My fellow Greens and I received enough votes to secure a ballot position for the party in 2010 in all but one of Connecticut’s five congressional districts.  I’m grateful to all who helped me achieve our goal here, especially Mike DeRosa, Richard Duffee, Vic Lancia, David Bedell, Walt Dunnels, Hector Lopez, Dave Ionno, Albert Marceau, Ralph Ferrucci, Joanne McCormick, Bridget Gohla, Miriam Kurland, Marge Schneider, Dave Schneider, Ruth Fournier and Paula Zeiner.

Two and a half percent was more than I expected but less than a young, good-looking, articulate, self-assured candidate would have received. I saw and heard myself enough times to get an impression of the candidate, and I definitely don’t have star power. I’m grateful to have had a part in the historic step we Greens took, but my modest accomplishment tells me that we should begin recruiting now for next time. I believe the First District returns prove that good writing can net you about 2% of the vote. Good hair is another matter altogether.

My impression from talking to voters is that the typical Greater Hartford resident hasn’t been following the congressional election at all, doesn’t know that there are three candidates, and never heard of me (or either of my opponents, including the incumbent). They’re coming out to vote for Obama, but many don’t know that there’s a congressional election. Most people don’t read papers or on-line news, and they will be casting a vote, out of habit, for one or the other major party candidate. Some proportion of them can be influenced by a phone call or a piece of advertising.

Election night celebration, starting about 8:30, is at my house, 74 Tremont St., Hartford. Don’t wait too long. You don’t want to miss McCain’s concession speech at 9. Plus, the Halloween crowd was sparse, and somebody has to eat this candy.

Here’s a list, for weather-resistant volunteers, of polling places in the First Congressional District:

Bristol

77A – Edgewood School – 345 Mix Street
77B – Northeast School - 530 Stevens Street
77C – Mountain View School – 71 Vera Road
77D - Stafford School – 212 Louisiana Avenue
78A – Chippens Hill Middle School – 551 Peacedale St
.78B – Clara T. O’Connell School – 120 Park Street
79A – South Side School – Tuttle Road
79B – American Legion – 22 Hooker Court
79C – Greene Hills School – 718 Pine Street
22 - Stafford School – 212 Louisiana Avenue

Bloomfield

District 1: J.P. Vincent School, Turkey Hill Road
District 2: Bloomfield High School, Huckleberry Lane
District 3: Robert L. Watkins Community Center, 73 Rockwell Avenue
District 4: Metacomet School, 185 School Street
District 5: Fire House No. 3 Tunxis Avenue/Adams Road
District 6: Laurel School, 1 Filley Street

East Hartford

1 Anna E. Norris School 40 Remington Road
2 Langford School 61 Alps Drive
3 Mayberry School 101 Great Hill Road
4 Silver Lane School 15 Mercer Avenue
5 Hockanum School 191 Main Street
6 Goodwin School 1235 Forbes Street
7 St. Christopher Church Hall 544 Brewer Street

Granby

DISTRICT ONE SENATORIAL DISTRICT 7 Granby Memorial High School315 Salmon Brook Street
DISTRICT TWOSENATORIAL DISTRICT 8 Granby Memorial High School315 Salmon Brook Street

Hartford

1 Mark Twain School 395 Lyme Street
2 Annie Fisher School 280 Plainfield Street
3 Hartford Seminary 77 Sherman Street
4 United Methodist Church 571 Farmington Avenue
5 Grace Lutheran Church 46 Woodland Street
6 Liberty Christian Center(formerly Horace Bushnell Church) 23 Vine Street
7 Rawson School 260 Holcomb Street
8 Parkville Community School New Park Avenue Entrance
9 Burns School 195 Putnam Street
10 Moylan School 235 Hillside Avenue
11 Batchelder School 757 New Britain Avenue
12 Kennelly School Monroe Street Entrance
13 Koeppel Community Sports Complex 175 New Britain Ave.Trinity Ice Skating Rink
14 Dr. Bellizzi Middle School (Portable Rm. 301-back of school) 215 South Street(Use Cowles St. Entrance)
15 Campfield Public Library 30 Campfield Avenue
16 Bulkeley High School 300 Wethersfield Avenue
17 The Learning Corridor 53 Vernon St/Black Box Theater
18 Ramon Betances School 42 Charter Oak Avenue
19 Hartford Public Library 500 Main Street
20 The Community Room 280 Sigourney Street
21 Sand Elementary School Library 1750 Main Street
22 John C. Clark School 75 Clark Street
23 Fred D. Wish School 350 Barbour Street

