I worked the polls yesterday in a very red precinct and it looked like the "revenge of the aging white people" was the theme. Heard some gay bashing from the other side and snickery joking about Obama. No sign of the young people and newly registered voters who carried Obama in Virginia last year. Our very moderate and weak campaigner for the Governorship did nothing to excite blue voters here. The result is a scary slate of candidates -- from a Pat Robertson "educated" social conservative governor to the state's top lawyer who refers to environmentalists as "watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside."

I had to take a day off to work the polls. When will we give everyone a day off on election day? On this off-year election day, the ones who made it to the polls were dominated by stay-at-home upscale housewives and retired people. Not a good demographic for blue Virginia.

I'm cracking up. I loved this article. You only have to ratchet up a tiny little notch and the reality of Sarah Palin becomes delicious satire. Well done, Steve Almond.

I hope Lynn Vincent gets out on the airwaves so Tina Fey can parody her, too.

Whatever the leakers are saying, President Obama will be speaking at a rally for Deeds this Tuesday at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.

Nonetheless, Deeds HAS been a yawn of a candidate. I will vote for him because he's not "shudder" McDonnell, but he's so middle-of-the road he makes oatmeal seem exotic. McDonnell is the kind of bible-beating misogynist that gets the base real fired up. His Regent so-called University thesis is a plus as far as they're concerned. It may have been the wrong time to say it but it's true that Deeds' failures in this campaign reflect nothing about Obama - except perhaps that hating him is the tea-bag faction's preferred recreational activity.

"you can't really blame conservatives for being angry with Snowe. Her vote did, after all, give Democrats a boost on the most hotly debated issue of the year." So anything that is a boost to Democrats must be opposed, even if it's the right thing to do. And when politicians act on this type of motive, we accept it with a yawn.

Rusty, Billo, Beck and the town hall crazies demonstrate symptoms of Axis II Personality Disorders. They're much more difficult to treat than Axis I disorders, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that generally respond to medication. No medicine works well for the problems those guys are displaying. I work in mental health recovery and most of the folks without personality disorders that I spend my day with don't demonstrate any mean-spiritedness, aggression and dishonesty. And the paranoia, grandiosity and fear you see would only be present in an Axis I disordered person who is acutely ill or responding poorly to treatment.

Better mental health care is a fine thing, but it's an iffy prospect with egos that distorted - for one thing, they are usually convinced of their rightness and sure that problems are caused by everyone else. Years of specialized therapy and often, maturity are required.

I think the autonomy argument is absolutely valid for first trimester abortions. "I don't want to have a baby" is adequate for whatever reason.

I say this as a mother who deeply wanted my one child. I marveled at most of the experience - then only had my dream come true because of an emergency c-section, a procedure available to a privileged U.S. citizen with access to excellent medical care. Otherwise we would both have died in agony, as mothers and babies do every day, especially in the third world.

Once as a child, I came across a very old cemetary and began reading the dates on the stones. I went home to ask my mother why there were so many gravestones for girls who died at the age of 14 or 15. Like my great-grandmother, many of them were "married off" young. And without contraception, pregnancy was their lot in life, wanted or not.

I read most of these letters but didn't find any (may have missed it) that pointed out that pregnancy and childbirth are a huge big deal. The physical changes that begin immediately can be uncomfortable, sometimes debilitating. The pregnant body favors the fetus in all things -- that's why mothers who had inadequate nutritional resources said "for every child a tooth," their cost for keeping the fetus fed. The body changes forever.

As much as I wanted to be pregnant and a mother, I'm horrified that a person can be forced to do that against her will. And it is a fantasy that every one of these women "chose" to have sex. Choice, even outside of rape, is influenced by many cultural, developmental, and survival issues, both subtle and obvious.

After viability, which I think of as the time that a fetus can live outside the womb without extraordinary measures being taken, is a harder question. This requires that the fetus be killed when it could have lived on its own. If the baby can be delivered rather than aborted, it is immoral in most cases to choose abortion. The decision in Roe acknowledged this.

But I would wish on no one the choice faced by a family I know. They discovered at five months their much wanted baby was horribly deformed, would suffer terribly and die in the first year although he could be kept alive for some months at great expense with heroic measures. After counseling, research and desperate soul-searching, they chose an abortion. And my friend grieves every day for that lost child. Whether you agree with her choice or not, may you never be condemned to have to make such a decision. And if you would want to make that decision for her, your hubris is breathtaking.