A Daily Dish reader writes:

At breakfast, I sat next to a table of four black students, all of whom had voted. The three men were wearing ties. I asked them why. The answer: It was their first election, and they wanted to mark the occasion.

There is a part of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today that takes solace in his faith and a belief that his grandmother Toots is watching the election from a Christian heaven. There is also a certain secular pride in knowing that his grandmother cast her vote for her grandson to become our next president of the United States of America, and that, despite her death, her vote still counts.

0933: First-person impact: How profound is the precipice of an Obama win

From Blogger Interrupted:

I”ve been collecting some anecdotal stories of how provisionals will be handled tomorrow, and I”m still completely unconvinced that a provisional ballot cast in Ohio on November 4, 2008, will be counted.

There are a lot of other people who have done a lot more research on the topic, and given the shit hitting the fan right now in my life, I don”t have the time to back this up with anything other than what I”ve already written. But I will add this.

Jennifer Brunner has done an excellent job this year fighting off the clear strategy of the GOP to suppress votes on a targeted, racial bias, through increasing provisional ballots. The Republicans have failed in all their major attempts – through the courts, through the smears, through the ACORN media myth, and through the campaigning designed for only this purpose. EPIC FAIL. Continue Reading »

One guess on who’s not getting any treats from the Treasury Department.

From the New York Times:

There was a rare moment of levity at the Treasury Department on Friday as the children of government workers scampered from office to office in Halloween costumes. A few minutes later, the children were gone and the hallways were retaken by grim-faced grown-ups – handing out tricks and treats of a different sort.

The Treasury building is ground zero for the Bush administration”s $700 billion rescue of the financial system – an ambitious, increasingly embattled program that passed an early milestone last week when the government wired the first $125 billion to the nine largest banks in the United States.

Having been handed vast authority and almost no restrictions in the bailout law that Congress passed a month ago, a committee of five little-known government officials, aided by a bare-bones staff of 40, is picking winners and losers among thousands of banks, savings and loans, insurers and other institutions.

As the outgoing Republican Party gives away one final round of treats, the American taxpayer once again gets screwed.

Back on 6 September I began asking the question: Why are you voting for your candidate?

Published below are the responses I received.

i am voting for Ross Perot. I will write him in until he dies. Or until a candidate brings a campaign platform as good or better as Ross Perot”s old campaign platforms.

***

……I will be voting for the candidate that presents our best and quickest exit from Iraq, And at this time, it seems to be Barack Obama.

***

Jeff, realizing that this is your site and you can do as you see fit with it, you”re still wrong to restrict this question to solely positive reasons why people will be voting the way they choose. You know as well as I do that people often view elections as “lesser of two evils” choices. I”m not interested in happy bunny talk and campaign-approved bullet points, which is of course what both campaigns would like all of us lemmings on the ground to engage in. Continue Reading »

Have Coffee Will Write was born in the despair of another four years of a presidency of George Bush.

Today is a very different day. Today is a day in which I know hope. In a few hours I’ll queue up at my polling place and cast my ballot for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. I haven’t felt this way since I cast my very first vote for a president in 1976 when I voted for soon-to-be President Jimmy Carter.

To commemorate my bloggiversary, reflect on the past four years and to celebrate the next four, I present my very first blog post.

One of the things I do is tutor high school student here in Cleveland. I recently started working with a young man on his American History. The assignment was to pick up his work with the end of the Great War-now known as WW I, of course-and to carry through to the mid ’90s. The text is American Odyssey: The United States in the 20th Century by Gary B. Nash, a professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles.

When I teach History I try to find the connections to the present to better aid my students in making sense of people and events. Usually it’s not too difficult, but this time the comparisons lept of the page. We started with the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and quickly moved to reading about The Red Scare. Here’s what we read: Continue Reading »

Jill at Writes Like She Talks wrote a post on 6 September offering brief insights into why she and seven women she knows are voting for their candidate come 4 November.

I liked the no-judgment style of the post and have challenged Jill to do more. Since I’d never ask anyone to act in a way I would not act myself, I told Jill that beginning 6 September and until 3 November I will post this open-thread question to my readers:

Why are you voting for your candidate for President of the United States?

I impose only two restrictions:

First, I’m not going to comment in the open thread. This is not about me debating or supporting my readers, I honestly want to know why you are voting the way you are.

Second, in your comment, you may only offer positive reasons why you are voting for your candidate. Negative reasons why you are not voting for your candidate’s opponent will be redacted or removed.

So, what are your reasons? Make your case.

She turns 18 just days after the election, but she’s still taking the time to email her friends (and teachers) this simple message:

Remember Exodus 20:4

Today was a Yom Iyun, a day of study, for Cleveland’s Jewish educators. The two breakout sessions I took part in — Special Needs In The Supplementary School with Laurie Gross Krammer and State Of The Arts with Robbie Gringras — were both very good.

At the end of my classes I always asks students a question I learned from Master Teacher Sue Arnold:

What is the most important piece you learned today?