Manchester

1 Robertson School 65 North School Street
2 Manchester High School Brookfield Street Entrance
3 Buckley School 250 Vernon Street
4 Martin School 140 Dartmouth Road
5 Senior Citizens Center 549 Middle Turnpike East
6 Nathan Hale School 160 Spruce Street
7 Waddell School 163 Broad Street
8 Verplanck School 126 Olcott Street
9 Keeney School 179 Keeney Street
10 Mahoney Rec. Center 110 Cedar Street

Newington

District One: Town Hall
District Two: Ruth Chaffee Elementary School Mortensen Community Center 160 Superior Avenue 131 Cedar Street (lower parking lot)
District Three: Anna Reynolds Elementary School
District Four: Elizabeth Green Elementary School 87 Reservoir Road 30 Thomas Street (enter through Roseleah Ave.)
District Five: John Wallace Middle School
District Six: John Paterson Elementary School 71 Halleran Drive 100 Church Street
District Seven: Martin Kellogg Middle School District Eight: John Wallace Middle School 100 Church Street 71 Halleran Drive

Rocky Hill

District #1 - West Hill School - Cronin Drive
District # 2 - Rocky Hill Community Center - 761 Old Main Street
District # 3 - Griswold Middle School - 144 Bailey Road

South Windsor

1 PLEASANT VALLEYSCHOOL
4 PHILIP R. SMITH SCHOOL
2 ELI TERRY SCHOOL
5 TIMOTHY EDWARDS MIDDLE SCHOOL
3 SOUTH WINDSOR HIGH SCHOOL

Torrington

DISTRICT 1 64-30-1 TORRINGTON MIDDLE SCHOOL
DISTRICT 2 64-30-1A COE PARK, CIVIC CENTER
DISTRICT 3 64-8-1 TORRINGFORD SCHOOL 1
DISTRICT 4 65-8-1 TORRINGFORD SCHOOL 2
DISTRICT 5 65-30-1 SOUTHWEST SCHOOL

West Hartford

1-1 18 King Philip School Foyer 232-6873 100 King Philip Drive
1-2 18 St. Mary Home Auditorium 232-6478 291 Steele Road
2-1 19 Whiting Lane School Foyer 231-7280 47 Whiting Lane
2-2 18 St. John’s Church Hubbard Hall 232-6655 So. Highland Street
3-1 18 West Hartford Health & Rehabilitation Center Recreation Room 521-6856 130 Loomis Drive
3-2 18 Edward Morley School Auditorium 232-1059 77 Bretton Road
4-1 20 Elmwood Community Center Room 110 233-7369 1106 New Britain Ave.
4-2 20 Charter Oak School Auditorium 231-9233 425 Oakwood Avenue
5-1 20 Webster Hill School Stage 521-5134 125 Webster Hill Blvd.
5-2 19 West Hartford Town Hall(formerly the main library) Auditorium 561-7427 50 South Main Street
6-1 20 Wolcott School Gym 521-5281 71 Wolcott Road
6-2 20 Conard High School Foyer of Gym 521-5352 110 Berkshire Road
7-1 19 Norfeldt School Auditorium 232-7768 35 Barksdale Road
7-2 18 Hall High School Career Center 232-7897 975 North Main Street
8-1 18 American School for the Deaf Gym (rear bldg.) 233-7986 139 North Main Street
8-2 19 Bugbee School Art Room 233-4156 1943 Asylum Avenue
9-1 19 Louise Duffy School Gymnasium 521-5357 95 Westminster Drive
9-2 19 Sedgwick Middle School Multi-purpose room 521-6206 128 Sedgwick Road
10-1 19 Braeburn School Cafeteria 521-7402 45 Braeburn Road
10-2 20 Solomon Schechter School Multi-purpose room 521-6245 26 Buena Vista Road

Wethersfield

District 1 Incarnation Church Hall 544 Prospect Street
District 2 Keeney Cultural Center 200 Main Street
District 3 Fuller Building 31 Butler Street
District 4 Highcrest School 95 Highcrest Road
District 5 Silas Deane Middle School 551 Silas Deane Highway
District 6 Wethersfield Ambulance Facility 206 Prospect Street
District 7 Pitkin Community Center Banquet Room 1 30 Greenfield Street
District 8 Emerson-Williams School 461 Wells Road
District 9 Pitkin Community Center Banquet Room 2 30 Greenfield Street
District 10 Webb Elementary School 51 Willow Street

Windsor

1. L. P. Wilson Community Center 599 Matianuck Avenue
2. J.F. Kennedy School 530 Park Avenue
3. Windsor Town Hall 275 Broad Street
4. 330 Windsor Ave. Community Center 330 Windsor Avenue
5. Oliver Ellsworth School 730 Kennedy Road
6. Poquonock School 1760 Poquonock Avenue
7. Rainbow Firehouse 750 Rainbow Rd.

