Decision Time in America

Donna and I voted on Saturday, October 27 here in Baltimore, on a warm fall day before Superstorm Sandy hit. We waited for three hours in a long line. Ironically, we voted at the League for People With Disabilities at 1111 East Cold Spring Lane, where my father had worked as head physical therapist for 16 years, so it was an emotional return for me to that building where I had spent some time either waiting for my father to drive my Mom and I home to Owings Mills -- I was attending nearby Loyola College and my Mom was receptionist at Glens Falls Insurance on York Road -- or the summer of 1969 when had a job stuffing there envelopes with Baltimore Colts tickets for season ticket holders! Not that I really recognized the League -- the outside was pretty much the same, the original building, with its datestone "1963" when they moved there from their former headquarters on Greenmount Avenue but the inside evidently vastly remodeled as far as I could tell, though the building was mostly off limits for the voters, the area where the PT department had been seemingly quite changed.



It was a good natured line of mostly African American voters. There were a lot of campaigners out in force for question 6 on the ballot -- for same sex marriage, and a young black guy in front of us requested for a lawn sign from one of the campaigners. I voted for question 6 and made sure first and foremost that I voted for Barack Obama for President and Joe Biden for Vice President. The country does not want to go backwards, and Obama and Biden are the progressives in this election. It's hard to know what Romney stands for. He has been on all sides of so many issues. His Vice Presidential pick, Paul Ryan, is easier to categorize: a right to lifer and a Tea Party budget guy. Romney chose him to please the Right Wing and the pick might have backfired. We will soon know in a few short hours. I just hope that the election does not go once again to the Supreme Court as it did in 2000 when the Court threw the election to George W. Bush with all that entailed -- an unwanted war in Iraq and the economy in the tank. Obama and Biden are correct in warning that those sort of policies, including the idea once again of "trickle down economics" would be a serious mistake for the nation. The United States deserves better and will get better if Obama gets the four more years he has earned! On MSNBC last night I watched Obama's last campaign speech, broadcast from Des Moines, Iowa -- it came on around 11:00 p.m. Baltimore time. Barack Obama was introduced by his wife Michelle who spoke well and movingly. Barack gave a rousing speech with a tear in his left eye. I have to admit I had tears in my eyes as well!

Fabulous Decision

Police frisk us
in Democracy Plaza.
We've nothing to declare.
Just our vote.

Christopher T. George
Election Day, November 6, 2012

In the higher echelons, the decision will echo and re-echo, for better or worse. Americans, make your choice well!!!!!

Bain of America: Capitalism and the 2012 Election

President Barack Obama has been taking some grief from his own supporters for criticizing likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for killing jobs and making money while Romney was head of the "Venture Capital" firm Bain Capital. This is something though that Romney has partly brought on himself by emphasizing his experience with Bain and for hardly ever mentioning his time as the moderate governor of Massachusetts, where he was behind a state-wide health insurance law that later became the blueprint for Obama's nationwide health care law, the Affordable Health Care Act, better known by the pejorative term Republicans love to use, "Obamacare", and that each would-be Republican presidential candidate in the GOP primaries vowed to kill if they'd become president.

Romney himself has crowed that he actually created jobs rather than killed them while was at Bain so perhaps the criticism is fair. But Obama supporters such as Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, and former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. have all expressed misgivings about the approach since it leaves the President open to the charge that he is against Capitalism. That is a very fair point.

Romney does not like to talk about him being governor of Massachusetts but that should not stop Obama and the Democrats from talking about it. In fact, the whole of Romney's working life and character should be fair game, just as the whole of Obama's career and time as President should be fair for the Republicans to talk about. Let's talk about Romney's time as a businessman, his time as governor, and as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Salt Lake City in Utah. Talk about the issues and who is best to lead the United States from 2012 to 2016. Mitt Romney is not Darth Vader but neither is Barack Obama. They both seem to be decent family men who happen to think they each would make the better leader for the next four years. The election promises to be a tight one. Let's make it a fairly fought one!

I have nothing against Mitt Romney. I just don't think he would be very good for the country. I don't think his business experience necessarily qualifies him to run the country. More trickle-down economics? Wasn't that tried under Reagan and found that it didn't work? Austerity? Nobody wants it. I just think that Mitt Romney is a somewhat boring stuffed-shirt kind of guy, not particularly interesting, and wrong for America at this time.

Sorry, Mitt. And while I have you on the line, Mitt, a crazy thought: your logo, my friend, keeps reminding me of Alfred Hitchcock's logo from his 1960's television show, "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour"!



Clerihew on the 2012 Election So Far

Barack thinks his rival's time at Bain presents a fair target,
making money at others' expense, the way of the market.
Others say it gets to the root of what is the US of A
-- in the Fall election, who will get the final say?

Christopher T. George




Military Cemetery

Rows and rows of stone markers,
rows and rows of the same flag:
so many stars, so many stripes.
Only the names and dates differ.

Christopher T. George

Photograph from Americans for Battlefield Protection. Find them on Facebook.