If you have a choice, vote the old fashioned way: At the polls, allowing plenty of time, and ready to assert your right to vote, by provisional ballot if necessary, if you are told your name is not on the list. Although it is "easy and fun", vote by mail is second only to Internet voting in the risk it presents to American democracy. To get a glimpse of just how slipshod our control system for vote-by-mail is, read the story of Jeffrey Dean and his prison companion, John Elder:

While in prison, embezzler Jeffrey Dean became friends with a narcotics trafficker named John Elder. While still in prison, on a work-release program, Jeffrey Dean was tasked with creating a computerized vote by mail program for King County, Washington. He began this assignment while working for his brother, Neil Dean, whose business had a contract with King County to provide temporary workers for its huge absentee voting operation. At the time, King County had about 1 million voters, 600,000 of whom voted by absentee.

Jeff and Neil Dean became involved in creating a vote-by-mail automation program to handle mail processing and signature comparison.

10/10/10

Dear President Obama,

It seems that the theme emanating from the White House is “Eat, Pray, Be Disappointed.” And yet, whenever I do feel disappointed, I always realize that the alternative was John McCain, with Sarah Palin just one Halloween “Boo!” away from the presidency, and then I always feel a sense of relief.

Actually, you’ve kept one big campaign promise – to send more troops to Afghanistan – so I guess we can’t fault you for that. In fact, according to Bob Woodward in Obama’s Wars, all you want to do now is get out of Afghanistan. Well, why don’t you just do what Osama bin Laden did; cross over to Pakistan. Since we bribe Pakistan to be our ally, you’d think they would never consider harboring bin Laden, though they reek with empathy when our outsourced drones drop those bombs.

Also, during the campaign you said you believe that the legality of same-sex marriage should be decided by the states, but that you personally think marriage should be between a man and a woman. Which is exactly the position that caused Miss USA, Carrie Prejean, to have her crown revoked.

Maryland's Calvert Cliffs nuke project is on the brink of cancellation. It's potentially one of the most critical atomic failures in decades.

But financial markets love the nuke's demise. The stock of its American partner---Constellation Energy---has soared with the apparent death of a project widely feared as a huge money-loser.

Just 40 miles south of the White House, George W. Bush hailed Calvert Cliffs in 2005 as the shining symbol of a "reactor renaissance." In partnership with EDF, the French national utility, Constellation jumped high in the line for a share of the $18.5 billion Bush earmarked for federal loan guarantees to finance new reactors

Bush wanted at least $50 billion more in guarantees, but was beaten back then, in 2007 and afterwards by a series of national grassroots campaigns.

Constellation Energy says it's still "in negotiations" with the Energy Department for $7.6 billion in guarantees. But financial reports indicate the project is all but dead.

Why?

I call it the Nazi virus.
Even as we were prosecuting Nazis at Nuremberg for their barbaric behavior, including their notorious medical experiments on death camp inmates, we were, it turns out, conducting our own medical experiments on a vulnerable and unsuspecting population: Between 1946 and 1948, medical researchers with the U.S. Public Health Service deliberately infected almost 700 Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and gonorrhea in order to study the effects of penicillin on the diseases.

What does it take to be a monster? Maybe no more than good intentions and a war to fight — in the above case, a “war” against venereal disease — and, oh yeah, near-absolute power over a group of people who, so easily in such cases, become expendable, at least compared to what we can learn from their unknowing or forced participation in a scientific experiment. Their suffering, their death, is such a small thing compared to human progress. Just ask Dr. Mengele.