Still too wound up to sleep...

Is it just me or did Dubya look like he's gained some weight? Sparky noticed it too, in the shots from behind he looked awfully wide. Maybe because he was slumping so much... Hmmm, Randi Rhodes read off some of the 32 page list of rules last night and one of them was they couldn't photograph them from behind, makes sense now.

He also looked really freaked out that people weren't cheering after his every sentence. Didn't anyone tell him this audience hadn't signed an oath of loyalty? Does he even realize that a lot of people don't like him? If he doesn't read the newspapers perhaps he doesn't.

I kept waiting for him to either:walk off the stage, start choking or having a feigned heart attack, or shout out "I wanted to be baseball commissioner, dammit!".

Was he sedated? Maybe that's why he's gained weight. They're keeping him drugged like in the Nazi episode of Star Trek.

And poor Rudy Giuliani trying to defend Dubya's performance. It was just sad. How do these poor guys sleep at night?

I've seen some threads running tonight that claim the Democrats are manipulating the online polls, isn't that what the Republicans are good at? Aren't they supposed to be the masters of media manipulation? Oh, and voting manipulation? It's common knowledge that they plant people at Democratic rallies, feed the press negative stories, line up to call in to radio talk shows disguised as non-partisan types, etc. How on earth could we beat them at their own game? Are they all asleepl? Or are they busy banging their heads against the wall? Surely they've been revved up and ready for tonight. They sure were on the ball when 9/11 happened, they jumped right on that bandwagon without a pause.

But we've seen the end of the post 9/11 faux-patriotic momentum tonight. Americans are angry, we're tired of being manipulated and lied to. We want peace, education, health care. We want the truth. We want our country back.

Maybe Ralph Nader will be so shocked by tonight's debate he'll step down. Hopefully his supporters will at least see why we need a new President.

I hope Oprah's Voting Party got people to watch the debates. She made the audience cry, that's a good start.

I'm going to go flip through the debate transcript while my memory is fresh. OMG, there were so many good (and horrific) soundbites tonight. I wonder if they corrected Dubya's grammar, I hope not. Damn Jim Lehrer did a great job.

Whew, now that my initial reaction has been captured untinged, I've spent the evening basking in Air America and flipping through weblogs. And I've been checking out & voting in the online polls, please go and cast your opinion too and see what people really think before the spin doctors try and salvage their loss. I've made it through most of them and the consensus across the board here at 2am is Kerry 76% and Bush 24%. EVERYWHERE! Even here in Texas... it would be nice to think my vote might actually count this November. Some of the polls have Kerry winning by over 90%. Sparky is so happy, I actually showed him quite a few of the polls so he would actually believe that America is coming out of it's coma.

The only scary opinion expressed this evening is one I've worried about also, what are the powers currently in charge going to do to try and swing public opinion back in their favor? Perhaps another terrorist attack on US soil? I wouldn't put it past them, seriously. Or are they going to sell their stocks and try to get out before they start losing money in this corporation they've created? I've been imagining for some time that this whole evil empire was going to self-implode like Enron. They'll turn on each other, no one wanting to take the blame for the criminal and financial mess they've made. And tonight we've seen their sacrificial lamb - poor Dubya will be the one thrown to the wolves. And he's too dumb to defend himself. He's actually lucky that we still do have some semblance of Democracy left or he'd be dangling over the village square by a rope tonight like Mussolini, with the angry throwing rocks at him and beating him with sticks.

The last thing Sparky said before he went to sleep tonight was "now we can put our Kerry bumper stickers on our cars". So there is hope, don't let anyone tell you there isn't. Believe your own eyes and ears, let this be remembered as the day America woke up. Our country has been off course, asleep at the wheel. We can wake up and keep from hitting the brick wall, it's not too late.

Well, thank you goddess! Sparky and I watched the debate tonight, and yes, the Emperor really has no clothes! It's been proven. And thank goodness also that the networks actually showed the reaction shots (which they weren't "supposed" to per the 32 pages of rules) and we got to see Kerry taking studious notes while Dubya swigged water, rolled his eyes, slumped on the podium and flipped his piece of paper back and forth (which appeared to be covered in doodles).

And miraculously, the pundits even seemed to agree that Dubya was nervous, defensive, repetitive and completely inarticulate. Though he does seem to have practiced saying nuclear, after a pause and deep breath he even managed to say "nuclear prolification". But he did say emeny instead of enemy. Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews even agreed that Dubya was seemed the annoyed monarch who did not want to be there and is unaccustomed to being questioned. My husband was so worried, not that John Kerry would do badly, but that Dubya would beautomatically be proclaimed the winner because that mean old smart guy was picking on him. That's how he won Texas, because Ann Richards (who was a wonderful governor, BTW) picked on "poor George".

