You may be wondering, 'Is PunditMom out to lunch?' Well, that IS always possible, but hear me out.

George's father was trying so hard to talk himself into a state of serenity, that in order to achieve it, he had to yell it at the top of his lungs. Repeatedly.

So when I started noticing some similarities with the whole push for Democratic party unity -- Unity NOW! -- I had to wonder whether Obama and Clinton are also working just a teensy bit too hard at it. Did we REALLY need the stage backdrop to say "U N I T Y" in larger than life letters and a massive American flag? If voters don't want to have unity, no amount of stagecraft in Unity, N.H. is going to help.

As Obama and Clinton stood in front of the crowd of thousands, looking so cute in their color-coordinated outfits, I thought they spoke powerfully and eloquently about why the Democratic party needs to move forward, invoking all the right phrases, ideas and soundbites about the future, the need to create an unstoppable force and their two historic attempts at the Presidency.

For all the iconic images, there's still a long way to go. According to an account by Jill Zuckman at The Swamp, two prominent New Hampshire politicians not only missed the Unity event, but are also refusing to jump on the new unity bandwagon:

While Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are trying to rally Democrats in Unity, N.H. ..., James McConaha, a former Clinton administration official, and his wife, Valery Mitchell, a Democratic activist, are working to gather support for the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.

'I think in general both of us felt that this is such an important position, perhaps the most important job in the world that it requires a person who has the experience and the competence to hold it,' McConaha told my friend, Kevin Landrigan with the Nashua Telegraph. 'We just liked Senator McCain for a lot of reasons. In our minds, he is that person.'

As an American, I appreciate this effort by these former opponents to come together in an attempt to work out their differences for the good of the country. It sets an excellent tone of mature leadership - something our country desperately needs. Also, it shows children just how to "play nice" and be respectful and mindful of moving forward when a clear winner has emerged in a competition.

But one Clinton activist is not convinced. A Washington Post story on Friday featured Diane Mantouvalos of JustSayNoDeal.com, a Hillary fan who is working actively to promote the idea of keeping Hillary votes from Obama:

Democratic leaders insist -- and polls indicate -- that the vast majority of Clinton supporters, including women, already have flocked to Obama or eventually will. But the effectiveness of the Internet as an organizing tool for dissent is creating concern and uncertainty about the scope and intensity of those unwilling to fall in line.

...

Mantouvalos, a self-described independent who grew up in Boston and said she nearly always votes Democratic, believes party leaders are underestimating the seriousness of the opposition movement. Using various metrics -- e-mails to JustSayNoDeal.com (125,000), databases of organizations involved with the effort, registrants to and hits on selected protest Web sites -- Mantouvalos estimates the coalition of more than 100 groups represents at least 10 percent of the 18 million voters who backed Hillary Clinton during the primary battle.

So will today's event, billed as the first joint general election rally with Clinton and Obama, be enough to get the unity ball rolling? As Hillary Clinton said in her speech, "Unity is a wonderful feeling." Now she and Obama have to convince all the Democrats to feel it and not just talk about it.

Joanne Bamberger, also known around these parts as PunditMom, is a Contributing Editor for Politics & News. You can also find her at MOMocrats, The Huffington Post and too many other places than she cares to admit!

The setting for Senator Hillary Clinton to say 'goodbye' was lovely. The National Building Museum is one of the grandest settings in Washington, D.C. -- all vaulted ceilings and Italian marble columns. Just exactly the kind of place one would like to make a victory speech, but just as inspiring for a farewell to the troops. The weather? A tad on the steamy side!

Even as Clinton's fans were waiting for her, squeezed shoulder to shoulder inside the grand hall in which she chose to make her departure from the race official, and she was preparing to do what so many have called on her to do for weeks, the cable pundits couldn't help take shots at her sincerity.

"If she stops short of a full-throated endorsement, I wonder whether it's an effort at Clintonian wiggle room," Jonathan Alter said on MSNBC, moments before Clinton's arrival.

There was a serene resignation as Clinton took the stage, no warm-up act preceding her and no introduction. Just Hillary, standing with her family, including her mother. Then the 60-year-old Wellesley girl stood alone to face the crowd and the nation.

"This isn't exactly the party I planned, but I sure like the company!" Hillary proclaimed as she tried to keep the smile on her face for the thousands of acolytes who had waited patiently for her arrival.

