marriage gap has kerry campaign looking for dates

usa today...women's suffrage day celebration event? ....kerry launches "take five" program to encourage supporters to find single women who want to "date" kerry on election day...apparently married women are more likely to support bush (not me of course) .. seems to be a security issue... single women feel the ups and downs in the economy more...are more likely not to have health insurance...etc. the marriage gap isn't new and is getting bigger (just like the gulf between the haves and have nots, hmmmmmmm)...1984, the difference in the presidential votes of married and unmarried women was 17 percentage points, according to surveys taken as voters left polling places. There was a 21-point marriage gap in 1992, a 29-point gap in 1996, a 32-point gap in 2000.

"single women could be to Democrats what evangelical Christians have become to Republicans: a huge group of people who often haven't been engaged in politics before but hold many views in sync with the party."

who knew?

stop the hate

i have trouble understanding why many of my politically passionate friends (regardless of party) have no hesitancy in describing their disagreement with particular politicians on policy as reasons to "hate" that person.

one institutionalized example of what I am talking about is whywehatebush.com.

now, while the rhetoric of the "reasons why we hate bush" is pretty overblown, the "reasons" do make a relatively cogent case for disagreeing with bush and for voting against him or for kerry.

but are they reasons to "hate" bush? e.g. he's "inarticulate". similarly, if you google "hate kerry," you'll get stuff like i "hate" kerry because he "flip flops" ... he "only wants to get elected"

now what is "hate" ?... "obsessive dislike unaccompanied by restraint and character" "a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action"

to my mind "hate" is a term that should be reserved for persons whose actions are so antithetical to common decency and civility, such an affront to our common humanity, that they should provoke a visceral, almost unreasoned antipathy .. should we not "hate" our captors if we are Iraqi prisoners subjected to abuse and torture? should we not "hate" terrorists who purposely kill civilians to make a political point? should we not "hate" bigots who maim and kill solely because someone is of another race or religion?

can leaders teach tolerance or expect tolerance from our children when we are so ready to describe objects of mere political disagreements as people we "hate"?

perhaps before we continue to speak about our political opponents as people we "hate", we should think about the message we are sending to our children about when it is okay to "hate," consider the words of George Washington, and ask whether our words/feelings live up to his expectation of the "demeanor" of "good citizens"...

"Happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry nosanction and to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who liveunder its protection should demeanor themselves as good citizens." President George Washington

She Wins You Win

"you only get power if you usurp it" and other lessons that I learned about playing on the women's team when it comes to politics, business and life......

"crabs in a basket"

A friend got me thinking about "crabs in a basket" -- in the context of women and minority business owners and others who seem to be more interested in pulling each other back down into the basket than in supporting each other in our success...

then I read this quote from an essay by Bill Huang about politics in the Phillipines called "Crabs in the Basket" that got me thinking about what we need to do to address the crab problem:

"... If you think about it long and hard, though, it's not really the fault of the crab. Consider that crabs don't pull each other down in open sand or sea. It's the basket that poses the problem."

So, in the case of women and minority owned businesses, if we were free to compete equally across the full breadth of the market place instead of simply in the confines of the basket we are offered (competing against each other for a fraction of the business, for example), there might be more swimming to success and less pulling each other down in the effort to get ahead.

hmmmm ... so who put us in the basket? and, how do we make the basket go away?