That said, I sympathize with supporters of gay rights who feel that Warren’s selection, combined with his recent support of Proposition 8 in California, and general opposition to gay rights and marriage equality, is a slap in the face. But there’s always going to be some point of disagreement with anyone. I don’t even agree with Obama himself on every issue, but I voted for him nonetheless.

Frankly, Obama’s choice of Warren to give the invocation bothers me less than the fact that the inauguration will contain a religious component in the first place. Obama was elected as the president of all Americans, not just the Christians. The inclusion of a prayer in the inauguration gives the appearance of improper and unconstitutional collusion between church and state.

I’m horrified that some people apparently believe that President-Elect Barack Oabama is the Antichrist (“Is Obama the Antichrist?” Belief Watch, November 24). And I am even more appalled that Newsweek chose to give credibility to their outrageous claims. While it may be newsworthy that some people believe this nonsense, the Newsweek article presented these opinions as reasonable and well formed. Indeed, the author went so far as to assure us that, “The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they’re not nuts…”

Sadly, these ill-formed opinions are merely the latest in a long line of myths about Barack Obama. Throughout the campaign, we heard whispers (and sometimes shouts) that Obama is a Muslim, a terrorist, a socialist, a communist, elitist, anti-American, and now the Antichrist. The only constant theme is that he’s somehow different from “regular” Americans, and that we should be afraid of him.

By giving a forum to the latest of these outrageous accusations, Newsweek is perpetuating the same pathetic politics of hate and fear. Luckily, this fear mongering didn’t dissuade people from voting for Obama in record numbers, and won’t prevent him as President from enacting the change he promised, and this country so sorely needs.

As another piece of evidence on the campaign’s use of open source software, Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, points out that barackobama.com was built on the open source MySQL database.

I’d also like to point out an extremely interesting comment from Republican W. Wayne Liauh on the topic:

I am a life-long Republican and I voted for McCain-Palin…

But just want to mention that when I showed up at our local Republican HQ to volunteer, the stuff members wouldn’t even hear anything that is not Windows based.

Right then (& among many other things), I know the battle is over. Not just this one, but many more in the future.

Finally, it seems that I wasn’t the only one to notice the correlation between open source software and Obama’s grass-roots and people-powered campaign. Watch Republican strategist Alex Castellanos discuss the topic (thanks to Simon Phipps for the link):

1. Hal Bidlack lost in his race to unseat my congressman, Doug Lamborn, who is proud of the fact that he’s voted most often of any representative against Nancy Pelosi.

2. Jan Hejtmanek received less than 25% of the vote in her bid to unseat state representative Amy Stephens, who made none of her positions known, depending only on the R after her name in this district in which Republicans significantly outnumber Democrats.

3. Proposition 8 passed in California. This initiative bans same-sex marriage in California, providing a huge setback for marriage equality and gay rights. This result is particularly disappointing to me. In 2000, when I was living in California, I worked against the original Proposition 22, which passed by a large margin at that time. I had hoped that society’s views on gay marriage had progressed since then.

1. My adopted state of Colorado has gone blue. In addition to giving our nine electoral votes to Barack Obama, we will now have a Democratic governor, two Democratic Senators, and five out of seven Democratic representatives. Some people are apparently blaming an influx of California liberals on this shift. While I appreciate the complement, I don’t think we California liberals can take full credit

2. In my own El Paso County, home to Focus on the Family and other embarrassments, Obama received 40% of the vote. For comparison, John Kerry received only 32% of the vote in 2004. For months local Democrats have said that if Obama got 40% in El Paso County, he’d win the state. So I’d like to think that my work on the Obama campaign over the past couple months helped win the state for Obama.

3. The politics of hate and fear perpetuated by the McCain campaign and its allies (James Dobson, Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and so on) fell flat on its face. The American electorate didn’t fall for the lies that Obama is a Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, a Marxist, or somehow not a “real” American.

4. Barack Obama received a higher percentage of the white vote than did John Kerry four years ago.

5. Marilyn Musgrave, who once said that gay marriage is, “the most important issue that we face today” was ousted from the House of Representatives.

6. Elizabeth Dole, who released one of the most despicable attack ads I’ve ever seen, stating that her opponent was “Godless” lost her re-election bid.

7. Colorado and South Dakota both defeated anti-abortion measures, including Proposition 48 in Colorado, which would have defined life as beginning at the moment of conception. Yes, apparently its supporters really think that we can decide when life begins by voting on it.

8. Democrats will have a majority in both the House and the Senate.

9. Finally, and most importantly, we have a president-elect who is intelligent, thoughtful, forward-thinking, honest, inclusive, and downright inspiring. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch his victory speech here:

In case you need some inspiration, here’s a short but effective video.

We then walked over to the Chapel Hills Mall, site of the polling place:

We assembled in the mall parking lot (safely outside the 100 foot limit for campaigning near a polling place):

After removing our Obama pins and leaving our signs behind, S. and I dropped off our mail-in ballots. Others in the rally also dropped off ballots or filled out a ballot on the voting computers.

The reception to the rally was generally positive, with quite a few people driving by vociferously honking their support. I think we showed that Northern Colorado Springs doesn’t belong exclusively to Focus on the Family and their ilk!

Thus, I find it particularly fitting that Barack Obama is using open source software in his campaign. Obama has inspired amazing grass-roots support and energy, and more excitement than I’ve ever seen for a presidential candidate. There are thousands of volunteers contributing their time and money to electing him president. Just like an open source project, those of us working on the campaign feel part of this “people-powered” community.

The decision to use open source software is truly a progressive choice. And, if Obama runs his presidency with the same transparency that is inherent in open source software, it will be a welcome change from the past eight years.

John McCain’s tax credit of $5000 for health insurance is a drop in the bucket. My husband and I pay $1200 a month for self-employed health insurance premiums. That amounts to $14,400 a year. We still must pay $40 every time we see a doctor, and we each have a yearly deductible of $1500. After that deductible is met, our insurance pays only 80% of our health-care costs.

The $5000 in tax credits of McCain’s plan would just barely cover the increase in premiums and health care costs compared to last year. We would be no better off than we were a year ago

We don’t need a Band-Aid approach for the health-care crisis. Barack Obama’s plan offers the change we need to fix a health-care system that is broken. All of the other civilized countries in the world have taken steps to make sure that their citizens have affordable health care. It’s time for the U.S. to join the civilized world

Aletha Solter

Goleta

In his excellent rebuttal in Slate magazine, Daniel Gross points out the absurdity of this line of reasoning. He says,

“…lending money to poor people and minorities isn’t inherently risky. There’s plenty of evidence that in fact it’s not that risky at all….

“On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it’s even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it’s difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients’ money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. … How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton’s fault?…

“Lending money to poor people doesn’t make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.”