Clinton did the obvious -- she thanked her supporters and expressed her gratitude in a poignant and powerful way. And then she uttered the Obama mantra that she knew she had to, "Yes we can!" You know that could not have been easy, yet she did it without choking up and without the least bit of cynicism or snark.

In crafting her efforts to make sure her 18 million fans would join with Obama's voters, Clinton spoke of the country's lost opportunities under George Bush and pondered how different our country would look today if more than three out of the last ten presidents in the past 40 years had been Democrats.

Hillary called strongly and forcefully for her voters to unite behind Obama, as she should have. And she still was able to speak about her passions -- health care for all and making this country a better place for all women by working to get everyone to understand the very real barriers and biases that exist.

Convincing those who supported her to line up behind Obama, especially those who were on board from the very beginning, won't be easy. Many Hillary supporters are still grieving and angry because they feel that the Democratic National Committee tacitly permitted the sexism against Hillary that wasn't always so subtle.

Katherine Seelye of the New York Times and The Caucus blog commented on that theme:

Mrs. Clinton and her aides are known to feel deeply that there was some sexism in this campaign, particularly in the media, and she mentioned it in this speech. She spoke of barriers and biases and not only of equal pay but equal respect. While she urged her supporters not to look back, was she telegraphing that she might take on this subject at some point in a more fulsome way? She obviously feels strongly about this or she would not have brought this up in this, her farewell address as a candidate.

Yet, even in this moment as Hillary steps off the Presidential stage, it is still a victory, according to Marie Wilson, the president and founder of The White House Project, because of how women, and rest of the country, will now view the possibility of women as leaders:

"I am here because of Hillary Clinton."

Over the past few months, that phrase has been repeated to me by hundreds of women you've never met but whose names you may one day recognize. They are this country's next generation of female leaders -- women of all ages and persuasions who have been searching for the means and encouragement to step into positions of leadership in their communities; women of all political affiliations who thank Hillary Clinton for making the impossible finally appear possible.

But will her supporters take Hillary's departing words to heart? As the cliche goes, that remains to be seen.

There is clearly a deep divide between Obama and Clinton supporters that perhaps not even her words -- which the TV pundits acknowledged were the ones she needed to say -- can heal. But Clinton did everything she could in a relatively short speech to send her base back out into the political process to make sure there is not a Republican in the White House in January.

I hope it was enough.

Joanne Bamberger, also known as PunditMom, is a Contributing Editor for Politics & News. You can also find her at MOMocrats and The Huffington Post.

Superdelegates were dropping like flies throughout the day, declaring their fealty to Obama, after being afraid to for months.

And there were two big speeches -- one from Hillary and one from Barack. Yes, McCain made one too, to try to horn in on the air-time, but it wasn't all that.

But Hillary Clinton put on her best game face, and wearing her most radiant royal blue pantsuit, stepped in front of her home state crowd to declare that the Democratic party is the one that counts every vote (read: Florida in 2000), that she's committed to uniting the Democratic party so it can take back the White House in November and that there would be no decision tonight about what her plans would be going forward.

No concession speech was given, even though Obama landed the majority of delegates to take the party's nomination. There were no veiled pleas by Clinton to be the VP candidate (though there are those who say that's what she's working for) and she gave no impassioned speech about what this country stands for, though she did come close when she spoke about the record numbers of voters who have come out to the polls this year.

MSNBC's resident misogynist Chris Matthews said before Hillary's speech, "I don't think she'll disband her army until she gets what she wants." So, Chris, what would that be?

A bigger platform for women's issues and things that families worry about like decent child care and health insurance? Hillary committed to that. That's a nice place to start. She said wants to taking back the White House and that she will continue the fight for universal health care. What's wrong with that?

Hillary may have been a flawed candidate from the start, but her ideas are ones that Obama would do well to pay attention to.

Clinton is still going to be in the Senate and if Obama is ultimately elected President of the United States, he'll need her help -- big time-- with his agenda.

Obama had his night tonight. I suspect Hillary will find a way to have a bigger moment sometime in the next few days before she steps off the presidential stage.

And then it will be time to move on toward Denver.

Joanne is a Contributing Editor for Politics & News. You can also find her political thoughts at PunditMom and MOMocrats.

I know that sounds like a bad joke. But it's no joke and the punch line can only increase the voting angst so many already have.

