Deep Integration With the US? Consider Spain and Then Think Again

Paul Krugman's column today is on the financial squeeze hitting Spain.  He explores how much of Spain's suffering actually results from monetary union, the Euro.  It's an apt warning for those who think deep integration with the United States would be great for Canada.

Christian Evangelists Refine the Art of Witch Burning

It's all the rage in backward African countries where American evangelists have plied their magic - homicidal homophobia.

It begins by a couple of cracker shamans (like Scott Lively, author of "The Pink Swastika") staging rallies at which they convince the locals that the homosexuals in their midst pose a dire threat to their children and their society.  Once the idea sets in, the rest pretty much takes care of itself.

Their biggest success so far has been in Uganda.   But this weekend in Ghana five attackers, one of whom was an evangelist pastor, seized 72-year old Ama Hemmah, tortured her into confessing she was a witch, and then doused her in kerosene and set her alight.

This video gives you a look into these odious Christianists:


Transforming Uganda / low resolution from Bruce Wilson on Vimeo.

If you're looking for more information on evangelical savagery you can begin here, and here, here and here.

Yeah, But at Least They Like the Idea of Bombing Iran

Oh, those wacky Saudis!  Guess what?   According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic communique, the Saudis are the biggest financial backer of al Qaeda.  Still Numero Uno.  I guess they're just not able to kick the habit.

Imagine that, the Sauds and al Qaeda.  That's a strange combination isn't it?  We're talking America's main Arab ally in the war on terror.    Whats that?   Those Arabs on 9/11 who hijacked those airplanes?  Almost all them Saudis?  Really?  But what about that Saddam guy?  Wasn't he the link?  No?  You sure?

So let me get this straight.   In 2002/2003, the United States staged its army in Saudi Arabia to invade Iraq.   Why didn't they just stay there and topple the Saudis?  I don't get it.

Fascism On the March in the U.S.A.

Mark Ruffalo knows about America's merger of political and corporate power.  It's what landed him on a terrorist list.

AlterNet reports that the Pennsylvania Department of Home Security has placed Ruffalo on its terrorism watch list.  Why?   How has Ruffalo become a terror threat to the United States?   By promoting the film GasLand, a documentary about gas fracking and the dangers that poses to his country's groundwater supplies.

The marriage of government and corporatism.  It would have made Mussolini proud.

Reagan Budget Director Turns Heretic - Attacks Republican Tax Cut Theology

Ronald Reagan's budget director says the Republicans have it all wrong on tax cuts and they've been wrong for thirty years.   The man who created the notion of "supply side economics" and "trickle down tax cuts" attacks today's Republicans for destroying the last vestige of GOP fiscal prudence.

Leslie Nielsen, Dead at 84

It's being reported that Canadian great, Leslie Nielsen, has died in Florida at the age of 84.  Apparently the actor died of pneumonia.  Nielsen was the brother of former Progressive Conservative stalwart, Eric.

How to Drive America's Christian Fundamentalists Utterly Crazy

Leave it to the Hindu American Foundation.  It has launched a "Take Back Yoga" campaign "to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism." 

According to an article in The New York Times, the group says it isn't trying to convert Americans to Hinduism but merely wants to acquaint yoga practitioners to its roots in their faith's ancient traditions.   The following video shows how yoga is seen by some American fundamentalists.   Sort of like Reefer Madness:

 

The Harpies Balk at Implementing U.S. Emissions Cuts

If you want to know what a lying dirtbag looks like, take a gander at the mug of Stephen Harper or John Baird.

The lie is that they're just waiting for American action to curb carbon emissions so Canada can do the same.  They're not and they won't. 

In January new rules come into effect south of the border to curb GHG emissions of big polluters.   The Harper government has decided Canada needs something much better than that, something far more comprehensive than a dumb American policy that, if applied in Canada, would directly target the Athabasca Tar Sands.

So just go home and sit and wait for "something much better" or, better yet, just forget about it entirely.  Lying bastards.

