No good move in a bad position

My father taught me chess when I was so young, that now I can not remember not ever knowing how to play. One of the most important lessons was, "There is no good move in a bad position."

That explains a lot about life in general. It explains why the Democrats can't articulate a magical, silver bullet strategy to deal with Iraq and terrorism. After five years of Republican rule, we've made so many mistakes* that there is no simple, clean solution to get out of the hole they've dug.

There is no good move in a bad position.

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* Should have bulldozed Abu Ghraib, made Saddam's palaces a national memorial instead of the Green Zone, never disbanded the Iraq army, never disenfranchised low-level Baathists, finished Afghanistan and Bin Laden first, double-checked the WMD intelligence.

Mid-term elections

Its coming down to the wire and here in NM its a close one between Wilson and Madrid. If the number of campaign signs in yards is any indications, Madrid will win. Her signs outnumber Wilson's 3 or 4 to one.

I've already voted and, to avoid the chance of electronic fraud, I did so with a paper absentee ballot. See How to hack a voting machine. More importantly, I read the entire Princeton report "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine" and believe its methods and conclusions are sound. Of course, my paper ballot gets read with an optical reader and then sent to some master database of votes, so anything could happen. But I will be very upset if the exit polls and the final vote counts diverge significantly as they did in Ohio in 2004.

One thought is to take a video camera, or failing that, your camera-equiped cell phone into the booth with you and record the process. If any unusual behavior turns up, please contact your precinct voting officials immediately with your images. I'd appreciate hearing from any who experience problems. Schlepp 'at' swcp.com.

All that said, in the end it comes down to one thing -- vote on Nov. 7.