I Voted Yesterday

Yes, I voted yesterday, 30 OCT 08, using a vote-by mail-ballot. To be exact, I marked that ballot, but didn't actually mail it in; instead, I'll hand it in on Tues, 04 NOV 08, here where I live (Valley Village, 310 apts) which has 2 precinct polling places. If that sounds odd, it really isn't here in Northern CA; just about anywhere can be a polling place & so many are. On the actual voting day, I'll 1st go to the hospital (not a polling place as far as I know, but might be), then drop off my sealed mail-in ballot back here at Valley Village, then ride the Caltrain up to S.F. where a friend's house is a local polling place.

So, you can vote at so many places from 8am to 8pm (as well as by mail) that you really have no excuse for not voting unless you're too unwell to mark the ballot, but even then you can get someone to help you who must co-sign that they did: "Due to illness or disability, I am unable to return my ballot in person and hereby authorize the following (circle one) spouse, child, parent, grandparent, grandchild, brother, sister or a person residing in my household." (also in Spanish).

Worku Negash, VP of Mission College,Santa Clara, an Ethiopian by birth, is greatly impressed by the efforts of the U.S.A. to make it possible to vote, compared to many African countries. Abuses, however, abound & the Democratic Party is busily documenting them: e.g., flyers telling Republicans to vote on 04 NOV, but Democrats to vote on 05 NOV, etc. are being circulated by Republican Party operatives who have previously stolen blank ballots, or dumped marked ballots in bodies of water in FL in 2004. Sheer desperation drove them then & still does now.

Last nite on Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS, Sat. eves.) he showed some of the flyers that GOPeratives are currently circulating against Obama: one showed Obama with a piebald (brown & white = bi-racial) pig's head, with a caption about lipstick on a pig (alleging he used that against Sarah Palin) thereby using any excuse to make Obama into an obscene animal, exceeding anything I've alleged in my poems, e.g. my imaginary flyer with a man-sized bunch of over-ripe brown bananas with a naked Obama next to them. I'm obviously too far removed from the target zones to really know what plays among crackuhs. (My reportorial poem "Bubba Redneck" is historically retro.) Apparently cross-breeding 'niggers with pigs' is leading-edge inter-species racial-biotechnology for today's crackuhs.

Appropriately enuf then, I'll be stealthily dressed all in black as a beret-wearing beatnik (with silvered sun-glasses) stalking malfeasing Republicans at a Halloween party here at Valley Village tonite. [PS] Norcal is 70/30 Democrat.