A Two-fer . . .

Ernesto, who mows my lawn, called me yesterday, which he almost never does.  He's a friend of mine, a Bolivian who has been here for thirty years and a citizen since 2000.  He speaks passable English (I am envious when I sit outside with my next door neighbor occasionally--she is his brother--and those two start speaking together in an indigent dialect from South America which means that they speak three languages, including of of course Spanish, whereas I can only speak one) but he is not fully up on politics in America so I do my best to inform him.

He told me that he had just voted early at City Hall and it only took him five minutes--in and out with no one else there except for the registrar.  He thanked me for informing him of the existence of early voting and where to go and when it was open (M-F 9-5 untill election week) because he wasn't sure otherwise if he would have gone to his local precinct at the elementary school on election day and waited on line during a pandemic to vote otherwise and getting an absentee mail-in ballot was otherwise too cumbersome for him in Virginia (you have to obtain the proper application form, fill it out correctly, send it to the proper place, receive the ballot back, fill that out correctly, including fulfilling properly all the requirements for the return envelope including a proper signature in the right place. and sending it back so it'll arrive in time in an era when the U.S, mail is being deliberately being slowed down by Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump sycophant).

I was gratified to hear from Ernesto because I had offered to take my neighbor, her husband and her two adult children to City Hall to vote when I went  to vote early but they were no shows when I knocked on their door at the prearranged time.  I then issued a standing offer to drive any of them to City Hall during early voting hours but a complicated series of reasons why they had no time to do this whenever I suggested a time made it dawn upon me that although they revile Donald Trump, they were going to vote, if at all, on their own time.

I felt bad that I really had no other plans to work in this election--I am too much in a suspect group health-wise to physically electioneer during a pandemic--besides voting early myself, sending modest checks to democratic senatorial candidates and putting up a Biden sign in my yard.  Receiving Ernesto's call out of the clear blue yesterday was a delight.

I voted . . .

 In these cataclysmic times, I executed my plan to vote on the first day early voting started in Virginia last month, on September 18th.  I drove down to City Hall at 10 am armed with a notice dated in August from my bank which came addressed to me at my residential address indicating that a check I had deposited had in fact been deposited.

I walked in with a face mask on and was met by a sheriff's deputy to whom I announced that I was present to vote.  He directed me towards the city's registrar office without requiring me to go through any security, where there was no there aside from a receptionist behind a plexiglass shield and the registrar and two polling volunteers.  The receptionist asked to see my driver's license whereupon I presented her with my bank account note (Virginia dropped its photo ID law this year after the democrats reclaimed both chambers of the statehouse although it still requires suitable documents) which she examined with a sour face and then handed me a voting slip which I gave to the registrar who gave me a ballot in a folder and a free (the pandemic you know) pen to fill it out with.

The choice for president/VP was easy as were the choices for senator and representative and it took but a second to mark those blank ovals.  I didn't know a single thing about any of the four persons running for three spots on city council so I left those blank and read carefully the two proposed constitutional amendments and marked "yes' on both of those (I'm a democrat you see, and since I discerned through the incomprehensible legalese that they were both measures intent on lessening burdens on poor people and "totally" disabled veterans, in other words giving money away, of course I voted for those), slipped my ballot into the scanning and counting machine and handed my folder back to a volunteer (did she wipe it down for the next voter who showed up?).

I asked if I was the first person there so far and was surprised to hear that 32 other voters had already preceded me that morning and that a third of the registered voters in the city had already made applications for mail-in ballots.  With such a crushing response already in the very first hour of voting seven weeks out from election day it was and remains clear to me that Trump is going to go down in a landslide and the country, and the world, will awaken from this four-year, horrific nightmare.

It finally came . . .

 On the first of the month, I prodded myself out of my numbing COVID-19 self-quarantine and made a plan to address the upcoming election, now a mere five weeks away.  There are 206,000 Americans who tragically won't be voting because they're dead unnecessarily thanks largely to our tax-cheat president's massively inept coronavirus response leading directly to the still continuing lack of reliable testing, contact tracing, provision of PPE, disclosure of truthful, non-divisive information etc.

I went to the city registrar's office and found out that I was indeed registered to vote and when and where early voting started, and I voted thereby on the first available date.  I went to Joe Biden's campaign website and for a $50 contribution, ordered two buttons, a bumper sticker and a Biden/Harris yard sign.

