Dear President-elect Obama,

In light of the recent vote on Proposition 8 in California, a friend of mine and I propose the following.  I'm going to use her words, because she's so damned awesome:

See, this shouldn't even be a blog entry, but I am intensely curious and want to see what kind of responses I get...
So, for months (years? decades? God, but these political seasons seem to stretch out) McCain responded to questions about his smear ads by saying that if ONLY Obama would participate in a town hall-style meeting, all the smears would stop. I'm not even going to bother posting links showing this, because TPM does such a good job of providing evidence of the above. 
So, now that Obama has faced off with McCain in a town hall debate, does that mean that McCain is going to keep his implied word and stop talking all the ridiculous smack about sex-ed for preschoolers and Obama being Jesus or Paris Hilton or a Muslim extremist or someone like that?  How about we keep an eye out, and see if those ads magically disappear?

I was home on Monday listening to NPR when the word came out that the bailout bill failed to pass in the House. It was almost fascinating, listening to NPR attempt to get the latest word on why the bill failed, switching frantically from BBC to CNN, then finally giving up and going back to their original broadcast. When I heard later that there would be no further immediate action from Congress due to the Rosh Hashanah holiday, two things immediately came to mind: 1) Really? There are that many Jews in Congress? 2) Didn't the President say our need for a bill was dire? I could have sworn that he had the authority to make Congress come back and keep on working in case of emergency... where did I get that idea? Oh yeah... ARTICLE II, SECTION 3 OF THE FRIGGIN' CONSTITUTION! Law scholars, help me out, would you? Doesn't the President have the authority to convene Congress under extraordinary circumstances? If so, would this not have constituted an extraordinary circumstance? Weren't we meant to crater or implode or get out our hobo-bags and get to riding the freight-cars to Canada or something if this bill hadn't passed by two days ago? Oh yeah, wait, none of those things happened. And the Dow is rallying back; having panicked on Monday like a nineteen fifties housewife upon seeing a mouse, the stock market is catching its breath, slowly stepping off the chair, reaching for the bottle of cooking sherry it uses to calm its nerves, and waiting for the husband to come home to take care of the scary animal. It's kind of interesting, though, that the unregulated market itself made this mess, and is looking for the American taxpayer to be the husband who bravely takes care of the scary animal and makes everything better. Who else thinks that, since the market didn't fall down to the ninth circle of hell and at least some of us still have jobs, the urgency to pass this particular bill is something of a scam job? It's kind of cool to know that both Jon Stewart and Dennis Kucinich agree with me. Check out Tuesday's episode of The Daily Show (avaiable on thedailyshow.com) and Tuesday's episode of The Rachel Maddow show (available at msnbc.com) to see why.