Keeping America's Promise in Columbus! That's what Barack Obama was doing this morning.

(Please accept my apologies for photo quality throughout the diary. A really, really tall guy was standing in front of me, so I just had to hold up and click. If you are particularly sensitive to motion sickness, you may want to take some Dramamine before you follow me over the fold).

My stomach rumbles, for we had no morning meal. But it isn't really a meal I want, though I would not turn one down.

More than anything else, I want to learn to read.

Every year, regardless of the grade I'm teaching, I read this book, by Marie Bradby and illustrated by Chris Soentpiet, based on the life of Booker T. Washington, to my class. It's why I'm there. It's why they're there. The most important thing that I can teach them is to crave more knowledge, more understanding.

I've just started reading The Audacity of Hope, and it's challenging me and affirming my support for Obama. His discussion of the Constitution is just one of the sections I've found compelling:

What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery--its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights--are designed to force us into a conversation, a "deliberative democracy" in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our mostives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgements are at once legitimate and highly fallible.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the book and highly recommend it everyone.
It's been a busy week! Follow me below the jump for the news roundup.

Mike DeWine is running a lying ad and now I've got that old Eagles song running through my mind...

Did she get tired or did she just get lazy?
she's so far gone she feels just like a fool
My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things
You set it up so well, so carefully
Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things
You're still the same old girl fool you used to be
You can't hide your lyin eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes

Memorial Day has been on my mind since early this year.  We have a war factory hard at work, producing veterans.  They have been thrown into hell.  Some of those veterans will not come home.  The rest will come home changed people.  We cannot change what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I hope that remembering what our loved ones did and had done to them, what war costs individuals and families, will help us to remember that asking for this sacrifice should never come lightly to a country or its leaders.

I spent my first two years of college at a private Christian school in West Texas.  Not just any Christian school-- it was a Church of Christ school.  The Churches of Christ, as opposed to the quite forward thinking United Churches of Christ, think that the Southern Baptist Convention is run by a bunch of hippy liberals.  While I did have some academically challenging and thoughtful courses, for the most part, every negative stereotype of Texas and fundamentalist religion was true in Abilene.