Where does this metaphor come from, and why are we suddenly hearing it so often? You won’t find it in the works of Stephen Crane or Rudyard Kipling. Eisenhower didn’t use it, and neither does Colin Powell. It came up recently when filmmaker Errol Morris made it the title of his 2003 documentary about failed warmaker Robert MacNamara, but it’s not a new concept.

The idea of a fog of war goes back at least to a Prussian general whose troops got beaten repeatedly by Napoleon’s forces, right up until the French conqueror’s fortunes were reversed at Waterloo. This Prussian,the esteemed Carl von Clausewitz, wrote a book in 1832 on the philosophy of war that is regaining popularity among “scholarly” militarists.

As a chronic loser of military engagements, Clausewitz seems to have anticipated Murphy’s Law, which says that what can go wrong will go wrong. The fog of war is an extension of this doctrine. Amid the smoke, the flying balls of lead, the flashing blades, the blood, the screams, and the dead bodies, there will be confusion, and military tactics will sometimes go awry. Can’t be helped. Oh, well.

I think the reason you haven’t heard much about the fog of war until recently is that is looks a lot like an excuse for malfeasance. Today, with military malfeasance at a level unseen since the 18th Century, excuses are needed, and the fog of war seems to get the point across. Never mind that Clausewitz was referring literally to gunsmoke, of which there was plenty from the firearms of his day and which has been largely removed from the modern field of combat.

So when you hear a general or government official or an agent of the commercial media use the term “fog of war,” don’t lose sight of the true meaning of this picturesque metaphor: incompetence, failure, and defeat.

Democrats and Republicans in Washington put us in this mess and they have no plans to change course. They’re going to keep on waging war, keep on making secret deals, keep us burning oil, keep on spying on us, keep on making the rich richer while the poor get poorer.

We didn’t vote for this. We didn’t vote for two wars. We didn’t vote for a trillion dollar blank check for bankers. We didn’t vote for a health care casino that leaves millions sick and broke. We didn’t vote to neglect the levees in New Orleans or to assemble mercenary armies for deployment to our streets. Democrats and Republicans in Washington, stuck in the 20th Century, gave us all that.

I’m running with the Green Party, because I’ve left the the 20th Century behind. In the 21st Century, we don’t do war. We do public works instead. We don’t do clandestine deals. We do the public interest instead. We don’t subsidize bankers, and we don’t coddle irresponsible debtors either. We don’t make people shop for health care. We join the rest of the industrialized world and make it a tax-funded entitlement. We work like hell to end fuel-burning and restore the earth, sooner rather than later.

As a lawyer and a professional persuader, I plan to put intense pressure on Democrats and Republicans to clean up their act. Restoring our republic is a dirty job, and I’ll do it if I win this election.

With extinction of the middle class, another Great Depression and the rule of law on the line, you would think we’d be hearing just a little bit more about the race in the First Congressional District.

In the neo-democratic institutions of the 21st Century, the inalienable right of the people to opt out of debate and decision-making has created a new social order: decidership. Americans live in a decidership, and it has rather suddenly replaced the republic we have been relinquishing over the past 20 years or so.

The ruling class in a decidership names a decider and holds a sham election to confirm him. George W. Bush will be seen as the first in a line of deciders. We entrust our decider to select from the myriad policy options available to comfort the worried masses in a failing nation.

A decidership is entirely multiple-choice. Unlike dictators, who superimpose personal vision on the nations they rule, deciders have no vision but depend on others to supply it. Deciders resemble dictators only in the sense that they wield absolute power.

Decidership requires no public discussion, and it countenances none. Visionaries representing privileged political patrons present their ideas in private to subordinates of the decider, who edit out the chaff and present what’s left to the decider. The decider then presents his selections to the legislative branch for approval; approval is optional, since the decider is empowered by the sleepy populace to execute his selections with or without it.

There are courts in a decidership, but the decider decides when and in what manner court orders will be honored or enforced. Court orders adversely affecting the decider or his subordinates or patrons are routinely ignored. Standards, rules, and laws are altogether arbitrary in a decidership and can never be allowed to impede the decider or his patrons in any way. “The Constitution is a piece of paper,” said the first decider not long ago.

In a decidership, the people must have enemies, and the decider chooses them for us. They are almost always ruled by cronies of the decider or his patrons, people like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Deciders are licensed to kill the chosen enemies, but they usually do it through surrogates, typically decent young men who put on a military uniform every day out of a sense of duty and honor. When the decider’s soldiers kill, they get a pat on the back. When they die, they must be buried in secret. The injured ones are discarded like refuse in a decidership, but who cares?

The who-cares ethic is really at the heart of a decidership. All power flows from the vacuum that informs public morality. In a decidership, the bombing of foreign cities and kindness to animals coexist comfortably. There are warriors for Jesus and vegans with pit bulls. Cognitive dissonance is treated with drugs, mostly by prescription, or with massage or meditation.