It finally arrived yesterday and I immediately planted it in my front yard.  I took a picture, which I ordinarily would have posted here but a few months go I lost the ability to transfer photos from my computer to my blog, and I no longer have the ability to put photos into this blog except for pictures from previous blog posts.

So now I parse out twenty-five dollar checks to democratic senatorial candidates and wait for January 21st, Joe Biden's first full day in office when patriotic Americans who aren't beholden to foreign money or influence can start making America Great Again.  Meanwhile my Biden yard sign stands out like an evergreen tree in a pine forest as I have yet to see a single Trump sign anywhere in town.

The problem with Act Blue

 I'm trying to do my best to help restore American greatness--I've already voted, in person so my vote won't get caught in any election day invalidation by being mailed in and never arriving or being counted too late after the current president has created the deepest constitutional crisis since the Civil War by declaring the election invalid on election night. I'm not going canvassing door-to-door like I did in 2016 ned 2018 nor doing poll-watching like I did in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I'm in the high-risk group for COVID-19. What I think is most crucial, beyond ousting our corrupt, faux president is to throw the senate out from the corrupt, soulless grip of Moscow Mitch, so that the tail no longer wags the dog, wherein 53 venal anti-patriotic senators representing about 29% of the population jam their values (none that I can discern besides getting themselves rich and maintaining power) and judges (young, pro-big business and rabidly antichoice) down on the majority of Americans, who think otherwise, are patriots and value principles and concern for all our citizens.

So I contribute $25 to contested senate races, so far sending a check to Dr. Barbara Bollier (KS), Mark Kelly (AZ), Amy McGrath (KY), Maggie Hassan (NH), Jaime Harrison (SC) and MJ Hegar (TX). The trouble is, except for one example, those are in response to solicitations that come in the mail that I can return a check to. For Harrison, I googled his name and found a site where it listed an address I could send a check to for his campaign. For the rest, like the Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana, Iowa and Virginia races, I get mired in an inescapable maze of the Act Blue payment system for those democratic candidates, with no way to get to a page which tells me where I can send a check to. First off, these pages want too much information from me and I don't trust their security in terms of safeguarding my on-line payments. I can't understand exactly what I'm supposedly paying for or how many times. I learned in 2018 about "recurrent payments" that appear a fortnight later on my credit card no matter how closely I read the fine print and that are a pain to get rid of. 

Never again, democrats, sorry! I'm retired and watch my nest egg go down dramatically each month in Trump's Amerika and fear for the future of Social Security under the administration of the kleptocrats in charge. So I sit and wait each day for the mail to arrive (or not as has been happening lately) in the hope that another solicitation will arrive for a democratic challenger for senate so I can contribute. I voted in person already--have you?

Three months to go . . .

Thank goodness that hot, long July is behind us.  Three months (and three days) to go to starting to restore America's former greatness, which is all gone now in three and a half chaotic, unstructured  years, poof!

Postpone the November election, really?  That wasn't done even during the heights of the Civil War or World War II.

Mail-in voting is "a mess?"  Sez who, the liar is chief?  Mail-in voting has been going on for years, decades, without any problems and it works well, especially in these times of a totally mismanaged national pandemic which has already killed 154,000 Americans in a mere five months because of Trumps's disorganization, incompetence or laziness, or all three

.

I'll be visiting city hall on the very first day of early voting to cast my ballot.  I can't wait.

A new month

I still remember when I went to my motel in Newport News after 11 pm on that first Tuesday night in November in 2016 after an exhausting 17-hour day being an inside poll observer in the poorest precinct in town.  The results were promising in this impoverished, largely African American part of the town, the votes were ten to one for Hillary Clinton for president over Donald Trump, with a smattering of wasted or unsophisticated votes for third party candidates like the stoned-out pothead from New Mexico or the Russian-plant woman who liked to attend dinners in Moscow.  Apparently there are no Democratic lawyers in the Hampton Roads area, as I and a half-dozen other Northern Virginia lawyers had to travel two hundred miles to be poll watchers.

As I turned on the motel room's TV to watch the election returns, I reflected wryly none of us Arlington area poll watchers had been invited to the victory-celebration in Virginia Beach at a fancy hotel downtown.  Thank you very much, have a safe journey back.  I was glad that my task was at an end, I have never liked Hillary Clinton and I couldn't wait to stop working for her.  She's so secretive and shady, but she's also smart, informed steady and advocates people-first policies.  There was no comparison between this former first-lady, senator and Secretary of State and the often bankrupted conman from Queens who was ignorant, inept and foul-mouthed, never held office, and was a misogynist and racist.  Clinton was always way ahead in the polls despite misinformation campaigns launched against her and James Comey's follies, but I always wanted to be able to look any of my children in the eye on the outlandish chance that the obviously unfit Trump should win the presidency and be able to say, "I did everything I could to prevent this catastrophe."

