From CNN:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Open Letter to Americans.

Yet another -- maybe.

Another servicemember with ties to New Mexico may -- or may not -- be dead. There are conflicting reports.

U.S. F-16 goes down in Iraq

Just for fun.

For a change here's a post about cars. Specifically the Ford Nucleon, from Defense Tech:

The "Deadlies": Atomic Automobile

Jury duty tomorrow.

Another day with superfast internet access. Hooray! I can actually look at pictures and more than one website at a time.

A not unpleasantly uneventful day today. Mailed claims. Deposited checks. Came home. Called KUNM and will go to their next News Dept. meeting. Came home. Listened to Amy Goodman. Ate leftovers from Texas, cooked potatoes and eggs in lard and somehow made it 24 hours without spending a damn cent.

Weather's changing. From springlike sunny days suddenly we're going cold and may get snow by later this week. Sky went gunmetal gray tonight like it always does once a year, but really late this year.

Beware "the duck".

I don't mean only the unelected lame duck "president" of these United States.

If we fail to stop the war against Iran, we might not be surprised to see the first offensive use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki by the same country that pioneered offensive use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima. What wonders that might do for perceptions of Americans abroad I leave to your fertile imaginations.

Natanz ("Kashan" to Israeli military intelligence) might be taken out by the untested Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) B61-11 (a.k.a. "the Duck"), which replaces the proven unsafe nine-megaton B53.

Nothing seems to beat a known evil like an unknown evil.

Just back.

From El Paso. Somehow going down there is always a bit like stepping into a time bubble. I've been gone for four days and have had little news and no internet access.

Stopped at the Owl Bar on the way down. Took two cats with me, placed one in a good home; the other came back with me. Yowling bloody murder all the way. Both ways. My nerves are shot.

Thanksgiving was nice. Cheryl, my father's freind, and I spoke for maybe an hour about the founding of KPFT 90.1 in Houston. That's the Pacifica station that got firebombed off the air *twice* by the Klan in the late 'sixties, and Cheryl was there for all of it. She spoke of being on air in the control room when bullets came through the plate glass windows among many other fascinating things you wouldn't automatically assume went along with building a radio station. She appreciated the piano rolls from the Mexican Revolution as only a handful of people ever do.

Friday I worked with my mother on clearing out a storage shed full of three generations' worth of crap. It's shocking what we accumulate and don't let go of. I am among the worst at it. There were at least half a dozen boxes marked only with my initials and no way of telling what was in 'em but by opening 'em up. Like comic books and a broken samisen all in one box, with lots of empty space, and other comic books and other musical instruments in other boxes besides. A lot of just complete and total crap, some good stuff (like the samisen) but it was in no sort of order whatsoever. Brought back a bunch of crap I might sell on ebay if ever I get my act that far together.

Saturday did much the same, then had a leftover dinner with a bunch of people who couldn't make it for thanksgiving. My mother made leftover turkey into mole and it was delicious, as were the beans and rice, which she made fresh. Met an amazing lady from Paso del Sur, who's working hard with that organization to stop an illegal "development" plan that would demolish something like 123 acres of low-income housing in the historic Segundo Barrio to put in a phony "mercado" for tourists.

Meanwhile the executive director of La Fe Clinic, who makes roughly a quarter of a million dollars every year running the only free clinic of its kind in the region (which now operates with *one* doctor and *no* running hot water), stands firmly behind the City plan to demolish the neighbourhood the clinic has under past directors served admirably well. (Good luck to all El Paso queers at getting free and anonymous HIV tests.)

This isn't anything new, sadly, there's a long history of developer-backed politicians trying to demolish entire neighbourhoods for the sake of "economic development". This lady was one of the people who met privately with Subcomondante Marcos when he visited Juarez last month, and she gave me a firsthand account of the meeting.

Speaking of economic development, I'm sorry to report that in El Paso, Texas, a city somewhere between 80 and 90% hispanic, it is now *impossible* to get decent corn tortillas without crossing into Mexico. (Even JR Produce down on Montana, which makes their own, has their tortillas pumped so full of preservatives that it just isn't funny.) Big 8, which *was* the only supermarket chain left standing (aside from Albertson's), just got bought out by Lowe's, which operates up here and is as notorious here as Big 8 was down there for tenth-rate goods and smelling like garbage the minute you walk in the door. Blue Sage, which *was* trying to start up a new regional chain in old Lomart locations, went out of business so fast it made peoples' heads spin. To buy a Boston Butt we had to go clear across town to Coronado Prime Meats only to find out they didn't have any, and then clear across town in the other direction to JR Produce which doesn't sell pork. We finally settled on making a brisket. It was delicious, but cost my mother a small fortune, and wasn't the carnitas she had planned to make.

If anyone wants to know what globalization looks like, on the ground, they couldn't do much better than to visit El Paso for about a week, complete with a foray or two into Juarez. If they dare. And heaven help us all the day the supermarket supply chain gets screwed up for whatever reason.

Speaking of Juarez: anyone who thinks the femicides are anything *but* an international problem, I quote at length from an "El Paso Times" article my mother saved a clipping of for me:

MISSING ARIZONA GIRL LINKED TO JUAREZ CASE
By Louie Gilot
El Paso Times, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006

The teenage girl who surfaced in Juarez last week claiming that she had been kidnapped from her home in Arizona, taken to Juarez and sold into prostitution may be a 14-year old Eloy, Ariz. girl who was reported missing Sunday, Eloy police said.

In a news release, Eloy police said the girl was reported to have been taken by two men who allegedly forced entry into her home.

One of the men has been identified as Jose Garcia, also known as Jesus Ramirez, 20, who lived nearby.

"The subject had shown an interest in the victim," the news release said.

"He had made a statement that he wanted to take her back to Mexico. Evidence of correspondence between the two has been located at his house."

Garcia's whereabouts were unknown Tuesday. He was described as 5 feet tall and weighing 140 pounds. His ties to Juarez were not disclosed.

No information was available about the second alleged kidnapper.

An Amber Alert was issued Sunday, police and news media reported. The FBI in Arizona did not return calls for comment.

Juarez police reported last Friday that an Arizona girl escaped from her captors and told them she had spent five days of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of five men.

Police said a physical and psychological examination of the girl seemed to confirm her story.

So now all the Juarez police have to do is pull in anyone named Jose Garcia or Jose Ramirez (I think I've known a dozen such named people in my life), torture 'em into confessing to a hundred unrelated crimes, and whatever pressure there is from the North will diminish for them to do *anything*.

One more.

Albuquerque's West Mesa High School graduate Army Sgt. Eric Vizcaino is now the 26th servicemember from the state of New Mexico to die in Iraq.

He leaves behind a wife and 2-year old daughter. He was 21 years old. A memorial service is scheduled at San Felipe de Neri in Old Town for Sunday.

Local group forming . . .

. . . to oppose a US war against Iran.

Stop the War Machine is the group that called the initial meeting. We're talking about demonstrations and teach-ins in something like a two month timeframe, which is to say, hopefully *before* diplomacy breaks down under the weight of US sabotage and/or noncoöperation, but giving us sufficient time to do something *much* bigger than gather a handful of people holding signs across from Frontier Restaurant.

The signing statement we agreed to after two and a half hours of back-and-forth discussion reads as follows:

As concerned New Mexico citizens and organizations, we oppose a US war against Iran.

It's crafted to be just as broad and inclusive as possible. It doesn't have anything remotely to do with Israel or Syria or Iraq or nuclear weapons. Lots of time was spent on whether we were "against war" or "for peace". (Everyone who works at the labs is "for peace", you know.)

It's a good mission statement, saying what needs to be said. That is all. It is very focused. (Unlike my writing.) If anyone wants to attend the next meeting it will be in early December and you can either contact me or find out from the Stop the War Machine website.

Seymour Hersh has an article I hear is excellent in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the subject of Iran, but it's not online yet.

There are, however, two other fine articles by him online now:

The Coming Wars (17.1.6)
The Iran Plans (8.4.6)

If you only read one, read "The Iran Plans".

It's over -- or is it?

Yeah, it's over. For now.

Citing the potentially prohibitive cost of paying for a recount which could conceivably go either way, Patricia Madrid conceded the CD1 race to five-time incumbent Republican Heather Wilson this morning. Why?

Because it "might have" cost too much. And *this* from the person we supported for opposing the person who supported war against Iraq on the current administration's LIE that Mr. Hussein "might have" had some sort of weapons of mass destruction at his disposal (not counting the chemicals Citizen Rumsfeld smilingly sold to him when we briefly got seriously scared of Ayatollah Khmomeini back in the days of the Iran-Iraq war, of course).

Not that I'm unaccustomed to it at this point, but I am sorely disappointed. I had to hold my nose to vote for her. Not very much, but just enough that now I feel betrayed. Again. By Democrats. Again.

Voting is an excercise in applied existentialism, or, if you prefer, in Prasangika Madhyamikha Buddhism. First noble truth: voting is suffering, suffering is voting, voting is no other than suffering, suffering is no other than voting, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.

But behold: those with a generation or two's statistics suggest that each generation rebels against their parents' generation. Both of my parents' generations saw Democrats craft the New Deal, lift the country from Economic Depression, win the biggest war ever, *and* enact the most sweeping Labour Rights, Civil Rights, and Voting Rights reforms in our nation's history. My own father (arguably) did as much as any other single person to desegregate the faculty of the largest State University in the Nation. Much as we might have disliked our parents' generations' party for whatever smaller (if not insignificant) reasons, they did a hell of a lot of just downright GREAT things in the making of this nation, historically (even if they had to steal a bunch of Socialist and even Communist Party planks over time to do it all, while blithely murdering Japanese civilians beneath mushroom clouds, and what have you).

