For the first time in my life, I actively participated in a political campaign. For the first time in my life, a candidate for whom I had any enthusiasm won a presidential election. I had honestly come to believe that I might never live to see that day. For the first time in my life, I am experiencing post-election euphoria.

I did not attend any victory celebrations last night, but I am celebrating now, quietly, by writing these words. As luck would have it, I just found a pouch of one of my favorite blends of pipe tobacco (Peaches & Cream), which I had forgotten I still had, and I’m smoking a bowl of it now. With this smoke, I send a prayer of thanks to the Great Spirit for this beautiful day.

Here are two views from my yard today:

Autumn Flower

Autumn Bud

It’s good to hear this subject being discussed intelligently on the airwaves. I was beginning to wonder whether anyone in this country even remembered that we have a Constitution. Most of our politicians certainly seem to be a gang of Constitutional amnesiacs. At any rate, read or watch it. I thought I wouldn’t need to (I know very well where I stand), but once the episode began, I was too absorbed in it to change the channel. This is worth watching.

People say this is not the time for finger pointing. Is it a coincidence the very people who say that are the ones who screwed things up?

If you didn’t listen to NPR‘s Marketplace on Friday (from which the preceding quotation was taken), read the transcript of Tim Bedore’s commentary. A summary won’t do it justice. On the larger topic he addresses, I have been saying much the same thing for years, but it’s good to hear someone else giving the battle cry.

Consider sales tax. Without the penny, all sales taxes must come in 5% increments. Gone are the 4% or 6% or 7.8% sales tax. Everything will be rounded, including every increase whenever the state needs to raise money. For some communities, this will include city sales tax. Rather than .5% or 1%, a city sales tax, for those cities that depend on them, will be 5% minimum. This means the total sales tax for some cities will be 15% at the very least by necessity.

Consider the cost of postage. The cost of a first class stamp will have to increase by a nickel each time, after it is first increased to the next highest 5 cent increment to enable people to buy them. This may seem to be an irrelevant concern to jaded e-mail addicts, but many people find writing letters to be less time-consuming and more enjoyable than spending money and time filtering and disposing of spam. Many private citizens and businesses rely on the postal service to ship or receive merchandise, and if all their postage expenses increase in 5 cent increments, this could have a detrimental cumulative effect on the economy perhaps more damaging than the rising cost of fuel. Pennies add up, especially when they suddenly become nickels.

In a bizarre twist of logic, the article seems to give support for the elimination of the penny by describing the bad effects that occur when a coin value is greater than the cost of minting it. Quarters were hoarded by many in the 1960s, it states, because the alloy of which they were made contained silver, which was melted down and sold. The point the writer is attempting to make, I imagine, is that the cost of minting a particular coin must never be greater or less than the value of the coin itself. It must be quite a trick for the government to guarantee that it costs exactly 25 cents to produce a quarter, 10 cents to produce a dime, and 5 cents to produce each and every nickel. O that wicked, treacherous penny! I am sure there must be some leeway in the production of the other coin denominations. Surely it costs considerably less than 25 cents to make a quarter, so why can’t it take the slack of the penny? It isn’t as if the entire world doesn’t know that our system of currency is based on nothing but faith. If legislators are so concerned about the cost of minting relative to coin value, they should return us to a system in which all currency is backed by gold and all coins are worth exactly the content of their metals. Playing both sides just isn’t cricket (or baseball, for that matter).

The arguments in favor of assassinating the penny consist primarily of complaints that pennies are worthless, annoying, and take up too much space in one’s pocket. Some people put them in jars and others throw them away. Saving money, by the way, was not considered a fault by the generation that survived the Great Depression and fought for our freedom in World War II. The current administration, though, has odd (read: addled) notions about fiscal responsibility as evidenced by its pleas for people to spend money as fast as possible for the good of the economy. Were they never taught about the Stockmarket Crash of 1929? I know the teaching of American history has been in decline in recent years, but shouldn’t our leaders know a bit of the story of our nation and those who built it in order to, well, learn from the mistakes of our past and make wise, informed decisions? I know it sounds silly, but I can’t help being a crazy idealist.

Pennies, I think I have shown, are far from worthless. Saving money, if one is not miserly, is a virtue. As far as taking up too much space, paying in exact change usually suffices to lighten one’s burden, and many charities benefit from small contributions by generous people across the country. Banks and automatic coin changers are also useful for transferring pennies into dollars. And as for the accusation of being annoying, I take issue with petty complaints against a noble coin bearing the likeness of Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents. The penny is a humble coin ennobled with the image of one of our greatest leaders, born of humble beginnings. Like Lincoln himself the penny is, in its way, apt, poetic, and crucial to the well-being of the United States.

Read it in Rolling Stone now (issue 1002, starting on page 46).

The exit polls in Ohio had Kerry leading by 8.8%, but Bush mysteriously “won” by 2.1%

Furthermore, and I quote from the article:

In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes – enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

There is more. Get Rolling Stone and read the article yourself. I’ve been saying it all along here at the Cuparium and elsewhere, but it’s nice to be vindicated. It’s just sad that it takes a rock magazine to do the job that journalists in the news media ought to have been doing from the beginning. Thank you, Rolling Stone, and thank you Robert F. Kennedy Jr.