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This post is about American politics, and I realize it may not be of interest to people from other countries. Then again, perhaps it will be. Our planet is so interconnected these days that what affects one affects all.

The 2^nd presidential debate took place this evening at Hofstra University, Long Island, New York. It was a  town hall meeting moderated by CNN’s Candy Crowley,  that consisted of 82  individuals who claimed to be undecided voters. I have no idea how or why ANYONE would be undecided at this point, but hey, okay. Undecided. Fine. These undecided folks had some good questions.

Before we go into this, I noticed that Michelle O and Anne R wore the same color outfit – hot pink! Synchro? Or did their consultants coordinate??

The first question came from a 20-year-old college student who wanted to know what the candidates could do for his generation to obtain jobs once they graduated from college. Right off the bat, Romney started out with his lies. He sang the praises of Pell grants, a government program that enables low income students to attend college.

Truth? Romney’s plan would eliminate Pell grants.

And from this point onward, the Romney lies multiplied. I kept waiting for his nose to grow longer. I kept hoping that the story of Pinochio was a true story, that when you lie, your nose grows longer and everyone recognizes it and knows you’re a liar. Instead of the elongated nose, we saw Romney’s odd little puckered smile and lots of blinks.

On energy: Romney said that under the Obama administration, gas prices have risen. That’s true. But the bottom line here wasn’t addressed: the government does not  control gas prices. The free market does that. As Obama pointed out, “The economy was on the verge of collapse, we were entering the worse recession since the Great Depression.”

On Libya: Romney blew it. Here’s why.

On foreign policy, Obama destroyed Mitt Romney. This was the Libya question, This point illustrates the difference between a commander in chief and a presidential hopeful.

On immigration: Romney? Self-deport. Obama? The dream act.

On women’s health: Romney will defund Planned Parenthood, an organization upon which millions of women depend for mammogram, health care, contraceptive care. Abortion, per se, wasn’t addressed. Romney’s administration would overturn Roe V Wade. Yet he denies that he would do this. Denies it in spite of the fact that Paul Ryan, his running mate, co-sponsored a bill with Todd Akin (the body of a raped woman has ways to prevent pregnancy) that would confer personhood on a fertilized egg – i.e., a woman who obtains an abortion wold be guilty of murder, even if that abortion was the result of incest or rape.

On the one hand, Romney mentions his healthcare reform for Massachusetts, on which the Obamacare plan was built. Then he turns around and says he will repeal Obamacare on day one. It’s the sort of doublespeak BS he stands for.

One of the best lines? Romney’s five-point economical plan. Obama pointed out that Romney has a “very sketchy deal. Folks at the top play by a different set of rules…”

Romney then defended the points of his tax plan with: “of course the numbers will add up. I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years and balanced the budget. I ran the Olympics and the numbers added up.”

Really? Romney ran the Olympics on government bailout money.

But the crowning moment was the last statement by Obama, where he addressed Romney’s remarks to behind-the-doors donors about the 47 % of moochers in the U.S. who don’t pay taxes – people like, well, you know, the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised, seniors on Social Security.

Candy Crowley deserves a raise. She kept Romney the bully within his pen, despite his attempts to break out, and shut him up when he tried to bully his way into further discourse and more lies.

Let’s be clear about this. Tonight, Mitt Romney, a zillionaire who has been running for president for at least 20 years, can’t connect with ordinary people. Despite his pathetic attempts at anecdotes about people he has met throughout  his campaign, he just doesn’t make the connection on pay equity for women, on education, on the tax plan, on foreign policy, on health care, on anything to do with women, people, or even dogs.

In the past few days, before tonight’s debate, the polls have shown that Romney has shown a ten percent rise among women voters. I find this hard to believe. What woman in her right mind would vote for a man who doesn’t believe in equal pay for women? Who  believes the government should control your reproductive rights, your body? Or, as a friend said to me today, “What woman would support any guy who seeks to control your vagina?”

Forget Ohio, the state everyone says you have to win to win the presidency. This isn’t’ about Ohio.  The majority of voters are women. Alienate them, and you lose the election. Romney and the Republicans must be damning the day that women won the right to vote.

The last question was interesting: How do you and your policies differ from those of George W Bush?  Well, vouchers for health care, for starters. This is where the government sends you a voucher to cover some of your health care costs and then sends you off into the insurance free market to buy your own insurance. Right. Like a 75-year-old man or woman on Medicare will be able to find affordable insurance.

