Ohio State 42 The School From Up North 7

Ah yes.

Ohio State rolls over a hopelessly undermanned Michigan squad and all is forgiven. The USC game: forgotten. The PSU loss. Meh. It's odd that this game looked more like a September cupcake game than the actual September cupcakes (where OSU struggled against Youngstown State and Ohio and the like).

It's currently 49-7 in the Penn State - Michigan State game so that little dream of going to the Rose Bowl is pretty much out of the question. Probably won't get a BCS bowl this year, but they'll get something. A little vacation somewhere warm. It won't matter. They beat Michigan. Five years in row. After years of struggling against Michigan, they'll graduate a class of seniors that has never lost to the Wolverines.

And that's all she wrote for another college football season. Go Bucks.

Obama Wins!

• Holy Crap!
• He wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Virginia. An unbelievable sweep.
• 338 and still counting. It's a mandate.
• John McCain's speech was honorable, and as a candidate he was better than his supporters deserved.
• Goodbye Sarah Palin. In four years we'll hardly remember you.
• From the international press, one might think that he's been elected President of the world.
• It's all sinking in now: first African-American president. A lot of people are going to say a lot about the historical moment, but it may be a long, long time before we can understand what it really means.
• As soon as I saw the crowd gathering in Grant Park in Chicago, all my doubts fell away.
• Yes We Can.
• LOLCat version: Yes We Can Has.
  

Obama for President

It's election day and it feels like Christmas. I could not be more excited, and frankly I am rooting for a landslide. I'm hoping that by the time I get home tonight and the first polls close, this thing will already be over. Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida are the states to watch. McCain needs to run the table to win, so one blue square and he's done. I have my doubts about Ohio, but I'm from there and I know how stupid those people can be. On the other hand, I can't remember ever seeing so many Democratic signs in the upper middle class suburbs even in 1992. Meanwhile, when the returns start coming in the from the west, from Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, and California, it will just be affirmation and reaffirmation.

This election means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It's about Bush, and his awful administration. It's about the war in Iraq. It's about Katrina. It's about torture. It's about the culture wars. It's about the Religious Right. It's about anti-intellectualism. It's about faux-Patriotism. It's about every appeal to divisiveness, malice, and pitting the elect us against the preterite them. The possibility of an Obama presidency is a turning away from all these things, a rejection of the resentments and hatreds of the past, the dead-ender's philosophies, and the hope and promise of a better tomorrow. More importantly it restores the notion that America always exists in the future tense. It is not a place or a people, but an idea that we all aspire to. Wherever you came from, whatever your ancestry, your religion, in America, you are a citizen first and foremost.

As a Gen-xer I was raised on the diversity and optimism of Sesame Street and the original Star Trek. There was a spirit of community and opportunity in those shows and in our childhoods that only soured under Reagan and the rise of the Conservative movement. Every utopia became a dystopia. Idealism gave way to cynicism and disenchantment. Under Clinton, we had a brief respite, but in Obama we have the chance to truly turn from fear and again embrace those ideals of community and our shared interconnectedness. Our greatest hopes may yet be possible, in this most improbable of presidents.

Best of luck today to Barack Obama.