The presidential primaries are almost over, but that doesn't mean we can stop thinking about voters and the voting process. After all, what if a group of radical, senior-citizen nuns stormed a polling place and demanded to vote with expired ID's?

OK, so the nuns didn't actually storm their Indiana polling place -- shuffle was more like it -- but the voter identification saga continues with octogenarian nuns and teen-aged college students wrongly being turned away from the polls.

Just days after the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Indiana voter ID law that allows citizens to vote only if they have certain types of state-issued ID's, old and young alike were turned away from the polls, even though they were registered and otherwise entitled to case their ballots.

Supposedly, voter identification requirements are about preventing voter fraud. Maybe I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd be willing to bet my retirement account that those nuns weren't a bunch of over-the-hill Hell's Angels trying to crash the 2008 election party. If you're making an argument about procedural integrity, can you really argue with a straight face that the ladies wearing the habits are the ones we need to watch out for?

Sure, as a lawyer, I understand the argument of protecting the system, but it's not the electoral process this law is meant to protect -- it's preserving the GOP's hold on how the process works in the hopes that more Republican votes will count than Democratic ones.

Ally Klimkoski at Everyday Citizen blog writes about the details of other voters, in addition to those nuns, who also were sent packing in Indiana:

19-year old Angela Hiss, a sophomore and computer science major at the University of Notre Dame, was turned away from the [Indiana] polls ... as she attempted to vote in her first election. ... She presented several forms of identification - her school ID, a piece of mail that showed her campus address and an Illinois driver’s license – but was misinformed that she could not vote because she could not show in-state ID. ... Instead, they suggested visiting the local Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain the in-state identification required by Indiana’s newly-upheld law, an endeavor that could take hours, she explained. Furthermore, while the law allows her ten days to obtain the required ID from the DMV, Hiss’s travel plans [did] not give her time. As a result, she said, she [was] not be able to vote in the primary.

As for the poll workers, they also weren't telling people about the provisional ballot option. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes at the Moderate Voice blog has an edgier version of what happened in Indiana:

These nuns, and others like them, who are elderly and, in many ways, are naive about the world, yet very sharp about the ‘other world,’ and yet have dedicated a lifetime to serving day in and day out, who have sacrificed so much, deserve to be treated far more decently than this. Far more. I see the reasons behind [the law] .

But also, there has to be a reasoned application of such a law, so that when one casts huge nets meant to catch the common fish, they do not also catch dolphins ... dolphins are mammals, not fish. Dolphins are disabled when stuck in nets underwater, not allowed to surface.

It makes no sense to deny the innocent their hard-won freedoms whilst trying to entrap the others.

Indiana, for your penance, that’ll be ten Our Fathers, twenty Hail Marys, and a passel of rosaries. And an apology to the sisters from the Governor would be nice, since Mitch Daniels (R) is the one who signed the law to begin with.

Indiana is just the beginning, though. Missouri wants in on this voter-suppression-disguised-as- anti-fraud measure. So does Kansas (and you know it pains me to criticize anything remotely related to the Jayhawks). Plus, there's apparently some mischief afoot in the Sunflower State to get legitimate voters off the rolls before November with a little something called "vote caging," according to Wonkette:

How about if we said that, as head of the Kansas GOP, [Kris Kobach] sent an email to supporters bragging about their successful use of semi-illegal tactics to eliminate Democratic voters from the rolls? Would anyone be surprised at that? Yeah, we didn’t really think so but we wanted to make sure. You know, there are some really nice people in Kansas, but I guess they, too, don’t want to run for office.

For some, the voter ID issue seems innocuous and is the price one ought to pay for participating in a democracy -- hey, if you can't get yourself to the Motor Vehicles Department, then you don't deserve to vote, right?

Maybe that's a fine argument if you're healthy, mobile and have the resources to manage that process. But if there isn't any real evidence of rampant voter fraud, what motivation for these laws could there be -- proposed by Republican heavy state legislatures -- other than to prevent Democrats from casting their ballots and preserve their hold on power?

Now, I have no way of knowing how those little old ladies and young students in Indiana would have voted. But for many, conventional wisdom holds that, historically, those age groups vote more for Democrats than for Republicans.

So what DO you get when you cross that nun with the voting restrictions? It's just not that tough to connect the dots that are there to come to the conclusion that voter ID laws are not what they're cracked up to be and that the punch line is frustrated voters who see politicians trying to rig the system at the expense of our rights as voters.