So, you get the idea here. What’s at stake in this election is both simple and complex.  Simple in the sense that the choices are clear between the Republicans and the Democrats. Complex in the sense that we are three weeks away from the election and less than eight weeks away from the Mayan end date of December 21. The closer we get to the election, the more convinced I am that the Mayan end times – or whatever it proves to be – is about a paradigm shift, not the end of the world, not disclosure, not about anything radical. It’s about a radical shift in beliefs. We’re in the midst of it now.

This point was driven home today when I was on my way out of our local grocery store and a well-dressed elderly woman sitting by the door said, “Excuse me, can you give me a ride home? I live just three blocks from here.”

“Sure.”

“Oh my God, thank you so much.”

I loaded her groceries into my cart and then into my car. Phyllis, who will be 90 in November,  always walks the three blocks to Publix, then waits for someone “kind, who will give her a ride home.” She has a teacher daughter who lives locally, a son in New York. “I used to work for Dior in New York,” she says.  “I loved it. Then I taught fashion. I loved it. Now I’m here and I love that, too.”

I carried Phyllis’s groceries into her townhouse, a pristine environment where everything had its place. She invited me to stay for coffee, but I had an appointment with a deadline and demurred. But as I backed out her driveway, I knew I had just seen myself in thirty years.

If we can’t help each other, if we can’t solidify humane policies, if we can’t lend a hand to those in need, then as a country, a nation, a people, we have failed. But I’m an optimist, and I think people like Phyllis lead the way.

“My daughter is appalled that I ask strangers for rides,” Phyllis says. “She tells me, Suppose they try to rob you, mom?” Phyllis laughs at her own statement. “But what do I have to rob?”

I failed in that I should have gotten Phyllis’s number so I could drop by when she needed a ride to and from the grocery store. But I suspect our paths will cross again. Maybe that’s part of life after 12/21/12.

Synchronicity. Hey, remember me?

This is called the Dolphin Fountain. Since daughter Megan paints dolphins, I was curious to take a look at it when a correspondent sent this pic and the accompanying synchro tale. At first, I couldn’t see any dolphin. In fact, that’s why I named the post the way I did.

Was the dolphin swimming below the fountain? No, you have to look closely. It’s right at the top.  That’s a kid riding a dolphin. See his/her head?  In the image, it blends with the dolphin and at first glance, the top looks like a horse’s head. At least, that’s what I saw. Maybe if I could walk around the fountain, I would get a better sense of the dolphin.

Here’s the story from KLM, artist residing in Phoenix.

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I was curious about a house in my area that I have driven by a few times recently. It has those arts and crafts style tents outside in their backyard. Big white tents with clear plastic windows. So I started to look up “art lessons” and “sculpture lessons in Desert Hills” thinking maybe somebody is using them for an art class. I see cars parked outside all the time, 5 or 6 at least.

I haven’t found that house yet, but I found an artist by the name of Walter Rezcek who happens to live in my area. I went into his online gallery and found this fountain. My dad had one exactly like it. I never knew where he got it, and had never seen one like it before. This must be where dad got the fountain though, or at least Walter designed it and sold it a nursery or something and dad bought it.

I have never seen this design anywhere else, right down to the wave style bowls and the kid riding the dolphin at the top. I had this fountain in my front yard for a long time after my folks moved to Oregon. I took it up to them after they got settled. It stayed with the house after dad passed a few years ago, but I’ve always regretted not packing it up and bringing it back. I brought everything else back, including his tractor, but just didn’t have the space for the fountain.

So, now I’m hunting for another job, I was laid off in late September. I have been considering making a go at art. So maybe this is telling me it’s time. I’m going to paint now.

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I told KLM that just after I read his story with the Oregon link, I talked to the service guy at the local car shop who told me my new engine for our Mazda–which was blown out from the flood related to Tropical Storm Isaac–was en route from Oregon. KLM then related a long list of synchros with Oregon that he has recently experienced himself. He hopes to move there.

This one is fun and is sure to make you smile!

Forewarned: no synchro here.

There is something compelling about Joe Biden. I have always liked this man, liked his voting record, his personal biography, and his ability to discuss issues in a powerful yet grounded way. Joe is….well, Joe. Middle class. His name pretty much says it all.

He has lived through tragedy that would kill lesser mortals – the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, shortly after Biden, 29, was elected to the U.S. Senate, one of the youngest people ever elected to that position. As a sudden single father of two young boys, he did what any parent would do, devoted himself to them unconditionally.

