In my day, wingnuts took some pride in their attacks.  The email character assassination campaign was a work of art.  Remember the one about how Oliver North used his Senate testimony to warn about al-quaeda and bin Laden?  The story went that one Senator arrogantly dismissed his warning.  If you got the email shortly after 9/11, the offender was Al Gore; in 2004, it magically changed to John Kerry.  

It didn't matter that the whole exchange never happened; the target audience wasn't going to comb through pages of testimony to check.  Besides, the email included a note from somebody you never heard of, who said, "I checked it out - it's true!"  Good enough.

Like most things, the decline of quality wingnuttery can be blamed on Vince Foster.

Winged pigs are now hurtling past my window.  I survived two years of living in Orange County, and attended the first Pride festival there in 1989, when a huge crowd of angry protesters outside the gate left an intimidating cloud over the festivities.

Orange County has changed a bit over the years, particularly with the risiing Hispanic population, but it's still known as the place where rich Republicans go to retire.  When I was there, the Orange County Register would criticize the Republican administration for not being wingnutty enough.  So I was a bit shocked to read their latest editorial on the far right's signature issue.

We haven't done a Veep diary in at least five minutes, so here are my thoughts for both McCain and Obama.  (I don't think Hillary can get the nomination at this point, and if she did, she'd almost certainly go with Obama, but if anyone has suggestions, I'm flexible.  But please, if you're just going to bash Clinton or Obama, there are other diaries for that.)

A few years ago, my spouse (known around here as Packrat) woke up at 4 a.m. Christmas morning with chest pains.  We didn't know if it was a heart attack.  I called an ambulance and she was rushed to the hospital.  We were lucky: it was just a bad reaction to mixing medications.

We were lucky in another way.  We live in California, where we can register as domestic partners.  Because of that, Packrat was on my insurance.  Even more importantly, I was allowed to be with her during those frightening hours at the hospital, and they included me in all discussions.

So, other legal protections are just as good as marriage, right?  Wrong.

Tuesday, 4:00 AM

The alarm goes off, and I pack up my equipment so I can hustle out the door.  This will be my first time as an election worker, and they've inexplicably put me in charge of a polling place.  I have three sealed boxes of ballots, a three-foot-tall ballot box, several trees' worth of forms, keys, seals, and assorted office supplies.  And a flag, of course.

There have already been some minor screwups, so I'm nervous.  I was supposed to check in with the three people who will be working with me (two clerks and one election judge), but was only sent one name, and I had to track down the rest of the information from the Registrar of Voters.  Then one of the forms seemed to be missing when I inventoried, but turned out to be in the wrong bag with a slightly different name.