Lu Bauer and David Bright have set up Dennis Kucinich's announcement for tomorrow in Portland next door to MECA at 81 Free Street. Lu and David are good organizers, I know them from the '04 caucus, and Chris Miller's '06 primary challenge to John Baldacci. If we were in Portland I'd take Grace, Sam and Jonah down to the Children's Museum and at closing time pop over to Granny's Burritos for quesadillas, then to MECA to see the student artwork and hit the MECA student store for materials, then meet Dennis and have the same chat MB had with John Edwards early in the '04 cycle in one of JRE's Portsmouth events, about autism, from causation to coping and how early intervention can really succeed (Sam), and not really succeed, or succeed differently (Jonah), and then home to a wind-down video and bed-time reading. Politics for Parents, not just PoAs.

Candidates should know what autism looks like, and should have the rudiments of the fact issues on such subjects as the eligibility under Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (Sam missed it by a month) and biological plausibility and the avoidance of means of proof of causation at the NIH and efficacy of early intervention and non-efficacy of NCLB pseudo-science in special ed and ... A universe larger than Dan Burton and Dave Weldon need to know one boy in 100, and one girl in 200.