He isn't coming.

No sir.

But he will come tomorrow?

Yes sir.

If you can't tell, I went to see Godot again today. Bill joined me at the theatre and took me to Double Rainbow afterward. The audience was different tonight. The house was *full*. The players were a bit less boisterous -- I can only imagine after playing in Godot for two weeks in a row after five weeks' rehearsals it starts to seep into your bones -- but this production is perhaps only a little bit less physically demanding than your standard Bruce Lee movie. It wasn't any less intense. The pacing and delivery were every bit as dead-on *perfect* as they were last week, the characterizations every bit as crystal clear.

Finally emailed the KUNM news people 'cause I figure now's as good a time as any. They said to get in touch "after the elections are over" and we're inbetween the vote count being over (Friday at 9 PM, under the wire) and getting certified, at which point it *may* (I hope) get called for a recount, which only the "losing" candidate (that would be Attorney General Madrid) can do -- at her expense.

Which is one more fucked-up thing about election law in this state. She's gotta pay for it -- 10% up front -- and then the full amount if she loses in the recount, which will come to over a million dollars. (In 2004, as soon as Election Protection demanded a recount and raised the money needed for it, Secretary of State Vigil-Giron turned around and changed her tune, declaring that the amount needed to pay for the recount was now six times what she had said it would be in the first place. But then there were no paper ballots to recount, so it would not likely have made a difference anyway. Besides which, Election Protection wasn't exclusively allied with the State Democratic Party Machine, and thus the laws are apparently different for them.)

Some states mandate an automatic recount if the margin is within say one or two percent. Clearly we're a "swing" state with major upticket elections (like this one, CD1) being determined by the slimmest possible margins of error -- in this case, four tenths of one percent, or 879 votes. (That's about the same number of seats that were in the D-150 theatre in Seattle where I ran the projectors.)

Jury duty tomorrow. Probably will be there all day. Got plenty of reading and a laptop, so I'm set.

Wrote an email to Governor Richardson Friday evening after I heard he was meeting with Mexico's Shrub, President Select Felipe Calderon:

Dear Governor Richardson,

I hope that when you visit President Elect Calderon you will bring up the hundreds of women, including several US citizens, who have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, and apply any pressure you possibly can for his government to stop these brutal murders and bring the perpetrators of these sickening crimes to justice.

The culture of impunity for those who practice violence against women knows no borders. These kinds of murders seem to be spreading both North into Texas and New Mexico, South into Guatemala, and West into Tijuana.

You stand in a unique position to voice the concerns of your constituents who live in one state on the North side of the border. It is my deepest and most sincere hope that you will do so as forcefully as you possibly can.

Thank you.

Very sincerely,

[Real Name]
[Real Contact Information]

You might be forgiven for thinking that there'd be an email address for him on his website. If there is, I couldn't find it, and had to use his office's ridiculous "contact us!" form. There were two separate, identical webforms: one called "need assistance?" and one called "have an opinion?", and you had to choose which one you wanted to submit. (One, I suppose, goes into the "give them money, buy their votes" pipeline while the other gets put in a trash bin.) So I did the unthinkable and submitted it both ways. After all, I "need assistance" getting the murders solved and stopping them before they spread *farther* into New Mexico than they already have *and* voice the "opinion" that these crimes are "sickening". (Apparently the Mexican officials, along with not a few U.S. Blue Dogs, are of a different opinion, for reasons I cannot pretend to begin to fathom.)

I did get a form-letter reply:

This is to acknoweldge receipt of your message and to advise it has been forwarded for review. Thank you for contacting Governor Bill Richardson.

I have no doubt that six weeks from now, following extensive reviews, long after Richardson has actually met with Calderon, some low-level aide may actually get word that my request is not some sort of threat to national security. Yay me.

Anyone who reads this drivel as obsessively as I write it already knows what I think of Governor Richardson based largely on how he treated Taiwan-born, Texas-educated Dr. Wen Ho Lee (李文和) back when he (Richardson, not Dr. Lee) was Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Democratic Party in the U.S. Congress needed a convenient ethnic Chinese scapegoat to counter National Republican "Democrats are soft on China" ad hominem rhetoric in the midst of Congressional debate on extending "Most Favoured Nation" trade status to China.

Long story short, Dr. Lee was framed, arrested, imprisoned, and held in solitary confinement for 278 days without bail, based on flimsy evidence of "secrets" allegedly stolen from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) regarding the Trident II's Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile's (SLBM) Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) W-88 compact warhead. (The leak was eventually tracked to an unspecified government contractor -- big surprise.) Dr. Lee was subsequently railroaded into plea bargaining guilty to one technical felony count of downloading restricted information, long after it was determined that the sensitive W-88 warhead information obtained by the Chinese government could not possibly have come from him, or even from LANL. (This way back in the happy once-upon-a-time days when LANL was run by the University of California, long before the contract to run the lab was put out to bid and eventually granted to Bechtel.)

Because Dr. Lee is Taiwanese (i.e., sufficiently unlike Louis Freeh or John Deutch to count as "close enough" to mainland Communist Chinese in the eyes of a deeply racist mainstream media that still recycles endless variations on "the yellow menace" with startling regularity), the Clinton Administration (with Richardson at the helm of DOE, which oversees LANL) could make a plausible case in the press, for the time being, that they had at least uncovered (if not foiled) a nefarious Chinese plot to steal nuclear missile secrets, thus substantially blunting Congressional Republican critiques without substantively addressing policy shortfalls in *any* arena.

In short: to Blue Dogs, it was far more expedient to detain "a Chinaman" and wave the fact of his illegal detention as "proof", in the face of detractors, of being "tough on national security" than it was to honestly answer a whole range of unresolved questions regarding decades worth of policy shortfalls, spanning administrations from both major political parties, from Tibet (བོད་, 西藏, 藏区, or 藏區), to inhumane worker conditions, to religious and political repression, let alone the Three Gorges Dam (长江三峡工开发 or 長江三峽工開發) across the Yangtse River (长江 or 長江).

Richardson may not have been the person who put Lee in jail, but it was in his party's short-term political interests to *keep* Dr. Lee in jail until the precise moment that doing so served no further political purpose. Secretary Richardson was complicit in this crime, in that he could have spoken up against the blatant racial profiling involved, but he did not.

Richardson then went on to be elected Governor of New Mexico. He then further went on to become the seventh most popular Governor among his own voting constituents in all U.S. states. Including the crucial -- indeed, election-deciding -- lab workers who vote in his state.

(Personally I think a lot of them voted for Wilson in CD1 even if they voted otherwise straight Democratic party tickets.)

If Governor Richadson can possibly do *anything* to redeem himself in my eyes for his complicity in the illegal detention of Dr. Lee, then pressuring the Mexican Government to solve and stop the femicides is *it*. My hopes, frankly, aren't very high, but it can never hurt to try.

Meanwhile, if you're inclined to sign a petition calling for a Presidential Pardon for Dr. Wen Ho Lee, you might check out http://www.wenholee.org. They're aiming for 30,000 signatures. They've currently got just over 15,000. They've got a long damn way to go.

I also want to contact Attorney General Patricia Madrid to encourage her to demand a recount. But again, I can't do it through email. For a party that makes lots of noise about "accountability", their elected members in office at the state level sure are hard to get a hold of. I have to go offline in order to call one of her several telephone or fax numbers:

(800) 678-1508 (In-State Toll Free)
Albuquerque Phone: (505) 222-9000
Albuquerque Fax: (505) 222-9006
Santa Fe Phone: (505) 827-6060
Santa Fe Fax: (505) 827-6685

Enough rambling from me for one night.