The precinct offered curbside voting for people with disabilities, so I grabbed an election clerk who brought her a ballot. The clerk walked away and I tried to do the same, but she asked me to come close to her. “I don’t see so well and my hands are too shaky to write. Would you please read me the ballot and mark my choices?” I obliged, though I was determined to be completely even-handed.

“The first office on the ballot is President of the United States. The candidates listed are George W. Bush and John Kerry. Who would you like to vote for?”

She looked up after a moment, and in a soft voice she said, “I don’t think I know either one of them.”

I could hardly believe it, but I explained that Mr. Bush was a Republican and the current President, and that Mr. Kerry was a Democrat and the challenger. With this information and some time for blank staring, she guessed at her preference, the substance of which really isn’t important here. We continued in this manner all the way down the ballot. She didn’t know a single candidate, and she refused to vote in nonpartisan or uncontested races. Call me an elitist, but it kills me to think that her vote counted just the same as mine.

I feel the same way towards the subset of Independents that can’t decide which side they prefer, or who reflexively insist on divided government.

Anyone paying a little attention to current events ought to have more than enough information to make a voting decision, at least for the important offices. Of course current events will make us feel in turn hopeful, disappointed, spiteful, empowered, and disgusted; people may change their voting preferences accordingly. Independents–along with all partisans–are right to recognize that no candidate or party can embody all of any one voter’s policy preferences. But when the differences between the parties are as clear as they are today, having no opinion is a form of dishonesty. In a democratic society, when serious candidates concentrate so much persuasive effort on the tiny margin of undecided voters, objectively it is comedy.

You see, my wife gave me a sodamaker as a gift; in my excitement to use it I quickly discovered that the prepackaged soda flavors are not so great. Determined to make my own tonic and root beer, I ran immediately into obstacles. Tonic’s essential ingredient–powdered quinine–is needed in teaspoons but can be purchased only by the pound from some crunchy-granola-looking natural herb specialists. Another ingredient, citric acid, is common in foods but, well, I’ve never noticed it on the shelves at a grocery store.

Ever since my days at summercamp I’ve believed that root beer came from sassafras root. Today I learned that sassafras has been a known carcinogen for decades. (That detail hasn’t stopped some folks from continuing to include it in “old fashioned” recipes.) Contemporary rootbeer relies on saspirilla, but much more commonly it’s based on some processed-sounding thing called “root beer extract.” Well, here I’ve embarked on a path towards natural foods (albeit those which will release 33 ounces of compressed carbon dioxide out of a tabletop gas tank) and I’d like to decide for myself which nonpoisonous chemicals belong in my homemade root beer.

Anyway, dear multitudes of this blog’s loyal readers, I beseech you to send all your syrup recipes posthaste. Thank you very much. Please try to post them in the comments in an orderly fashion.

This line of reasoning assumes that, in the internet age, the decline of dead-tree newspapers was inevitable–an assumption with which I would quibble.  Somebody in this decade figured out how to adapt technology to offer classified ads, how to target retail advertising to vast audiences, how to buttress an imperiled business model with innovative products that people want. It’s just that none of those discoveries belongs to newspapers or television networks.

And while it’s easy for me to link to poorly reasoned newspaper columns, no one should ignore or accept the more complete degradation of television news reporting.  At the local and national levels, television reporting is not to be taken seriously.  The only exception here is sports journalism–an exception which speaks volumes about our culture.

Most importantly, Kurtz’s assumption cannot explain why serious, well-reported and important journalism is being delivered everyday to an expanding audience in a totally anachronistic medium. I am speaking of the many heroic efforts, led by NPR, to preserve journalism on the radio.

Just a couple days ago, on our Christmas Eve flight from Chicago to Seattle, I was cursing the airport security pantomime, in which I removed my shoes and belt to enjoy the privilege of travel in a free society. I don’t think today’s attempt, apparently thwarted by quick-thinking passengers, changes the basic reality of airport security: there are nearly infinite ways to cause an airplane disaster. If anything, this event should remind us that airport security measures are an ineffective, expensive way to combat terrorism, but an effective way of tricking the public into thinking that the government is doing something.But what else? Certainly the threat of terrorism remains real, and the US has to punish (and destroy) the networks of people who are bent on killing Americans. Whether the Afghanistan operation is the best way to do that can be debated (I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that it is), though the bad guys seem to have more bases than we can count. Any serious person, even a peace laureate, will recognize the need for military action here. (For the record, I consider myself a realist-pacifist on these issues.)