America's Government Has Surrendered to Corporatism

If some America's radical right politicians sound eerily fascist that's probably because that's the trend in the United States today.   Even Mussolini knew that fascism is really the marriage of state and corporate power, something that is now well established in the permanent warfare state we know as 21st century U.S.A.

As Frank Rich writes in the weekend New York Times in an op-ed entitled, "Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy,"   American lawmakers now respond only to those who still have all the cash:

"... When it was reported just days before our election that Iran was protecting its political interests in Afghanistan’s presidential palace by giving bags of money to Hamid Karzai’s closest aide, Americans could hardly bring themselves to be outraged. At least with Karzai’s government, unlike our own, we could know for certain whose cash was in the bag."

In Cancun, Four Is The New Two

This may be what the Cancun climate summit will be remembered for - abandoning our focus on limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and, instead, accepting that we can no longer stop warming of at least 4 degrees.

The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has sponsored a report "Four Degrees and Beyond" that will be circulated to Cancun delegates tomorrow.  The report outlines the world we can expect to face.   From The Guardian:

"... . a billion people face losing their homes in the next 90 years because of failures to agree curbs on carbon emissions.

Up to three billion people could lose access to clean water supplies because global temperatures cannot now be stopped from rising by 4C.

"  The main message is that the closer we get to a four-degree rise, the harder it will be to deal with the consequences,"  said Dr Mark New, a climate expert at Oxford University, who organised a recent conference entitled " Four Degrees and Beyond"  on behalf of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

A key feature of these papers is that they assume that even if global carbon emission curbs were to be agreed in the future, these would be insufficient to limit global temperature rises to 2C this century – the maximum temperature rise agreed by politicians as acceptable. " To have a realistic chance of doing that, the world would have to get carbon emissions to peak within 15 years and then follow this up with a massive decarbonisation of society,"  said Dr Chris Huntingford, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire.

Few experts believe this is a remotely practical proposition, particularly in the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks last December – a point stressed by Bob Watson, former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. As he put it: " Two degrees is now a wishful dream."

Researchers such as Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office, calculate that a 4C rise could occur in less than 50 years, with melting of ice sheets and rising sea levels.

If you're 40 or under you have a pretty good chance of being around to see this played out.   The rest of us will still manage to catch the first two or three acts of this production and that'll probably be plenty.   Our kids and our grandkids - this is going to dominate their lives.

A billion people without homes or three billion without fresh water - those aren't outcomes, they're triggers.  They set off a chain of events that lead to one or more outcomes that are typically not addressed in reports like the Tyndall Centre's.   They are, however, amply addressed in research studies by the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defence and even Gwynne Dyer in his book, "Climate Wars."

Put it this way, four degrees Celsius is a civilization changer and nothing less.  Fasten your seat belt, it's going to be a wild ride.

It's Time to Bypass Karzai Altogether

Is that it?  Just the one cheque?

No army will be able to defend, for very long at least, a government as weak and corrupt as Hamid Karzai's.  It didn't work in Vietnam and it has even less chance of working in Afghanistan.

That's the view of the International Crisis Group too.   This is how they put it:

" U.S. plans to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by 2014 would lead to a collapse of the government in Kabul and serious security risks for the region.

U.S. military operations are now entering their tenth year and policymakers in Washington are looking for a way out. But the key to fighting the insurgency and bringing about the conditions for a political settlement in Afghanistan lies in improving security, justice and governance. 

" The exit strategy sounds fairly simple: try to pound the Taliban, build support by protecting civilians, lure disillusioned Taliban over to the government and create resilient security forces”, says Candace Rondeaux, Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Afghanistan. “The problem is that none of this is working”. 

...An alluring narrative of a successful counter-insurgency campaign has begun to take shape, but the storyline does not match facts on the ground. While success is being measured in numbers of insurgents killed or captured, there is little proof that the operations have disrupted the insurgency’s momentum or increased stability. The Taliban are more active than ever and they still enjoy sanctuary and support in Pakistan.