Nobody knows how long a decidership can endure. We know that it can overcome a hardy old constitution, 50 state governments and international organizations of every kind, including the one known, anachronistically, as the United Nations. We suspect decidership will survive another election and corrupt the winner irredeemably. The people will be asleep again within a month of the inauguration, if history’s any guide. The big question is whether decidership can withstand the strains of an economy in catastrophic failure and an army in revolt, common hazards for nations that reject the duties of citizenship.

The Connecticut League of Women Voters is sponsoring a candidate forum in my district, but I’m not invited to participate because, according to the decision-makers at the League, I’m not a serious candidate. The League didn’t tell me exactly what the criteria for seriousness are, but they were clear on this: I haven’t raised enough money. I made a complaint, but I don’t expect to get anywhere with it.

There’s some irony in the League’s decision. The League was kind enough to invite me to submit answers to questions for its on-line voters’ guide. I put some work into the answers, exhausting the word-count limit, and I tried to cram as much information and detail as I could into each response. I visited the site to see what the other two candidates had submitted. John Larson’s responses refer voters to his web site for answers (there are no answers on his web site), and Joe Visconti gives brief, general responses with little detail and no commitments. Anyone consulting the League’s guide would conclude from the three sets of responses that I’m the only serious candidate and would be surprised to hear that I was disqualified from the League’s candidate forum.

Channel 3 also seems determined to keep me out of the public eye. Dennis House interviewed me for eight minutes in June on “Face the State,” but the station didn’t archive the segment for over two months, impeding my petition drive. Interviews with Democrats and Republicans were featured prominently on the show’s web site, but I had to press hard for a couple of months to get my interview posted. This past Sunday “Face the State” featured Larson and Visconti, but Dennis didn’t call me.

The lesson of all this is not that I’m unelectable. If ever there was a year to vote against Democrats and Republicans, this is the year. The lesson is that voters will have to discuss the issues in this congressional election among themselves. The commercial media aren’t going to cover it, and they especially aren’t going to give a dissident candidate a soapbox.  So when you talk to people who vote in the First District, ask which candidate they’re supporting for Congress and why. Send them to my website. Send them to CT-N, which taped the forum on Sunday at St. Bridget’s and will soon have the event available on-demand on the CT-N website. If you don’t discuss this election with people you know, it probably won’t get discussed at all.

The bank thugs didn’t hold a gun to the Congress, but they did the next best thing. They threatened the government of the United States with the immediate termination of further credit if the people failed to fork over a sum equal to the yearly earnings of 30 million workers. Just as a kidnaper cuts off his victim’s finger and sends it to the anxious relatives, the bankers cut off the credit of small business first, to show they’re serious.

Our leaders like to say that they don’t negotiate with terrorists, and they didn’t negotiate in this case. They simply agreed to pay the ransom. As often happens in such cases, capitulation is no guarantee that the bankers will liberate our abducted economy, and my congressman John Larson, who voted to pay the terrorists, shouldn’t be surprised to find the economy decomposing in a shallow grave soon after the election.

They held the floor for over an hour and left the public a half-hour to ask questions. It was clear from their talk that:

There is no panic except among bankers
The bailout (Larson prefers “rescue) isn’t paid for
The people are against it
It regulates nothing
The political process of enacting it is corrupt
It might not work, and, even if does, we’ll have to cough up more later
It’s still a blank check for Bush
It was arranged in haste and poorly thought-out
Huge amounts of money will flow out of this country
Congress is incompetent to handle economic issues, and this is probably not the best solution

The reasons for enacting the bailout—Larson believes that it didn’t pass because we called it a bailout instead of a rescue—are one: we’re scared. It’s a crisis, and we must act, says John Larson. Do something! Anything! Throw money!

When Larson was challenged to explain why he let this happen, he had, as always, “blame to go around.” His defense is based on his own weakness and the utter corruption of the body—the greatest government on earth, by consensus of opinion—in which he serves.

Larson’s argument is that it’s impossible to act in the public interest because members of the other party oppose it. He’s saying, first, that the positions of his adversaries are fixed and immutable and that he hasn’t the strength of character to persuade any of them of anything. He’s acknowledging that as a leader, with the power to sway public opinion and public policy, he is an utter failure. And as he confesses the weakness of his own advocacy, he maligns the House of Representatives as incapable, without supermajorities, of doing the right thing. Crap!

John Larson fails to carry out the will of the people because it conflicts with the will of his owners, expressed through the leaders of his elite club, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Barney Frank, and company, along with their cronies in the other party and in the Senate and White House. It’s Larson and Bush against us on this issue.