*That's* what our parents' Democratic Party did, and our distaste for our own generation's Democratic Party is no prebubescent reaction against authority. We know perfectly well what our forbears did, and troubled and conditional though our respect of it may be, we *do* respect it. In short, you've got some big damn shoes to fill, and so far, you (Blue Dogs, fuck you) have failed, and failed, and failed, and failed, and failed.

We *are* the two percent. We *won't* stop voting. Learn that, and you may win an important election one of these days. Sooner or later. Maybe.

What decided me in Madrid's favour in this race was what I took to be her principled opposition to the war. Yes, even dedicated Independents and Greens can be hoodwinked. But as Lincoln said, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." (Unlike Governor Bush we do know the actual quote.)

You should have seen that second (and only televised) CD1 debate. It was a total train wreck. I have *no* doubt that debate coaches in high schools all around the state taped it for their students, it proved *so* perfect an example of one debater doing almost everything right while the other did almost everything wrong, regardless of the actual issues at stake. It was alomost purely about style and almost not at all about issues. Wilson looked good, even when she flat refused to answer tough questions about substantive issues. Madrid broke down in tears behind the podium, even when answering "soft" questions halfway honestly -- or worse yet, bumbled around endlessly in details about details surrounding the State Treasurer's criminal corruption case that 99% of viewers knew *nothing* about.

Meanwhile the only candidate opposing the war in Iraq in this race *also* expressed support for unproven "Star Wars" missile defence, in such a way she sounded downright disingenuous to *everyone* who might be interested in either issue for very different (and very often overlapping) reasons. (They're not that dumb at the Owl Bar in San Antonio, too bad you couldn't take the time to go down there, or hell, show up to the debate at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, which I *know* lost you a bunch of native votes in the four Counties surrounding Bernalillo where your opponent won, hands-down.)

Hoping to shave a vote or two away from Wilson among labworkers and their families, I guess. Play the swing all you want, you will lose. If I'd been a labworker smart enough to split atoms -- or hell, a labworker smart enough to sweep up split atoms from the floor -- I sure would have been smart enough to know when I was being shamelessly pandered to, even if I *did* support Star Wars.

Normally I'd have voted a blank ballot. I seriously thought Madrid might barely squeak by. And we're down to 874 votes deciding elections where I live now, and given what I went through in 2004, the prospect of being "the" decisive vote is just a little bit too close for comfort. (Not that it changes how I actually vote.) I dare say her concession of the race makes me *more* likely to vote blank ballots in hot upticket races from now on when there's no third party candidate. Well done, indeed!

Then again we do, at least, have secret ballots. (Unless, of course, you're disabled, and failed to get your vote counted by voting on an Automark machine.)

The good news -- yay for me -- is I maintain my absolutely spotless voting record of picking LOSERS in upticket races.

NADER 2000!

My vote doesn't mean shit and I know it. But you *will* have to kill me to stop me from voting.

In her concession speech, Ms. Madrid said if only one person in each precinct had voted for her who voted for Wilson, she would have won.

SHAME ON YOU. This is called "blaming the victim". As Attorney General I should have hoped you would have known how that worked. *All* voters lose when we *can* have no confidence in our electoral system. I could as easily say "had you debated *just* badly enough to not lose one more vote per precinct you might have won". I'm not saying that, though, because it's odious to do so.

And I guess we'll never know whether the ballots were accurately (let alone fairly) counted or not. Yep. Back to Tammany, folks.

And what happened to all those well-funded lobbying organizations that paid top dollar for people willing to go from door to door? Did any of them offer to help support the cost of a recount under New Mexico's unfair election law? (It ain't rhetorical, I *really* want to know! Like NOW. Before I give 'em *any* money. EQNM? Anyone? Hell, did you ever go "mop up" in Precinct 150? Or did you just waste money further harassing the unfortunate over-canvassed voters in Nob Hill?)

The State-wide Democratic Party Chair said something about maybe paying from party coffers for a random 2% district-wide recount (which Democratic Secretary of State Vigil-Giron *refused* to allow to happen Statewide as a fully funded independent audit for reasons she never explained) which might, what -- change the results? I doubt it now.

Ms. Madrid, thank you for holding out this long, but in the long run you rolled over like a little puppy -- just like Mr. Kerry did, and Mr. Gore behind him, citing the same bullshit reason: not wanting to be "divisive".

Your concession bodes about as well for this narrow Democratic Congress as Gore's ultimate concession (in the face of an extraconstitutional Supreme Court decision) bade for a Bush administration back in 2000. And look where we are now.

Fuck that! Elections are *supposed* to be competitive and hotly contested! And neither you nor Gore rolled over to get rubbed in the belly, you just rolled over to get your guts rolled out across the highway by a KBR Transport of empty trucks on its way to being kidnapped by insurgents/police forces/whoever at a phony checkpoint. Well done, indeed!

This shit ain't magnanimity, it's cowardice.

Being a political candidate for peace does not mean that you link arms with people in sackcloth and ashes around Ashley Pond Pond for a rousing round of "Kum-Ba-Yah" (though nothing keeps you from it, if you're not afraid of detractors). It means you fight like dogs in the electoral sphere to end a war you *know* to be illegal, unjust, and immoral, while fighting to hold those responsible for it accountable under US *and* International Law.

Shame on you, Ms. Madrid, for falling for the lie that being for peace means you are weak. You do us all a grave disservice by playing the stereotype. Shame on myself for having voted for you when I *knew* better within my heart of hearts.

So, incidentally, does Representative Wilson fail us. But at least she never *lied* about what she was doing. She just never responds to her constituents.

Too bad money means more to both Rebpublicans *and* Democrats than the integrity of our elections.

If it be possible . . .

. . . to get bored with all the coffee I can drink and fast wireless access I will find out today.

Figured out how to contact the Madrid campaign, which I think isn't the same thing as her office. I think. I hope. I wouldn't bet on it. But there you have it. Elected officials in this state love to give you webforms rather than email addresses.

Huh. Tried to click a web clip in gmail to goveg.com to read about why I shouldn't eat pork and the page came up blocked. This may prove more interesting for what I can't access than for what I can.

In the meantime I guess I'll just putter around online 'til something captures my interest.

My gawd "Ask Yahoo" sure is dumb. They don't know the difference between an etymologist and an entymologist.

Neat. This is like high school. They're calling roll.

Oh man. Two words: Google Earth.

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.

One final smartass remark:

The New Mexico Secretary of State's Official Unoffical statewide vote tally website's badly miscoded header very clearly reads:

"State of New Mexico: Election Results Reporting Application"

Thus the official unofficial election results vote tally website for the State of New Mexico under Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Gion may be fairly referred to in perpetuity by the official unofficial acronym: "ERRA".

Which I'll be damned if it doesn't sound just a teensy weensy itsy little bit like hip-hop for "error".

Results?

The vote tally for CD1 was legally required to have been done and certified by 9 PM tonight.

Not that the results are going to be any great surprise: Wilson will narrowly "win" and Madrid will contest the results, demanding a recount -- assuming she's got half the balls now that she did when she dared piss off certain key constituencies by halting same-sex marriages in Sandoval County in the super-narrow-minded name of "letter of the law" not actually written into any law.

No reason she should worry about that, though, seeing as her same-party cronies in the Secretary of State's and County Clerk's Offices will by now have had ten full days to manufacture a slim electoral majority for her, during which time most of her queer supporters will have drowned their sorrows in the bars, only to get selectively raided and jailed (not now maybe, but wait 'til next summer) by homophobe Jim Plagens (Deputy Director of the Special Investigations Division within the NM Department of Public Safety).

Yeah, so you got our support, but only to a point. Too bad for you I couldn't bother myself to go canvassing another day for you, which might just have turned out those precious votes you absolutely needed (Precinct 150, anyone?). Your mistake, not mine, elected official. Continue failing to capture our imaginations and you will continue to fail to win elections. Period. Your note in history, if you have one, which is doubtful, will be that you failed to unseat a member of the party in the seat it has controlled since its creation in 1968. Welcome to history, where you ain't nothin' but a reference to a cross-referenced footnote. If that.

The Secretary of State's Official Unofficial Vote Tally page won't load.

Imagine that.

I guess votes only count in this state if you've got broadband access.

So when I am at work, I am a fully empowered citizen, even if I'm being paid specifically to wory about anything but vote tallies. But the minute I clock out, the same minute I can't lay claim to the latest vote tallies, I ain't worth shit.

Then again I could tune in to KUNM, but the music hosts at this hour are no more likely to give election results than the newsreaders are likely to play a really incredible one-of-a-kind cut from some 40-year old vinyl pressing they found buried deep in someone's personal archive.

Ah, the joys of public radio in a world where no one else broadcasts the news.

Here are the official unofficial statewide results as of 11/17/2006 9:52:07 PM from Secretary of State Vigil Giron's website:

UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE - DISTRICT 1
PATRICIA A. MADRID Democratic 105037 49.8%
HEATHER A. WILSON Republican 105916 50.2%

According to my calculations, 105916 - 105037 = 879 votes to win, out of 210,953 total votes.

