Just to reinforce what some of my friends, such as ellen and anghara have stated, the Public Option in Health Care Reform is not only a necessity, it is also far from being abandoned. Heres is a graphic that shows the last few opinion polls on the subject:



Unfortunately the mass media is spreading the rumors that 1) there is little support for the public option, and 2) the Obama administration is ready to drop it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The public opinion is clearly overhwelmingly in favor or of the Public Option. Obama has to soft-pedal this for now to get past the filibuster threat in the Senate. So the Senate passes a bill with a lame replacement for the Public Option, such as Health Coops. Meanwhile, the House bill has the Public Option. So it goes to Conference Committee, where only a simple majority is needed, and where the Public Option is re-instated. The Blue Dogs (who are behaving as badly as the Repubs now) can go eat dirt.

Well, it's off to New England tomorrow. I'm joining Ellen at the tail end of her writing workshop in Manchester, NH (a two-day drive via the NY thruway and the Mass Turnpike), then we're heading for ten days to Maine (Acadia National Park), the White Mountains, and Northern Vermont, en route to our final destination: Montréal, hosting this year the WorldCon which they have named Anticipation, August 6-10. The latter term, of course, refers to a synonym in French for Science Fiction.
Ellen & I will be doing a multi-media presentation on our 2003 collaboration, the full-length ballet The Willow Maiden for which she wrote the original story, and which is now turning into an epic novel (epic in the sense that it is now in its third draft). In addition, Ellen has one more panel and a reading session, and I have been tapped for one panel on French Fantasy and two movement sessions in the Teen Track. We'll be busy.

Speaking of French Fantasy, as I was doing some research for my panel, I found out that the famous writer Jacques Sternberg once commented about Science Fiction being "the antechamber of Fantasy". Quite an interesting reversal of thought, which in itself explains the peculiar take on the genre exhibited by the francophones ever since Rabelais, Voltaire, J.H. Rosny Aîné, Boris Vian, and Jean Cocteau.

Maybe we'll see some LJ friends in Montréal... I haven't been back to this jewel of Québec for almost forty years, and look forward to re-discovering it. As for New England, that is a region that I have ventured into far too parsimoniously. The ragged Maine coastline is one that I particularly look forward to beholding.

We'll be back in Indy before mid-August, in time for the preparations for yet another semester, with both Ellen & I teaching sections of the First-Year Seminar in Butler University's new Core Curriculum.

Tomorrow I'm setting off to the Southernmost outpost in the US (at least on the Atlantic side): Puerto Rico, a piece of US territory that is, oddly, still a protectorate. The political status of this small piece of land in the middle of the Carribean Sea is another story alltogether.
Why am I going there, besides the blessed tropical location? Well, my son Chis is spending the Summer doing an astrophysics research project at the Arecibo Observatory, the largest radio-telecope in the world. And as I'm off from Butler U. with no teaching duties until August, it just felt right to embark on this adventure. I anticipate the usual tropical weather (balmy, moist, and rainy at least once a day), the shock of a place where English is only at best a second language, and probably of the feel of a third-world country. But my scant research so far has unearthed some pretty awesome-sounding places, such as the Yunque Rainforest Preserve, and a bioluminescent bay. Not to mention beaches ;-) In other words, cool places to explore. And having a chance to visit with Chris in such a setting is going to be just awesome. And who knows, I amy get some news about the SETI project...
I'll post some reactions and pix if I get a chance.

OK, I was curious after reading that my wife was classified as a Renaissance Fair Wench (although I liked the "quirky liberal" appended to it, which I think is accurate), so I took the same test. Lo and behold, I am not faring much better:

Your result for The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?)...

The Manga Geek (QLBM)

Quirky Liberal Beta Male

Take The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?) at HelloQuizzy

I have been derelict in posting lately, probably too high on a cloud because of finally getting a Chief Exec whose views are remotely close to mine. Yes, I have been confined in what psychologists would call the Exstatic Stage.
What Pres. Obama (how sweet it is to utter those two nouns together, and to be allowed the abbreviation on the first) did on his first few days is really reassuring that he indeed will take us to the next chapter. To wit:

