In the past, voting has always made me feel cheerful and virtuous. After voting this year I felt ashamed and disgusted. As I walked out of the polling room, which is located in a seniors’ center, I heard some jazzy music and the sound of tap dancing. When I peeked into the room it was coming from I saw a group of elderly ladies taking a tap dancing class. They were really into it, faces alight.

This cheered me up considerably, but on the way home I lapsed back into despair. I stopped and bought some chocolate ice cream and some strawberry ice cream and some potato chips.

I didn’t know what else to do.

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I’ve voted in every Presidential election since I was eligible to vote, starting in 1972. Tomorrow I’m going to vote one more time. For President, I’m going to check the box on the Nevada ballot which says “None Of the Above”. I’m going to go stand in line to vote for nobody. There are a lot of other things I’d rather do tomorrow, especially since my vote won’t mean much, but I’m going to vote, because voting means a lot. Everybody should vote, even if they are as nauseated as I am by the the choices our system has given us this year. It’s one’s duty as a citizen to vote, and doing one’s duty as a citizen is always a fine and honorable thing, even when the republic one loves is destroying itself.

I don’t see how anyone with even a vestige of intelligence could vote for Mitt Romney as President. I don’t see how anyone with even a vestige of conscience could vote for Barack Obama as President.

When offered a choice at dinnertime between two plates heaped high with steaming piles of feces, the only logical act is to walk away from the table.

“Shit” is not an acceptable answer to the question “What’s for dinner?”

Today a fresh-faced young kid showed up at my door canvassing for Obama. I told him I would be voting, had already made up my mind about how I’d be voting and urged him to go spend time with someone who might be less decided about things.

He asked me all the same which way I was leaning and I told him I’d rather not say, wanting to avoid a conversation that would have included the phrases habeas corpus and due process, because I figured the kid wouldn’t know what I was talking about, or why so many Americans in the past gave their lives to preserve those rights which Mr. Obama has wiped away with the stroke of a pen.

The kid’s enthusiasm and hopefulness made me sad, because they reminded me that I had been doing what he was doing four years ago, wearing the button pictured above, and in the same cheerful frame of mind.  I’m not in a cheerful frame of mind now and on Tuesday I will be downright depressed.

Mitt Romney hasn’t taken public questions from reporters in three weeks. Good thing he’s not running for president of a democracy, where people might find that sort of behavior odd!

If within the next three days you publicly announce a decision to restore habeas corpus and due process — guaranteed to us by the Constitution you took an oath to defend and essential rights in any free government — I will vote for you on Tuesday. The announcement won’t answer all the objections I have to your policies, but it will be enough.

Think about it, Mr. President — there’s still time.

. . . briefly.

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We’re all worried, I know, about the victims of Sandy, but I can tell you my mind was put at ease when I saw the pictures of Mitt Romney loading a 12-pack of bottled water onto a truck. These weren’t 16-ounce bottles, either — they were 32-ouncers, a sign that Romney knows how serious the situation is.

It was impressive, too, that Romney was doing this in Ohio, the state hit hardest by the storm.  He could have gone to a battleground state like New Jersey, which suffered little damage but would have given him more useful exposure, but he wanted to be on the front lines, where the need was greatest.

God bless you — yes, God bless you, Mitt Romney!

Romney has startling geopolitical insight, identifies Syria as “Iran’s route to the sea”, even though they don’t share a border and Iran has a long coastline of its own.

Romney — always thinking outside the box.

Romney proposes reinstatement of horse-mounted cavalry units in case of surprise Sioux uprising. Says, “My first duty as President will be to make the American frontier safe for settlement.”

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Dinesh D’Souza — identify a dogmatic right-wing apologist for traditional family values and you will identify a sleazeball adulterer. It never fails.

But let’s give the guy a break — he probably got the first expert blow-job of his life from his current squeeze.  Some things transcend ideology.

I understand the concept of voting for the lesser of two evils, but what is the end game for this approach if the lesser evil is consistently worse than the lesser evil that came before? Is it possible to draw the line anywhere?

If you can’t draw the line at Obama — at the abolition of habeas corpus and due process, at extra-judicial murder by Presidential fiat, at impunity for Wall Street criminals — can you draw it anywhere?

And if the plutocracy can go on counting on your vote for evil as long as it puts up a greater evil in opposition, who wins in the long term?

Things will change only when people draw a line beyond which their conscience won’t let them proceed.  Where is your line?  Do you even have one?