The numbers were just updated, with the same exact figures for CD1, at 10:08:46 PM.

And again, at 10:25:25 PM.

And again, at 10:42:05 PM.

And again, at 10:58:44 PM.

And again, at 11:15:24 PM.

Amazing how Secretary of State Vigil-Giron's website goes without update for days on end, then suddenly all the counts are settled right at the moment they're required to be settled under law while being "updated" with what appears to be no new information repeatedly late into the night. A person might be forgiven for thinking that the counters were instructed to give up.

With 22 of 33 Counties reporting. Not that that number means anything, I suppose. After all it's probably just indians and farmers and hippies out there, wherever, I suppose. Not the important people whose votes really count.

22 of 33 Counties reporting, but that's the final tally, and if you don't like it, you can take it to the Mayordomo I suppose.

Anyone up for recounts?

Tweed for Grand Sachem!

Vote the Tammany Tiger!

Nader 2000!

Nader/Camejo 2004!

And from the NY Times.

Iraq is starting to look more and more like Juarez, what with the same police and military officials selectively "solving" the abductions that they orchestrate:

Iraq issues Warrant for Arrest of Sunni Cleric

Enough. I'm going home now. This DSL connection is addictive. It's unthinkable that I could do this "rapid fire" type of reading and posting from home.

Meanwhile, from NPR:

Senate Approves Nuclear Deal with India

Two news stories.

Both from the International Herald Tribune, while I goof off, waiting on some *very* screwball DPLs to get formatted:

Guantanamo detainees routinely denied witnesses, evidence in hearings, report finds

More U.S. Marines are headed to Iraq's violent Anbar province

Hunting and gathering.

Whenever I get it into my head that I'm gonna stop smoking ("no, really, this time", every time), which is about two or three times a week at this point, I *have to* break my familiar daily routine. (Maybe Jury Duty'll help keep me just a little bit off-kilter.) I always leave work in time to listen closely to Democracy Now at four, and that's the one thing that won't change, no matter what. (The listening, not the leaving work. Bill even set me up a radio so I can listen when we're running late on this or that. But Amy Goodman gets my *full* attention, every day, no matter what happens, and even entering charges in silence is too much a distraction.)

Then come five it's time for NPR's All (riiight) Things Considered. If heaven help me I've heard about enough from them about the oh-so-fascinating takeover of Delta Airlines or whatever else I really truly do not give half a rat's ass about, that's when I start to slip into the old habitual routine: go to the Pueblo Smoke Shop and the guy will have my pack of Smokin' Joes before I've even hit the door. All it takes is one story that loses my interest. If I'm ever on oxygen 24/7 I might sue NPR for making me smoke by repeatedly failing to capture my imagination.

But I smoked all day at work today and I *don't* like the way I feel when I smoke! The problem is I get *better* and *feel* myself get better for some days in a row whenever I quit and then figure "oh what the hell one won't hurt me" and then I'm surrounded by filth yet again and *reacting* to everything instead of *responding* to *anything*. It's all tied in together, somehow.

Last week I broke the routine by going to see Godot at the Vortex (if you haven't read about that, you simply *must* go and see it before it closes) and cleaning up my kitchen. It's a stupid little matter of having just a tiny bit of discipline and a fair bit of fearlessness. I think I'm going back to see Godot again.

Finding something *different* to do each day gets scarier the older I get. When I was 22 one time after drumming downtown I walked with a freind into Juarez and back. Didn't spend a penny. Just always wanted to see what Juarez was like at night, since that seems to be how most Americans imagine or remember it. It was insane. I'd *never* do something like that now. Or I used to drive *very* far, *very* fast in the night -- like halfway to Carlsbad, just to get a good view of the stars. Or decide at the last minute that I absolutely need to be in Los Alamos by 9 AM the following morning.

Those days may not be over, but for the most part, those aren't the sort of things I can plan for.

When I start thinking "wouldn't a plume of acrid smoke be lovely in this light", I'm likelier to run to the Smoke Shop than anyplace else, really, even though I'd much prefer do almost anything else, period. It is familiar. It is comfortable. It is insane, filthy, and suicidal, too; but all that matters when I do it is that it *isn't* challenging.

So today, once again, rather than go buy cigarettes, I shop like a Mexican. It's been too long. When I don't have basic foods in the house I'm not right.

Started off at the Hi-Lo Market on Fourth just South of Candelaria. That's the best place to get Carne Adobada for cooking at home that I know of. Not that I've tried all that many different kinds, maybe half a dozen or so, and they're *all* different, and there are still more places to get it that I've never tried than there are those I have. I get three pounds, it comes to $8.05, and it'll feed me for three days. It's cooking now, smelling downright divine. Well, that's a habit I could do well to get into. As long as I get restless and feel I "have to" go out and buy something it's a damn sight better to buy this than cigarettes.

But then I needed tortillas. I was unusually focused on precisely what I needed from where today. My mother shops the same way in El Paso and she calls it "hunting and gathering" because it involves going well out of your way for that *one* thing that's *right*. It's how we've come over the years to do most of our shopping since all the supermarkets -- yes, all of them -- closed down in El Paso, eventually leaving only Albertson's: a total monopoly.

Of course these little Mexican stores are really the same way her mother shopped, too, and it's a model that works. Very decentralized, and largely (if not totally) local. Even if the cheese lady wasn't there today yes it was a disappointment but you still got five out of six other things you needed and you wouldn't starve like you very well might if you depend exclusively on supermarket distribution chains trucking or even flying in fresh produce.

It's how we shopped when we went into Juarez once a month: we get produce from that vendor at this stall at the market, meat from the butcher across the street, tortillas from the tortilleria with the ancient squealing machines across from the butcher, and something else I forget a few blocks away. We didn't buy tourist ware and we didn't go to Juarez to get drunk. We went there to buy food. We knew where it came from and built relationships with vendors that went back at least three generations.

That's not an option for me, here, but I know damn well where I'm welcome, and I'm willing to go well out of my way to give those businesses my hard-earned cash. For me, it's Rio Grande Fruits and Vegetables on Isleta Boulevard. All the others have something or else I need or want but Rio Grande is the Mecca for my Mexican food shopping. It's the end-point of my winding excursions. (Going way down South to Quality Baits for chicken eggs is a whole different kind of thing.)

So for a change, instead of getting Tortillas La Poblana at Rio Grande, I go straight to the Tortilleria La Poblana on Old Coors half a block South of Central. Amazing place! The tortillas are fresher, to begin with. They've got that *perfect* pliability. They also have some other limited groceries, but what the BEST thing was they had a Los Alamos sectional glassed-in bookcase, exactly like mine, which had been painted white, but FILLED with piloncillo. GOOD DARK piloncillo. Talking the closer to blackstrap, the better. Everyplace else I've seen it here it's been a sickly blond. NOW I can *finally* continue canning chipotles. I only stopped because right when I got the recipe and canning technique *down*, exactly then, I ran out of sugar! *This* is why we hoard Mexican sugar like gold.

Then to Nice 'n' Fresh next to Samon's Electrical for one thing only: Flour Tortillas. The amazing Mission ones (not the nasty dense and slimy shiny burned and smooth whitebread "Mission" brand all over the US, these are *local*). I fed some to ZzigZzag (forgive me if I miscapitalize) when he visited because I needed a nonobtrusive quality carrier to showcase the Salsa Hernandez I'd brought from El Paso, and to my horror I think they have lard in them, even though it says nothing on the package about it. (I persoanlly am getting very good at cooking with lard, but he's vegetarian, and it wasn't my intent to trick him. I had never tried them before, I don't think.)

Why the suspicion? Because of the precise way they bubble almost microscopically when reheated from smallest to largest until blowing up the entire tortilla like a cloud in a truly random scatter (very rare) while being thin enough to see through yet strong enough to stretch *around* whatever's filling your burrito without breaking, even when reheated on iron. Also because of the specific way the bubbles "pop" without adhering to unlubricated iron, as well as the fact that the half-millimetre or smaller pop burns do *not* readily conjoin, which would serve to dry the tortilla, making it brittle, as is *far* more common, even among the very best. My fingers do not lie.

Then down Old Coors to Bridge to Isleta. I've *finally* figured out that's a different way to get there. And down to Rio Grande Fruits and Vegetables.

They're out of Queso Menonita. I ask if it's forever or just now and the young woman tells me it's just now. I say that's why I come here, 'cause it's a big big big part of why I do. The message is conveyed. I miss my cheese! But I get six avocados and walk out happy regardless. One rule: when you value a particular business enough to go out of your way you never leave completely emptyhanded.

Not having the cheese I'd set out for put me in a bad frame of mind, the sort of frame of mind where if you look long enough at the space where it was the last time you came down it might appear. But the chance of finding it elsewhere (no chance) led me to discover Carniceria La Especial. I was too crushed at not having my Menonita. I bought some yummy looking agave honey candy since I couldn't be unfaithful to the Mennonite. The good news is they have an excellent meat and cheese counter and are open 'til eight. They also have the flour tortillas I like. They have a small selection of good fresh fruits and vegetables and have Felix nopales from El Paso. I don't know how, but they're fresh. Nice 'n' Fresh, sorry, but you're history.

Then to Elotes Holguin, outside the panaderia next to La Poblana. This is the last place I know you can get corn on a stick from a cart. Today the lady was out of sticks so she was doing it in styrofoam cups, which is how it's more commonly done these days. I wouldn't normally have gotten anything but watching her was like watching the priest at the altar. So much love and focus going into the preparation of each and every cup, layering in corn with just the right amount of juice, margerine, cheese, corn, margerine, chile, chese, lime and so forth I *knew* it would be foolish to pass up. I adore her.