Clinton won handily of course and she backed down the Russians in Ukraine, using the hard-nosed skills she honed as Secretary of State.  She put American advisors in that beleaguered country under invasion from Russian proxies and also invited in other NATO advisors as well, keeping the European unity against the Russian Bear at a high level.  She warned Putin against continuing to attempt to dabble in our elections, pointing to the Western troops as Ukraine advisors to their army, and the electronic chatter from the Russian troll farms noticeably fell off.  The Obama economic boom continued under her stewardship, at double digit returns from the stock market for the first three years.  She installed two USSC liberal justices in their thirties to the highest court, easing the heretofore intolerable pressure by conservative old men to control the bodies and decisions of women.  Unions thrived, wages went up, tax rates were cut for the middle class and health care under the new and improved ACA reached even more uninsured people and out of pocket costs for it declined measuredly.  Then the coronavirus pandemic, the first global one in over a century, washed ashore on our shores in February of 2020.

President Clinton, having run the White House as First Lady, a senate office and then the State Department as Madame Secretary, was not surprised by it at that moment nor ignorant of its potentially devastating import.  The pandemic response office in the White House, set in place by Obama after the Ebola virus outbreak, had been expanded and enlarged and had been briefing her since December on the troubling occurrence odf a novel virus in China.  Clinton had set up a WH task force to study it and make recommendations, and in December she was informed that if or when the virus came to America there would be strains on the US medical supply lines, specifically in ventilators, swabs, antiseptics gowns, face masks and shields, gloves, testing chemicals and other necessary medical paraphernalia.  Noting that the 1918 Spanish Flu cost 670,000 Americans their lives due to lack of decisive national leadership under President Woodrow Wilson who was preoccupied with his vaunted Fourteen Points at the end of World War I, she appointed Bill Gates as the national Pandemic Czar in early January with full power, after she swiftly activated the Defense of America law, to order US manufacturers to shift production to these and other necessary equipment and supplies and build up a national stockpile of supplies in advance.  The Pandemic team expressed concern to her in January about the  CDC's coronavirus test as being too complicated, too self-centered to the agency and not taking full advantage American expertise and innovation in the medical field and she put in a standing order for millions of tests from the WHO and had the Pandemic Chief to contact leading educational institutions with requests for them to start working on tests for the virus and potential vaccinations, with attendant grants.

The first hotspot to emerge was in Seattle but in conjunction with the proactive governor of Washington, hundreds of thousands of tests were administered and the extent of the outbreak was learned and through contact tracing, contained.  The phrase, "Testing, testing, testing," was heard often in the public discourse, and President Clinton bragged that, "Anyone American who wants a test can get one."  And it was true, through foresight, preparation and production.

Italy went into a fortnight of house confinement due to being ravaged by the deadly virus and America maintained its customary role of being the leader of the developed world and sent medical personnel and necessary items from our full stockpiles to our valued and grateful ally.  When President Clinton said she was considering, and then undertook, a three-week national lockdown in early March, the stock market tanked one day, dropping two thousand points to 25,000, but it has bounced back to 27,000 since then, still down a thousand points but slowly recovering.  The prognosis for America weathering this pandemic with a minimal death toll is fair, naysayers claim that 100,00 to 220,000 lives might be lost ultimately instead of the 20,000 to 50,000 deaths the medical experts predict based on modeling.  They urged the national lockdown, and the president promptly got the 50 state governors to institute it, thus delivering a blow to the economy but undoubtedly saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

April Fools.  Trump got elected and we're all paying fully for this catastrophe during this catastrophe.

A new profile picture

Each year I change my profile picture to a picture of me from the preceding year that speaks to where I am or was in the recent pass.  For instance, when I started this blog about 13 years ago, my first profile picture was me standing in a park on Staten Island, where I grew up, with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the background.  I was running the New York City Marathon the next day and it seemed a fitting portrait of my blog at that time.

