---letting go of a small stash of money which rounds out my contributions to the President for the Primary season. Clint, you didn't weaken my commitment to the President, you strengthened it. And I'm letting go of you as well as some cash which at my age is not all that easy to earn back.

I feel good about my additional contributions to Obama. I feel like the kid in me who spent his last dime at the country fair and came home with empty pockets but with a smile on his face.

Listening today to my obligatory dose of drivel from Rush Limbaugh (weep for Rogie--he listens so you don't have to) I was surprised to hear that we remain a beacon of social mobility.

The proof that your destiny is not written on stone, per Limbaugh, *Paul Ryan's journey from mowing lawns, orphaned as he was at 16, to the nomination for Vice President. (A heartbeat away, blah, blah, blah, etc.).

Deloraine Houle is getting on-the-job training through BUILD, which steers men and women into the building trades. She says, "My grandmother is kind of proud of me - I'm the first girl in my family in carpentry."

"A new inner-city programs, the first of its kind on North America, could see 400 leaky North End rentals get energy retrofits in the next year.

That's 400 down, 79,600 more to go.

This fall, thanks to a tweak in Manitoba Hydro's legislation, two inner-city renovation agencies are hoping to go door to door, block by block, in the William Whyte neighbourhood offering renters thousands of dollars in renovations, effectively for free.

After looking at Romney's Wikipedia page, it's hard to imagine anyone better suited for president, more admirable. A pro-business guy who was friends with the common worker, a Governor who managed the budget while expanding social programs, a very effective business leader who gave back excess bonuses, who stood up for civil rights and against the war.

Why we ended up with Nixon in 1968 instead of Romney should give us pause for thought. Someone who seemed to unite the best of the right and left, an actual compassionate conservative, someone who believed in his people and his community, who raised taxes and expanded the budget to build a bigger, more effective state government.

I’d heard some buzz about the 50 Shades series around the web (let’s be honest, it was Pinterest) but I don’t usually pay much attention to that sort of pop culture so it went ignored by me. That is, until two friends, each unbeknownst to the other, discreetly and with the same mischievous gleam said the same thing to me almost verbatim, “So… I’m reading this book… It’s really bad. You have to read it.”

So I read them. All three. They aren’t exceptionally well written and I don’t know how anyone understood one another, given that everyone was murmuring and whispering all the time, but that’s what I think is interesting about the popularity of this series. My husband commented that “if all it takes is a shitty pulp romance to get women hot and bothered, guys like Pablo Neruda actually put work into this sort of thing, what’s the point?” Romance has been done though. Everyone knows women like romance and men like sex. What everyone doesn’t know, or at least isn’t willing to acknowledge, is that women like sex too. This book is sex.

Paul Ryan and his mother will be touring Florida this weekend and will be visiting the Villages, a large retirement center north of Orlando. I conjured such a Ryan trip to the Villages in a recent blog post here but admit that I completely mis-underestimated the potential leverage of Ryan bringing his mother along for the ride. In contrast to Romney, who shower-sang "America the Beautiful" at the Villages a few weeks ago, Ryan is likely to generate the best T.V. footage of the campaign there.

I've been worried the past couple of days that Ryan, Romney/ Koch might be making some headway on the Medicare attacks. The thing that might have gotten some traction was the linking of Medicare reforms to the dreaded Obamacare. I thought Obama was a little slow on the uptake. But what I didn't realize was that Joe Biden set a trap for Romney who just tee-ed up the ball for Obama to hit out of the park. Biden's faux pas was intended to put Romney on a high and loosen his tongue---because Romney can't keep his mouth shut. Especially when it comes to embellishing his argument.