The whole excursion cost me 22 dollars and I've got food enough to last a week.

Common Law forever!

The orientation is over.

She -- the lady in charge of Jury Orientation whose name I forget, 'cause they're giving us a lot of information all at once -- is calling people up by group number to get parking passes and proof that they came and all such. Since my name wasn't on the list when I walked in I got tacked on to the very tail end of the next to last group. They save the best for last, baby.

This is a solid two week commitment. And there ain't no way I am gettin' out of it! Not that I really want to, even though, poor me, I might have to scramble just a bit to get claims out or make it down to El Paso for Thanksgiving or what have you. Not that any of that matters at all compared to my just showing up to do the *one* measly civic duty enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

I have a phone number to call once a day to see whether or not my group is set to come in the next day, at which point we'll go down to wait 'til we're needed, then maybe get called up to whatever courtroom, and then finally go through voir dire.

For the entire two weeks, they're saying I'll probably get called in three or four times (based on averages) and *might* even get to sit on more than one jury for trial. It's a court of limited jurisdiction, so the 19 judges only try misdemeanours and civil cases up to $10,000.00. Very bread-and-butter, basic stuff.

Nice place to start! No Grand Juries or three-year Enron trials here, thank gawd. No one's gonna get sentenced to die based on my actions. It's the busiest Court in the State, for they handle precisely the day-to-day matters. Mostly DWI, domestic abuse, and in civil cases, landlord/tenant disputes and the like.

They have this whole amazing (some might say crazy) system because the judges are the next to last to know whether a defendant wants a trial by jury or not. This thing is written into law to protect the accused. It's absolutely not some random bureaucratic inefficiency. And thus the jurors are the very last to know. That's why there's all this waiting. It's not always determined months in advance as I always thought it was. They *have to* keep a viable pool of prospective jurors on hand at all times if the dockets are to be gone through without creating massive gridlock, since whatever's unresolved on one day's docket gets pushed off until the next. It's not a perfect system, maybe, but I'd bet my money it produces better results than death squads, like in Juarez, Colombia, Iraq, or wherever else there's no standing tradition of Common Law, perhaps the one good thing English colonialists brought in their wake.

If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with Henry II. And if you fail to get in touch with him, you might write your Representatives and Senators in Congess to recommend they undo the Assize of Clarendon (which incidentally helped to lay the legal groundwork for the separation of Church and State) just as glibly as they happily undid the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus this last congressional session. But then maybe some of my readers *want* Mr. Rumsfeld and Governor Bush to have access to Compurgation as defence, if and when they ever face their accusers in the International Criminal Court. I'm sure there are people out there who believe the Fourth Lateran Council did something downright haram when it forbade clergy from participating in trial by ordeal.

Neat!

No one seems to want to be here but I do not care. My eyes and ears are wide open. I feel like I've been drafted, but into a war I actually want to be a part of -- go figure that one out.

Hulloo from the Jury lounge.

People are filing in now.

Never thought I'd be blogging from here.

I think today's just the orientation and primary qualification. We'll see.

The lounge is very nicely appointed. Great view, and I've got the best seat in the house, right by the window. People complaining about how far away they live, so lucky me, I'm practically down the street.

The security guy took my handcuff key I got from Alex when I worked at Foxes. Fine with me, it was a sort of joke to begin with,; nah, I don't need it back, and it's not worth putting in a gun locker.

Did get freaked out when I went to go through the metal detector and they sent me to the law enforcement entrance. I buzzed in and they unlocked the door into a little closet with gun lockers and no way out. Heh. That's one room I'd just as soon stay out of.

Lucky for me an escort came shortly thereafter so my claustrophobia was relatively short-lived.

About an hour . . .

. . . before I go to Jury Duty. Finished up what I could at work and left early. Now I am almost ready.

Never been called up for it before. About time. I'm actually looking forward to it. I'd love to get picked to sit on a jury but know it isn't likely. And if I'm not, I hope it at least gets wrapped up in a fairly timely manner.

At Flying Star downtown to get fed and pampered just a bit before I go. The people at the table behind me are talking about "my whole case is built on the letter of understanding". At the next booth over people are talking about the provisional ballots. Wonder if I'm tainting myself just by being here. Heh.

The courthouse doesn't allow cellphones but does allow laptops and they say they have wireless internet in the Jury Room. Hmm. Still haven't figured that one out.

In election updates, the faulty ADA machines are Automarks, not Autovotes. Meanwhile provisionals are getting counted and the Secretary of State's website continues to use fuzzy math in tabulating votes. Wilson's 1487 vote lead shrank to a 1472 vote lead this morning but is shown a tenth of a percentage point ahead of where she was when the lead was 1487. A recount is almost certain. Too bad Vigil-Giron refused to allow the random 2% audit to go forward, which could have saved the state the time and expense of a recount.

The nuclear meth lab story . . .

. . . just keeps getting more interesting:

From One Lab to Another

Say the right thing.

Looks like disabled people's votes won't be getting counted in this election. At least not (irony, anyone?) anywhere the paper ballot system was implemented.

So catching up: Vladimir declares victory last Friday morning (complete with Champagne before 7 AM) while maintaining a statewide margin of 1487 votes (less than half a percentage point) while Estragon refuses to give in even though he needs 68% of *all* the uncounted provisional ballots to win (with the percent he needs going higher with each additional ballot that gets discounted). Meanwhile Pozzo takes Lucky to the fair in Washington to sell him, leaving Didi and Gogo to fight over turnips and carrots on their own.

How's that for a convoluted and pretentious analogy? Yeah, "Godot" at The Vortex is *that* great a play. I could make an analogy between it and current events no matter what was going on. It's just that universal. (Closes 3 December. Call 247-8600 now for Fridy-Sunday evening reservations. I have no doubt it'll be a different play entirely next time I see it.)

Anyhow. When electioneering...

The printer's taking the blame for the insufficient number of ballots delivered to Precincts 603 and 57. Not the County Clerk or Secretary of State, of course not, for they can do no wrong. Just another government contract gone haywire, hmm, imagine that. I wonder whose cousin the printer was, or which of those two New Mexico Democrats he or his hired help may have owed a *very* special favour. I've seen enough of how Herrera and Vigil-Giron work I can't just believe it's a printer's delivery error because they say so. They lie.

Then again, maybe this is just faith-based voting.

Having the printer deliver the different ballots for each separate precinct *to* each separate precinct *on* the day of the election strikes me as somewhat akin to subcontracting out the minting of currency, and then expecting the printer to deliver the precise amount needed in the proper denominations to every bank in the country each morning before they open. Maybe that *is* how it works, these days, but I seriously doubt it. Not that markets are inherently rational. I honestly don't know. But the idea itself strikes me as uttely absurd.

I want to go to KUNM but I'm waiting for this election to end and our congresswoman to come. Then we could sleep in the hay. If only night would come.

Still no clue what happened to Juan A. Pino. Probably something perfectly explainable, but I've still gotten no explanation from either the CC or the SS.

And the best part? Just when you think well now we can count the provisionals and then get a recount and it'll all work smoothly, hah! hah! The universe laughs and spits at us. He's not coming, is he? No sir. But he's coming tomorrow? Yes sir. Tell him you saw me. Yes sir. You did see me? Yes sir.

There's this thing I think called Autovote. (I'd check if I weren't online at home where it'd take all night.) Anyway, it's the device the new ES&S paper ballot system uses to allow physically disabled people to cast their own ballots without having poll workers stand over their shoulders and announce who they're voting for to the world while marking the ballot for them and lying besides. Great idea. But there's just one little problem with these machines.

They only print on one side of the two-sided ballot: inevitably the downticket side with the bonds and amendments. Not the upticket side with the candidates running in super-tight races. So if you're disabled and you voted anywhere in New Mexico on an autovote paper ballot marking machine, your upticket votes didn't get counted.

Sure sounds like an ADA violation to me.

Waiting for Godot.

The Voretx Theatre is *amazing*. I found myself still on their mailing list from months ago and finally find something I want to see is playing there today. And so I go.

Dale Dunn's "Body Burden" is a two-act play about an experiment conducted at Los Alamos in the 'sixties in which a doctor administered potentially fatal doses of radioactive Iodine 131 (I think it was) to his own daughter and several of his coworkers children. My understanding is that it's still a work in progress, which is why it was presented as a reading rather than a fully staged play. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and would love to see it staged. I also enjoyed it enough to drop by again to see a play I was only halfway kind of thinking about maybe catching sometime if I happened to think of it before it closed on the very same day (instead of putting it off).

So I go back an hour later for "pay what you will" night of "Waiting for Godot". They've done this play twice before at the Vortex: once, as their first play, back in '76, then for their fifteenth anniversary, and now for their thirtieth. David Richard Jones has directed it each time.

I think I've seen it twice before. I always enjoyed reading it more than I enjoyed seeing it. It's always seemed, in my limited experience, that the cast and crew sort of "gave up" on it before opening night. Understandable. It might be said, if you look at it very pessimistically (which isn't fair), that it's a play that only goes downhill after the two main characters decide not to commit suicide in the opening scene.

But not tonight.

This is the best production I have ever seen. High-stakes emotional turmoil throughout.

