Kate McKinnon

I have about ten new rings going, I should have them out of the kiln and photographed sometime tomorrow. Exciting! I was really inspired by teaching the ring classes in San Antonio and wanted to make more rings myself.

The league championships start tomorrow, moving closer to the bittersweet end of baseball. Naturally I am rooting for the Phillies and Rays, the only teams left that are not the Red Sox or New Red Sox.

Muzikal from DK did a great series featuring our candidates. In this one, she assigns them each Simpsons characters. Brilliant!

And what a piece they wrote. It’s simply signed, “The Editors,” and it’s a blisteringly frank essay on where we’ve been, where we are at, and the two paths we can take from here.

An excerpt:

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion.

For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

The air is cool, the doors are all open, the yard is full of birds and butterflies and the cats are sleeping in the sunshine.  It’s a beautiful moment.

I give to a bitter old warmonger today. Last night in the debate, McCain told a particularly offensive lie. When Barack called him on his disrespect for the process of diplomacy, and referred to McCain joking around about bombing Iran, McCain said that it was just a moment where he was sharing a laugh with a fellow old veteran. Uh, not exactly. It was on stage at a campaign event. First, he cleaned his nose in front of the crowd, and then he sang that bizarre little song. Here it is, all 43 seconds of it, just to set the record straight.

After we do the radio show today, I am going to put McThuseleh out of my mind, and finish up a few rings in process from class that I found particularly exciting. Pix later today.

I’m glad Obama mentioned the AIG executives, who, in receipt of a taxpayer BAILOUT, decided to take a week off at a high end spa resort, at the cost of $400,000.  I guess they were so stressed out by running their company into the ground and getting their hands on our tax dollars that they needed to relax.

Barack wants the money back. So do I.

and I’ve really decided that John McCain is a racist. His disdain for Barack could be any one of a dozen things; envy for someone who has succeeded on their own merit, rage at someone who is on the brink of taking away the prize that he has been lusting over since he entered the Senate, or bitterness at the vitality, energy, and competence of a much younger man. Envy, rage, and bitterness are common emotions for McCain, as he readily admits. “Not going to win any Miss Congeniality awards, heh heh.”

But two small moments really stood out for me when he was interacting with the crowd, and apparently I am not alone in noticing them. McCain made a real point to remember the names of the questioners, and pointedly used their names in his answers. Until he came to a young, beautiful, and well spoken black woman. He didn’t use her name once, and he didn’t make the eye contact with her that he did with the previous questioners. That was bad enough. 

But when he spoke condescendingly to the black man who asked him about the economy, saying that he had probably “never heard of” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the meltdown, I was stunned. So was Rachel Maddow.

David Zurawick of the Baltimore Sun agrees that McCain was strangely condescending and offish:

In TV terms, one of McCain’s worst moments came when a young African-American man asked how the Wall Street bailout plan was going to help members of the middle class.

“You probably never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac before this crisis,” he said patronizingly…

… And worse, while McCain seemed at times as if he would actually climb into the audience to make person to person, up close and personal T- style contact with some of his white questioners, he kept his distance from this young black man. And it was noticeable.

Yes, it was. Very noticeable.