Because it happened in full view of the public, this event will capture more attention than other recent events which resulted in arrests before the terrorist attempts occurred. But those other, quieter events may have been just as serious.

I know, I know, the Tiger story was Thanksgiving, not Christmas. But the admirable Sally Jenkins ponders his meaning in today’s paper. Why does anyone still care? Here’s why I do:

At most, I am an extremely casual golf fan; however, I appreciate greatness in sports wherever it appears. And from the moment Tiger Woods announced his hiatus from golf, this story (or at least its ramifications) became legitimate sports news. (Ask Michael Wilbon, whose interest in the personal lives of athletes couldn’t be less.) But let’s put sport aside for a minute.

Even if Tiger’s marital indiscretion is none of our business, this story is really interesting because it suggests so much about the media and its audience–the essence of public life in our culture.

Was it ever Tiger’s life purpose to advertise wristwatches? Of course not; his life’s purpose is to be the best golfer who ever lived–and amazingly he’s succeeded. The media loved building him up, and we in the public loved buying the story. Tiger had a unique place in our popular culture: he is absolutely successful at what he tries to do (which made him great for Nike and Gatorade), and he seemed to be the most boring and plain person anywhere (an image which appealed to conservative corporations such as Accenture and Buick).

Tiger has no obligation to say to sponsors, “Gee, before you pay me millions to be in your wristwatch ad, let me tell you all about my marital infidelity.” (Agatha, if you’ve mentioned your greatest personal failings in a job interview, I’d be amazed–and even more so if you kept doing it after repeated rejections.)

In addition to all the marital dishonesty, Tiger deceived himself about how much dissonance his public image and true self could tolerate. And he’s being punished for it, big time–these revelations easily will cost him hundreds of millions of dollars.

We aren’t being totally honest with ourselves either. Just because I have seen Tiger on television doesn’t mean I should feel comfortable using this guy’s first name like he’s a real live guest in my living room. (Yet I do!) The facts are: I do not know Tiger Woods; he has never made me a promise; it would be foolish of me to buy a Buick just because of his commercials; he is merely an athlete; and if I ever considered him a role model I did so unreasonably (or with insufficient information) and at my own risk.

Yet many people still say that Tiger’s true failing lies in his refusal to apologize publicly. That is fascinating.

Should Tiger accept us for all our faults, and give us the public apology we demand but don’t deserve? I hope he doesn’t. But I would like to see him return, from his low-down dirty place, to the pinnacle of athletic achievement.

For our world, Ruth Marcus despairs about this decade and the next. I think she’s right to be gloomy, and to put “the ominous fiscal picture” as her first reason for pessimism about the next ten years.  In 2000, the US national debt was $3.4 trillion, and the federal government collected a record surplus. The US government will finish 2009 with a $1.4 trillion deficit, and has more than doubled its accumulated debt in ten years.

Those figures should scare anyone who plans on living for a few more decades, because we will have to pay that money back. And we will also have to pay for government services (or foreign adventures) we consume in the future. That means that taxes will be much higher than today, and services will be worse. Already state governments (some more than others) are straining with a sagging economy, increased demands for services, and balanced budget imperatives. How far behind can the US government be?

These nightmare scenarios won’t arrive right away, but over the long term they are inevitable. And the next ten-year period presents plenty of time for things to change.

The article mentions a favorite of mine, the Drake Equation.

Drake, an astronomer, assembled this formula to calculate the number of alien, technological civilizations with whom humans may communicate. The calculation depends on your estimate of a few key variables: the number of stars around which life might develop; the percentage of life-supporting environments with intelligent life; the percentage of intelligent life forms that are technological–that is, have developed technologies (such as radio communications) which we might detect from across the cosmos; and the period of time for which such technological life forms exist.

For me, it’s pretty certain that life exists outside of Earth. Given the vast number of stars and planets in this universe, we’re talking about a lot of places supporting life.

Intelligent, technological life is much more rare. I say this because the Earth is 4.5 eons old, the earliest life forms 3.7 eons old, the earliest multicellular organisms 1.6 eons old–yet tool-making hominids are only 2.5 million years old, and civilization has existed for but 10,000 years. So in the whole history of life on Earth, intelligent life has existed for 0.00027 percent of that time.  Of course, I have an anthrocentric view of intelligence; in any event, even this factor allows for thousands of planets in this galaxy with intelligent life.