1) Close Gitmo. Yeah. The worst blemish on our country in history. Today, the media is striking back with the story of one lone released Gitmo prisoner who escaped the re-education Saudi center he had been confined to and rejoined the Taliban. Thing is, we all learned from that news report more about the Saudi reeducation centers than we had ever know (they're humane, reasonable, and in general quite effective). Second, the "escape" rate in that program is less than 5% (per CNN). So yes, close Guantanamo Bay, send the remaining prisoners wherever they belong, trust the systems in place elsewhere, and deal with the unavoidable exceptions.
2) Ban torture. No further comment needed.
3) Freeze staff salaries above 100K. No comment needed.
Then today one more, even more far-reaching Executive Order (this one anticipated by all feminists): rescind the "Gag-Rule" for delivering aid abroad. All this did was to remove the ordinance first enacted by Reagan that prohibits any US funds to be disbursed to foreign agencies that even mention abortion as a means to solve overpopulation problems.
Reagan started that, abolished by Clinton, re-enacted on Day 2 by Bush W, now again eradicated. Ping-Pong game by partisan administrations?
Maybe not.
While there are many issues to consider in the abortion debate (if you believe that life starts at conception, I, like Obama, won't argue with you as that is a faith-based question), there is no doubt that the Gag Order crippled population control in Third World countries during the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II years. Developing nations have more than their share of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies that end up in impossible mouths to feed due to the crippling poverty rate. Moreover, the right to choose belongs only to the one gender that gets to carry a baby, and that's not the gender of most politicians, especially not the one of Republicans. While I recognize the right to differ on when conception begins, I will not yield on the question of whose right it is to choose. Neither, fortunately, will Pres. Obama.
So... Four balls, and in my view, four strikes. One batter retired, one in the hole. Keep on pitching, Mr. Prez!

There's been a lot of flap in the media lately about Yo-yo Ma and Itzakh Perlman supposedly "lip syncing" since the version most of us (Including the 2 million folks on the Greens) heard was actually recorded from the night before, and at the actual Inauguration the musicians just played in sync with themselves. Yet play they did, as anyone watching the Inauguration could tell.
There was a very good reason for doing so.
The first concerns cold temperatures. By all accounts it was very close to freezing by the time they played, and musical instruments are very sensitive to temperature changes. String instruments will go out of tune within minutes when faced with a drastic temperature change (say, from the 68 degree when tey tune before actually going out) to the frigid temps in place at the inauguration site. In those conditions, less than halfway through the Williams piece both string instruments and the piano would have been so badly out of tune that even with the mastery of the players to compensate for that by fingering higher or lower would have changed their masterful playing into a high-school recital.
The second concerns accessibility to such large throngs; miking the instruments live would produce a dreadful Doeppler-effect, perceivable both by those close by (the Presidential Party) and the media covering it.
So the soundtrack we got was of the previous night's recording, and at the inauguration the musicians played in sync with themselves. Only those closest to their platform heard the acoustic waves produced by Itzakh and Yo-Yo and their two co-interpreters in the Williams piece, and probably by halfway through the piece it may have started sounding bad.
The rest of us, whether on the Mall, or online, or on the newsfeed, got the prior night's recording.
A perfectly legitimate way, in my view, to handle both the Doeppler-effect problem and the annoying temperature-related tuning loss.
The media likening it to Milly Vanily's problem is just another way to show their ignorance. Thankfully some networks (including, to their credit, CNN and PBS) correctly identified the reason.