Joe understands that any country is only as strong as its middle class and this point came through strongly during the VP debate this evening. Ryan was clearly in over his head when it came to foreign policy, Medicare, Social Security, taxes, the right of a woman to choose, and just about every other issue covered in the debate. When the moderator, Martha Raddatz, a correspondent for ABC News, asked him a pointed question, asked for specifics, Ryan sought refuge in talking points.

Martha was fantastic, a terrific moderator in that she didn’t allow these two guys to take over. Better than Jim Laher, for sure .

MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donald felt it was inappropriate for Raddatz to ask the candidates, both of them Catholics, how their religious beliefs influenced their policies – particularly on abortion. O’Donald feels that religion shouldn’t enter the debate because of the separation between church and state. But the fact is that the separation between church and state has been eroding for years, Religion has been a factor in politics since the Nixon/JFK debate in 1960, when JFK’s Catholicism became an issue. And in the first twelve years of the new millennium, religion has gained a foothold in politics that is unprecedented.

For instance, Paul Ryan co-signed a bill with U.S. Congressman Todd Akin that would declare personhood upon a fertilized egg. Akin, by the way, sits on the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and wants all of you women out there to know that pregnancy from rape is really rare. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Really? And this guy is sitting on a science committee?

That’s a whole other post. The point here is that Ryan co-wrote this bill with Akin – and is now struggling to distance himself from it. When Joe Biden answered this question, he pointed out that his religious beliefs tell him that its right for the government to take care of those who can no longer take care of themselves – the poor, disenfranchised, elderly, sick – the very people, in fact, whom Ryan’s budget would dismiss completely. In terms of abortion, Biden said it isn’t up to government to intervene in such personal decisions, that he wouldn’t interfere in Roe v Wade.

Ryan would appoint supreme court justices who would overturn that ruling and basically render any woman and/or doctor involved in an abortion a murderer. Nice, huh?

An abortion is not an easy choice for any woman. And it’s shocking that decades after the supremos ruled on Roe v Wade it’s still an issue, that we have candidates who actually believe the government should have the right to dictate the choices a woman makes about her own body. But there is no corresponding proposed ruling about what men do with their bodies.

Years ago in college, I remember having this discussion with Dr. Millet, a professor of English Lit whom I absolutely adored. He was trying to convince me to stick with English Lit as a major (rather than Spanish). “You women, Trish, always hold the upper hand because you are the ones who birth life.”

“Uh, we don’t do this alone, Dr. Millet.”

“Well, no, but because you’re the ones who actually give birth, you’re the ones who come under under scrutiny by those in government  who seek to control your bodies.”

This conversation happened around 1967, before Roe v Wade. I was a 20-year-old hippie who was against everything the government stood for. And here I was, having this surreal conversation with a professor at least 20 years older than me who nonetheless understood the stakes. “Go write your novels and books, Trish,” he said. “You will always follow the path of your heart.”

It sounded nice but it took me many years to understand what he actually meant by that statement, the greatest compliment I ever got from any professor. And right now, my heart tells me we are still a country where racism is prevalent, where many people who are going to vote for Romney/Ryan will do so simply because Obama is black. Reactionary voting is often a vote against your own self- interest.

Here’s what I’m sure of: Any woman who votes the Repub ticket needs extensive and profound psychiatric intervention.

Biden won.

Here it is, October 10, and the temperature this afternoon in the dog park was probably 85. Not too much humidity.    A breeze. Shade. Everyone was talking about how maybe – maybe – winter Florida style would be arriving soon. But the dogs told a different story.

The dogs panted, slobbered, kept going to the fountain for water. And that huge great dane there on the ground is Dharma, not even a year old, and she drinks a lot of water. She’s the  biggest dog in the park and  just wants to play – with any dog, any human. She trots over to the bench where I’m sitting and thrusts her huge muzzle at my bottle of water, knocking it to the ground.  Play with me, and if you won’t, I’ll eat your water bottle. She slobbers, she licks, she’s the kind of dog who captures your heart immediately.

Cody the trickster husky starts chasing her and for about five minutes they tussle in the grass. Here’s Cody and Noah:

And  when Dharma finally gets to her feet, Noah comes up behind her, mounts her, and knocks her to the ground. That’s when all the little dogs moved in to sniff and nibble at her feet and legs and ears. She takes it, she loves it.