Over the years I had profile pictures of me, if I remember correctly, standing before an Indian battlefield in Wyoming (the Fettermen Fight, formerly known as the Fetterman Massacre), eating a pizza, visiting a baseball park and attending a protest rally now that my Street Fighting Man days from the early seventies during the Nixon years have been necessarily revived during these Trump years.

Last year, 2019, my profile picture was a snapshot of me from November 2018 as I headed out to canvas for a democratic challenger, Jennifer Wexton, in the Tenth Virginia Congressional District running against the Republican incumbent in a seat that had been Republican for forty years.  We flipped the seat, the first seat to be announced to have flipped during that entire historic blue-wave night.  I was pretty proud to have contributed a meaningful effort that fall in the fight to preserve our rule-of-law nation.

For this year's profile picture I reached back to March 2019 when I visited Omaha Beach in Normandy, one of the five D-Day beaches that the Allies stormed 75 years earlier during Operation Overlord, the success of which presaged the utter destruction Nazi Germany eleven months later.  Omaha Beach was the bloodiest and most bitterly contested of the five landing beaches and the initial shallow lodgment there almost failed, a catastrophe which would have unhinged the whole Allied line those first days and might have caused the American, British and Canadian troops to be driven back into the sea.  Unlike at the other four beaches, the first wave of American troops at Omaha suffered mass slaughter wading ashore and for almost the whole day the Americans reached only the seawall, perhaps thirty yards past high tide, under which they sought shelter from the murderous fire raining down upon them from the bluffs beyond the narrow coastal strip.  Orders were being prepared to withdraw them but in the afternoon intrepid soldiers singly or in pairs or clumps went up into the nearby hills, engaged the enemy and the beachead was preserved and enlarged as more troops came ashore.  It was a close thing and a costly victory, with hundreds of Americans killed and thousands wounded on that beach alone.  It is a reverential place for Americans to visit, haunted no doubt by the ghosts of shattered young men roaming ceaselessly among the ruined detritus of war still there decades later.  It was a time when Americans were great and proud and wanted to make the world a better place, and weren't victims of seemingly hopeless circumstances wanting only to keep the world out by building a thousand-mile wall, separating families and caging children.  My dad fought with the First Marine Division in the Pacific driving towards Tokyo and my girlfriend's dad fought with Patton's Third Army driving into Germany, and I was humbled to stand upon that hallowed beach in France yet suffused with pride at the can-do American spirit it represents.

A cracked license.

The sickening, unbelievable diminution of America's greatness that I woke up to on November 9, 2016, a wound inflicted upon our great republic by a selfish, short-sided minority of our very own people, enthralled voters chasing a chimera, which hopefully will not ultimately prove to be fatal to our democracy, spurred me to activism.  That extended to voting this week in the primaries in my city where the incumbent Democratic congressman and senator are in absolutely no danger of losing their seats in November, so long as the Russians don't intrude into the process even worse than they did two years ago in aid of our current president, the Kremlin's puppet.

I walked into the polling place and had to spend five minutes in the practically vacant gymnasium while the voter officials scrutinized my driver's license.  In the first forty years of my voting life, I would just announce my name, and vote.  But the current vogue of voter suppression requires a photo ID to vote.   Don't you remember George Washington getting carded at the voting booth?

My OL was cracked right across its bar code.  The official looked at my license, asked me my name and address which I confirmed verbally, the address on it was proper for the precinct and matched their rolls, it wasn't expired and had my picture on it (no smiling!), and then she put it in her optical scanner.  I was not comfortable with having my license scanned but these are the gymnastics our elected officials have foisted upon us in order to exercise our right to vote.  The machine failed to recognize my OL.  The crack, remember?

They took it out and re-inserted it at least half a dozen times.  They puzzled over it.  I suggested the crack across the bar code, from normal usage, but which didn't invalidate my driver's license so far as I know, was preventing the machine from registering the license.  They were literally scratching their heads over what to do.  They finally got a reading on about the sixth try, seating it just so, I guess, and allowed me to cast a ballot.  I foresee lots of problems coming up in November with this system.  They could see who I was from my photo ID which was the preferred one, a driver's license, and the information it bespoke of which I verbally confirmed, yet I had to wait for long minutes while they took this extra step with their little scanning gizmo.  I hope I remember to bring my passport as backup in November.

Street Fighting Man

"Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy." At a rally this year in front of the Supreme Court in support of voting rights as it heard a case based on Ohio's aggressive purging of its voter rolls disenfranchising thousands of citizens who didn't vote for two years and didn't read their junk mail.