...The neglect of governance, an anaemic legal system and weak rule of law lie at the root of these problems. Too little effort has been made to develop political institutions, local government and a functioning judiciary. Insurgents and criminal elements within the political elite have as a result been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the weak Afghan state.


That last line is telling.  We say we want the Taliban to take a place within the Afghan government but they're already there.   The bad guys are part of Afghanistan's political elite and that is doing nothing to stop the fighting.

The ICG is almost certainly right that the Afghan government we have crafted both in Kabul and in the provinces has a snowball's chance in Hell of surviving our departure.   What should also be obvious is that, without a viable, legitimate and honest government, the Afghan National Army really has nothing worth fighting to defend.

The problem is we can't start all over from scratch.  We have accepted the legitimacy of Karzai's government.  Karzai added an insurance policy by cutting deals with some particularly horrible warlords/drug lords.   The only force that could depose Karzai is our own but that would  put us at war with every side in Afghanistan.  We'd be fighting the Islamist fundamentalists in the south and the bandit warlords/drug lords everywhere else.   Unless America wants to bring back the draft and open a massive new line of credit with her foreign lenders, that isn't going to happen.

The worst part is, this is a mess of our own making.  Or rather it's a mess of the Bush administration's making.   They ran the Islamists out, at least as far as the Pakistan border and then they plopped Karzai in as top dog while wasting no time making preparations to move on down the road to topple Iraq.

I guess we can blame both Bushes for creating this mess.   When the Soviets quit Afghanistan in 1989, George H. W. Bush was the newly minted president.  Over the next four years he sat indifferent as Afhganistan descended into a vicious civil war among the victorious Afghan warlords.  By 1994 the Taliban established themselves as a major force by taking Kandahar with the backing of the Pakistani intelligence service.

Bush I turned his back, allowing Afghanistan to collapse into a radical Islamist tyranny where al Qaeda could flourish.   Bush II set out to topple the fundamentalist Taliban government and destroy al Qaeda and then, without finishing either job, like his father turned his back on Afghanistan.   That leaves us in 2010 facing the Herculean chore of undoing the damage caused by the Bush administration in 2003.   That would've been tough in 2003, it's nearly impossible in 2010.

Perhaps the only exit strategy that remains open to us now is in direct negotiations with the Taliban.  We'll never get a straight deal going through Karzai and he's shown us that again and again.  Perhaps if Karzai & Company realized we were willing to deal with the Talibs directly and cut them out they would finally see it in their own immediate, even urgent, interest to reform their rotten state.   However if we're not prepared to go that route, we'll probably be having this same discussion three years from now.   What would be the point of that?

We're looking for the exit but Hamid Karzai is blocking that door.

Is the U.S. In League with Terrorists?

Wikileaks is planning a truly massive dump of U.S. government documents this weekend that could show Washington in league with terrorists.   The documents are said to show the U.S. has been supporting Turkey's Kurdish separatists, the PKK.   This is the same PKK that Washington officially lists as a terrorist group.

A report in The Jerusalem Post said the US military documents referred to the PKK as ''warriors for freedom and Turkish citizens'' and said the US had set free arrested PKK members in Iraq.

The documents also say US forces in Iraq have given weapons to the PKK.

But, then again, if America is supporting them they're not terrorists, they're freedom fighters.  Washington's perfidy will likely drive once secular Turkey even more firmly into the Islamist camp which will also probably eliminate what had been Israel's best friend in the Muslim world.

Holding Humanity Hostage

Those of us from the industrialized nations can have a pretty skewed notion of our place in the world.  We've had it so good for so long we've come to believe the continuation of that imbalance our right.  We are entitled to keep pursuing affluence regardless that others may be bearing the end costs of it.