Turkey Day came, or Tofurkey Day since my daughter is a vegetarian (but not my son, thankfully). As Ellen and I thought neither of them were going to be in town we had booked a reservation at the Inn of McCormick Creek State Park, about 70 miles SW of Indy, for their Thanksgiving Day Buffet (beats cooking for just two). But Lo and Behold, both of my kids who live in Indiana - Emma and Chris - (the third one, Dan, exiled himself to LA last Summer) ended up being in town instead of joining the mad road rush, so all four of us trudged down to the Canyon Inn for some good country fare buffet, but mostly we were looking forward to enjoy the park's trails as a digestive constitutional.
The buffet was OK, but the trail afterwards was great. It was called Wolf Cave Trail after a legend of a woman who, coming back from the market with a load of butter, ended up confronted by wolves emerging from a cave, and pacifying them with the butter while she ran to safety. But at the peak of that two-mile loop was, indeed, that very cave, a real one in which you can crawl in and quickly loose yourself.
Fortunately Ellen had had the presence of mind to pack a flashlight (though my son Chris claimed he could have crawled through by the light of his i-Phone screen).
The passageway quickly narrowed both in height and width, so that we literally crawled, duck-walked, and slithered sideways, along the tapering path of a long-gone underground stream. Being almost deprived of sight (we had to pass the flashlight from hand to hand, as quickly total obscurity was the rule), other senses tend to take over; the smooth feel of the water-polished rock felt like exquisite marble to the touch, and I swear there's an unnamed sense for direction-switching, because the sharp twists and turns made us feel like we were trapped inside the bowels of some long-gone fossil. After perhaps 20 minutes of spelunking in quasi-darkness, we finally could see a vague gleam seeping through, and found the other opening of the cave, this one requiring a belly-crawl to reach the promised light. We landed in yet another one of the sinkholes for which McCormick State Park is famous, our eyes blinking in the newfound sunshine, to admire a natural bridge in the rock formation which the coursing waters of long ago had carved before escaping further downhill. Quite a sight. Then Chris, who had as usual gone far ahead, laughed loudly from afar and beckoned us to join him to the top of the hill behind us. We were less than 300 feet away from the other cave entrance! It surely had felt like at least a good half-mile, but the beast's convoluted bowels had fooled us.
Spelunking on Thanksgiving is a new activity for me, and I guess for all my companions as well. But the grins on our faces showed that it's not a bad combination.

Many of us who have posted the quote about not wanting do-righters (in both senses of the world) nose into our bedrooms will appreciate this impassioned plea from Kenneth Olbermann about Proposition 8 in CA, a powerful commentary broadcast by MSNBC on the eve of last Tuesday's otherwise victorious election. You will find it by following this link.

As we close this week that saw a momentous change in the thinking of this nation, with a huge win for the forces of progressive thinking and for bringing change, I found myself humming the two musical themes of Stanley Kubrick's monumental 1968 film 2001: A space Odyssey (both the Richard Strauss awe-inspiring, dawn-of-the-world ascending chords from Also Sprach Zaratuhstra and the contrasting lighthearted and lilting Johann Strauss Die Schöne Blaue Donau waltz), and wondered why. Well, maybe there is a correlation.

As a 20-year old, watching Kubrick's extraordinary (and ground-breaking) cinematographic rendition of Arthur C. Clarke's philosophical musings about humanity's destiny, in repeated viewings (I must have seen that movie at least 5 times then), I realized that we as a world were entering a brand new era, one where technology mated with sentience to allow for a new dawn in thinking. It was truly an awakening for me, and I felt the surge of optimism in my fellow movie goers as well. Reading the book (over and over) thereafter only reinforced my feeling that Clarke had touched on something really huge, a groundswell of deep understanding of the WHY of the cosmos. To this day I still consider 2001 one of the most influential films and books of the 20th century.

Forty years later, as I behold the glow of a nation basking in the election of its first-ever African-American president in spite of all the hatingly spewed rhetoric accompanying the long campaign, we all stand at the same threshold that the primitive cavemen depicted by Clarke & Kubrick contemplated at the foot of the monolith sprung overnight in front of their dwellings: a sign that the sky is now the limit.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Georgia Senate race will be decided in a run-off election, with the odious Saxby Chambliss (the one who won so dirtily against Max Cleland six years ago) competing head-to-head with Democrat Jim Martin. Chambliss has slipped below the 50% threshold and by Georgia law there is an automatic runoff in such a case.
Don't hold your breath, though; Libertarian Allen Buckley siphoned off only 3.4%, but my guess is he dipped mostly into the Republican base. However, this is a new era, the Democrats feel justifiably energized, and GA voters may want to reconsider, who knows?

Our days in the desert are about to end. As larryhodges rightly said, this marks the end of one of the worst era in history: the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush years. It took a storm of great magnitude to lead us out, and that was yesterday's monumental, history-making election. The deafening cheers of the Grant Park victory party in Chicago are still resounding in my ears as I write this.
My most uncharitable snicker came this morning as I drove groggily and elated to teach my 8am class at Butler University. My route passes through a very blue portion of the city, with a brief incursion into a red-held mansion-lined quarter, and as today was trash day I noticed a McCain-Palin sign emerging all crumpled up from a despondent trash can.
The best quote I have found so far comes from Starhawk: "Today we become the nation we dream of being, a place where everyone can rise to the level of their true worth, with no false barriers. Today truth triumphs over lies, hope over fear. Today we become the people who can do the great things that are needed to restore health and balance and abundance for all. Today we take the dream and make it real."
The best analyses so far is from this former Republican turned liberal blogger, Arianna Huffington, in a post titled Why All Americans Have a Reason to Celebrate. A recommended read.
And Indiana turned blue!... albeit by the smallest of margins (50-49%). Now I can be proud not only to have become an American citizen, but even to be a "Hoosier"!

