In these pages on Friday, 2 July 2004 in Voices – On Winning or Playing Fair you will find some comments on the upcoming election and the importance of Ohio

Bob Patterson, The World’s Laziest Journalist, says that state is the one key state in the next election.

Ohio.  In April 2003, Bush visited the Timken Company in Canton (Stark County) to give an economic policy speech to many hundreds of Timken line workers, administrators, and the company's chief executive officer, Tim Timken.  He held up Timken – the company, not his friend - as a model for how the recovery was going great guns.  I saw it on CNN.

Really.

Last month the plant closed.

Jobs all gone – poof!

The Timken closing represents twenty-seven percent of Stark County employment.

Oops.

Details here - and it was a bummer.  The CEO is major Bush campaign fundraiser, a "Ranger."

Oops.  Again.

Will Bush win Ohio?  Who knows?

My brother in Cincinnati says no.  But Ohio just mandated that all their public schools teach both evolution and creationism - equal time for each.  My brother’s wife, a teacher there, just rolls her eyes.  She teaches reading to “special education” second graders.  She’ll be fine.

Yes, Bush has publicly said "the jury is still out" on that there evolution theory.  He doesn't buy it.  Well, to be fair, there’s more, or less, to it - in an October 29 New York Times article on Bush, Nicholas Kristof reports: "Characteristically, he does not believe in evolution - he says the jury is still out - but he does not actively disbelieve in it either; as a friend puts it, 'he doesn't really care about that kind of thing.'"

You see, he’s just not curious about it.  It’s just fancy book-learning stuff.  Not his concern.  That might play well in Ohio.

Consider too that Ohio just passed a total state ban on not only gay marriage, but on same-sex civil unions too.  No rights for these folks.  The Bush call to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage may play well there.  He’s on their side.

The state is his to lose.

The vote?  Electronic there this year.

Bob worries the Ohio vote could be rigged.

Yes, the Ohio Diebold systems can be hacked.  Easily.  The Diebold CEO is a Bush Ranger too.  And his guys know the source code and data structures.

But the systems are pretty open.  Maybe I could hack them in the other direction.  That might be fun.

But that wouldn't be fair.

Ric in Paris sends a warning –

To add to this item you might want to check around to find out who else still makes bearings in the USA - ball bearings, roller bearings, etc.  Without these, nothing rolls.  Not cars, not trucks, not trains, not machines, not ships, not aircraft - nothing rolls without bearings.  No motors run without bearings.  It looks like another step towards the USA losing its independence.  Computer games may be sexy, but they can't deliver any goods you eat to your supermarket.  Timken's closing may be more serious than just a few jobs lost in Ohio.  You need to think about walking in LA.

Well, maybe Ohio will embrace change and vote against the Bush-Cheney ticket, and we’ll have our ball bearings.  All we need.

But I did come across this observation in Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan - 

To most people radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is accomplishing one’s duty – one duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the Church.

We’ll see.