We're being watched.  The developing nations and the Third World are keeping a close eye on us and they don't like what they see.  Now with the Cancun climate summit a week off, they're accusing the rich countries of "holding humanity hostage."  From The Guardian:

"
Tonight the first shots were fired in what are likely to be serious diplomatic clashes at the talks. In an interview with the Guardian, Bolivia's ambassador to the UN accused rich countries of "holding humanity hostage"  and undermining the UN. " [Their] deliberate attempts to sideline democracy and justice in the climate debate will be viewed as reckless and immoral by future generations,"  he said. " I feel that Cancún will become a new Copenhagen if there is no shift in the next few days."

" There is deep frustration among the least developed countries", said Bruno Sikoli, the spokesman for the 54-strong group of mainly African countries. " "We feel there has been far too much talking. If the rich countries put nothing new on the table, then it will be very serious. Climate change is affecting our countries hard now. It is most urgent."

If we think we've got a terrorism problem now in radical Islam just wait to see what will come out of a devastated Third World that squarely blames us for their plight.

Brilliant. Gerald Caplan Explores How Canada Has Jumped Aboard America's Permanent War

This should make the Liberal faithful cringe - a lot.   Gerald Caplan explains how our leaders enlisted Canada into service of the most warlike nation ever, the United States.  As Caplan so rightly points out, we are joining America on the path to permanent war.  That's probably understandable from the radical Right but it's an abomination coming from someone who purports to lead the Liberal Party.

Read Caplan's piece and then ask yourself if the Liberal Party or Canada has anything to gain from this sort of leadership.  Caplan notes the passing last week of the American Chalmers Johnson.   Here's what the late Mr. Johnson thought about your Liberal Leader:

During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for  "humanitaian imperialism,"  also known as " Empire Lite."   As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and become a politician.  Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having use " we" and " us" some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled " Lesser Evils," which is a defense of official torture.

In the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserts, 'Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis.  Yet what word but 'empire' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?  It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.'


In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: 'Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs...  Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty fo a state...  The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough.'


Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff's epistles to the Americans to 'a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), transforming Bush's blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.'

 Oh, I know, I know.   That was the American Michael Ignatieff, not the Canadian Michael Ignatieff who came to restore the Liberal Party to its former greatness.  Really?  Well guess what?  It's up to Michael Ignatieff to explain how someone claiming to be fit to lead the Liberal Party could have so recently and so persistently embraced the American warfare state.  How can a highly educated person simply ditch such boldly stated and repugnant views simply by returning to Canada?  On this, Mr. Ignatieff does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.  The burden of proving - and explaining - his transformation lies squarely with Mr. Ignatieff himself.  We're waiting.

Afghanistan, Now They Figure It Out

All the King's Horses and All the King's Men

Canada went to fight a war barely prepared to fight a skirmish.

The force that now safely retired general Rick "The Big Cod" Hillier assembled for the combat mission to Kandahar comprised 2,500 soldiers (1,500 supporting a battle group of just 1,000) equipped with laughable vehicles like the Itlis, a Volkswagen mini-jeep designed to navigate the densely treed European forests.

That little jeep was used to take shots at former Liberal governments for supposedly under-funding our military.   Apparently Hillier thought that, back when Chretien/Martin were at the controls, trying to pull Canada out of the fiscal nosedive they inherited from Mulroney, the armed forces should have been exempt from cuts.  Anyway, Hillier and Harper gave each other lap dances on that one.  And besides it gave our brilliant civilian and military leaders the chance to make it all right - they bought a bigger and equally defenseless, German SUV, the G-Wagon.  That was indicative of how poorly our military and civilian leadership grasped what they our soldiers were up against in Kandahar.  And that was just the beginning.

When Hillier assembled the Kandahar force, he figured 2,500 would be enough for the job which he described as a mission to "kill scumbags" that he assured reporters numbered just "a few dozen" in strength.  Hillier committed the ultimate error that has marked countless failed military leaders throughout history - he underestimated the enemy he was sending those soldiers to fight.  He underestimated their numbers, he underestimated their capabilities and, worst of all, he underestimated by light years the size of the force needed to secure a province such as Kandahar.