"Godot" is probably one of the hardest plays to act, and one of the the easiest in the world to make boring, academic, dry, or just pretentious. It needs to be acted broadly, but not overbroadly, and not *always* broadly. It's a tragicomedy, and if you can't tell the difference between one line that is tragedy and the next line that is comedy you wind up with mere farce. It is, at best, "the theatre of the absurd", and *not* "the theatre of nonense".

Several factors joined forces in this production to make it the first I have seen to rises to such a level that it deserves to be called "the theatre of the absurd".

First off, the stage. It was performed, per Vortex tradition for "Godot", on a mound of dirt from the alley out back. There were probably rocks in the dirt that were part of the first stage 30 years ago.

Second, the staging. Seating was set up so the stage was "in the round". Characters entered and exited through a space defined by the audience, rather than in an imaginary space set off from it. The audience *was* the boundary of the action in that instead of coming "onscreen" or "into the viewer's field of vision" from "the wings", they came in from over your shoulder (surprise!) and then made you crane your neck to watch them go off in the distance. You exist in the character's space; they exist in yours.

Third, the actors. No ambitious 20-somethings in black turtlenecks out to impress the world with the seriousness of the roles they believe themselves capable of taking on. *All* of the principals were mature actors with lifetimes of experiencing frolicsome glee and abysmal despair to draw from.

Fourth, the acting. They all did so. Brilliantly. Before a single word was spoken, the characters on stage were clearly delineated by their posture, placement, and movement. Estragon, played by Paul Ford, was the earthy, downtrodden, emotional Yin to Vladimir's abstract, flighty intellectual Yang, played by Peter Shea Kierst. Before they opened their mouths, you knew them, as real people. And they never stepped once out of character for the length of the play. No small feat when you're literally discussing nothing, at considerable length.

I felt both pity for and terror from each character in turn.

Then there is Pozzo, played by Charles Fisher, and Lucky, played by William Sterchi. Their entrance, alone, inspires both pity and terror all at once, and everything that follows with them plays these emotions out in infinite variety, emotionally manipulating you first to pity the slave and fear the master, then out of *nowhere* to do the exact opposite.

I've seen productions where these two characters' presence is reduced to a sort of deliberately farcical interlude, or nonsensical "performance art" parade across the stage, inbetween Vladimir and Estragon delivering lines as if they were reading lines from Sartre's "Being and Nothingness", which does gross injustice to the underlying structure of the play and Beckett's characters.

In this production, the very heart of the play is the times in Act I and Act II that *all* the principals are on the stage. This is, I am convinced, how it *should* be. The interpersonal dynamics between characters increase exponentially in complexity for each person who's brought on. And the conversation between Vladimir and Estragon is not abstract existentialist philosophy, it's a desperate attempt to avoid total silence at all costs. They're not philosophers. They're people who, for distinct reasons, literally can not stop talking.

I have never, ever felt so terribly sorry for any human being as I felt watching poor Lucky on his leash in Act I. I literally wanted to cry for him. He never said a word. And how could Pozzo be *so* evil? How could *any* human being be so evil? Then suddenly, no, Pozzo loves him, and we *want* to hear Lucky speak, so we can know why he really loves him. Surely he will speak wisdom from which Pozzo has distilled his arrogant cynicism. Then heaven help us all, we have let loose a raging terror, guiding us through emotional valleys and troughs in total gibberish the likes of which a pentecostal preacher would admire. Take back the whip, please, before he hurts us in the audience! Then, yes, ahh, wonderful, everything's back in it's right order, the slave's the slave, the master's the master, and we're all comfortable again.

Except -- why are we comfortable with that? Isn't that what *all* theatre's about? The world's turned inside out and upside down but in the end we've got catharsis and for whatever reason we are OK with being back in the unjust world with its masters and its slaves and its desperately lonely, chattering, whining, arguing vagrants who'll do *anything* to avoid being silently with their own minds for half a minute at a time.

This is a *great* play. And this production of it is *superb*. Go see it. Fridays and Saturdays at 8, Sundays at 6, through 3 December at The Vortex Theatre, 2004½ Central Ave. SE, across from the Pig & Calf or UNM. 247-8600 for reservations -- not strictly necessary but *strongly* recommended.

A POGO press release.

British Embassy Has Questions about Latest LANL Security Breach.

Or, in local TV news copy terms: "Your freindly local drug dealer? Or an international terrorist menace? YOU BE THE JUDGE. Thirty seconds of details at ten...".

Let *me* count 'em.

So this morning, with no official updates (since yesterday just after 7 AM) on the unofficial vote tally coming from the Secretary of State's office, NM CD1 incumbent Heather Wilson (R) declares victory with a lead, she says, of 1,600 votes that the Associated Press can not confirm, while something like 3,700 provisional ballots remain uncounted.

Huh.

Meanwhile the hand-count continues, with critical errors in vote tabulation down at the warehouse.

Best thing Attorney General Madrid can do right now to convince me I didn't waste my vote on her is just sit tight, and then demand a recount -- best of all, even if she *does* win in the final tally. I have *no* confidence whatever in Mary Herrera (County Clerk) or Rebecca Vigil-Giron (Secretary of State), or their ability to conduct an accurate District-wide vote tally.

People talk about these things as if it's about being "fair". It's not. "Fairness" is a subjective value judgment, and whenever the candidate you oppose wins, it "isn't fair", and that's all there is to be said about "fairness". NADER 2000!

This isn't about fairness, it's about accuracy. Simple counting. Fairness doesn't come into play with this many votes still uncounted. It *may* come into play in determining voter intent; but that's why you've got four representatives from each party for each contested race on the ticket at each counting table signing off on each voter's "intent" in every single race (except when, as some counters have attested, Vigil-Giron does not have that many counters from each party at each table).

This isn't down to single votes, pregnant and hanging chad, and stray marks on ballots. This is still conceivably clearly winnable or losable on the level of broad-based counts, given that those counts are accurate.

Here's how it works. 1+1=2. 2+2=4. See? Simple. No multiplication tables or long division involved. Maybe this is just an unfortunate result of there having been no statewide preschool education in this state a few years back. Who knows. Perhaps it's time we brought in Inspector General Danny Kaye.

Too bad Vigil-Giron won't explain why she *refused* to allow a fully funded random 2% audit of votes cast statewide to be conducted, even when two in-state firms cast bids on the contract. And now Herrera's slated to take her job. Oy vey. What a state.

I need to get in touch with the KUNM News Department people but it was quite clear -- I should do so *after* the election. I'm dying to contact 'em now, but it would seem that this election's taking a bit longer than usual. Fine with me. I'd rather put it off a few more days than distract them from following the count or dare to hope for fraudulent results just so I can go volunteer.

I wonder where Congresswoman Wilson's numbers come from. They're not on the Secretary of State's website and no one else seems privy to them. Odd, seeing as the Secretary of State's Office is presumably a public entity. My guess is that she's trying tactically to force the issue and embarrass Attorney General Madrid into conceding.

Hang tight, you handsome woman, you. Just once -- *just* once I want to *know* votes are being counted more or less fairly in the place that I live. And if they are, and you win, so be it. But if the election's called off by either side before this thing is done I'll absolutely positively never have any confidence whatever in New Mexico's elections. I'm enough of a wild card as it is, what with skewing exit pollsters' samples and the like.

Give me hard numbers that balance within a margin that can not swing the election either way and I'll have confidence my vote does matter. If you don't, well, you won't stop me from voting, regardless.

How to cover up . . .

. . . a nuclear weapons secret leak, post Cold War style:
Atomic Obfuscation

Rummy resign no doubleplusgood.

Even given a historic shift in power from one wing of the national ruling party in power to the other in the legislative branch; the unelected, nonnative former reigning Governor of the Independent Republic of Texas still manages to trump headlines in the National Department of Truth.

Just what we need: an aggie running DoD.

Not good enough. This isn't ultimately about media manipulation as long as lives are at stake every day, though media manipulation makes it possible.

One week ago, Citizen Rumsfeld was absolutely, positively going to stay in his post for the next two years, come hell or high water (except on the Gulf Coast). Now, well, whatever happened way back then is ancient history on the level of the Punic Wars. Wow. Shove it into the memory hole.

Meanwhile, recounts are the order of the day in Georgia as Senator George "Macaca" Allen suddenly finds himself profoundly worried about disenfranchised voters who might just have happened to support his candidacy.

I'm very glad to see a woman as Speaker, but desperately hope she's not beholden to the Blue Dogs. We will see. Yeah, some of us *do* know the blue dogs. And their pepper spray. And mounted officers with bully clubs. Et cætera.

Meanwhile "THE" math of Karl Rove (a bit fuzzy, perhaps?) proved wrong, wrong, wrong. Perhaps his father really *wasn't* queer. I guess it lies in how you do the math, or as we queers call it, the "stats". (I wonder what his "numbers" were.) But that's OK. Everyone lies about their "stats".

Now it's Republicrats who're getting screwed at the polls, and the Demicans (surprise, surprise) don't care, even when in states like New Mexico they sign the ballots with their names listed in opposed upticket races. Yeah. Foxes guard henhouses just totaly fantastically, as a rule. (Meanwhile it would seem I guard Foxes.)

Meanwhile, I've yet to get *any* official explanation on the disapppearance of Metro Court Division 19 Judge Juan A. Pino from the ballot. (Barbara Johnson either got disqualified or dropped out of the race, depending who you ask.)