According to this enlightening article from the Huffington Post, you can trust bookmakers and gamblers more than pollsters. Which in a way stands to reason - after all, if you bet on the outcome of an election and do so poorly, you're out a lot of dough!
So... you might find it reassuring that the odds on Obama winning tomorrow are 8 to 1.

OK, this week-end and the last one I've done something I never thought I would attempt: volunteering for a political campaign. I feel so strongly about this election being a monumental page-turner (in both senses of the word) that it became obvious to me that if I believed so strongly in the hoped-for outcome, then I had to be more than a mere spectator/cheerleader on the sideline. So I volunteered for the Obama campaign in Indianapolis for the last two week-ends, and today even drug ellen_denham with me this afternoon.

What does canvassing consist of? You're given a list of folks who have been identified as strong potential voters for the campaign, and you go knock on their doors, remind them of early voting opportunities, make sure they know where their polling place is if voting on Nov. 4, and give them a pamphlet. We're told not to engage in persuasive discourse unless visibly prompted to; if by any chance the person says "I don't know who I'll vote for" you probably have a non-voter or a secret McCain supporter, you mark the data sheet as such, and move on. I had only one case of a voter who sheepishly admitted she would vote for McCain, and I wished her a good day right there and then.

After knocking on probably 220+ doors, talking to less than a fourth of the folks living behind those stolid portcullis (bane of the canvasser: the "NH", "Not Home" square that you end up checking 3/4 of the time), blowing on my sore knuckles, clocking a good 20-mile total walking time in those 3 days, enjoying a real balmy Indian Summer with gorgeous colors pointillating the trees and a warm yellowish light bathing the landscape, so overall rather enjoying myself... here's what I think I've learned from this activity:

1) The campaign is incredibly well-organized on the ground. 98% of the folks I talked to were indeed Obama supporters. The lists we are given may not always be totally accurate, folks move out especially in apartment complexes, but the degree of organization in the small neighborhood office was evident, and gives me much hope.
2) Turning out voters on Nov. 4, as well as encouraging early voting, is crucial to an Obama win. Particularly true here in IN, and this blue island of a city in a red sea of a state needs to show up en masse for the miracle to happen. If Indiana goes blue for the first time since 1964, which is a distinct possibility, it will be because of the work of the canvassers. Every vote counts, as they say.
3) Obama supporters come in all shades, and that is the true Rainbow Coalition that was dreamed about by Jesse Jackson so long ago, but is finally materializing.
4) We may actually win this thing!

Thanks to 1mpenitent's post today, I visited a fascinating site where you can track the countries you've been to, in both the world as a whole, or just the U.S. (there's also a detailed map for India!). So... here's a fun map of the countries I've been blessed to visit or live in:
(Disclaimer: Jamaica, where I've been 4 times, is so small it doesn't show at all on the map; China looms awfully big, but I've only been to Hong Kong, not to the "Mainland", albeit four times; Iceland is there because it was an obligatory stopover the numerous times I flew Icelandic Airlines, the cheapest airfare then, more than four times between Europe and the States; and my total hours in New Zealand amounted to just over 24 hours. The rest is more substantial.)


visited 35 states (15.5%)
Create your own visited map of The World or determine the next president


And here's a map of all the states in the U.S. where I've either lived, or spent at least a day:

visited 48 states (96%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president


Wow. So many blank countries, and still two states in the U.S. I haven't been to... but not too bad for a guy originating in one of the smallest countries in the world, tiny and amazing Switzerland.

"Copy this sentence into your LiveJournal if you're in a heterosexual
marriage, and you don't want it 'protected' by the bigots who think
that gay marriage hurts it somehow."

OK, now that I've done my duty as an LJ-er, there's another thing I gotta do: I'm going to canvass votes for Obama this week-end. Indiana is now a true toss-up, with Obama up by a mere one point. So here I go... never did this before in my life, but who knows? a few more votes on Tuesday might make the difference.

As larryhodges said, if Obama wins any one of the toss-up states (FL, OH, VA, NC, NM, NV, CO, and yes, IN) he is our next prez. Cross fingers!

