solarbird | 19 minutes left to vote

Voted today; walked to the polling station. This'll be one of the last times I do that, as King County is going all-mail in 2007. I have generally been opposed to this, as well as to electronic (touchscreen) voting, but with one positive exception: you have an absolute, unavoidable paper trail. To wit: yay!

Today I have another reason for being for it. They had an example touchscreen in the polling place for what they'd go to otherwise. It's a... wait for it...

Diebold touchscreen.

Of course. To wit: fuck no, and I repeat, fuck no. No easily-hackable, trivially openable, 30-second reprogrammable, malfunctioning, vote-shifting, built-for-fraud Diebold machines, period. So yay, going to mail-only balloting, I guess. Personally, I like the old-school fill-in-the-oval paper system we have now. It works just fine.

Turnout is very low. I suspect a few of the fundamentalist asshat judicial slate will get in as a result. To wit: dammit. But it'll be a while until we know, most of the ballots expected to be cast are expected to be cast via paper mail.

Today's (Tuesday's) Miles: 2.5
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1325.2
Miles out of Rivendell: 860.2
Miles out of Lothlórien: 405.2
Miles to Rauros Falls: 3.8

Yes, the walk to the polling station and back was rather tiring. But here I am, there and back again. And I even took my backpack (with a jacket and umbrella in it in case it got rainy and such) so I even had some cargo with me, making things heavier. And since I figured out I was holding my shoulder to avoid excruciating pain no longer there and stopped doing that, it's been hurting less. Go fig.

A couple of more articles that I didn't include in my previous post because I already had four and these aren't as to the point (click through for full articles):

[Canadian computer engineer] Arar, now 36, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released, the Canadian inquiry commission found. O'Connor concluded that "categorically there is no evidence" that Arar did anything wrong or was a security threat.

Another version in another paper:

OTTAWA, Sept. 18 — A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

If you're for the kind of routine torture the President wants, this is what you're supporting. There's plenty of fault on the Canadian side in this, but it was the US who shipped him off to torturetown.

I'll end on a flower picture, to cleanse the palette: