The text below comes from an e-mail a friend forwarded to me.  It has some valid points.  What if things were a little different and roles were reversed?  How would this year’s presidential campaign be different?

Ponder the following:

• What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
• What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
• What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
• What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
• What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
• What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
• What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to painkillers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
• What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
• What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
• What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
• What if Obama couldn’t read from a teleprompter?
• What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
• What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?
• What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer distribution?
• What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware – B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John McCain:
United States Naval Academy – Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University – 1 semester
North Idaho College – 2 semesters – general study
University of Idaho – 2 semesters – journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College – 1 semester
University of Idaho – 3 semesters – B.A. in Journalism

Education isn’t everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.

~Vulcanella

People, you just can’t make this stuff up.  Joe McCain, brother of republican presidential candidate John McCain, appears to have called 911 because he was stuck in traffic.  Here’s some of the transcript:

Operator: 911 state your emergency

Caller: It’s not an emergency but do you know why on one side at the damn drawbridge of 95 traffic is stopped for 15 minutes and yet traffic’s coming the other way?

Operator: Sir, are you calling 911 to complain about traffic? (pause)

Caller: “(Expletive) you.” (caller hangs up)

When 911 returned the call (as is protocol in situations where 911 callers are disconnected), they heard this on the voice mail:

“Hi, this is Joe McCain I can’t take this message now because I’m involved in a very (inaudible) important political project… I hope on Nov. 4th we have elected John.”

As a person who gets stuck in traffic every day during her hour-long commute, I have no sympathy for Joe McCain.  Nor do I appreciate him using police resources for a traffic report.  Does he not know that WTOP gives its own traffic reports on the 8s?????

~Vulcanella

10. The straight talk express will be converted to a blimp.  The hot air in Sarah Palin’s head will be used as fuel.

9. Creepy debate-watcher Rich Lowry at the National Review will bid on Sarah Palin’s expensive wardrobe.

8. Campaign brochures will now be printed on recycled paper from the 1500 pages of McCain’s medical records.

7. To encourage 527 groups to pay for attack ads, McCain will now refer to audiences as “my fellow Swiftboaters.”

6. McCain’s seven houses will host all future fundraisers.

5. Governor Palin’s daily diet will be converted from moose burgers to baby seals.

4. Paid surrogates will no longer explain the latest Palin gaffes.  Instead a pre-recorded message will state, “It’s clear that the elitist media is behaving in a sexist manner, and Obama is a Muslim anti-American socialist who pals around with people like bin Laden.

3. McCain will streak at Game 4 of the World Series to get free national TV coverage.

2. Campaign witchdoctor will be let go and re-assigned to Gov Palin’s Office of Voodoo Affairs.

1. It won’t save money, but has our campaign accused Obama of being a Neo-Nazi yet?

Bonus #1: Governor Palin will sell Alaska back to Russia to boost her foreign policy credentials and reduce travel costs.

Bonus #2: McCain and Palin attire to be purchased on triple-coupon day at Walmart.

~Roy

Captain O’Biden and myself did a little fall gardening this weekend in hopes of having a colorful garden in spring.  It can sometimes be difficult to envision what the garden will look like in several months when it now just sits as a pile of recently disturbed soil.  However I have faith in those daffodil bulbs, and the patience to wait for my springtime reward.  My patience extends to the upcoming election.  I know that our country’s problems won’t be solved in one day.  We have to hunker down are really get to work, but there are no east fixes.

I do worry that the country’s apparent ADD and short-term memory will cause people to forget that all our goals, universal healthcare, balanced budget, healthy economy, secure borders, reduced gun violence, etc, will take a lot of hard work and time!.  I worry this falls on deaf ears.  After all no one this entire campaign season has remembered that John McCain was under investigation in the 1980’s when we were going through the Savings and Loan crisis.  He was never charged with a crime, but …  it was forgotten almost as quickly as the report finding that Sarah Palin abused her power as governor.

Why don’t people remember the past and learn from its lessons?  I cannot believe that Sarah Palin admonished Joe Biden in the VP debate for not looking forward.  Where are we going if we don’t know our point of origin?

My point is that the United States has serious problems and we need to identify all the problems and we cannot forget some in lieu of others.  Then we must draw the solutions from every available port of information including our own past.  Then we must implement our solutions, support President Obama, and above all exercise patience.  Understand that it took 8 years to get into this mess and it will take time to repair, but like those spring daffodils, the rewards will be the first color in the gloom and bountiful for us and generations to come.

~ Ferosha

Now the Terminator is dissing Palin, he told Campbell Brown that he doesn’t think Palin is ready to be commander in chief yet, ouch!

CAMPBELL BROWN: Do you think she’s qualified to be president?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: I think that she will get to be qualified.

BROWN: She will get there? What do you mean? She’s not ready yet?

SCHWARZENEGGER: By the time that she is sworn in I think she will be ready.”

That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement to me.

~Roy

And I’m not even going to mention how much McCain pays to get his own makeup done.  Nor will I mention that his makeup artist has also worked for American Idol and So You Think You can Dance.  I guess “paling around” with Hollywood types isn’t that bad after all.

~Vulcanella

The Daily Show sent a correspondent to Wasilla to find out what things are like in the “real America” and what makes Wasilla so different from the lower 48.

Turns out the town’s mayor doesn’t manage the fire department, the school system or any social service.  But she does hold staff meetings on Mondays at 10 am and sign checks on Thursday afternoons.  By the way, did you know that Wasilla is the meth capital of Alaska?

Watch the video:

The mayor of Wasilla has staff meetings on Mondays and signs checks on Thursdays. Sure, she's ready to be president!

Yup, this video makes me feel so much more confident in Sarah Palin.

~Vulcanella

Watch John McCain on the Late Show with David Letterman.  This is must-see TV if you want to see McCain answer critical questions about his campaign’s decision to blast Obama’s connection with David Ayers and McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as VP.  Oh, and McCain also had to explain why he skipped out on his date with Letterman a few weeks ago.  Fun.

The CNN Truth Squad does some fact checking to separate myth from reality on some important issues in the 2008 presidential election.  Below are a few tidbits that came up in last night’s debate.

• Fact Check: Did Obama vote to raise taxes for people making as little as $42,000?
• Fact Check: Did Obama vote against Supreme Court Justice Breyer?
• Fact Check: Would equal-pay bill waive the statute of limitations?
• Fact Check: Would McCain’s mortgage plan aid banks and cost taxpayers?
• Fact Check: Did McCain’s campaign say it needed to shift focus from the economy?
• Fact Check: Did Obama ‘all of a sudden’ alter energy stance?

~Vulcanella

We aren’t live-blogging tonight’s debate, but Mark Ambider over at the Atlantic dug up this vintage footage of a debate that is strikingly similar to what we may see tonight.

If that’s not enough, take a look at some of the live-blogging goodness that’s going on elsewhere on the blogosphere: Wonkette and Swampland are live-blogging.  The Washington Post column, the Fix, is twittering the debate.

~Vulcanella