I recognize that Obama is a more attractive candidate than Romney on many levels. He’s more personable, more empathetic with people going through hard times and more respectful of simple facts.

But Obama, in his four years in office, has overturned two of the principle foundations of American democracy — habeas corpus and due process. This is something hardly anybody talks about. They probably know everything there is to know about Romney strapping his dog in a carrier on the top of his car for a long trip. Gutting The Constitution doesn’t merit that kind of coverage.

Habeas corpus is the foundation of any free government.  It means that the state can’t seize and incarcerate you without due judicial process.  It’s guaranteed in The Constitution except in cases of war or national emergency.

Lincoln notoriously and controversially suspended habeas corpus in a few instances during the Civil War — which was indisputably a war and a national emergency.  Obama, like George Bush before him, has decided that the War On Terror is an equivalent sort of war and national emergency, giving the President the right, on his sole authority and at his pleasure, to suspend habeas corpus.

This is madness.  The point of the Constitutional exceptions was to limit the suspension of habeas corpus to defined periods of crisis.  The “War On Terror” addresses a threat that might continue indefinitely — and only the President can decide if it’s over or not.  This is a classic maneuver of tyrants — suspending the guarantees of freedom on the grounds of an emergency, an emergency defined only by the tyrant.

Obama has also redefined due process.  This has always meant judicial process.  One reason for our tripartite form of government, with an independent judiciary, is to create a check on executive or legislative power through law.  Obama has introduced the novel notion that “due process” means any kind of process he chooses to apply, including formal executive or military review of cases.

When the executive can define “due process” in this way, it essentially does away with the guarantee enshrined in The Constitution.

Bad as Romney is, how can any patriotic American vote for a man who has effectively gutted The Constitution, which he took an oath to preserve?  It’s like pissing on the graves of the patriots of earlier times who gave their lives to defend the freedoms protected in The Constitution.

Liberals think, “Well, Obama is not going to misuse the powers he has seized from the people by fiat — it’s not going to affect my life.”  What they fail to consider is how future Presidents may use the tyrannical powers Obama has seized.  They argue that Obama will make better Supreme Court appointments than Romney — and that’s surely true.  But what difference will that make in an America which no longer respects habeas corpus and due process?

It will make no difference at all.  Democracy in America will be, for all intents and purposes, over.

I had a hunch that Obama might phone in his second debate with Romney, or only pretend to try harder, having lost his heart for the job of President, but I was way wrong. He brought his best game to the table Tuesday night and he played his cards like a shark. Romney, overconfident and greedy, played the role of the fish.

Obama played two especially brilliant hands in the game. One was a devastating check-raise. When Romney challenged him on his statement that he had called the Benghazi murders a terrorist attack on the day after they occurred, Obama demurred mildly but didn’t seem to want to discuss the issue. Romney read this as weakness and pounced, thinking he had trapped Obama in a lie.

When Candy Crowley attested that Obama had indeed called the murders a terrorist act on the occasion in question, Obama went all in. He hit Romney hard, invoking his authority as President, and called Romney’s insinuations “offensive”.  That’s harsh language for a Presidential debate, and Obama delivered it harshly — but he had caught Romney overplaying his hand and Romney had no choice but to fold.

Then, on the last hand, the closing statements, Romney made another bad bet — he referenced, almost in passing, his infamous 47% speech.  Obama hadn’t mentioned it himself, and maybe Romney thought he was going to ignore it, but Romney didn’t factor position into the equation.

Romney had won the coin toss to decide the order in which the candidates would speak and he unwisely chose to speak first, meaning Obama would speak last.  So when Romney made his weak bet on the 47% issue, Obama had a chance to go over the top and overwhelm him.  Since Romney had brought it up, it didn’t look like a gratuitous jab from the President.  Obama raised the half-hearted bet and then showed stronger cards.

By the end of the night Romney had lost most of the stack he had accumulated since the first debate, and Obama had enough chips on his side of the table to keep the game competitive.  Romney may not learn from his bad play — he strikes me as one of those pompous “experts” who sits down at a poker table and blames the cards when he loses his money.  It’s rarely the cards that make a man a fish — most often it’s the fish’s vanity and inability to recognize the strength of his opponents.

Women suspicious of Romney can breathe a sigh of relief — he wants flexible hours for working women which will allow them to pick up the kids, clean the house and fix dinner before their husbands get home. Gals, he’s got your back!  Whew!