My cat is smarter than Sarah Palin/we're going to MEXICO!!!

Look how cute she is! She loves sleeping in bags. Anyway, now onto some serious content. Jake has kindly donated his latest political thoughts to CD (which is what I just now nicknamed my blog). I guess perhaps since election season is in full swing all over the country, but especially here in the DC area, I should have periodical political updates. Ok, here's one. From Jake. He was pissed.

At the Republican National Convention the other night, speaker after speaker mocked Barack Obama's past as a community organizer, turning the job into a punch line.

“Community organizer... What?” Rudy Giuliani asked incredulously to laughter and cheers. 

John McCain's new VP pick Sarah Palin took some digs at community organization itself, suggesting it lacked “actual responsibilities. “ The barb went over so well she’s started using it on the stump.

I don't get the joke.

In his early twenties, Barack Obama ran an organization in Chicago's impoverished South Side called Developing Community Projects. It was a church-based outfit that helped poor people get job training and prepared low-income kids for college.

How is this funny? In the mid-nineties I was an adult literacy tutor, and I worked for a nice guy named Dave who was a pudgy, middle-aged...community organizer.

There are small, community-based organizations doing valuable—even essential—work all over this country. Republicans used to say they were the party of local control and local solutions. What is a “faith-based initiative” if not an organization of people working toward the common good? Why are the Republicans mocking someone for running one of these organizations?

They imply that Obama is using his past as a community organizer to pad his resume. I don’t see it that way. He worked with DCP just after he graduated from college. After that he had a career as a law professor, a state legislator for the 13th district of Chicago, and a United States senator. His background as a grassroots organizer is instructive only insofar as it shows us what he cared about as a young man.

The attack on community organizers, however, is instructive in another way. It demonstrates the Republican insecurity about their ticket and their need to distract from it. Since John McCain is a career politician with a history of corruption reaching back to the Keating Five Scandal, his campaign has decided to trumpet their new VP pick as an agent of “change.” And while Sarah Palin has already demonstrated raw political skill, her much vaunted “executive experience” boils down to two things: her twenty months as governor of Alaska, a fine state which has fewer people than—just to pick one place at random—the 13th district of Chicago, and her two terms as mayor of a town which had, at the time, about the same number of folks as Walnut Ridge, Arkansas.

Maybe none of that matters, but next time you hear someone insulting “community organizers” put it in some historical context. In the early 1980s, Barack Obama was running an inner city program designed to help people stay off welfare. John McCain, at the time, was setting himself up for a rebuke from Congress for his part in the Savings and Loans scandals involving Charles Keating. And Sarah Palin's big accomplishment of the early eighties? Winning first runner-up in the Miss Alaska  contest.

Ok, so that's what I have to say about that, and by "I", I mean, "Jake, and I agree." Moving on... we bought our tickets to Mexico last night! YES! We're not going till January, but whatevs, having tickets is a big commitment and I'm totally stoked. We got 4 tickets, we clicked on the "purchase" button ceremoniously simultaneously and it was amazing. How? Oh, well, since you asked... we set up a sweet, fully early-90s, Zack Morris phone-style, conference call. Yeah, like the kind you had with your friends in junior high until 8:30 pm when phone time was over. Except this was with modern technology - cell phones and the internet. See below:

I called Adrian on my phone (the blue one), and Heather called Gin on her phone. We put them next to each other on speaker phone and did a lot of laughing and yelling. They're sort of spooning, phoning? Anyway, you can see our guidebook and airline ticket research. It was an official conference call and one that way, I might add, more productive than many I had as a consultant. 

Anyone been to Mexico City and cool 1-3 day long trips outside it? Input welcome. We're interested in beaches, weird sculptures, art, hiking, eating, drinking, and seeing things.