OK, let me get this straight: Palin is being sniped at by the McCain staff for being a "Diva" and positioning herself for "political future". I don't blame her about the latter (anyone aboard the sinking Exxon Valdez would jump off and try to swim to shore and beat the oil slick if possible), but what about the former?
Doesn't the McCain campaign realize that's what's going to dominate the news cycle? Is this how they hope to extinguish the fire caused by the 150K price tag on Palin's wardrobe? Oh, and nice job Ms. Governor, for keeping it folksy: "I'll go right back to my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage" (be sure to read this with a nasal sing-song nasty voice resounding in your head, since that's the way she sounded) - once the election is lost, obviously. Duh.
A political future for the former Wasilla mayor, wolf-killer, hockey-mom, denier of women's rights,and now an obvious burden on the McCain ticket? What a laugh. But maybe that's what she really dreams of, after all those adoring crowds made of the starving far-right base of the party (how often do you get more than 200 people for a rally in Alaska?).
This does beg the question of the political vacuum that is sure to ensue after the massive Republican calamity that is about to enfold in just a week. If not Palin as the new leader, and certainly not the vanquished grumbly McCain, then who? Is there any reasonable, middle-of-the-road Republican that could possibly pick up the pieces of the shattered Republican dream, crushed by the greed of the neo-cons and their relentless drive to power? That party has been so bereft of their middle wing, folks like Nelson Rockfeller and Howard Baker who actually made sense often in their pronouncements. Maybe this purgatory time for the Republicans will be an opportunity for rebirth. We can only hope.

Wow, the last time I attended a political rally was for Walter Mondale, in downtown Des Moins, IA (I was then artistic director of the Des Moines Ballet, and naive enough to think that Mondale had a chance... as I recall, he did edge out in IA, but bombed elsewhere).
What an event. Ellen & I made sure to get there early (as in 8:40am for an 11:00 event), found ample parking place at the downtown library, and were greeted by a campaign (or library?) volunteer who gave us the layout of the land from the cavernous undergrounds (take the elevator to the main library floor, go down the escalator to the main entrance, don't bother with St. Clair Street that has been taken over by the Secret Service, just go S until you get to the Park for the event, plenty of volunteers to show the way from there).
Good enough advice. Since we were there early enough, the snaky line off Meridian Street was not overly long, we got through into the security checkpoint in less than a half-hour - remarkable discipline noted in the attendees; who thought that plain-folk Midwesterners could queue up just as well as our British brethrens?
My thickest thought process was to forget about security checkpoints. Of course, we had to pass one, emptying pockets, and I had kept as every day my little souvenir toy from Lassen Volcanic National Park, an imitation Swiss Army Knife that was actually quite handy, but I had to resign to having that confiscated at the checkpoint (sigh).
Then on with a thickening audience towards the actual delivery area. The crowd was already quite thick, but where we ended up was an incredibly good spot: right against the fence separating us from the TV camera platforms, about 20 feet away from the podium where Obama would eventually speak.
The "event program" was to start at 11 am, so Ellen & I stood shivering for a a couple hours in the 40-something damp weather. I was glad to have remembered gloves and wool hat (we shared the gloves for a while), and glad also for the thermos of herbal tea Ellen had brought along.
By 10:40am we had the "Warm-Up Band": challenger for the Governor's seat Jill Long Thompson, incumbent Rep. Baron Hill from neighboring Bloomington, and our own Rep. André Carson. All well done and good to go.
But then, the wait began, with no further explanation. I got very nervous as the clock edged on, having a ballet class to teach at 12:20 at Butler University. After the event passed a half-hour late, having heard that there were 35,000 people now packed in that park, and knowing the depth of the security detail, I realized there was no way I could even make a move out of this place for now. Good thing I had my cell phone... I called the Dance Dept. secretary to describe my plight of being stuck, and she stoically took the news to the Dept. Chair (I later learned that they wisely distributed my ballet class students among the 4 other ballet levels meeting at the same time, so no lasting harm was done).

