The American people are about to go to the polls to cast their votes on Diablo/Diebold computers that leave no paper trail, are hackable, and even if they were as honest as votes in Iraq probably wouldn’t change anything anyway. Baghdaddy Bush isn’t on the ballot. Neither are his major henchmen.

This midterm election is about keeping or changing members of Congress and most of these people abandoned their responsibilities a long time ago. How do we find people who questioned the many lies about Iraq and didn’t concede their constitutional authority to be the only political body capable of declaring war? How do we unearth those who twice voted against the Patriot Act that took away so many of our freedoms? How do we locate those who did not support the Military Commissions Act that abandoned Habeas Corpus, condones torture, and makes George W. Bush a virtual dictator?

Are there any third party candidates out there who haven’t already sworn allegiance to the New World Odor just to get their names on the ballot? Do any of them have clear plans to get us out of the quagmire in Iraq? Are there “write-in” candidates who have a snowball’s chance without the name recognition of Donald Duck?

Bush and most republicans started out campaigning on fear stories about the “war on terror” and suicidal madmen that are out to “destroy our way of life” even though five years after 9/11 our borders are still wide open, our port management is still up for sale, and baloney has it that the enemy can’t spare nineteen more terrorists because we “took the war to them” by invading and occupying a small nation that had nothing at all to do with attacks on America.

Most Americans are finally beginning to realize that there’s no reason to hide behind their duct tape when the federal government, the prime target of terrorists, obviously has no fear of terrorists and that’s why both Congress and the administration have done little or nothing about our open borders.

At this late date in the campaign season, republican candidates are being advised to come off the “fear” stories and switch their promotions to the “booming” economy.

Wow. That ought to get incumbent and new republicans a lot of mileage with the people.

All of the American workers who haven’t yet lost their jobs to outsourcing and companies leaving the country should fall on their knees and bow towards Washington for all of  the help they’ve been given. Small businesses that have been run out of town by monopolies like WalMart and other box stores filled with products manufactured in China, people who’ve lost their pension and retirement plans or had them seriously cut back, should all face to the East and give thanks to Washington.

The fact that inflation has been held down and what you’re paying for a hamburger these days is just a mirage ought to give republicans a real shot in the arm.

Federal tax receipts from corporations went up fifty percent in fiscal 2006 bringing their contribution to a whopping fifteen percent of total tax receipts while proving that tax breaks and the old “trickle down” economics really do work. That ought to be a big point with workers that paid payroll taxes of more than twice that amount, had these taxes raised for the sixth year in a row, and where $78.2 billion was stolen from their backup Social Security “supplemental” retirement plan to be spent on wars.

While Jeff Skilling took the brunt of the Enron debacle after Ken Lay died, finally getting a twenty-four year prison sentence, no one in government is punished for similar accounting tricks. For instance, Henry Paulson, the new Secretary of the Treasury, held the national debt down to $573 billion by paying off maturing securities in September without renewing them until one working day after fiscal 2006 closed – a little trick that brought the national debt to a record breaking $615.7 billion for the year and one day. Wasn’t that one of the things Enron did – hide debt to make the company look more successful than it was? How about theft and transforming a surplus into debt so we can pay it again?

Of course, the government shields itself a bit from trust fund and securities fraud by appointing someone like Christopher Cox to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Cox is the former congressman from Southern California’s “Enron by the Sea” and was a great supporter of the power brokerage swindlers. Maybe if Skilling had been a politician he’d have the job.

And if you don’t suspect that gas prices and interest rates are going to go up after the midterm elections are over, then you must have some other plan for how our horrendous debts to other countries are going to be paid off. There’s got to be a day of reckoning somewhere and with a federal government running huge deficits and still desperate for more money, that day is liable to be sooner rather than later. Are you ready to bite the bullet? It’s all on your shoulders.

On top of that, we’ve got a dollar falling in value worldwide. How long do you suppose our foreign creditors are going to continue accumulating treasuries when their interest rates are less than common certificates of deposit or return on the Euro? China and Japan also have huge amounts in dollars accumulated by our negative balance of trade. In fact, they could bankrupt us any time they tire of our aggressive foreign policies and decide to divest themselves of dollars that already represent a form of international welfare.

With average Americans carrying substantial credit card debt and, for the first time since the Great Depression of the thirties, having a negative savings rate, are you ready to pay back the federal government’s borrowing habit?

So, let’s all hear it for the economy. Hip, Hip, Hooray.

Meanwhile, our president just signed a bill for a yet to be funded seven hundred mile fence across our 1,400 mile border with Mexico. If you or your 401(k) have money to invest, you might consider putting it into Mexican ladder and shovel sales.

Back to Iraq, everyone should by now realize that it would have been cheaper to have sent oil tankers filled with money to the Persian Gulf to buy oil. Even after we bypassed that option and deposed Saddam, it would still have been less expensive to just give the Iraqi people a couple of hundred billion and let them rebuild their country themselves.

Instead, we exported corruption by sending in our own Bush/Cheney companies to not do the job. And with more than sixty percent unemployment it was easy to enroll 310 thousand Iraqis into a force to maintain order so our boys could “stand down” as these forces “stand up.” Now, we’re surprised that they aren’t killing insurgents and fellow countrymen as well as we expected.

Have the democrats offered any viable solutions to the above?