about that election

1. This has nothing whatsoever to do with how I'm going to vote, but I think Michelle Obama is a fine woman.

2. This morning I wondered if McCain, knowing tonight's debate could be the last chance for him to jump into the lead, (but only if Obama made a big mistake) would risk confronting him, face to face, during the final debate, about the shady characters he associates with, with the hope that he might break through Obama's gentle, manly demeanor and show the lower forty-eight, as we call them, that, 'see, you can't trust him--he is an angry, young, black Muslim man.'

Dang that Bob Schieffer if he didn't beat McCain to the punch and showed all of us that both candidates feel they have been slandered by the other. I'm thinking that I haven't heard much at all from Biden or McCain or Obama that sounds slanderous. Certainly there are groups that relish their self-appointed role to draw unsubstantiated, poisonous conclusions and shout out their misconceptions from the mountaintops. But more than anything else, I have been surprised, astounded, even amazed by the fervor at Ms Palin's rallies. Where is the civility?

Tonight there was no outburst of anger from Obama and no huge blunder, so McCain will have to rely on the Bradley effect.

And I continue to sense a dread deep inside of me, a feeling of deja vu from the time of Martin Luther King--a ray of hope in that time who was extinguished too soon.