An hour late, finally Obama made his way, after a rousing introduction from Sen. Evan Bayh, who actually managed a far better speech that I thought him capable of. Then Obama himself. Oh my.
What charisma this man possesses. Even though I have heard his stump speech many times over the TV networks or online, to hear him deliver in person, radiating warmth, energy, and determination, was absolutely amazing. The crowd erupted in cheers periodically (fewer times than I thought adequate). Then it was over, like a lightning storm that had just hit your community, and you wander out somewhat dazed and elated by the lingering electricity.
The rest is trivial... having to take circuitous walking detours to avoid the Secret Service areas, the asininely slow elevators (only way allowed) back to the Library's underground parking lot, the stop & go traffic for miles back to where I was supposed to teach my class. Fully one and a quarter hour late. Great that my colleagues adapted.
This was most certainly a lifetime opportunity - to see and feel the man right there, throbbing with promises he intends to keep, radiating an energy that has been so absent from our political process for far too long. Being there meant a lot to me.
And I have no doubt Obama is about to win this one, in a landslide. He might even win Indiana. What a reassuring thought going into the final days!

Is Colin Powell's endorsement, revealed today and making the rounds of all the news shows with a sussurus of excitement, the last nail in McCain's coffin, or merely just another one in the long, pounding march of his sorry wake-turning-into-being-interred-alive nightmare?
Of course, the obvious "big news" is that Powell is a Republican who is widely respected, won us the first Desert Sand war in Iraq (wisely turning away before the march to Baghdad), serving as a well-respected though flawed Secretary of State, etc. etc.
And because of all of that, he may provide the needed cover to those remaining moderate Republicans (and I believe that breed has not completely died yet) as well as to wavering independents. The most important comment he made in justifying his decision today is that he considers Obama as the one to take charge as commander-in-chief. This is all the excuse that many who may still have been hesitant may need to flip finally to the Force.
The http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvdFzYi-BfQ entire interview is worth watching, but the salient political statement that jumped at me as I watched Mr. Powell finally redeeming himself from his idiotic "WMD" speech at the UN 5 years ago was this: "...ready on day one." (reminds you of something, hehe?). Today, Powell even made be believe that someday the Republican Party may come out from the dominating Silver Eagle of the Neocon fascism it has suffered from for so long.

Ellen belongs to this wonderful mail order deal, BBC Music, which means once a month we get an unexpected CD with a very erudite BBC magazine. Often we don't even take advantage of it, but his time the combination of hearing some yet-unheard of British composers and our new kittens combined for quite a wonderful evening of entertainment.
Our goal was to keep the new kitties busy and happy, which meant using their favorite cat toy - a feather-like boa with a bell attached, suspended to a wand you can wave - but we also decided it would be good to play at the same time the newly-arrived BBC CD, which contained an overture by Frederick Delius, and some rather obscure songs by Ralph Waughan-Williams and his disciples, George Butterworth and Gerald Finzi.
The lilting tunes and Impressionistic-derived harmonies, which gradually slid into the kind of daring experiments that Benjamin Britten thrived upon, became the background of my trying to amuse the kittens, who were at first rather awed by the awesome sounds coming from the speakers (and weren't sure what to make of it). But after a while, holding the wand of the toy, it was as if I was choreographing the movements of that otherwise inert green caterpillar hanging at the end of the wand I was holding; making it dance to the music became a new game for the kitties, and for me as well.
The green fuzzy caterpillar leaped high up with the soaring ascending tunes, and crept low while the baritone whispered its secrets; it slithered around on weird harmonic contours, then escaped as either Freia or Narvi thought to capture it. The fun was also in watching the kitten's head begin to bob or shake in time with the music as they contemplated their next move.
What a fun evening, for me and for the kitties. And what a nice tribute to Vaughan-Williams, Butterworth, and Finzi. Choreographing with a cat toy... maybe not what anyone would think at first.

OK, the long-expected verdict came down from Anchorage today. Sarah Palin was guilty of "Abuse of Power", but "Broke No Laws".

Nice cop-out for a Republican-dominated legislature, which had initiated the bi-partisan inquiry before the Moose With Lipstick was chosen as VP, and had given itself today's deadline to publish its findings.

The fact remains, this is the first VP candidate ever to have been declared by her own sate legislature to have "abused power".

"Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired," the report said. (source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081011/pl_nm/us_usa_politics_palin_6).

Some commentators have already pointed out that this could be an impeachable offense.

Yet she is allowed to go on and scream about Obama "pallin' with terrorists" until the loonies that still attend McCain's rallies scream "traitor" or "kill him". Desperation tactics? You bet. Dangerous? You bet. I hope the security detail around Obama is prepared. The crazies are loose, and they're headed by an abuser of power and her lame presidential candidate.