Why it's important to vote, no. 2435549132

This column from Monday's L.A. Times recognizes the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by remembering what it was like when abortion was illegal:

At any one time, 15 or 20 women lay in the county hospital septic abortion ward, an additional half a dozen at Harbor. They were too sick to talk, but Mishell knew the common thread: usually unmarried and abandoned by the man, uniformly, suicidally desperate. They jabbed into their uteruses with knitting needles and coat hangers, which Mishell sometimes found still inside them. They stuck in bicycle pump nozzles, sometimes sending a fatal burst of air to the heart. They'd try to insert chemicals -- drain cleaner, fertilizer, radiator-flush -- and miss the cervix, corrode an artery and bleed to death. Mishell once put a catheter into a woman's bladder and "got a tablespoon of motor oil."

This is why we have to vote, to make sure Bush is defeated in 2004. He will probably have the opportunity to appoint two more Supreme Court justices during his first term. Making sure it's also his last would give us a chance to reverse some of the crypto-fascistic laws and regulations he's promulgated.

I don't use the word "fascism" lightly. But I can't think of any other word that better characterizes the collection of laws, regulations and practices the Bush administration has enacted, especially since they got the carte blanche of 11 September. In response, the ACLU is initiating a major campaign to fight creeping fascism.

Meanwhile, here's a wonderfully archetypal account of the rise and fall of a tech worker. With a few variations, it could describe almost any laid-off tech worker, including me.