I just got an email from MoveOn here in Maryland asking people to come down to the local Obama phonebank....apparently many newly registered voters in states with still-open polls have not yet shown up to vote. If I didn't have a sleeping 5YO upstairs and a husband working late, I'd be out there. But in any case, if you're able to make calls you may want to check in with the campaign or with MoveOn and see if there's a place you can go to help.

.....

On a totally unrelated personal note...it happens that tonight at 8 EST there's a local Baltimore radio show featuring me and my band in an interview/studio performance we taped a few weeks ago...It's sort of a major personal milestone for me and yet I will not be able to tear myself away from election coverage to listen and am going to wait until the rebroadcast this weekend...Is that pathetic, or what? :-) I tell this story here only because I know many of you will understand.

I was never a huge Hillary Clinton fan, but I completely agree with your post. If anything, I hope that her failure to win the nomination has only refocused her ambition toward the important work that needs doing.

Letting myself breathe with one lung now.

Waiting for IN or FL before other lung gets to exhale.

Dwindling Republicans = regional party of the south, indeed. But maybe there's long-range hope that this too will end, as the Bull Connor generation dies off definitively and enough Blue State liberals and moderates retire southward.

The contrast here seems to telegraph something significant, yes?

I don't recall so much booing at a presidential concession speech, but maybe I'm selectively forgetting.

I agree with Juliebird... McCain and Palin have channeled a lot of monstrosity in these past few weeks. His speech, while beautiful and measured and gracious, strikes me as "too little, too late." The ugliness will abide, but let's hope it gets marginalized over time.

My 5YO son is a sweetheart. Sarah Palin is a prideful ignoramus who has spent the last two months actively juicing racial hatred and xenophobia and cross-regional mistrust (or does that kind of thing not bother you, being a putative "real American" from the midwest?).

And President-Elect Obama's "extreme" abortion views are shared by a majority of citizens in this country.a

You may be a very nice person, perhaps even a "sweetheart," but your posts are mind-boggling in their obstinacy and delusion.

Goodbye.

Just wanted to acknowledge your post. I agree, the "party line" tepid support or non-support of gay marriage and equality is extremely disappointing, one of the major factors that kept me emotionally outside this election for a long time. Eventually I allowed myself to feel very hopeful and euphoric for the positive and historic aspects of this win, but that remaining sore spot is still there...the same one that has been with me since Clinton's advocacy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and a number of other capitulations on social and civil rights questions. Being heterosexual, I suppose I have the luxury of not focusing on these shameful disappointments. But you are absolutely right to remind us all of those who've been left out, again. I am glad Obama mentioned "gay and straight" in his acceptance speech, but I would not argue with anyone who feels it was just a little too little. I will continue to hope and work for change, even from politicians.

I know exactly the kind of parents you are talking about, have experienced the smothering/control freakdom and strictly conditional "love" of the pathologically insecure, and I have rarely seen it expressed so powerfully & succinctly. Thanks for your post.

Maybe I am desperate for positive news and reading way too much into this, but in the Holder quotes Glenn provides on the topic of 9/11 detainees and the Geneva Conventions, I'm tempted to hear a relatively thoughtful attorney trying to justify ideas that he knows, on some level, are deeply problematic.

He wants to remain "almost consistent with the Geneva Conventions" and call attention to "humane treatment," but still leave that loophole to enable (presumably) brutal interrogations...but he's not able to come right out (as others were) and advocate such. True, that's hardly a profoundly principled position, but hell, compared to some of the bloodthirsty and vengeful talk about "working the dark side" in those days, it's relatively rational. And rational people can learn and change their minds, eventually, based on cooler emotions and considered evidence. I'll take that over a dumbshit ideologue any day.

What's also striking to me is the reminder that we, as a nation, immediately defaulted to the concept of "war" and to trying to fit the 9/11 CRIMINALS into the category of combatants. So you've got people like Holder struggling to apply Vietnam and WWII P.O.W. conventions to a situation that really doesn't fit the mold.

Totally OT, but Glenn, are you feeling a bit self-absorbed today? For some reason, your byline shows up three times in a row. :-)