Homeless in Arizona

Source

Were some issues missing from these debates?

Posted: Oct. 21, 2012 | 2:06 a.m.

Today's relaxed rules for absentee balloting destroy the secrecy of the voting booth - and thus the credibility of the overall canvas.

Because the voter no longer even has to pretend he or she will be out of town or in the hospital, union shop stewards and presumably even the occasional employer can order their workers to request absentee ballots and bring them to a "work session" where they can be instructed how to fill them out, and then see their ballots gathered up by their bosses for mailing.

Add early voting - which invites fraud by allowing votes to be cast miles from the poll-watchers of a voter's home precinct - and about half the minority of Nevadans who will "vote" in this election, at all, will have voted long before Nov. 6 - whether they're still alive, or not.

So much for the old "national day of decision." Some have compared this to allowing trial jurors to cast their ballots before the defense is done presenting its case, if they want to go home early.

Our elections are of limited effectiveness in allowing us to dictate a course change as a nation, anyway. Our kleptocrats have borrowed trillions that can't be repaid, except with the inflated rubber money the Treasury and Federal Reserve now desperately create out of thin air with their electronic keyboards, a vast improvement in efficiency over the boxcars full of paper and ink the Weimar Republic once used.

And what did our wise government masters spend that money on? Windmill farms that stand mostly idle, bankrupt solar manufacturers, enraging Third World nations by killing thousands of their civilians with drone strikes, schools that take the six-week process of teaching a child to read and stretch it over a decade so it costs $100,000, college endive research, a big pile to reward our irresponsible banksters and encourage them to do it all again - surely the road to hell is paved with pork.

Why do you think the Red Chinese are buying up our derelict real estate? Gotta spend their hoard of dollars on something before those colorful scraps of paper become completely worthless.

Yet candidates of both parties vow to "protect Medicare" (no matter how much more we have to borrow, or loot from the young) and "work to undo the Draconian 15 percent across-the-board spending cuts that are due to go into effect Dec. 31."

Draconian? We'd have to cut federal spending by 50 percent - not 15, but 50 (Gary Johnson says 47) - overnight to convince anyone we ever mean to balance the budget and start paying down the debt.

That'll happen after hell freezes, or the rioters burn Anacostia to the ground, or a Libertarian gets elected president, whichever comes first.

Yes, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson will be on your Nov. 6 presidential ballot - though you wouldn't have learned that by watching the sham "presidential debates."

As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine pointed out in an op-ed in Thursday's Review-Journal, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney pretty much agree on keeping the Patriot Act, keeping the constitutionally toxic National Defense Authorization Act, and continuing our vastly expensive and counterproductive interventions in the internal affairs of nations around the world.

It's OK for Pakistan and Israel and the Ukraine to have nukes, apparently, but we'll invade Iran - which is like Afghanistan except with an actual army - if they try to build a weapon of which we possess thousands.

Both Mr. Obamney and Mr. Rombama would continue the absurd and vastly expensive (and coincidentally unconstitutional and ineffective) strip-searching of every American airline passenger, and continue to incarcerate a higher proportion of our populace than any nation in the world - a curiously high percentage of them black and Hispanic males - by perpetuating the War on Drugs.

Why wasn't Libertarian Gary Johnson, who will be on the ballot in all 50 states, allowed to participate in at least one of the three major presidential debates?

Because these shams are in fact orchestrated by the Democratic and Republican parties in a joint venture designed to create the impression they're the only game in town, like the American League and the National League somehow forgetting to invite any Japanese teams to compete in what they call the World Series.

("Why should we let those guys in? They'd only lose, anyway! And if they ever did win, they'd do it by bunting! Who wants to see that?!")

Johnson wasn't invited "lest an actual debate about foreign policy break out," Mr. Sullum quips.

Or maybe about the Federal Reserve, or the U.N.'s Agenda 21.

In fact, after being denied entrance to the campus because they lacked "credentials," Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate were arrested outside Long Island's Hofstra University prior to Tuesday's thoroughly orchestrated "debate."

The two candidates sat down in the street with an American flag across their laps, ABC News reports. They were led away by police and reportedly held till the debate was over and no more possibility existed that they could panic American voters by causing them to hear anything but the Republicrat line.

Not that I sympathize much with the positions of the Green Party, mind you. I just can't understand why they're not allowed to be heard. Things are going so well that we don't need any fresh ideas?

This conspiracy of silence extends to our local races in Nevada, when it comes to TV. At least those who peruse the Review-Journal's voter guide today will learn that there's a candidate on the ballot in the 4th Congressional District who would vote to really cut taxes and get government out of our lives - local schoolteacher Joe Silvestri.

I've got nothing against Republican Danny Tarkanian, mind you, who's smarter than Democrat Steven Horsford, less dependent on memorized party talking points, less ethically challenged and more likely to keep in mind the plight of the small business owner whose efforts alone can bring about an eventual economic recovery.

But it's 46-year-old local schoolteacher Joe Silvestri who argues that a truly free market in health care would look more like the market in consumer electronics - largely free of government mandates and regulations - where technology keeps improving even as costs fall.

Ending the War on Drugs? Ending our wasteful and counterproductive meddling in scores of nations overseas? Those issues again went unmentioned in our local televised debates in CD4, because of the systematic exclusion by the statist press of personable, articulate, local high school history teacher Joe Silvestri - a systematic exclusion of responsible Libertarian voices that's been ongoing for decades.

And we wonder why they're so alike on big issues that they end up arguing about Big Bird and "binders full of women."

Vin Suprynowicz is the author of "The Ballad of Carl Drega" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See vinsuprynowicz.com.