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It's already USA election day and I'll be voting in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in a few hours.
Largely thanks to the US Supreme Court Decision known as Citizens United, I can't, in a long lifetime, recall a nastier, fouler, uglier election. I don't think that's a symptom of Whippersnappers' Disease or atherosclerosis. This one was REALLY vile and nasty.
Somehow or other I will vote in some way that I pray will prevent Martha Coakley from being our next governor. I do not bandy about the word "evil" much, but I make an exception in Coakley's case. She's evil, pure evil, Old School Racist Evil, and I don't want her running this state.
She has made a career of putting non-whites and young people behind bars in wildly disproportionate numbers. She is Massachusetts' local designer of making the USA the world's largest prison -- more prisoners than China, more prisoners than Russia.
If that means I'll have to suffer 4 years of the Republican jerk (and I know a trick so I won't have to vote for that creep), I can live with that. We survived four years of Governor Mitt Romney.
I will definitely vote to ban legalized casino gambling in Massachusetts. I worked in Springfield, Massachusetts for several years, and it's hard to imagine a more dangerous, corrupt, sick city -- but a huge casino and all that goes with a huge casino, that would do the trick, more drugs and addiction, more violence, more underage prostitution, more cancer in an already cancer-ridden failed city.
Let the other casino states in the USA Northeast choose to sicken themselves with this "industry" of folly and false dreams of sudden treasure. Until fairly recent times, gambling -- like addictive drugs and prostitution -- were the monopoly of organized criminals.
Now our state legislators, and federal authorities who "supervise" Native-American nations, have embraced gambling (and its criminal handmaidens) as legitimate industries like manufacturing and scientific technology.
(Two Atlantic City casinos owned by Donald Trump in New Jersey just went belly-up and closed. My probability professor long ago taught us that it was mathematically impossible for a casino to go bankrupt. Trump is a mathematical pioneer -- he just bankrupted two casinos.)
I'll vote to expand the beverage bottle deposit program. Without it, empty beverage bottles are just worthless litter and garbage. With it, a determined army of cash-needy people -- the homeless, the broke -- gather these bottles and redeem them for cash, and clean up our landscape.
This election cycle has come very close to making me want to stop voting altogether. (Voting "just encourages them," as a TV character once said.)
But I still, albeit shakily, believe (reasonably free and fair) democratic elections are the finest, most responsive form of government that human societies have ever evolved. I want to keep filling in my ballot every election day to show that somebody prefers the free and fair democratic vote to several other systems of government or brutality or bestial atrocity I witness elsewhere.
