Flawless weather today. Bill Clinton gave a pretty okay speech yesterday but it didn't have enough red meat in it for this Democrat with anarchist tendencies. Gimme Al Gore. They say us liberal types are willing to give Kerry a pass right now because we hate Bush so much, and I guess that's true. But even if he's elected—which right now seems like a fair possibility—we are all going to have to work harder for real justice and equity. Clinton said one thing which moved me in his speech: he said that a tiny percentage of our defense budget (he may have said $120 million, which is a droplet in the bucket) would make it possible for the more than 1 billion children who "never darken a schoolhouse door" to go to school. This energized me and made me angry at the same time: why didn't he propose that when he was President? It seems crystal clear to me that the only way to win the war on terror—or more significantly, to break the back of the war metaphor—is to make ourselves more friends in the world. One of the first steps is to stop doing all the bad things we do. But beyond that, a campaign with real financial muscle behind it to build schools, feed the hungry, provide low-interest business loands, and foment genuine self-determination for people would take the wind out of the fundamentalists' sails. Every bomb we drop, every door we kick in creates another terrorist. What is so freaking hard to understand about that.

I didn't even want to talk about politics today, I just wanted to say how terrific the new Magnetic Fields album and Nellie McKay's album are. But of course Nellie's tremendously political. The label on the CD says it all: "a cross between Doris Day and Eminem." Wonderful, funnny, bitterly witty stuff.

It will soon be time for barbecue.