Election day

For about 5 minutes yesterday afternoon, I got to feel like a good mom, and not only that, a good pet owner - both my kids voted, and the vet was pleased to see that my tending to chubby 4-year-old female cats had each lost about a pound in the last year - because as both the cats and my kids think, I am starving them....the cats only, not the kids.

Then I got the panic call from my older son in Milwaukee, scrabbling in the car glove box for the insurance information, because evidently he tapped the rear of another car in rush hour traffic - and despite the great gains made in the national elections (and Rumsfeld just resigned, yeah - I'm betting the war will be over in a year...) there were a bunch of disturbing things here in WI - we passed an amendment to our state constitution, defining marriage as between a man and woman, and even worse, making any other marriage-like arrangements UN-recognized by the state - UW-Madison is already the only big 10 school that doesn't give benefits to domestic partners - the City of Madison does, so it means that the new mean-spirited Attorney General - who has likened abortion to homicide and seems ready to try to prosecute doctors who will perform abortions, and who also seems to think that birth control might be a form of abortion, too - J.B. Van Hollen, is going to spend all his time prosecuting cases that have to do with people trying to get their benefits back, or more likely, institutions trying to take them away ... And there was also an advisory referendum on the ballot, and turns out 56 percent of Wisconsin voters approved reinstating the death penalty - WI has not had it for over 100 years. They must be the people who hit their kids for hitting.