Smart bombs: What stolen elections?

If you’re convinced that voter fraud is rampant and warrants immediate legislative attention, you might want to skip this item. The New York Times reported Thursday that a five-year effort by the U.S. Justice Department to crack down on voter fraud has produced a whopping 86 convictions nationwide – and most of those cases involved people who were ignorant of the rules, not conspirators trying to steal elections.

So does this merit the kind of voter reforms that Washington state Republicans have been clamoring for ever since Dino Rossi lost that squeaker to Gov. Chris Gregoire?

Richard L. Hasen, an expert in election law at the Loyola Law School, says this in the article: “If (the Justice Department) found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a congressional election or a statewide election, that would be significant. But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that often have not shown any kind of criminal intent.”

Milking the issue. Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was asked the prices for a gallon of milk and gasoline this week, and he replied $1.50 for milk and $2.89 for gas. In fact, they’re about the same, but it’s unsurprising that he knows more about gasoline, because its cost is a political issue.

Congress is considering a bill that would penalize oil and gas companies for price-gouging, though there’s been scant evidence of this after numerous investigations. The bill would not cover other products, such as milk. What’s interesting is that the prices for milk and gasoline have risen by nearly identical amounts over the past 20 years. Yet, nobody is trying to turn Big Milk into crime bosses.

In fact, for most of the past 20 years, milk has cost more than gasoline, because its cost climbed steadily, whereas gasoline prices remained flat – even dipped when accounting for inflation – for many years. It’s been only in recent years that gasoline prices have climbed dramatically to pull even with milk again.

Let’s say oil companies had raised prices right along with the milk industry. Would consumers have been better off? No. Would there be legislation? No.

So it goes. Who knows why teenagers and college students are drawn to novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who died Wednesday at the age of 84. Perhaps it’s the clear-eyed view of everyday absurdities – the kind of vision that gets blurred when joining the “real world.”

Whatever the reason, I was hooked. But I hadn’t read anything by Vonnegut for about 30 years, when the news of his death broke. In reading remembrances of his work this week, I was reminded that the absurdist view plays an important role in cutting through the fog of propriety that dulls so much political discourse.

For instance, there’s his answer in a 1999 Salon interview when asked his epitaph for the 20th century: “The good Earth – we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”