Current American counterinsurgency doctrine prescribes the need for one counter-insurgent (rifleman) for every 25 to 50 civilians in the area to be secured.  In Kandahar that meant a minimum combat force of 20,000 to 25,000 soldiers.   So many troops are required so that they can defend every village, day and night, to deny the insurgents access to and control of the population.   If you pass through a village two hours every day, you leave the locals subject to the whim of your enemy twenty-two hours a day.  If they want to survive guess who they'll be siding with?

For Afghanistan we needed a force equivalent to the combat force we sent to Korea but we opted to wage war on the cheap.  Even back then Petraeus was warning that counterinsurgency is the most labour-intensive form of warfare bar none.   He was pretty blunt that it was "go big or go home."   He also noted that foreign armies have to get the job done quickly because, in a short time, they can go in the minds of the locals from liberator/defender to occupier/oppressor.   The mission Hillier crafted broke every rule in the book with entirely predictable results.

Now that it's probably too late (the political war has been decided and not in our favour), conditions have changed in Kandahar province.  Now, only now, NATO and the US are beginning to field an adequate force.   A report from Reuters has an anonymous Canadian officer praising the improvements:

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has about 25,000 troops in Kandahar province, a big increase from when 2,800 Canadian soldiers tried to control the province's 54,000 sq km (20,000 sq miles) on their own in recent years.

 About 10,000 Afghan soldiers also are in the province.

The sprawling ISAF base centered on Kandahar city's airport rumbles almost constantly from fighters and helicopters taking off or landing and from the noise of new construction.

The greater troop strength means that Canadians and other NATO forces can better protect residents from the Taliban, a key element of the counterinsurgency strategy laid out by U.S. and NATO commander General David Petraeus, the officer said.

 "Before, we were chasing ghosts. We were never able to say, 'We're here to stay and defend you', and then actually do it. It all comes down to boots on the ground,"  he said.

Now they figure it out.   Now they flood Kandahar with an adequate force.   Now it's probably too late to make much difference.  Stephen Harper got his war on the cheap and Hillier and his generals ran cover when they should have resigned in protest.   They sent our troops to a war zone to tread water and troll for IEDs.  


We had clearly defined objectives when we went to war.   We were there to defeat the insurgents and to help craft a secular, democratic, modern government to run a viable state in which the rights of everyone, especially women and children, would be upheld.   One by one, we lost our objectives.   The insurgency morphed back into a classic civil war, insurgents transformed into rebels.  We were so understrength we had no option but to embrace the doubly toxic culture of warlordism and tribalism that poisoned any chance of establishing a viable central government.  We allowed Afghanistan to become one of the most corrupt "failed states" in the world and a narco-state at that.


Every one of those sad happenings was a defeat for us and an outright, albeit unearned victory for our enemy who wants nothing more than to revert to the civil war that existed before we drove the Taliban out in 2001.   A hopelessly corrupt and predatory government works entirely to the rebels' advantage.


But we, our civilian and military leadership that is, masked their defeats by routinely moving the goal posts.  Now our objective is to simply train an Afghan army that can supposedly step into our shoes to fight the Taliban.  That's it and any way you cut it, that's an admission of defeat.   We've lost.

Whatever Happened to 2 Weeks Notice? Danny Williams Quits

Newfoundland & Labrador premier Danny Williams is cleaning out his desk.  Williams will retire - on December 3.  Yeah, next week.  He's certainly been a high profile premier more than ready to stand up to Ottawa when that was needed and I'm sure he'll be missed by many people at the far end of this country and quite a few in between.

How come Newfoundland gets all the luck?  They've got a good premier.  He resigns - on his own terms - and promptly vacates the office.   Here on the Left Coast, we've got a jackass of a premier.  He gets run out of office in disgrace (think pitchforks and torches) and yet hangs on to the very job no one wants him in for months.   I guess that says a lot about the difference between a Williams and a Campbell.

