One-sided political junkie

As political junkies go, I'm right up there with the best of half of them, I suppose.

You see, I can't quite stomach watching the GOP convention. Alison has done a great job of detailing yesterday's events, and I'll thank her publicly for that. Oh, and my husband writes notes and leaves them on the laptop, so I don't miss anything. Last night he wrote that Ryan is pro-Romney and anti-Obama. And Ryan "also went into some detail in describing that he is pro-Ryan." Heh.

(Aside: Back in the old days, knitters got together online in a Yahoo group called the Knitlist. That's how I first "met" Alison. I quit reading the Knitlist a few years ago and lost track of quite a few members who are suddenly popping up as friends of my Democrat Facebook friends. I'm loving this small world, connected by invisible threads.)

When the Washington Post – not exactly a liberal mouthpiece – publishes a fact-checking piece on Ryan's speech, well, that says a lot. More than I can say, especially since I haven't done any research. Because Alison did it for me.

A friend stopped by yesterday who is as left of the salad fork as I am, and between the two of us we've solved all the problems of the world. What we haven't figured out is how any Republican woman can vote for the Republican ticket this year.

Republicans have been taken over by the well-financed Astro-turf Tea Party Rethuglicans. The current batch of GOP candidates are nothing like the moderate Republicans who actually worked with their colleagues to govern. We should have known things wouldn't go well when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stated after President Obama's victory that "Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term."

Here's the GOP in a four-minute nutshell, courtesy of Will McAvoy, Alan Sorkin's fictional anchor on the HBO series The Newsroom. There are longer pieces out there in which McAvoy identifies himself as a registered Republican. In this clip he's explaining how his party has changed:



I will work as hard as I know how to re-elect President Obama. I think our country is in grave danger if Republicans win. We need to re-elect President Obama and hand him a Democratic-controlled Congress, and we need to bring back some sanity to the political process.

Countries fail. The GOP seems to be hellbent on making the United States one of them. And those who will lose the most are women. I can't let that happen. My granddaughters deserve more. And so do yours.