Bagel for me. Neil Finn and Co. for you.

Athenae points out an article in which someone named HollyBaby refers to Angelina Jolie as an irresponsible parent for leaving her brood behind to travel to Dangerous Pakistan and help millions of little children left homeless and orphaned by the horrible recent floods. Apparently, it’s Jolie’s “obsession with thrill” that makes her commit such a reprehensible act. Go read Athenae’s response. It’s good.

I am proud of my mother who worked hard, rose high in her profession, traveled abroad for work, and came home to us full of love and concern every single day. And knew all of our teachers and other goings-on.

The twit who condemns Jolie sounds like those who think working mothers should not ask to be upheld to the same standards of promotion and raises that working folks without kids, or men with kids whose wives “take care of all of that,” enjoy. Basically, you have to be a mother or a worker, and if you choose to do both, you’re somehow diluting both experiences and ought not to demand the rewards of either. Here is a perfectly-manicured middle finger, which went to work yesterday and came home to mow my own damned lawn, to that.

Reason’s “I’m Not Going to Be Interrogated As a Pre-Condition of Re-Entering My Own Country” reminds me of the fall of 2005 when United States Border Patrol detained me for an hour on the Progreso International Bridge, as a girlfriend and I returned from a daytime walking trip to Mexico and back.

Border agent: “Your passport here says you were born in *lowers Aviator sunglasses for maximum dramatic effect* Kuwait City.”

Me: “Yes, sir, I was.”

Border agent: “Come with me.”

W was ushered into an air-conditioned waiting area populated with those cheap lawn chairs whose rear legs buckle at the slightest weight shift. I was handed over to a very charming Mexican-American version of Nurse Ratched and, for a quarter of an hour, interrogated about all of my travel abroad since I permanently moved to the United States in 1990. If you’re a professional international traveler like me, it’s not likely you remember every single foreign trip you’ve made in the last 15 years. This turned out to be a slight problem.

Border agent: “It says here you were in Amsterdam in 2003 and 2004, not just 2003.”

Me: “Oh yes, I forgot about that short 2004 trip.”

Border agent: “How can you forget going abroad?”

Me: I don’t know, do you remember what you ate for breakfast on Wednesday three weeks ago? Yeah, it’s like that. “I travel a lot, so I don’t remember every trip.”

Then the border agent went away under the pretext that she had to extract data from and enter it into a ten-year-old 486 laptop or something like that. Likely story, given the two cameras were trained on me. They were observing my every move and facial expression. So I just stood there. For 30 minutes. Probably while a family of illegal immigrants and truckload of nuclear material successfully crossed over into America not yards from this dog and pony show. I’m an American, but hey, it’s the Appearance Of Efficiency we’re going for here, right? Sit, lie down, roll over, give up your constitutional rights in the name of Homeland Insecurity! Good dog!

Border agent: Where do you live now?

Me: New Orleans. I’m in Houston now because of The Storm.

Border agent: Oh, yes. I’m really sorry about that. So much pain. I hope you can go back home soon. Alright, you are free to go just as soon as I record these notes.

As Paul Karl Lukacs states in the post referenced by Reason, “this is about power not security” and “the federal cops are my servants. They would do well to remember that.” When the hell did America turn into Kuwait or India wholesale is what I want to know. Mindless bureaucracy as security, lengthy and unnecessary border checks of obvious non-threats by the untraveled, third-world reactions to actual threats, burning books to send messages internally and abroad. Fear is the mind killer.

Ohio has semi-open primary elections, which requires a voter to have a party affiliation. This approach has its pros and cons, but that is not the issue here. The problem: my precinct requires me to announce my party affiliation out loud to poll workers while they check and match my identification. Following this, one of the poll workers manually keys into the touchscreen voting machine the “right ballot” for me. As someone used to Wisconsin and Louisiana ballots that confidentially and automatically pop up on a curtained machine after I check in, I am astonished at this precinct’s process.

Secret Ballot, anyone?

The Ohio pollworker training manual states:

Ohio’s law is structured to place equal numbers of people from the two major political parties at work together for a check and balance system to ensure fairness. Each precinct in Ohio must have no more than half of its poll workers representing the same political party.

Yet, human nature and body language being what they are, this is not right. Do you want someone’s stink eye fouling up your whole election experience because you don’t belong to the Right Party? Seriously, it’s hard enough being a Republican in Cleveland and anything other than Republican in a county south of the “big city.” Again, I’m not sure if this is an Ohio-wide practice, but neither should a poll worker nor people in line with me have to know my party affiliation. That is my business as an American citizen.

So, let me know whether this is legal or if I have to call the county’s board of elections.

While you’re at it, check out Ohio’s map of voting systems. This is the state that gave us the Diebold controversy, after all.