It's time to fire up the old blog again, to have a voice, however small, promoting my preferences for the 2008 election.

I'll get right down to it: for the sake of our country, for all that we represent as a nation of laws and as an aspiring democracy, it must be Barack Obama for president in 2008. Not that he is the only one who could save us from this horrendous slide toward corporate fascism, but that he is the only one running for president who can do it.

John McCain has no ideas of his own. He is another mouthpiece for corporate interests, as Bush was. A puppet, stripped of all that made him remotely attractive as a man apart, a man who was not afraid to speak his mind even when it veered from his party's line. That man is gone. What you see now is a hollow man, a panderer, unprincipled and greedy for power. It's shocking what this drive to power can do to good men.

So Barack Obama gets my vote. He has the strength, the intelligence, the values and the vision to lead us back to sanity, to begin to restore what we have lost in the last 7 and 1/2 years. He is not perfect, he is not a god, and he is the first to admit it, but he understands the Constitution and believes in it. That puts him far ahead of any Republican I've heard from recently.

Between now and November, I'll try to show you why Obama is the right choice for America.