Don't get me wrong. The general idea of voting is good. So is the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the other way around. And yeah, free Athenians, or better yet, free white landholding males voting is *far* better than *no one* voting, period. But it seems to have proven to be the case since we wrote out the Constitution that women are humans, too, while Negroes may indeed be worth somewhat more electorally speaking than 3/5ths of the white male landholding human beings who own them. Or maybe that is just slightly too "radical" a notion to voice "now".

In short, I think it's time we step out of the 18th Century.

Instant runoff voting? Proportional representation? Voting as a civic duty? No, no, we can't do that, no part of it. We operate government in this country on the assumption that it's still 1787, and we can't afford (for "national security" reasons, presumably, not that we can examine the evidence against us anymore) to take the muzzle-loaded muskets from the farmers. Meanwhile private industry operates in the realms of biotech and nanotube technology. Government is effectively castrated.

Yeah, we are *still* ahead of the French back in the days when governing houses counted one priest and one nobleman for every commoner. Yay.

Yeah, we are *still* ahead of the English Parliament back in the day when it was all conflict between the Scots Presbyterians and the Church of England. Yay.

Fuck you, NPR, for going apeshit on the Governor's weakest attempt at a self-deprecatory joke ever -- specifically his "interior decorators" comment, in front of some *very* fancy red drapes and carpets and one hideously govenmental egyptian revival armchair.

Aww. NPR throws a nostalgic "we're gonna miss you Rummy" party. Too bad you couldn't call him on his nonsense when he actually said it, when you might have served to mobilize the citizenry against an illegal war. Chickenshit east-coast elitists.

Your monkey ass don't have to show to us for us to smell your shit.

Rumsfeld's out, Gates (may be) in.

Rumsfeld's resigning.

Governor Bush has nominated CIA director and president of Texas A&M University Bob Gates to replace him, pending Senate approval.

Anyone up for ratifying the International Criminal Court?

Your trusty public servants....

The Secretary of State's Unofficial Election Results Webpage showed 22 counties of 33 reporting at 9:33 this morning. Then at 10:36 it was *down* to 17 of 33 reporting. And their clock is at least five minutes fast. (Don't want 'em drinking after hours in the Secretary of State's office, I guess).

The CD1 seat (Wilson/Madrid) is down to five tenths of one percentage point, with Wilson leading. An hour ago it was four tenths.

The Newspaper Tree.

This is how we do things in El Paso. Or at least this is how we did things back in the days of the first Mexican Revolution.

One last-ditch effort to get out the vote.

The yellow sheet is the front of a sample ballot for Precinct 166, with all the upticket, super-tight races listed.

The white sheets read as follows:

On the left:

ELECCION HOY

Locales para votar se cierran a las siete.

Usted pertenece en el Precinct 166.

Si usted esta registrado para votar, usted puede votar en la Escuela Washington hasta las siete.

Si usted necesita transportacion para ir a votar, John en el apartamento numero quatro los puede llevar.

Thanks to my mother on the phone for a quick translation. And on the right:

ELECTION TODAY

Polls close at 7 P.M. tonight.

You are in Precinct 166.

If you are registered to vote, you can vote at Washington Middle School until 7 P.M.

If you need a ride to the polls, John in Apartment #4 will gladly drive you there and back.

This is the *one* apartment building in Albuquerque that hasn't been plastered with canvassers 24/7 so I have no doubt my neighbours won't mind my putting a ballot on the tree outside my bedroom window. Adam's tree. My porch light and living room light's on, and won't go off 'til seven PM *sharp*. Maybe it *is* too little too late but no one can say I didn't try.

Mary Herrera can not (or will not) do her job.

Surprise surprise: when you've got each ballot "signed" by a candidate on that same ballot things aren't all quite completely fair.

In one predominantly Republican precinct (602?) in the far NE heights, and in one key "swing" district (57?) on the Westside, something like 1/10th of the ballots were delivered, leading to 45+ minute delays.

What the Secretary of State isn't telling me:

Called the Secretary of State's office once and it just rang and rang until I got hung up on.

Called a second time, the same thing happened.

Called a third time and the lady who picked up said she'd transfer me to Elections.

I got hung up on, yet again.

Even insurance companies are not this bad.

What's more, I cannot access the Secretary of State's Website.

No wait, now suddenly I can. How lovely. There's a little form with a field the size of an email address to ask Rebecca Vigil-Giron (D) a question. Let's try "What happened to Juan A. Pino in the Metro Court Division 19 race? He's not on the ballot in Bernalillo County's Precint 166." Entered my email address and a popup tells me I will receive an answer to my question "shortly".

Whoops. I misspelled "precinct". I can only hope that they know what I mean.

Now to deal with some insurance companies. This is gonna be a *snap*.

What the League of Women Voters told me:

Called the Albuquerque Bernalillo County League of Women Voters and they knew about the missing candidate in the 2nd Judicial District Division 2 seat. According to them Barbara Johnson "dropped" out of the race.

The Metro Court Division 19 race may be the same sort of issue, but they had not heard anything about it.

OK. I've got people all over it now. What else to do -- oh yes -- call the Secretary of State.

Then I can stop goofing off and get to work.

What the 1-866-OUR-VOTE volunteer told me:

What I already knew. But I want it *documented* just as soon as possible.

It's entirely possible that both missing candidates were disqualified between the time the LWV Voters' Guide was printed and the time the ballots were printed.

Now to call the League of Women Voters.

Missing candidates in precinct 166.

On hold at work now with the Bernalillo County Clerk.

Two candidates for judgeships who were listed in the League of Women Voters' Guide were not even on the ballot in Precint 166.

In the 2nd Judicial District, the ballot listed only Stan Whitaker (D), not Barbara Johnson (R).

For the Judge of the Metropolitan Court Division 19 seat, the ballot listed only Linda S. Rogers (D), not Juan A. Pino (R).

Neither Mr. Whitaker nor Mr. Johnson were running unopposed, to the best of my knowledge.

The presiding judge was unable to tell me why.

I called the Clerk's office, got transferred twice, and spoke to two different about it before I got put on hold and transferred to voicemail. The second gentleman who spoke to me knew about the 2nd Judicial District seat issue and said the Secretary of State disqualified Barbara Johnson. He hadn't heard about the District 19 seat issue.

I'm calling 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Now.

Last word before the elections.

I don't care *what* state, Senate District, House District, AMAFCA or PRC district or anything else you live in.

Elections have been *rigged* in this country since long before the days of William Magear "Boss" Tweed in his firehouse:


Ballot boxes have been stuffed since way back in the day when they were actually locked boxes full of paper ballots -- not unsecured, credit-card sized, proprietarily-coded cards (with first-year high-school level coding) from Diebold and Sequoia with thermal paper printouts that fade within a few months' time.

And votes have been *suppressed* since *well* before ballot boxes were made clear, ostensibly to prevent stuffing, but actually in order to suppress votes. (That's what the Klan and Texas Rangers and Minutemen are all about, right? And what fine organizations they all are.)

Vote rigging. Vote suppression. Neither is a new phœnomenon. To the degree either cancels the other out, they hardly matter. Both are at work. Always. In every election, in every precinct, and in every district, in some degree or other. To whatever degree one tendency dominates the other, elections can't be trusted.

Since well before all that, really, votes have been "fixed" in countless ways -- but Tweed is *still* the tutelary deity of the high art of "fixing" modern elections given the irresolveable tension between "stuffing" and "suppressing" votes. So you all go ahead and vote for your elephants and asses, and then tear out eachothers throats about who really got that precious slim majority well within the statistical margin of error and blame the handful of voters that saw each parties' lies for what they were. I will continue voting for the Tiger, even if he isn't on the ballot as such, anymore.

Sure, you can email me when something strikes you as "funny" about your ballot, or your polling place, or anything that happens to you in the process of trying to vote. But I am voting for myself tomorrow; and chasing things down any way I have to to make sure *my* vote counts in *my* precinct is likely to keep me more than sufficiently busy in the coming 24 hours. The advice which follows goes for everyone, however you are inclined to vote in any race in any election.

If *anything* strikes you as even *slightly* "funny" about *any* part of your whole voting experience, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE the very minute you find out about it. The sooner you call them, the sooner the issue will be resolved, period.

Whether it's an insufficient postage issue or a "flipped ticket" (paper) or "flipping ticket" (electronic), whether it's a "butterfly ballot" or a "hanging" or a "pregnant" chad, or even if you've got to tell the poll worker *how* you voted to get your vote fixed (thus eliminating secret ballots, in which case I'd strongly suggest you call if possible *before* you raise your hand to the poll worker to come over), or if you've been told the wrong place to vote, even if you know better, or find yourself on a "caging list", or find so much as a printer's error on the ballot, or whatever, it doesn't matter: call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

If you possibly can, take video of your voting experience. It's your right. I'm taking *two* digital cameras with me, with battery backups. If that sounds paranoid to you, well, heh, let's just say I *dare* my voting machine to switch *my* vote! I'd *love* to get it on tape. I've *earned* the right to vote. And it's no less any one else's right just because they have not been through some of the bullshit I've been through to vote.

And if you do not like my politics, more power to you. But please, do document your own vote any way that you possibly can. While I am interested in how you may find yourself disenfranchised this election, I'm rather busier than normal today with my own damn vote. :^)

Document *everything*.

Do it early.

Do it often.

Enjoy it while you can.

Twelve hours . . .

