Fear

One can't help but feel that the United States is going through some dangerous times.

Anyone who may have entertained the thought that the election of Barack Obama signified a victory of positive politics over polarised hatred will surely have had such high hopes dashed as it becomes increasingly clear that the change of command has not really changed anything about America. It is still a scarily polarised and divided nation, one in which hatred, anger, intolerance, and, especially, fear bubble near the surface.

It is a country now entering very dangerous territory. Not only have politicians and other people been shouted down and denounced, not only are the denunciations clearly based on some of the basest scare tactics, it has gotten to the point where a man is found picketing the building where the President of the United States is explaining the issue of health care with a loaded firearm strapped to his leg and holding a sign which could in context be seen as calling for a violent revolution. The sign said, "Now is the time to water the tree of liberty." In all likelihood it referred to the quote "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

The truly frightening thing is that violence, or even a civil war, doesn't seem like such a remote possibility. Even before conservative windbags were declaring that Obama was a Muslim, a socialist, and was going to destroy America, the United States was a starkly divided and polarised country, a nation of "red states" and "blue states". Throughout the reign of George W. Bush, the right wing turned "liberal" into a dirty word, an amalgamation of all they felt most undesirable of their political opponents. But it went further. More than just simple disagreement over what would be best for the country, it was ugly. The voices of the American right, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and their ilk, condemned and promoted outright hatred of anyone opposed to their views. They continually declared or implied to the effect that such people were traitors, evil, and not "American" at all, rather, they were enemies of "America", who were working to literally destroy "America".

This stream of scorched earth invective has left the political situation in the United States in a truly dangerous state. It continued, through the 2008 presidential election campaign, with Obama's opponent John McCain even having at times to quell the more extreme views at his own events; people who truly believed Obama was a Muslim and said they were afraid of him. Often attendees at Republican events wanted to know why the "truth" wasn't being used by McCain. It continued after Obama was inauguarated, with right-wingers promoting the ridiculous idea that Obama was not actually born in Hawaii but in Kenya - and by their constitution, therefore ineligible to be president.

In all this, Obama's strong electoral victory seems to mean nothing. The fact that he may have won in the old Confederate states like Virginia and North Carolina does not mean that hatred and racism do not still endure, or that the polarisation in America is over. Obama himself may have declared that there are no red states or blue states, only the United States. Unfortunately, it isn't really about which candidate a geographical area voted for any more, although such views are definitely more prevalent in the politically right-wing sections of the country. There is an unresolved, fundamental disconnect here.

And on the other side of that disconnect is a dangerous, violent undercurrent. It isn't simply support for the Republican political party, indeed, nothing could be more harmless than a peaceful democratic dialogue, even if it is a partisan one. But it has gone well beyond that now, and therein lies a well of hate spawned by fear. It is likely what fuelled one like Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing, indeed, it could very well be that the next terrorist act against the United States will not be from any external threat at all, but from within, from someone like McVeigh, from any number of those who have come to believe that the government itself, not just the politicians who happen to be in charge of it, are corrupt and evil.

The stage is set in the United States now for something terrible and dreadful to occur. And I confess now that I am deathly afraid that one day soon, it may happen.

Rumours on the Internets: E-voting is a terrible idea

Elections Canada has got a solution for low voter turnout... vote on the internet.

You thought those Diebold machines switching thousands of Kerry votes to Bush votes or having Kerry's count missing altogether, and those electronic machines in the States were bad? There's already a bit of the danger being seen by some machines not leaving a paper trail, if they crash or the data becomes corrupt, for instance. And they're not even connected to the Internet. If electronic voting machines are already that prone to miscounts and malice, what more if you actually add a pathway for people to hack into the whole damn thing? Just imagine when the votes are going right through the Internet and anyone in the world could potentially hack into the system and literally decide Canada's government for it.

Well, not just anyone, actually: the most likely candidates to try are foreign national governments. Russia, for instance, is suspected to have launched cyberattacks against Estonia to cripple their government sites and Internet services, and similar reports were heard from Georgia during the Georgia crisis in August 2008. Barack Obama's recently created a military "cyberwar" division. Do you really think that the Americans are going to be so scrupulous if they see it in their interest to make sure they have as compliant a Prime Minister as possible in Ottawa?

And that's not even getting at the most obvious source of what is the enormous potential for an outright subversion of democracy, the candidates themselves. Casual hackers already break into websites just for the hell of it, what more those with more concrete motivations? Would it be that difficult to imagine a party leader desperate to become Prime Minister clandestinely hiring people with these skills to break in and mess with the voting tallies?

Of course, there's plenty of fraud that goes on with paper ballots throughout the world. That's no reason to make it even easier and less detectable with Internet voting. With paper ballots, there's physical evidence. To cover it up you have to burn them or destroy them because they will show the true vote. Granted, you do have that long-drawn-out proceedings over the Minnesota senate election with people scrawling "lizard people" on their ballots or other silly things, but can we say there wouldn't be controversy over an Internet vote with the same numbers and that 0.0075% margin of victory?