When she's not here at BlogHer, fulfilling her duties as Contributing Editor for Politics & News, you can find Joanne at her place PunditMom, as well as MOMocrats, The Huffington Post & MomsRising! WHEW, that's a lot of politics!

More registration efforts are about to begin anew to get people ready to vote in the general election in November.

This month at BlogHer we've been trying to talk about voter registration. To be honest, I've had a hard time just focusing on one topic for this post -- there are more efforts afoot to limit and challenge who should be able to vote in the general election. But since I wrote about those efforts on that in an earlier post, I thought a random cruise around the blogopshere to see what people are doing and saying about voting would be interesting.

I couldn't vote in the primaries the year I turned 18 because of my autumn birthday. But I could register for the November general election. Being a political geek early on in life, I was pretty damn excited when that voter registration card came in the mail. (No, I didn't have it laminated or framed!)

So I was excited when I read about efforts underway in Florida to register 16 year olds to vote. Don't call out the election fraud people! Those registering don't actually get to vote until they turn 18, but what a creative idea to cultivate interest in high-schoolers about the process and the responsibilities of our electoral process! (I TOLD you I was a geek!)

More prisoners in Maine & Vermont may be getting to cast ballots for president in the fall. Most states don't allow prisoners to vote, but Maine and Vermont do. So the NAACP and political party officials are kicking off efforts to make sure that those behind bars an exercise a right that most others in prison can't.

Interestingly, while the Democratic National Committee, as well as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are still trying to figure out what to do with the votes case in the Florida primary, Obama is pushing ahead in the Sunshine State with his own GOTV efforts. It strikes me as a little funny that the Obama campaign is pushing hard in Florida when he doesn't want the primary votes to count, but wants them to matter in the November general election. That could leave Florida voters scratching their heads.

When you do register to vote, you might want to think twice about whether you complete the line where you're asked for your e-mail address. According to Adventures in Email Marketing blog, you might, as she did, find yourself the victim of political spam:

I made the mistake of putting down my email (which is optional) last time I voted. Adding my email to my voter registration information was eye-opening, because in the following months, I got about 5 emails from Democratic Party candidates, and multiple emails per candidate. Doing some research and replying to the emails, I asked, “where did you get my email” and they replied with conflicting stories of: “Public records,” and “Don’t worry, these emails aren’t public.” I kid you not.

Of course, maybe it's time to change the whole process and let everyone register AND vote on election day at the polls, according to Jackie Doherty at her blog:

Last November, I was urging a young friend of my son’s to vote in the local elections. Well, he had been away at school and had never gotten around to registering and by that time had missed the cut-off date. Why choose an arbitrary cut-off day that’s weeks before the election (I think it’s 20 days in Mass[achussets]) when technology makes it easy for us to streamline the process and allow people to just show up, register and vote. Seven states, including New Hampshire and Maine, have election day registration. Statistics show an increase in voter turnout in those states: for example, in 2004, four of these (ME, NH, WI and MN) were in the top ten for voter turnout.

So there you have it -- a little tour around the blogosphere to see what bloggers and others are saying about voting and registration now that almost all of the primaries are over.

Do you have any great ideas on how to make this process better?

I've always hated labels, but I've never been able to figure out why our media insist on branding families -- step-sisters, half-brothers, foster children. What is gained by describing families in these terms, other than to divide or to suggest that one type of family relationship is better than another?

For me, families are families. But there is clearly something up with society in terms of wanting or needing to define people by the degree of blood relations they have -- as if not having a genetic connection makes people less of a family.

But the one that really took the Mother's Day cake was this weekend when NBC and Teleflora hosted what I think is an incredibly silly show called, "America's Favorite Mom." Among the various categories was one that was apparently designed to encompass people like me -- a mother by adoption -- as well as other women who are parents of children who are not related to them by blood.

The classy title they came up with?

Non-moms.

It took me a while before I could actually sit down to write this piece because I had to wait for the steam to stop coming out of my ears.

One of the "non-moms/adoptive moms" is described as having a child "of her own" and six "meth babies." Do I even have to start explaining all the ways this is wrong??

While PunditGirl became a part of our family by adoption and not as a result of some of the more fun ways of creating a family, I am not her "adoptive" mom.