. . . 'til the polls open and 24 'til they close.

I'm gonna try and get some sleep in the meantime.

Random musings:

Why I use plain text for emails (yeah Bill I am about halfway addressing you): EQNM just sent me a last-minute "get out the vote" email -- no surprise. There are at least three different font sizes used, not to mention underlines, boldfaced text, and underlined boldfaced text, in addition to multiple fonts, unnecessary exclamation points, several different colours, and no fewer than *seven* images that don't load on my just slightly slowish connection. It's called "backwards compatibility", and I *choose* to be backwards so I can communicate reliably with anyone.

This is entirely too much power in the hands of people who couldn't write copy on an IBM Selectric without changing the ball less than seventeen times if they tried. I'm sure it looked OK in whatever Microsoft program they wrote it in but it just looks sloppy and unprofessional to me. It looks distinctly as though whoever wrote it was, indeed, REEEEEEAAALLLLYY EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!! when they wrote the email. This sort of tactic may work well enough in Craigslist's Personals but it's *not* how you win elections. Perhaps I overestimate my own kind here (I have done so before) but I do not think we're as cavalier about who we vote for as we are about who we sleep with. (Indeed, most of us never vote at all: the electoral equivalent of taking a lifelong vow of celibacy.)

I might point out that this is an organization which I actually *support*, even as they seem to spend all their time and resources on marriage, marriage, marriage, and marriage, even when (as some of us have said for the last fifty zillion years) it's an issue the broader public is just *not* ready for, while recognizing and even respecting that at some level you dare to push the envelope a little further while the rest of us struggle for our day-to-day existence, even as those who struggle for existence feel slightly betrayed by those who fight for "issues" we know serve as "wedge issues" amongst the liberal-leaning segment of the electorate. And yes, I am indeed foremost among the fags who bite the hands that feed me. But in the end I'm just impressed enough EQNM gets their precinct maps and lists from where they do that I'll support 'em. (And to the guys who put out those lists and precinct maps -- and you know who you are, even if I don't dare to name you -- you kick ass fifteen different ways. And all of 'em are good. If there's any failure in turning out the vote, it's with the organization that brings people in from out of state who don't know the difference between an already saturated precinct and one *begging* for canvassers to give a rat's ass that they exist to begin with.)

My voicemailbox has been filling up since five PM sharp. Jeez, people. Do yer fuckin' research and quit wastin' money on the Nader voters already. We're sick and tired of your shenanigans and no we're not gonna stop voting, either. Quit wasting volunteers' time and and paid staff's hours (and some of us know what they're paid) to contact poor little old me. Go back to Precinct 150 and offer rides to some little old ladies with gay sons they love but never talk about who "forgot" to vote but "will" just as soon as they spend half an hour making up. I already know damn well how I'm gonna vote. Maybe. And if I don't, your filling up my inbox won't change my mind, whether you're the US Chamber of Commerce, the Democratic Party, Heather Wilson for Congress, or anyone else. Sounds a little too much like the (how many hundreds of?) people who declare themselves "deeply in love" with us night after night while we're working the door in the bars.

My decision whether I'll flirt with you is based on a moral calculus you cannot understand until you've stood in my place, exactly. So don't be surprised, Ms. Madrid, if I decide to drive you home tonight and then turn on you tomorrow, when you support something I don't. And don't come back to my door all shocked and dismayed if I turn you away onto Central.

If you *really* want to win our votes, then take our issues. Puhlease. I do think Ms. Madrid has come *about* as close to doing so as any major-party candidate to date in any district where I've lived, at least on the single foremost issue this particular election, though the last thing we need is a dead-end, symbolic "withdrawal plan" bill from the House from a Junior Congresswoman that will get buried in committee or in conference or just plain flat-out vetoed by the unelected "president" you *should* be referring to the International Criminal Court (if only the Senate would ratify it) for crimes against humanity.

I am inclined to vote againt Constitutional Amendment 3 on the basis of critiques I've heard about it that it might pave the way for eventual privatization of water resources.

Now to the judges.

Dan kicks ass, so I'm voting for his retention as a Judge. I don't even have to read his comments in the Leage of Women Voters' Voters' Guide to make up my mind (though I did). He just plain old kicks ass. If he ever sentences me to jail time (I hope not) I swear I *will* enjoy it for all that it's worth.

Judge Nakamura I am far less certain of! I've heard bad things from both sides of the DWI debate about her, making me flat-out wonder. And I've got Jury Duty for her on 15 November. So my experience with Nakamura is both all negative *and* all hearsay. Perhaps I'll decide in the voting both, with the League of Women Voters' Voters' Guide beside me. Perhaps I'll just vote blank. It may indeed be too close for me to vote fairly for or against her retention at all.

Final note on the Judges: I get to vote for or against retention of the judge who convicted me just last year, and I'm definitely voting *for* her. She may be "tough" but she's a human being and she does her job pretty damn well.

I do *not* vote for unopposed canidates in *any* races. Period. (And voting for or against retention of judges *isn't* quite the same thing.)

County Assessor: eew! A Montoya (all of whom I believe are crazy) versus a Republican running on President Nixon's second-term tagline: "Now. More than Ever." And we all know how fabulously well Nixon's second term turned out. So that one's a tough choice. (And, yeah, some of us do recall Nixon.)

Then there's the CD1 seat.

Hm.

I wonder how I'm gonna vote there. I don't like either candidate. My choice is either vote for the Attorney General who halted the gay marriages in Sandoval County or vote a blank ballot. Voting for Congresswoman Wilson is out of the Question, even though she's a better debater.

For those who say "politics makes strange bedfellows", I would rebut "you've clearly never been to Foxes".

I honestly don't know. But when I make my mind up, you have my word of honour: I'll answer honestly if I wind up being the tenth person out to get exit polled.

Maybe.

No shit, Charlie.

The office of Special Inspector General for Iraq Recontruction is scheduled to close on 1 October, 2007.

From the Washington Post: Contractors Rarely Held Responsible for Misdeeds in Iraq. This is what we call "burying the lead".

At any rate, the scheduled closing of this office isn't news, and impunity for contractors is not a new story. Robert Greenwald's film Iraq for Sale deals with this problem in compelling depth.

It's also recently been discovered that Galileo may not have been entirely incorrect in positing his theory that the earth revolves around the sun.

Time for some vapidity.

I'm at Flying Star downtown again. Have not been here in months. It's a good place for me to be right now. Thank you again Mr. Hartman for *still* feeding me almost a year after I left your employ. Goodness knows I didn't want to, but if I hadn't, I might not be at KUNM today. How things work out I do not know, but work out they inevitably do.

It is high time for some vapidity. Ahh, all the pretty coloured tiles and amber lighting and huge servings of warm food and all's well in the world. Or maybe it's just time to go online and get things "caught up" like they don't get on my lousy slow Alltel connection at home. Finally I can update all the software and archive all the emails. I'm up to nearly 4,000 -- just about all of them *real* emails. Not spams.

Went to another event for the women in Juarez yesterday and got Diana Washington Valdez's book, Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico (1993-2005). To the gentleman who asked me if I thought it was "really" dangerous when I proposed crossing illegally into Mexico and finding our way back to the bridge I would just *strongly* recommend reading this book before committing to a crossing, licit *or* ill-.

The book is absolutely shocking. The problem is absolutely shocking. The murdered women of Juarez are not an economic issue. It is a massive unsolved crime and local, state, and federal Mexican governments of *both* major parties *refuse* to do *anything*. Meanwhile the government north of my can of mud consistently fails to apply serious pressure on Mexico to solve the murders and stop further murders from occurring.

Shame on NPR for their "Morning Edition" report from Oaxaca today. They talked of the teachers' protest "turning violent" but did not so much as mention the American journalist who was murdered by Mexican police officials, nor did they reflect the fact that it was the police who instigated the violence. I might expect this sort of bullshit from the L.A. Times but it is flatly unacceptable coming from Public Radio in *any* form.

Attended module one of broadcast training today. General orientation. Not sure exactly what all the process is (different people with different interests go through it in completely different orders) but Rachel had me interview ahead of time with the News Department last week. The sense I got was wait 'til the election is over and then we can work with you on working with us. Stupid U.S. Constitition -- now I've gotta way three whole entire days before I can go back to KUNM and pester the Newsroom people to let me do something. Let's get this damn dirty election over and done with.

Mr. ZzigZzag: What I Heard today is that the weak signal you remember is from when the station was a common carrier on AM radio. The original license with the call sign KUNM was issued for the FM frequency 90.1, and they date the anniversary (on the fortieth of which I found my voice) to the first use of the transmitter on Sandia Peak. (KANW uses the same exact transmitter, incidentally, but tuned to a different frequency.) The current upgrade to a digital transmitter may eventually be used to create two separate bands, effectively allowing the station to broadcast 48 hours a day.

Random radio musings, &c.

Have political campaigns ever been anything less than intense and closely contested? Have they ever been truly civil? Have politicians from different parties ever *really* disagreed on life-and-death issues? Have votes ever been fairly counted? How I miss the good old days of Tammany Hall, when everything seemed to be simpler, blah blah blah. VOTE FOR TWEED!