The democratic process is serious business and to create the potential for it to be compromised is a very dangerous thing. If such a thing were to happen in Canada, we should be so lucky that we suspected it and had mayhem in the streets as in Iran now or as Ukraine had in the 2004 "Orange Revolution". Even worse would be for an election and Canada's democracy to be quietly stolen without anyone's knowledge - by one of the candidates or by another state altogether. Internet voting makes that very disturbing possibility into a probability. And let's face it, even the detection of a foiled attempt would compromise the legitimacy of the vote, since we wouldn't know if there was also a successful one. Then it's right back to paper ballots again, isn't it?

All this, however, hasn't hit the "problem" Elections Canada wants to solve: low voter turnout. First, the basis for the conclusion that a problem exists is that the 2008 election had the lowest turnout in Canada's history.

Is that really so surprising? 2008 was the third election in four years. Even beyond that obvious factor, you had a Prime Minister who had broken his own law to call the election in the first place, a cynical, calculative and bullying man so intensely wooden and stiff as to be beyond all inspirational ability. The man with the best chance to replace him was incomprehensible to a huge swath of the voters, and most of those who could understand him perfectly detested him for his part in the Quebec anti-sovereignty fight, and had been comprehensively demonised by a vicious year-long attack ad campaign, which doubtless only added further to the sense of "why bother?". Is it any surprise that voters found it all so uninspiring that a significant number of those polled said that given the chance they'd give up their right to vote in Canada for the chance to vote in the American election instead?

And what happened at that American election? They had the highest turnout in 41 years. The reason for that was obvious: one of the candidates had fired the imagination and excited voters, and there was an urgent sense of the country having been careening wildly into terrible places and being on the precipice. The palpable energy and excitement and the momentous nature of the choice made it very difficult to be apathetic.

In short, it isn't really about how convenient it is to vote that affects the turnout. It's whether the voters feel that the election itself is worth voting in. Any move to make it simpler and easier to vote will help, of course, so people won't feel they're subjecting themselves to some sort of excruciating trial to exercise their political rights, but the basic integrity of the vote itself cannot be compromised, or such efforts, such as this idea to vote over the internet, become self-defeating to dangerous degrees.

Here's one fact to chew on, however. That earth-shaking, inspiring, hard-on inducing American election had a turnout of 56.8%, by that source. The overwhelmingly apathetic failure of democracy in Canada had a turnout of a terrible, disappointing, measely 58.8%. Yeah, that's right. We still beat them in turnout.

To end on a lighter note, here is my basic point being made as only The Onion can - with a satire of vacuous TV political analysts as a bonus.

Quick thoughts on the Abdelrazik saga

Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.
- Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 6

It's not just the messing about to get out of complying with a court order. It's deeper and more troubling than that. It simply should not be this hard to make the government acknowledge and cease its violation of a person's basic constitutional rights.

If the government can be so cavalier about this legal right, what other rights are they going to feel free to be cavalier about?

And Omar Khadr still isn't back in Canada, too.

What could possibly be sexier?

Apparently Lisa Raitt, whose aides sure seem to misplace a lot of important things, finds isotope shortages "sexy".

The satire just writes itself.

Lisa Raitt and Harper cabinet strangeness

Who on earth knows what Harper's thinking, especially in the wake of the fact that he apparently refused to allow Lisa Raitt to resign from the Cabinet over those secret documents left in a CTV studio.

It may be just a puppet show orchestrated for the public, but the facts as we know them are that Lisa Raitt went to the Prime Minister to resign and Harper apparently told her "no". An aide who was involved and also offered to resign was allowed to, however. It seems strange, therefore, that after Raitt in effect admitted her responsibility for the documents, Harper apparently said, no, you aren't responsible for them, the aide is. You're fine, you're not to blame, please stay.

Isn't this extremely strange?

Consider that Maxime Bernier, who was much more high-profile and from Québec, which at the time was being openly courted as the final piece in the puzzle that would have led to a Conservative majority, was hustled out of his Cabinet post real sharpish. Surely Raitt can't be more valuable to Harper than Bernier was.

Could it be that perhaps Bernier was a threat to Harper in terms of Conservative Party leadership, and Raitt was not? Perhaps, but I don't recall anyone even talking of Harper even being in trouble back then. May 2008 was just months before Harper called the election in which he actually gained seats.

Perhaps it's a question of the sordid manner in which the Bernier lapse came to light, what with the element of sex and girlfriends which tend to make Conservatives queasy... or maybe that's it, Harper's got a crush on Raitt. Maybe Raitt stumbled upon Harper burying the corpses of seven freshly-killed infants which he had just sucked dry of their blood. Who the hell knows.

At the very least though, this is clear inconsistency. The fact that Harper has decided to deliberately back Lisa Raitt, and scapegoat an aide, just doesn't seem to be easily explainable to me.

It could be worse

Omar Khadr has been ruled mentally unfit to testify about psychological torture.

"Because of Mr. Khadr's fragile state due to unknown hours spent under the most brutal, mentally straining conditions, he cannot be trusted to speak competently on his own behalf,"

...that's The Onion, of course.

Pro-life?

...not so much.

Sincere condolences to Dr. Tiller's family, who have been made victims of a terrible crime which simply cannot be justified.