Dharma, like her great dane brother Mufasa, who wasn’t around today, is probably  an old soul,   probably remembers her previous lives, her previous human companions. Dharma and Mufasa  probably have a secret school in some obscure corner of the dog park where they and their  students are invisible to humans.  I think Noah may sit in on this class, but it’s tough getting a straight answer from him on anything. He’s an Aquarian born February 12, 2009.  He’s resolute, he misses his buddy sister Nika, but oh wow, does he ever love his Frisbee.

Every time I go to the dog park, which is probably four or five times  a week, I’m invited to join the dog’s world, where everything is apparent if you watch closely enough. Where everything entails synchronicity, something dogs seem to instinctively recognize and honor.

I wish there was a cat park where I could observe our three felines. They are: Tigerlil, who at age 15, is the deaf matron and doesn’t photograph well because she is always moving; Powder, whom we fond in a library parking lot, is at least 12 and maybe as old as 13, the most accepting of our cats; and Simba, our youngest, a male brought to us by our neighbor.  I wish I could divine their psyches in the same way that that I do the psyches of dogs.

But hey, a cat will be the first to tell you that he or she is NOT a dog, dislikes the doggie slobbering and pandering to humans. Yet, I believe that cats, are also our cheerleaders, our teachers,  and even though they don’t have parks and wouldn’t do well in such parks, they get it, too. We’re all in this together. We are Indra’s net, animal and human alike, and what affects me impacts you up and down the line.

Dog Park. You, me, them. We’re on it.

Right?

Years ago, we interviewed a man  in an office with all the walls painted black. He had a great stereo system and was playing a Peter Gabriel tune when we arrived. It seemed that while in his darkened den the outside world simply vanished. His name was Michael Mann and he was producer of Miami Vice, a TV show that ironically was known for it bright pastel colors. His Mann-cave provided him a place to escape all the hoopla and buzz about his popular show.

Now there’s another Michael Mann who says many of us are living in caves like his namesake, avoiding the reality of what is happening to the climate.  This Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, recently told The Guardian  of London that low-lying island nations could see disastrous consequences of climate change far sooner than expected.

“The models have typically predicted that will not happen for decades but the measurements that are coming in tell us it is already happening so once again we are decades ahead of schedule,” Mann said, who is the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center.

Meanwhile, more than a third of the people in the U.S. and Great Britain deny that there is any climate change going on, and that figure, ironically, has been rising along with the waters from the melting ice on the polar ice caps. “There’s a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,” according to NASA scientist James Hansen.

Whether you think climate change is a normal pattern of nature or is being hurried along by 7 billion people and their carbon prints is irrelevant to the fact that the climate is rapidly changing.

It’s time for the deniers to abandon their caves and take a look at the science, which says the rise in average global temps, has been largely attributed to the burning of fossil fuels and the resultant increase in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. That’s the overwhelming conclusion of scientists, even if politicians and their corporate allies are doing their best to tell us it ain’t so.

Even if all the scientists are wrong, the bottom line is that disastrous consequences are coming our way. As the Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets disappear,”we [will] really start to see sea level rises accelerate,” Mann says. Unlike with the melting of sea ice, these ice sheets would introduce vast quantities of water into the world’s oceans, and could cause the evacuation of some islands.

“Island nations that have considered the possibility of evacuation at some point, like Tuvalu, may have to be contending those sort of decisions within a matter of a decade or so.”

For vulnerable island nations, like the Maldives, Kiribati, the Torres Strait Islands and many others, rising seas will bring significant coastal erosion and saltwater contamination of limited freshwater supplies. Environmental group Oceana recently noted that nations dependent upon the sea will face food security threats as greater temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase ocean acidity and put marine life at risk.

Yet, the disbelief that it is happening is widespread. So maybe one day we will step out of our Mann-caves and discover that we’re on an island and water is rising.

This year’s record melting, which occurred under more “normal” conditions than the previous record set in 2007, left Arctic sea ice at a minimum “nearly 50 percent lower than the average … for the years 1979-2000,” according to Climate Central.

Despite the increasingly clear picture painted by scientific observations and climate modeling, “There’s a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,” according to NASA scientist James Hansen. Recent polling suggests that as much as 35 percent of the U.S. population and 37 percent of the British public remain unconvinced of the scientific reality of climate change.

After watching this flash mob dancing, I wish I worked for Twitter!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YLnrH6E9lxs