Once again, can I make a plea - can we PLEASE have the smart, well spoken guy for President?? Please??? I don't want the average Joe Blow running our country, I don't want the "everyman" in charge, I want the smart guy who is going to plan things out before he acts. Running the largest nation in the world requires a lot of knowledge, education and experience. Here's an analogy to chew on - If you were going on a car trip and were bringing your family along, do you want to ride with the guy who never passed his driver's license test, who is prone to road rage and spent the first part of his life drinking to excess and snorting coke or would you rather ride with the responsible guy who reads the maps before he goes somewhere and would never drink and drive? Because that's where we are America, we've been riding with the road raging cowboy and we're out in the middle of nowhere and the other drivers won't get near us because they're afraid of OUR driver. But now he's finally running out of gas and hopefully soon won't be able to harm anyone else. We're going to take the keys away from him.

So we're both taking sighs of relief, and I have a feeling even the propaganda masters in the GOP won't be able to salvage this disaster. I do not want to wake up tomorrow to headlines that say "Bush Won Debate". If the media does not want to lose all of their credibility they will play it straight on this debate. Kerry slaughtered Bush. And Kerry answered everything clearly, succinctly and in plain language. Meanwhile Dubya interrupted, ran over in time), and kept raising his hand to object though when called upon he often had nothing to say. Except that the country needed someone who didn't change positions. Who didn't play well with others. And who refused to learn from or even acknowledge his mistakes.

And there are two more debates left... And next week is Edwards vs. Darth Cheney. This is going to get bloody.

But seriously, I REALLY want the smart guy to win this time. Will everyone get off their butts and vote this November? We can have a peaceful, prosperous America again. We've done it before, I remember, I was there. And your vote really is anonymous. And registering to vote does not mean you're more likely tol be picked for jury duty. They don't do that anymore, they use your driver's license info. Yes, really. So if you don't want to go to jury duty, don't drive. But please vote.

I saw a house a few blocks down from ours today with not one, but two Kerry-Edwards signs proudly displayed in the front yard. I'm wondering when the guy across the street from us is going to put up his Dubya sign. Our neighborhood is pretty conservative, if we were about three miles to the east we'd be in a predominatnly liberal Jewish neighborhood. And, yes, the houses there cost more. I saw quite a few Kerry signs driving through there today (sigh).

Sparky's been really bi-polar this week about the debates this Thursday night. I hope I get my Fiorinal renewed before then, I've had a headache all week myself. At least I do have some Valium left if he gets too angry at the "liberal media". My mantra? Polls are crap and the only person I believe on TV is Jon Stewart.

I'm looking at two Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers on my desk, a pretty navy & red one and a smaller baby blue, navy and white one. I've been dying to put the red one on my car, but Sparky's too paranoid. Mostly of some idiot keying my relatively new (i.e. expensive) car. I've got nothing but a Carmax sticker on it right now. My last car had about half a dozen stickers in the window and on the bumper. Of course it was 13 years old too.

I mentioned the yard signs to Sparky today and wondered aloud where we could get one and he wondered also. So we're making progress. Or he's not afraid for the house, just my car. He also pulled out the stickers and looked at them, I told him I had two and the white one would look great on his white car. He also agreed. But his car is 16 years old...

Everyone watch Oprah's Voting Party, today's show is to convince people to register to vote. Maybe she could give a new car to anyone who votes for Kerry, I think it would work.

I think I'm going to get hooked on plugins, I added Mt Entry If Comments tonight, which basically only displays a number count for comments if you have more than zero. Very nifty and makes me feel less unloved because I'm using my blog as my startup page on Opera.

Although the spammers seem to love me, MT Blacklist is working it's little heart out, bless you Jay Allen!

Whee! Not sure whether to feel like a genius or an idiot ;-) Instead of doing my real work tonight I decided to figure out the whole weblog syndication thing. I honestly think the whole thing used to work but I hadn't checked it in ages and I've done a lot of updates and found out that I had old, invalid syndication feeds. So I went back to the MT forums, because it's not really clear through the MT users manual, and found out here is how it all works...

The syndication feed is just a link to a template in your blog. The older one is the RSS 1.0 index and the newer XML feed is the RSS 0.91 index (which should now be renamed 2.0). Mine were out of date, apparently they don't update themselves when you upload a new version.

To check yours go to the Feed Validator and enter your link (should be your weblog/index.rdf or index.xml). This will pretty much tell you what to do. I got this page telling me how to update my Movable Type templates, which I did and the XML one works but the older one is buggy so I didn't add it to my syndicate link.

And MT 3.+ is supposed to support Atom feeds... hmmm, looked through my templates, nothing for Atom. Nothing in the user manual, but there is an Atom template on the default templates page (and the newest RSS 2.0 one). So I added a template and named it atom.xml and the validator says both now work!

So I think I may finally be a real blogger now :-) So that's my aha moment for today, my sincere apologies to anyone I frustrated with my blogging ignorance... Next lesson - how the hell does trackback work...