I’ve seen more bad movies than anybody I know. Back in the 70’s I’d regularly go to my local drive-in with a lawn chair, a couple of quarts of beer, and watch terrible low-budget movies till 3 in the morning.

The question immediately comes to mind … why would I subject myself to steaming piles of cinema like: The Corpse Grinders, The Undertaker and His Pals, The Worm Eaters, Invasion Of The Blood Farmers, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies?

Before I got started I wanted to define just one word: Fascism. I spent hours wandering in the vastness of the Google and by the time I called it quits I had thousands of words mined from scholars, historians, and politicians. I then boiled them all down to these 109 words:

Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

Leon Trotsky, “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

One year ago today we loaded up a borrowed truck for the last time and in the great tradition of The Grapes of Wrath and The Beverly Hillbillies, rolled on out towards a dream of a better life. The Joads struggled along Route 66 from Oklahoma’s dustbowl through California’s Mojave Desert to get to the Promised Land. Jed Clampett sold his oil-rich swamp in the Ozarks for 25 million and moved his family to the hills of Beverly. Our move wasn’t as difficult as the Joads' and certainly not as well subsidized as the Clampett’s. It took us 10 years to have the wherewithal to make the two and a half hour drive from our house in Seattle to our new home in Canada. Though we woke up in A New Country … we didn’t have the time to appreciate it for the first three months or so.

First we had to deal with schools that were going to start in a couple of weeks. Our son was going into the 6th grade and my wife was going to the University for her graduate degree. And we literally had an accumulated lifetime of boxes to unpack. All the nuts and bolts that held together our day-to-day lives had to be figured out and fast. Where are the schools? Where are the stores? Where do we get the car fixed? Where’s the library? Where’s everything? For the first time in my atheist life I welcomed guidance from above.

We had our cheap but trusty Tom Tom GPS to tell us how to get to where we wanted to go.

I won’t vote for Barack Obama. I can’t vote for Barack Obama. And it’s not because he’s not liberal enough for me. I gave up on the idea of a progressive president before I was old enough to vote. No … the reason I won’t vote for Obama is because he’s just slightly less murderous than George W. Bush. And a man with bloody hands doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

So who will I vote for?

Who cares?