This ad attacking Obama for being friends with this Weather Underground Ayers guy is lame. It makes me like Obama more really. I'd rather have this country run by a man who isn't afraid of radical dissent, like most our founding fathers.

I've been reading lots about the people who created our United States, and more about American civics than most of us bother with after high school. Quite a few of our founding fathers would have likely associated with people like the Weathermen, had they existed as contemporaries. I'm referring to Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Sam Adams- all men much admired today, for being the eighteenth century's equivalent of today's radicals. Doubtless, had Ben Franklin lived in the nineteen-sixties, he would have rubbed shoulders with Weathermen, Black Panthers, communists, yippies,free speech advocates, civil rights activists. I couldn't imagine any man or woman of strong ideas and convictions he'd avoid, or worry about his reputation for the association. In Jack Fruchtman Jr.'s American Cousins, Franklin is portrayed as a forward-thinking and great man, who associated freely with these kinds of people- abolitionists, revolutionaries, free-thinkers and men of radical ideas. That I admire, and the current presidential candidate for the Democrats for the same reason. McCain used to seem like he could be one of those types of people, back when he was proud to be called the maverick. I might have voted for that guy, but not this dopey W.-clone who doesn't even know how many houses he owns. If I were him, I don't think I'd need to add the white house.

Lately I've been reading a book about the U.S. citizenship test, which has all the questions that you might be asked, if you weren't lucky enough to have been born here like me. I'd have passed, I didn't find a question I couldn't answer, even though I think they usually only ask a few of the easier ones to most folks. I've worked with a few legalized immigrants over the years, and I don't think any of them had the english skills to answer more than a fraction of them. These are Cambodians, a Vietnamese guy(who is really stupid and annoying, not because he's Vietnamese, I should say), and Bosnians. They all have friends and family that want to immigrate here, I'm passing on the book to them, when I finish the appendices tomorrow. The questions have a lot of follow-up material that explain and put things into context, but besides some presidential trivia that would be useful watching Jeopardy, it's stuff I knew already. Thanks, largely to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This book should be mandatory for anyone who registers to vote, but only in a better world. Even though people would still vote Republican in that one anyway.

My brother is helping me get a scanner/all-in-one, so hopefully soon I'll have pictures and other multimedia, for all none of you that will probably ever notice. I have a video camera, but you can easily find more interesting v-content elsewhere. For instance, "Hell-bent for Election" on YouTube. Prosit!