How like sports: this team or that team will or will not win, while the fans of either team may riot in the streets (or not) after it's done, and it's not certain 'til minority votes are lost with phantom votes counted in strict one-way precincts that the outcome for the next four years is determined for certain. It's *all* about the "stats", baby. But still (forgive me, Weasel) it's all dumb jocks against dumb jocks. The dumb jocks still win, either way. I therefore vote, whenever I possibly can, for people from the physics club and economics club, even if they *do* look like damn fools out on the playing field in other peoples' oversized shoulderpads as they point at their microscope slides and line charts.

Aside from quite a few downticket races, I *still* have not decided for sure how I'm going to vote upticket, and won't, until I find myself behind the curtain on 7 November. The *one* moment in this whole ordeal that I'll finally have a little privacy.

Four new voicemail messages in the last hour. All from unknown numbers. I doubt I'll listen to a single one of them before I delete them. Believe it or not there are people I give a rat's ass about and I have the phone so that *they* can reach me, any time. These unsolicited, abusive voicemails are not worth my time and will not change my mind on anything at all. They won't keep me from voting, nor will they get me to vote. They will not change how I vote. I won't even hear 'em.

Best advice I ever got on voting came from Karen Ponchard, the amazing woman from Chloride, New Mexico, who wound up living in France, then came back to El Paso only to die way the hell too young from smoking. Once upon a time, when I was barely legal to do so, I didn't want to vote at all. She said I should vote a blank ballot in protest. I *still* have never managed to vote a *completely* blank ballot. It is, you might say, always what I aim for! Sure beats *not* voting, which just means sheer defeat. But alas, our democratic republic is not quite so imperfect that I can do so. Not yet. There is *always* something on the ballot I feel strongly enough about to vote for, or, at least, against.

Of course now I suppose it's possible for someone to "fill in" upticket undervotes with a #2 pencil, not to mention hack the counting machines since Secretary of State Vigil-Giron (D) flatly refuses to conduct a random 2% audit for reasons she will not explain to the public. (Perhaps she'll be too busy enjoying another luxury cruise paid for by Diebold or Sequoia.) I'm *definitely* voting blank for Secretary of State. I *can't* vote *either* party in that race. Not Republican after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004. But also absolutely not for Democrat Mary Herrera, who as Bernalillo County Clerk failed *miserably* to do her job, sending me scrambling from place to place on the day before election day, 2004.

I can comfortably vote for some judges and some constitutional amendments. The Alien Land Law's simply *got* to go. We're the last state in the Union to have one. Yay for New Mexico -- one thing in which we're actually *behind* Mississippi! Cisco McSorley may indeed not be worth trusting with blanket support, but I think his analysis on this proposed amendment (repealing the Alien Land Law) is generally sound.

David Bacon's not in my PRC district, damn it. Too bad for me I can't afford to move across the street to support the *one* candidate in my own damn party. Such are the joys of gentrification.

Why are general obligation bonds for education always slated to pay for construction? Has anyone ever thought to float a bond to bring in more teachers or increase student services? Or buy books for the library? I for one am sick and tired of seeing public colleges and universities used as excuses for well-connected contractors' pork and would welcome with open arms *any* bond measure that did something *other* than demolish historic buildings unnecessarily to build ugly new ones. I'm definitely tempted to vote with the libertarian fiscal conservative landowners on this one, especially since no such bond has been defeated in this state since 1990.

Of course I plan to vote for Democrat Jim Baca for Public Lands Commissioner, even if he did take money from the Governor I'll likely never honour with my vote. I innately distrust Republican incumbent Pat Lyons' connections to oil and gas exploration companies when both the Valle Vidal and Otero Mesa are at stake in the short-term.

To political commentators:

QUIT comparing the cost of proposed bond measures and tax increases to the price of going to the movies. Not everyone has a family of four and hardly anyone goes to the movies (at least not since the development of Betamax video cassettes, let alone VHS cassettes which now sit in dollar bins around the world). Those few who do go to movies don't take all seventeen kids -- but if they do, they don't go to first-run opening night shows and don't buy candy and sodas and popcorn and snacks all around, unless they are such voters that you don't want to bother trying to change their minds in the first place. This sort of comparison may have held water back in the 'thirties and 'forties but dude, please, step into your own generation. You might as well be arguing in favour of "a chicken in every pot", or "free soil", or "greenbacks". You might as well say "this initiative, if enacted, will cost the average homeowner roughly 1/10th the cost of a brand new Model T Ford". (I'm sure there's a brand new Model T in a museum somewhere and equally sure I could never afford 1/10th of what it might cost me to buy it today.) Political cliches go stale, *really* fast. Failing to see that is a great way to lose elections.

QUIT speaking of holding anyone in public office accountable in terms of "holding their feet to the fire", harkening back to Spanish colonial Inquisition techniques of torture. They didn't have Habeas Corpus, back then, at least not in the Spanish territories, like New Mexico. (Just like we seem not to have it right now.) They did such horrid things under a strictly theocratic system of govenment (such as we seem to be hurtling towards right now). You're trying to say you mean to do a good thing by drawing a bad analogy that is deeply repugnant to *anyone* with a sense of history that goes beyond the last election. So "hold their feet to the fire" all you want, but be prepared to lose elections amongst native americans and the great-grandchildren of slaves who understand *exactly* what you say as deliberate "double coding", even if you don't mean it as such.

The "quality of life" initiative has my support. Mayor Riordan -- no wait, I think it's Mayor Chavez, I can't actually tell anymore -- opposes it. Reason enough. It's definitely a big pot of money he can't use for his own self-aggrandizement.

Another radio story about the femicides across the border. Not a word about it in El Paso. Wow, that's Rachel translating. Here's where radio theatre comes in to news: she's got to translate register and voice as well as words. Kick ass! Even NPR can't manage this. But KUNM can do it. Go figure that one out.

Meanwhile an American journalist is murdered in Oaxaca and all NPR talks about is the firefighters' deaths in California. (I like journalists. They strike me as the second most likely persons on earth, second only to faggots, to ignore outrages against their own kind in order to protect their own asses.)

I might just deliberately vote against Governor Richardson. I definitely *won't* vote *for* him. Besides the fact that his campaign's set all sorts of fundraising records, he has, in my eyes, committed at least one crime against humanity. His Republican opponent's not worth taking very seriously. And while I hate to throw a vote to the Republicans, thus risking making the Democrats go even *more* conservative next time around, I know it won't amount to a drop in the bucket. Maybe I'll vote Republican for Governor. At least Dendahl didn't put Wen Ho Lee into solitary confinement for nine months on racist false charges as head of the Department of Energy.

GOOD GOD.

I JUST HEARD NOAM CHOMSKY ON NPR.

For about three seconds.

But hell, three seconds is better than none. Good for you, NPR, for finally admitting he exists.

Bravo to President Chavez for forcing NPR to admit that Dr. Chomsky exists from the podium of the UN General Assembly (suplhurous stenches notwithstanding), where no one could exactly ignore you, nor ridicule you effectively given the world's largely sympathetic reaction to your words. We have been hounding NPR for years, now, and most of us eventually gave up.

Too bad you chickenshit East Coast elitist shitheads went from Chomsky to playing the "Darth Vader" theme from Star Wars. ("Catchy tunes" *doesn't* make for "great radio" during drivetime newsblock programming. We're *not* as dumb inland as you apparently assume we are, even if we *do* support radio stations that depend on you for way too many hours every day for boilerplate programming.)

Too bad that someone's pop culture reference to Monty Python struck you as more worth 15 seconds' priceless national airtime than Chomsky's comprehensive critique of media in service to power. A listener/sponsor *might* be forgiven for thinking that in a public radio segment purporting to examine current political language (specifically, the term "American imperialism"), that the founder of the modern science of Linguistics *might* merit *at least* equal time to a British comic skit from thirty years ago about the Roman empire.

Then again, it's "safe" to skewer the Romans, now isn't it? You don't depend on Cæsar like you depend on WalMart for funding, now do you?

Ah, NPR, you never fail to disappoint me. Maybe never more than when you dare pretend to speak intelligently. You do not. (And if I ever hear another affectatiously deliberate unvoiced labiodental plosive on the part of a certain evening host who shall go unnamed -- and you know who you are -- I shall go positively mad and work to get you *off* the air if only for an hour each day in one dependable market that matters.)

I'd almost welcome an hour of dead air preceeded by the National Anthem to hearing NPR repeat a single hour of its progamming every day.

I shouldn't type while listening to the radio. This is what happens.

So anyway after all that was done I went to the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center to see a documentary about the femicides in Juarez called On the Edge: the Femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Winds up it was completely bilingual, meaning more in Spanish than English, with subtitles going both ways. Not Oscar material -- all the text went by way too fast, and most of what I got from watching the movie I could have gotten from reading. Except for one thing. I don't think I'd have turned quite as white as a sheet without the familiar visuals from downriver.

It doesn't need to be to be an amazing documentary, which it was. Not a single bloodied corpse sticking out of the sand. It was *no* exploitation and *all* about the survivors and the mothers organizing against the ongoing murders linking the $30,000,000,000.00 annual Mexican drug trade to the murders. I got a copy of the DVD and will put it into certain key peoples' hands next time i'm in El Paso. The women who've organized around the issue here, and in Santa Fe, and in Las Cruces indicated that aside from one amazing reporter for the El Paso Times they have *no one* in El Paso that they deal with on a regular basis.

Don Schrader was there. We talked. I've got a long damn way to go but I think, generally speaking, I'm going in the right direction over all. I need to visit him. He's very scary. I can't be in his presence, or for that matter, in the presence of his clothes for more than a few seconds without wondering what I could be doing better.