But are those intelligent civilizations detectable? The last variable (denoted L) is key: the average life expectancy of a technological civilization such as ours. Drake estimated this at 10,000 years. But I believe his estimate to be far too optimistic.

Think of it this way: at roughly the same time that humans developed radio technologies enabling interstellar communications, humans also developed nuclear weapons ready to destroy the earth and life as we know it. Sixty years later we haven’t destroyed ourselves, but I consider that a miracle; I certainly wouldn’t bet on the passage of another 60 years, though I hope I am wrong here.

What happens to the Drake Equation when L is a small number, like one or even two centuries?  Well, the possibilities for contact get quite small.  Maybe one or two civilizations become currently detectable.  Given the vastness of the sky, they could be hard to find.

Plug some things into this Drake calculator, and see for yourself: the difference between L as 100 and L as 10,000 is, rather obviously, a factor of 10.

There’s no way of knowing right now, but I think this bill will show the limits of incrementalism. This bill may be a dead end.Whether this bill succeeds substantively or not (substantive success would be an improvement to the current healthcare system), Democrats can expect to lose seats in 2010.  The accepted lesson will be that the public punished Democrats for overreaching, especially on healthcare–even though this bill fails to cover all the uninsured (the individual mandate is such a mild penalty that it’s really just a suggestion) or introduce cost containment.  In other words, the bill either botches or altogether avoids important reforms.

So why would a future Congress choose the political pain of going any further, when avoidance is so safe?  Future reforms (cost containment or resurrection of the public option) will even more directly disrupt the revenues of an embattled insurance industry–making for a bigger, more bruising fight.

Yet even this lousy bill passed by the slimmest of majorities.  No one voted against it because it didn’t go far enough.  Despite control of both houses and the presidency, this is the best Democrats can do.

I don’t join the call of some progressives–notably Howard Dean and MoveOn.org–for defeating the bill and starting over. But I am every bit as frustrated as they are. For that matter, so is Dionne: watch him rail against the Senate’s dynamics and call for an end to cloture’s 60-vote requirement.

On NPR this morning, Cokie Roberts pined for the good old days of deliberative bodies and segregationist stonewalling, when senators actually had to keep the debate going to sustain a filibuster.  That’s not a bad idea, considering that civil rights bills passed in 1957 and 1964 despite those filibusters. (Back then, there also was a guy who knew how to work the Senate.)

But we are dredging up these ideas because the Congress today is so broken. And that, more than anything, is why I see today’s healthcare bill as a dead end rather than a first step.

I served it, to the approval of my wife the test eater, with raisin bread and a cocktail of my own creation, which I will call a Ginger Flower. (Between this drink and this blog, I am really bad with names; I pity my future children already.) It’s 2 ounces of vodka (Ketel One, leftover from the days when I had money), 1 ounce Koval ginger liqueur, 1/4 ounce of fresh squeezed lemon juice, and 1/4 ounce of honey. Shake with ice and serve in a chilled martini glass.The ginger liqueur is something I bought this weekend at Whole Foods, where the distiller was offering samples. She and her husband quit their jobs and now turn grains and other flavors into spirits. Her mom is confused.

But I get it (or I think I do, anyway): when you love something, and you’re really good at it, and you have this crazy idea to drop everything and go after it–well, you should really think about doing so, because it’s pretty cool if you can pull it off. Mom is risk-averse, and she’s always going to be; she is, after all, much older than you. But part of being young is going after your crazy idea, and for some reason young people come up with really great discoveries. It’s because young people have a new way of looking at the world; old people have been looking at it for a while and if they had anything new to add they would have added it already.

Given my student loans, I could sure use some free stuff. But I’m not taking what those papers want to give me. The telemarketer is always insistent, and seems unable to understand how anyone could refuse such a good offer. So let me state my position:

As far as I’m concerned, Chicago’s two newspapers have led the way in a nationwide race to the bottom, in which every participating paper has degraded its own quality. Anyone wondering why newspapers are suffering should inspect the newspapers themselves: the articles are shorter and dumber, the reporting cursory and the writing stale.

Don’t talk to me about technology as if it is solely to blame. The counterexample thwarting this tired accusation is the thriving state of radio journalism: the audience for quality journalism will find the news it craves in whatever medium it exists. Lousy newspapers lose subscribers daily because the are lousy.

None are more worthless than the Chicago dailies. I refuse to aid or abet their complete collapse. So, no thank you, I won’t accept your coupons.