Wednesday is Thursday is Wednesday

Late last week someone sent me an email about an upcoming meeting, saying that the time conflicted with the third Presidential debate on Wednesday night so they weren't coming. No worries, that meeting was actually scheduled for Thursday.

Yesterday someone called to confirm a Thursday appointment and said, "I'm just confirming that I'll see you on Wednesday." I called back and clarified: the appointment is on Thursday.

This morning I drove 30 minutes to an 8:00 appointment, only to discover that it was scheduled for, you guessed it, Thursday.

What kind of day-swap vortex have I entered?

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Seriously?

Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims the world over are praying for an Obama win, and if their prayers are heard they will believe that their god is bigger than John McCain's.

What serious leader allows this kind of religious peeing contest language at his events? Seriously.

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The Things You Learn

If you own a Honda Civic made prior to 2001, the car doesn't have an immobilizer system installed. So if you should lose your key, and then lose your backup key, inexplicably misplacing it between the switching off of the ignition, the closing of the door, and the supposed depositing of the key into your pocket, then any Honda dealer can cut you a new key with only your registration to prove ownership.

Let's hear it for old cars.

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The Genie

"I don't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's an Arab."

That's the kind of opinion being voiced at John McCain's town hall meetings these days. That such a view can find voice at this late stage in a national presidential campaign is the result of months of disinformation spread by groups at the conservative fringe and "reported" by Fox News and company.

But now that the McCain campaign has unleashed the hounds, as it were, and spent the last seven days spinning out ad after ad trafficking in suspicion of Obama's past and introducing the phrase "palling around with terrorists" into our discourse, we're getting a good look at what, exactly, this tack is dredging up amongst the electorate: rage.

It's obvious that McCain is taken aback by it (observe the look on his face here when the shout "kill him!" issues from one of his supporters). He's not this kind of guy. But it seems to me he's made a deal with the devil and taken some very desperate advice from the wrong people. Or, to use a different metaphor, he's let the genie out of the bottle, and now that genie is going to do with genies do, namely wreak havoc and make McCain wish he could stop it.

When this election is over, I don't think McCain wants to be remembered as the guy who's run for the White House set American race relations back 50 years. But that's what people are describing at McCain/Palin events, an environment of anger and suspicion that feels, at times, like it might burst the dam of civility.

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Rage Against The Machine

The well-documented McCain/Palin offensive of the last week has shown me one thing clearly: one candidate in this race is tapping into peoples' hopes and aspirations, and the other is drudging up their fear and anger.

Surely, they're talking to different people. Obama is appealing to liberally inclined Americans, many of them young and many of them ambivalent to electoral politics. In doing so he's utilizing soaring rhetoric about "hope" and "change." There's not much novel about it. It's actually quite conventional for a candidate running from the party that has been on the outside of the executive for the last two terms.

But McCain and Palin are not speaking to the politically ambivalent. They're appealing to men and women who would sooner eat glass than vote for a Democrat. And they're marshaling that body's sense of victim-hood, of anger and indignation, in order to push them to the polls. More than one observer has described the atmosphere at McCain's campaign stops as "angry." It's a phenomenon unique to McCain's supporters, and one that they're happy to indulge (allowing their surrogates to warm up the crowd with multiple mentions of Barack Hussein Obama), even if they deny whipping it up. Would anyone at an Obama rally cry, "Kill him!"?

I decided who I was voting for long ago. But if I hadn't, I think the last seven days would have been more than enough to send me running from the frothy-mouthed mobs backing the other guy.

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You Learn Something New Every Day

I'm preparing a session with the youth at the church about politics, rights, and decision making. Part of that preparation has been researching laws that apply specifically to young people. Here's some of what I discovered:

• In the city where most of these young people live, it is illegal to operate a tattoo parlor (that one doesn't apply specifically to youth, but it doesn't not apply either).
• In the same city, "It is unlawful for any minor under the age of eighteen years to loiter, idle, wander, stroll, or aimlessly drive or ride about in or upon any public street, avenue, highway, road, curb area, alley, park, playground, or other public ground, public place, or public building, place of amusement or eating place, vacant lot or unsupervised place between the hours of ten p.m. on any day and sunrise of the immediately following day.
• The minimum age requirement to run for Governor in the state of California is 18.
• It is illegal in the state of California to perform a body piercing on a minor without the parent or guardian's actual presence or notarized written authority.
  
  
• It is a misdemeanor to tattoo or offer to tattoo a young person under the age of 18 in California.
  
  

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"Let Me Say It Again"

Biden rocked it. He was back on his heels for nearly the first 45 minutes of the debate as Palin exhausted herself with winks and linguistic gimmicks, all of which worked beautifully on television. But you can only keep that up for so long. Biden was steady and consistent, not overagressive and yet not deferential. People will say that Palin exceeded Biden's expectations, and I don't think that's true. Biden has expressed nothing but esteem and high regard for the Governor since the day she was announced. Tonight he showed up her utter lack of substance by the abundance of his own. This exchange on Afghanistan is perhaps the best example.

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