This one's for Shelia.

First of all, "Howdy!!" I've long been wondering who the heck was reading my stupid old blog all the way up there in Alaska. I could see your little blip on the sitemeter map, and I felt humbled and curious. And it was you!!

I want to say thank you for posting your very local views and opinions about Sarah Palin. It does seem that she's got some really cool characteristics, not the least of which is being a ball buster. And clearly she's made quite an impression during her time in public office there in Alaska. But I still just cannot support her in an office as important as Vice Presidency of the United States, and again, that makes me sad.

I am a hardcore feminist in that I believe that women absolutely should be considered on equal terms with men, no matter what the playing field. That part of me desperately wants to be able to be thrilled and excited by a female vice-presidential candidate. But I honestly feel like she is being used by her party to pander to sections of the voting populace that they heretofore had difficulty reaching, and she either isn't aware of this (pitiful) or doesn't care (scary). I grew up behind the Pine Curtain--a place that is filled to the rafters with serious gun-loving, abortion-hating, immigrant-blaming, feminist-bashing, Bible-thumping, N-word dropping good ol' boys (and gals). I KNOW people like Sarah Palin. Hell, I'm related to people like her, which is one of the reasons I left the Pine Curtain and have never moved back. But Ms. Palin and I stand so far apart on so many issues, that I feel like she's speaking on behalf of my grandmother's generation, not my own. Although I'm intimately familiar with her world view, I simply don't understand it, and I'm very sure she'd have a difficult time sharing mine.

Nothing about this election has excited me. I'm not thrilled with the Obama/Biden ticket, but I will vote for them come election day because it means voting against the Republicans.

The Republican polices of the past eight years have prolonged an astronomically expensive and unnecessary war while virtually ignoring where the real problems still lie (Afghanistan), have made enemies of countries who used to consider us friends because of our arrogant "do as I say and not as I do" approach to foreign policy, driven our economy into the crapper while the cost of everything has skyrocketed, done nothing to decrease our slavish independence on foreign oil, and on and on and on. And the most disturbing trait of this administration (and that's saying a lot) is their feeling that they're simply above the law--invoking "executive privilege" and "for reasons of national security"--whenever they don't want to play by the legal rules and putting a positive spin on everything they can in order to avoid admitting to anything. The fact that the McCain/Palin camp is now trying to convince voters that they're who we should vote for if we really want some change in Washington is seriously insane. They saw that the "change" mantra was working for Obama, and now they're trying to co-opt it. Pathetic. And what's sadder, is that there are millions of uninformed voters out there who will fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

Bear in mind that I am in a blue county (one of very few in Texas) surrounded my a whole lot of blood red, so my measly vote counts for almost nothing here. But I will cast it, while mourning the fact that four more years have come and gone and there is still not a viable 3rd party candidate in the running--not because there aren't capable people with interesting ideas out there who could be leading a strong third party--but because the Mighty Media deems it so.

Yep, there's much more wrong with this whole picture than the fact that we've got a slate of less-than-stellar options to choose from on November 4th.