where bill collectors are also calling (inscessantly!) answering Gallup's polls? Fifteen? Five?

I think the methodology is no longer sound, because the probability of selection is not equal for all Americans anymore, and it is this probability of selection being equal that Gallup relies upon for statistical accuracy--as do all scientific polling organizations.

The Sarah Palin Hype

She's for more drilling for oil--in Alaska.

She doesn't even want victims of rape and incest to have access to safe abortions.

She's for teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools.

She asked a librarian three times if she could have "objectionable" books banned. She never presented a list (the one circulating on the Internet started as a speculation and became "the" list--it was never real, because Palin only asked about the concept of banning books), but she asked the questions. Three. Times.

She's all for hunting wolves. People in Ohio and Michigan, at least, should know that the reason we can hunt so many deer every year is because our recent ancestors took out the timber wolves, so nothing was hunting them. That imbalance created by an absence of predation could have led to ecological disaster otherwise.

She doesn't want polar bears to be protected as an endangered species.

The above are facts, and they're all I need to know about Palin to dismiss her as someone I feel is not qualified to be President (let's face it: John McCain hasn't aged well. If he were in the same shape as my dad, I'd say he has a chance of living through his first term, but he didn't play soccer for forty years of his life). The idea that she would support banning books from a library at all tells me that she either hasn't read the Constitution, or that she doesn't care about it--and she has to swear to uphold it if she were to become McCain's VP.

So I hear all of these polls have Obama and McCain neck-and-neck, with indicators that show McCain is ahead.

Rubbish, I say. Rubbish.

That's putting it very gently.

What do we know about Sarah Palin, other than what I've posted above? Well, there are a lot of allegations and some more factual items I could post, but here's what America has heard out of her own mouth.

ONE FREAKING SPEECH!!!! ONE SPEECH SHE DIDN'T EVEN WRITE HERSELF!!!!

The writer was Matthew Scully, former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Palin didn't write it herself. She merely recited what someone else wrote for her.

I'm not saying that just anyone could do that. What I am saying that reading off a teleprompter can be done by plenty of people who shouldn't be President. Your local news anchor can read quite well off a teleprompter. Even if she memorized the speech, so what? I was in a musical and a play in high school, and I've memorized some Shakespeare and good poetry, and plenty of other people have, as well.

Remember how polished Dubya was during the campaign season in 2004? I stopped listening to him during the 2000 campaign after he said that the jury was still out on evolution, because that one phrase put my vote into the Democrat column for the first time since I began voting. I can't vote for an anti-science candidate. If both were anti-science, I'd have to go for the one who was going to do the least damage otherwise, but I'd have to hold my nose to do it. In any case, Bush was polished because he stayed on message--a message someone else wrote for him.

Now, remember Bush in the debates against John Kerry? Unless you were Rudolph Giuliani or Karen Hughes, whose spin came from Bizarro world, or unless you were anyone from Faux News Channel, there is no way you could come to the conclusion that Bush won.

Enter Sarah Palin's upcoming debate with Joe Biden. People keep talking about how people who watched the Kennedy-Nixon debate thought Kennedy won, and people who listened to the radio thought Nixon won; looks allegedly played a role. I say no. I think maybe the correlation is that radio listeners were more conservative than television viewers, since the TV viewers would be more technology-friendly and more likely to enjoy the entertainment offered on television over radio. Plus, Kennedy was very smart. I'm not saying Nixon wasn't, but Kennedy was sharp.

Can Palin think on her feet? We'll have to see. What I think is that she's going to speak in the abstract ("Victory is within sight in Iraq"), and Biden's probably going to tear her to shreds with details. She's going to look just as bad with Biden as Quayle did with Lloyd Bentson. Remember that moment? If not, view it here.

Yes, I know Bentsen was on the losing side of that election, but Dukakis was his running mate. What do you want?

Barack Obama isn't Michael Dukakis, fortunately. Sorry, Mr. Dukakis, but you didn't inspire me; Obama does. In fact, Obama has been the first candidate ever to have inspired me in any way. Wait--Dubya inspired me to work for the Kerry campaign, but that's just not the same, somehow.

In any case, Palin is meant to be a distraction--something to take any media scrutiny off of him and onto Palin. Not that the media has been doing much scrutiny where McCain has been concerned, but with it being all Palin, all the time, nobody's looking at the corpse-like John McCain. Nobody is paying attention to his lack of energy, his gaffes, his substance-free speeches. Nobody's looking at the old, bald dude.

Palin was a purely political choice. There are plenty of women--even in the Republican Party--who could have qualified to be John McCain's running mate. She was chosen because she's young, she's pretty, she's unknown, and she has the values of the rabid religious right. She's not there because she's qualified. Most women I know would be insulted by the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. What woman doesn't look at Sarah Palin and then say, "Is she the best you do? Really?"

Sarah Palin is nothing but a political choice, a marketing ploy. They're sheltering her from the media (until they can successfully coach her on the talking points), while the media is still gushing about how she "hit it out of the park" with her RNC speech--which contained lies and insults.

What person in their right mind insults community organizers?

And Obama's right: Palin's comment about reading terrorists their rights is a flat-out insult to the Constitution she wants to pretend to uphold.

My final word for tonight is this: do not worry about the polls. Please, please ignore them. First of all, national polls mean very little, especially if they're even; only state-by-state polls do, because that's how electoral votes go. Something else is skewing the polls this year, though.

It's the economy.

People who found themselves suddenly paying interest rates approaching 30% on credit cards--just because the issuing banks could do it legally, when it used to be called "loan-sharking"--also found that they couldn't pay the minimum payments anymore, and they defaulted. Since bankruptcy is harder to declare, thanks to Republican policy, these people find no recourse but to let the bill collectors call them incessantly with autodialers. These people no longer answer their phones, and their numbers are large.

When a study shows a seventy percent increase in water bills, it's an indication that there are a lot of people with bill collectors calling about other unpaid services.

What about people facing foreclosure? I hear 8,000 per day, 7,000 per day--does anyone have the real number? I heard a staggering figure: just over 6% of homeowners are either behind on their mortgage payments or facing foreclosure right now. Do you think these people are going to vote for another Republican? Let's poll them and see if McCain has support anywhere close to Obama's. Oh, wait--they probably won't answer their phones, either.

So...if 6% of homeowners aren't answering their phones, add to it the percentage of people with delinquent credit card debt who also aren't answering their phones, and you have a great many unanswered phones involved in the polling process. Perhaps someone from a polling company will tell me they correct for that, but I somehow doubt it.

I'm going to say that Obama is actually ahead, and it's more like 58% of voters supporting him. I'm not saying you should stop working hard--work harder!--but I think the polls are horribly skewed this time.