In that spirit, I want to share with you the most important piece of learning that I walked away with today: a different way, for me, to think about Israel.

It comes from keynote speaker Yonatan Ariel, executive director of Makom, the Israel engagement network. During his remarks he described three layers of being for Israel:

Israel is the Jewish Sanctuary.
Israel is the Jewish Repository.
Israel is the Jewish Laboratory.

By the first, Israel is the Jewish sanctuary, Ariel means that Israel is both a sacred space for the Jewish people and, perhaps more importantly for those who remember when there was no safe space, Israel is the lifeboat to which we can all retreat when the rest of the world is hostile or uncaring.

By the second, Israel is the Jewish repository, Ariel means that Israel is the place where all of Jewish history is stored and preserved; where every aspect of what it means to be a Jew is protected.

By the third, and this was the most important piece that I learned today, Ariel meant that Israel is where Judaism evolves and grows; where Torah scholars still argue and search for meaning in ancient texts so that they might make life better today. Israel is where all Jews are in conversation about what it means to be a Jew and how that will change Judaism and Israel tomorrow.

Ariel said one more important lesson: that we are all both hugging and wrestling with Israel. Too many in the United States, and in the rest of the diaspora, believe that we are only allowed to hug, give our unconditional support to, Israel. I’ve always thought that wrong, but I’ve never heard it articulated so well as I did this morning.

We have always been the people that wrestled. Our vary name, the children of Israel, comes from the night spent Jacob spent wrestling with God. God wrestling is what we do; it is what we are.

From CNN:

At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor – John McCain”s.

What have you created Senator McCain?

I honestly don’t know if this is Photoshopped or not, but it sure looks like it to me. That’s unfortunate because it goes to the journalistic integrity of Esquire. The story is still enlightening about the state of American politics.

David Peisner writes:

If recent polls are to be believed, white voters favor John McCain over Barack Obama by nearly ten percentage points, but the McCain and Obama camps probably haven”t factored in the following fact: In an informal Esquire survey, three out of four white supremacists prefer Obama, while McCain is the clear favorite among black nationalists.

(Sure, our methodology suffered from an extraordinarily low sample size–limited to four white supremacists and one black nationalist–but just because it wouldn”t fly with Gallup doesn”t mean there ain’t a kernel of truth in there.) This is just one of many surprising views that emerged after we talked to extremists about this historic electoral showdown between a 46-year-old black man and a 71-year-old white man.

My favorite quote comes from Rocky Suhayda, Chairman, American Nazi Party:

White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I”d prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters.

Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals–basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush.

Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black women–when usually negroes who have ‘made it’ immediately land a white spouse as a kind of prize–that”s the kind of negro that I can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial heritage in a positive manner, it”s good for all racially minded folks. Besides, America cares nothing for the interests of the white American worker, while having a love affair with just about every non-white on planet Earth. It”d be poetic justice to have a non-white as titular chief over this decaying modern Sodom and Gomorrah.

What will we wake up to on 5 November?

0827: Ok, so my mom is in the hospital

Jill at Writes Like She Talks wrote a post on 6 September offering brief insights into why she and seven women she knows are voting for their candidate come 4 November.

I liked the no-judgment style of the post and have challenged Jill to do more. Since I’d never ask anyone to act in a way I would not act myself, I told Jill that beginning 6 September and until 3 November I will post this open-thread question to my readers:

Why are you voting for your candidate for President of the United States?

I impose only two restrictions:

First, I’m not going to comment in the open thread. This is not about me debating or supporting my readers, I honestly want to know why you are voting the way you are.

Second, in your comment, you may only offer positive reasons why you are voting for your candidate. Negative reasons why you are not voting for your candidate’s opponent will be redacted or removed.

So, what are your reasons? Make your case.

Jill at Writes Like She Talks wrote a post on 6 September offering brief insights into why she and seven women she knows are voting for their candidate come 4 November.

I liked the no-judgment style of the post and have challenged Jill to do more. Since I’d never ask anyone to act in a way I would not act myself, I told Jill that beginning 6 September and until 3 November I will post this open-thread question to my readers:

Why are you voting for your candidate for President of the United States?

I impose only two restrictions:

First, I’m not going to comment in the open thread. This is not about me debating or supporting my readers, I honestly want to know why you are voting the way you are.

Second, in your comment, you may only offer positive reasons why you are voting for your candidate. Negative reasons why you are not voting for your candidate’s opponent will be redacted or removed.

So, what are your reasons? Make your case.

From OpenCongress:

Today on OpenCongress, we’re launching a new feature that allows you to compare and contrast any two Members of Congress — especially Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama.

The Head-to-Head Vote tool provides an at-a-glance way to see where senators and representatives stand on the issues facing Congress today. See how their votes match up on hot bills and more. And here’s the direct link for Sen. McCain vs. Sen. Obama. And last, here’s a blog post with lots more information about 50 key votes taken by the two candidates.