"Because summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the streets boy." Voter suppression, that's what it is.

"But what can a poor boy do except to sing for a Rock and Roll Band."  For 40 years I never showed an i.d. to people who knew me by name in order to be allowed to exercise my right to vote, until now.

"Hey! Think the time is right for a Palace Revolution." We're coming for you in November!

Record or Assist

It was cold and rainy on election day Tuesday but at least I had the opportunity of working inside all day, although I walked outside several times to introduce myself to every observer, volunteer and candidate out there doing hard duty handing out sample ballots, blue for democrats and green for republicans, to voters as they walked up to enter the local high school to vote. All were unfailingly polite.  

Inside, there was a stark difference in what I perceived my duty to be as an inside poll observer and what my republican counterpart's assigned duty was. All day I stood or sat near the check-in table and watched for problems voters encountered in being enabled to cast their ballots--wrong precinct, no longer living in the district, their name spelled wrong in the voter rolls, their sister voted previously in their name because the staffer couldn't decipher the Asian name properly, the voter couldn't understand English and required assistance but couldn't write either and thus couldn't sign her requires-assistance form--and followed them discretely to the chief's table to stand by and listen to the problem's resolution. Almost always there the situation was resolved in favor of the person being entitled to vote, sometimes after a call being placed to the registrar. Three provisional ballots were cast (the aforementioned sister/brother mix-up, for instance), often the voter was sent to one of the other two precincts to vote and rarely the voter was turned away, usually after being registered on the spot to entitle them to vote in the next election. I never felt the need to intercede with the election officials in support of a voter and only made one or two suggestions to them all day, and asked them questions about situations or procedures several times. I often spoke conversationally with the officials to varying degrees during slow moments, having introduced myself to each of them and made a point of remembering their names. It was an efficient organization with heart there.

The other poll observer had a different reason, obviously, for being there. Aside from getting up occasionally to go outside to make a call on his cellphone I assumed or use the facilities or stand in order to stretch his legs, he sat in a chair within 3 feet directly behind central check-in person and furiously thumbed his I-phone all day, doing his best mark on his "app" (I presumed it was a registered voter list or perhaps a list of persons that party had contacted during the campaign) the appearance of every voter who checked in as they announced their name and the name was repeated back to them by the staff member. Never did I see him wander around the voting room by the officials' tables except to plug in his back-up battery, nor did I see him converse with the staff except in the course of a situation arising out of him placing his chair initially so close behind the check-in person's chair that that officer complained that the observer was in such proximity with him that he was uncomfortable and felt interfered with in the performance of his duties. He literally couldn't get up from the table without the observer moving his chair back. (He also conversed with staff in the course of graciously being offered a donut or two during the long day.) The chair incident produced the day's only "drama" as my friend across the aisle, Joe, termed it. 

The staffer who felt Joe was too close to allow him to do his duty properly requested him to move back permanently and the observer refused, saying he couldn't hear the names as they were announced otherwise and to do his "job" he needed to be right there behind the staff member. Thus the right of the observer to be able to see and hear everything being done and said at the check-in table clashed with the right of the staffer to be free of interference or influence in the performance of his duty, and this stand-off at the fulcrum point of the free and transparent operation of our basic voting rights pulled in the Board of Elections Directer and Mr. Dan Dodds, who I presumed was the roving Republican operative assigned to that district.

In my opinion, Mr. Dodds was a pissant, and I watched from my perch five or six feet behind the check-in table where they had set up a table for the observers as in the back, the twenty-something tall gaunt man argued down in an angry voice, with much finger jabbing interspersed with backhanded slaps across the sheaf of important papers he was clutching for awe-inspiring emphasis, with the diminutive fifty-something Director who was standing her ground even as, at one point, the rover had a metal chair slung menacingly over his shoulder as he gesticulated. In a word he was, in my opinion, nasty.

Order was restored to the process with a compromise as the two came out and together moved Joe's chair to a spot about 32 inches behind the staffer's chair and declared that that was the redline, for both of us. Joe tried his dictated location and claimed that he still couldn't hear but Mr. Dodds spoke to him like one would rebuke a dog, telling him to do his "job," to get busy with his "app," and that that spot was "final." Then Mr. Dodds stalked out, obviously an important personage with more places to be on that day.