I AM HER MOM! Period.

By law and by love, in all ways, I am her mother and that will never change. Even if she is lucky enough to someday find her birth mother -- or as we call her, "China mom" -- I am the one who loves her, cares for her and is legally responsible for her, just as parents of biological children are.

But for some reason, there is rampant yet subtle prejudice in our society against non-biological family relationships. Friends, media and even relatives can't get past calling families like mine something different. As if by calling us "adoptive" families makes biological families better -- read: real.

Don't believe me? Check out what one of my favorite adoption writers, Dawn from this woman's work, has to say about the NBC/Teleflora mom snafu:

Adopted kids — and the adults they grow up into, although in the eyes of the world they’re always adopted children — just aren’t as “real” as people who get to grow up in their families of origin. The only reason non-mom would ever bother me (because honestly I don’t give a damn what people call me) is that it’s indicative of the disrespect that society has about our kids.

Take this a step further -- why is there even a need for a separate mom category? Is it because "adoptive moms" aren't military moms? Or single moms? Or working moms? Or CEO moms? Garden Variety Family blog wonders, at what point we'll stop with the silly categories:

How about a category for artificially inseminated moms, fertility drugged up moms or moms who have had children via embryo sorting/gender selection? Why [does] my route to parenthood need to be aired as something that doesn't make me a mom?

Sure, NBC and Teleflora said they were sorry when the uproar got loud enough -- if you can call what they issued an actual apology:

After closer examination, we can see how this may have been offensive to moms who have adopted children -- moms who are indeed real moms to their children in every sense of the word. In fact, many of us at Teleflora are 'adopting' parents ourselves, including our president and owner.

Insensitivity? That's a pretty big understatement. Stereotypical insult would be more like it.

In an E-mail message to me, Amie at Mamma Loves ... wrote:

My mom is my mom. I have never once qualified her status in my life. She is not my "adopting" mom or my "adoptive" mom or any other BS. SHE IS MY MOM.

And I am my son's mom (even though if we want to be technical I'm his aunt).

This is the most insulting thing I have seen in a LONG time.

I could care less about myself, but for my mom??? I can't pound the keys hard enough or type fast enough to get my anger out.

Those whose families are not impacted by issues of adoption, divorce or extended family members raising children, may find this is hard to understand. But here is the simple truth -- biology is not the only thing that makes a family, so it's time to stop talking about real moms and dads and real families.

There is a need for people to take a step back and shake off the old assumptions and start to believe that our kids are our kids. There are still so many people our family encounters, not that infrequently, who ask the bizarre questions (how much did she cost?), give us 'the look' (Oh, that's so sad you couldn't have "your own" child), or ask my daughter if she knows her "real mom" (uh, that would be ME!)

Perhaps the only way to end this sort of "adoptism" is to start reversing the questions and asking biological families:

"Did you use in vitro to conceive or did you do it the old-fashioned way? Boy, I bet that was expensive?"

"So, how many months did you 'try' and not succeed?"

"Are you sure he's 'your' child? He looks nothing like you?"

You get my drift. This is about so much more than a silly contest hosted by Donny and Marie. This is about how we view families and children and the messages we send as a society to our kids about who has worth and value. The clear message by continuing to make these senseless distinctions is that some kids aren't real or as good as others. You know, there's enough of that in world as it is -- we don't need to divide kids by how they came to be part of their families.

My husband (Mr. PunditMom!) has two daughters from his first marriage. Since PunditGirl joined our family through adoption, she is not related to them by blood. So what do we call them?

Sisters.

Until we can get more people on board with the fact that all families are real families, we will continue to be diminished. And, as Dawn at this woman's work says, as an adult, I can deal with the categories others try to slap on me, but stop telling our kids that they're not part of real families. Because as long as we allow that to happen the message that the world gets is that non-traditional families are second-class, inferior and not worthy of the simple word 'family.'

I'm real. And our daughter is real. PunditGirl is "our own" (even though, as with any second-grader, she'd like to disown us as parents when we embarrass her in public). My family is as real as any other. Real is a lot of things other than sharing genes and a blood type.

Here's the proof:

Joanne, sometimes better known as PunditMom, is a Contributing editor for Politics & News. You can also find her writing about the intersection of motherhood and politics (and adoption!), at her personal blog, PunditMom, and at MOMocrats.