The Law Catches Up with DeLay

Former Republican House leader, Tom "The Hammer" DeLay has been convicted of money-laundering.  A jury of six men and six women deliberated 19-hours to reach their guilty verdict.

DeLay faces between 5 and 99-years on the charge but he is, after all, a prominent Republican and this is Texas.  Watch the judge go for a probation deal instead.  To circumvent Texas law prohibiting corporate contributions to political candidates, DeLay accepted the money and laundered it through a co-operative Republican National Committee.  The RNC accepted the DeLay money and then wrote cheques according to a list of candidates and amounts each was to receive.

The Hammer says he'll appeal his conviction.

Chalmers Johnson, Dead at 79

Well before America was rocked by the attacks of 9/11, Chalmers Johnson's prophetic book Blowback was published in which he warned that America's secret operations abroad would inevitably exact a terrible price at home.   His subsequent books Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic; and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic came to comprise what was known as the Blowback Trilogy.

This year Chalmers published his final work, Dismantling the Empire, America's Last Best Hope.   All of these save The Sorrows of Empire are reviewed on this site.   The New York Review of Books aptly said this of the man, "Johnson wants the scales to fall from American eyes so that the nation can see the truth about its role in the world.  His is a patriot's passion: his motive is to save the American republic he loves."

A latter day Cassandra, Chalmers Johnson, together with others such as Andrew Bacevich, see their country caught in a death spiral of militarism.  His death certainly is America's loss.

In This Sort of World, Sarah Palin Could Be President

Any remotely sentient being could not imagine the American people electing Sarah Palin their president.   Rachel Maddow explains how the US Right has seen to it that they actually could vote Palin into the White House - a culture of mutually-reinforcing lies:

A Better Way to Vote?

There was a discernible sense of relief across British Columbia when premier Gordon Campbell announced he was finally resigning.  But what should have been a really joyous event fizzled for a lot of us quite quickly when Campbell's departure reminded us of the province's 'other' political leader and candidate for the premiership, Carole James of the NDP.  Oh dear.

Call it the curse of living in a bi-polar province.  The NDP has its staunch supporters on the Left.  The BC Libs, despite their misleading name, have plenty of their own staunch supporters on the Right.   But the key to power lies in capturing the centre.   Most of us in the centre really don't much care for the Left or the Right which leads to a lot of negative voting.  We figure out which one of these clowns we like the least then hold our noses, vote for the other one and brace for the aftermath.

What if there was a second option available on the ballot?  What if, instead of having to vote for someone, you could vote against the candidate you least liked?  I mean we always complain about low voter turnout when that's probably in fact the result of high voter turnoff.  If you can't stand either of the choices, why bother? Just stay home.  But if you knew you could go to the polls and know your vote could be deducted from the candidate you most didn't want it'd certainly be worth the trip.   And wouldn't the results be interesting on the evening news?  "Out of 26,000 votes cast in the riding, Ms. Maple won with a net 2,000, trouncing incumbent Mr. Oak who received just a net 600."  No bragging rights there, no false "mandate" either.

The disaffected vote could actually decide elections and wouldn't that be a wake-up call for the establishment Right and the doctrinaire Left?   Just being the better of two evils might not cut it any more.  I think that's about the only way to get the Left and the Right to be more attentive, even dutiful to the centre where most of us live, the liberal centre.

There's something truly perverse in the current arrangement.   Even though you go to the polls intending to vote against a party or candidate, the only way you can do that is by voting in support of another candidate you may not consider worthy of your support.  That's giving a vote to somebody who doesn't deserve it.  It's like saying "you can only express your opinion by supporting one of these two jackasses."  If you don't think either one of them is fit for the job, why can't you express that in a ballot by having a vote deducted from the worst of them while, at the same time, not giving a vote of approval to the other one either?  Surely that's genuine participatory democracy.

Who needs proportional representation when you can take your scimitar with you into the ballot box?  Regardless of the outcome, your vote will count.