The rest of the day was long and uneventful for us. Joe liked history, and had brought two books to read, and we talked history and books sometimes. I tried to time our quiet discussions for when a crowd of voters came in and he tried to time them for when a voter was spending an inordinate time at the table, indicating a problem. I offered him a cracker smeared with spicy tuna from a small tin I had for lunch, which he declined, and he had a bag of nuts in his pocket which he would occasionally go into the hallway to nibble from, of which he offered me none. We got along famously, and I even told him that I had observed that the voting machines were set at zero that morning before the polls were opened at 6 a.m., something he hadn't observed in person, as that apparently was on both our checklists.

During the long day I had the opportunity to reflect upon which course of inside poll observation action was better--to record on your hand-sized computer every voter who comes in so that at HQ they can selectively utilize their phone banks to get out their voters, or to look out for problems as they develop inside the voting area and follow them through to their resolution, thus allowing as many voters presenting themselves to vote as possible. Since the permissible number of inside observers is limited, doing both is well-nigh impossible. I'm not surprised at the very different choices each party made in this election, and I wonder what it augurs for the future of voting and inside observing.

Thirty for the week.

Beautiful fall weather heralded the arrival of October and I took advantage of it by starting the month with a long run of 8 miles on the first day.  You might consider that runners tend to be obsessive because I ran five consecutive days, always starting eastbound on the W&OD Trail on an out-and-back, going 8, 7, 6, 5 and 4 miles to total 30 for the week.  (I voted!)

Always an adventure, the first day, a Saturday, I ran by two different 5K races getting underway and was mightily tempted to join in each time but I had to get back home to get ready to go sign up voters in a registration drive later that morning.  Although it was a non-partisan volunteer effort this presidential campaign season, you could imagine that it's Democrats who are signing up voters in Northern Virginia, and probably Republicans who are making the same effort further down south in Tidewater Virginia, and my two hours of effort garnered two new voters.  (Step up and get registered!)

I turned Sunday's run of seven miles into a mini-nature tour, photographing dollar webs on the damp grass (fungus spots), unsuccessfully trying to shoot an actual spider web on a light pole I went by and running along the banks of Four-Mile Run creek, which parallels the trail, as much as I could.  Monday's run of six miles wasn't much different from the day before, the same dollar webs were ever-present in the medium-tall grass alongside the trail, except that I ended up my run at the local McDonalds for a breakfast of a $1 sausage burrito and a 69c senior coffee, after which I went down to City Hall to vote early.  (A dollar spot early morning web.)

Tuesday's run of five miles was followed by a walk of two miles in the District with my currently-injured running buddy from work as she tries to resume her running regime, and Wednesday's run of four miles was followed by my 114th blood-products donation of whole blood.  I took the next seven days in a row off from running because my abdomen was still bothering me and I wanted to give it a good long healing period.  (Power walking at noon in the District with my running buddy as she convalesces, here stopping in to use the restrooms at the National Botanical Center.)

Hilary

I have a sister named Hilary.  Not Hillary.  Sir Edmund Hilary ascended the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, with his Sherpa porter Tensing, around the time she was born so perhaps she was named after him.

I want Hillary for president now, not because she's so great but because she's not The Donald.  I have no idea who Hilary prefers.

I have been working for Hillary's candidacy during this presidential campaign; the last presidential campaign I worked for was George McGovern's campaign against Tricky Dick.  You might know how that came out, an absolute debacle at the polls for the Democrats, so although I always vote, I don't work for candidates anymore.

The choice seemed so clear back then, and the stakes so high, just like now 44 years later.  But the lesson I learned back then, when I was young and hopeful and confident that if I worked hard I could make a difference, is that the American electorate is often its own worst enemy, and I always defer to that era's cartoon philosopher, Pogo, who famously said (a slight misquote), "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Anti-Democratic Measures under the color of law

I just voted in Virginia and for the first time in my 44 years of voting was required to present a photo id.  I am ashamed that my state has turned to this to try to suppress economically-depressed, elderly, minority and recent immigrant voters.

Virginia is a state that went to war trying to preserve human bondage.  In my lifetime Virginia necessitated the United States Supreme Court decision (unanimous) Loving v. Virginia to overturn another of its outrageous practices, its anti-miscegenation laws. 

Did the founding fathers carry photo ids?  I'm thinking not, and they certainly didn't put a national id requirement into the constitution.

Papers, please.  I'm not trying to cross a border into a foreign place where they don't like our way of life, I am here to exercise my fundamental right of voting in a democracy!