I want to talk about a couple of things that are kind of old news now, but at least I’ve had a chance to reflect on them. First is election fraud. Obviously, what’s happening in the Ukraine makes this topical, but there’s no shortage of places in this country where people think elections are being stolen.

First, there was Florida 2000, of course, where the Secretary of State also was Bush’s campaign director in the state, and his brother is the governor. Suspicions about the legitimacy of the ‘04 election in Florida also are rampant, but the real swing state was Ohio, and guess what, the Secretary of State also was Bush’s campaign director. Add in the factor of the voting machine manufacturer declaring publicly that he was going to help Bush win the state, and you’ve got an election in which no one can possibly have confidence. Just for good measure, check out San Diego. Donna Frye clearly won the race for mayor, but because she was a write-in candidate, a lot of people simply wrote in her name without blacking out the little oval next to the blank line in which they wrote her name. A judge ruled that those votes weren’t to be counted, costing her the election. Clearly a situation where the letter of the law violates the spirit.

But compare what’s happened in the Ukraine to what’s happened in this country. In this country, a substantial number of people are convinced that the Presidency has been stolen twice in a row, but aside from talking and writing, they’ve all rolled over. In the Ukraine, people took to the streets to defend their democratic rights, and they’re well on their way to overturning a phony election.

The US always has been self-righteous about its democratic tradition, condemning other countries, especially in Latin America, for disguising dictatorship as democracy. Jimmy Carter bagged the Nobel Peace Prize for junketing around the world observing elections to ensure that they were as democratic as they are in his home country. Where was Jimmy in Florida 2000 or Ohio ‘04? While we probably could have used Jimmy as an observer, we might have been better served had he been a candidate.

Notwithstanding the old cliche attributed to Stalin about how it doesn’t matter who votes, all that matters is who counts the votes, and despite the old Chicago saying, "Vote early and vote often," most of us never thought seriously about election fraud in our own country until Florida 2000. I suspect, however, that it’s like extramarital sex; it’s always been there; we just didn’t notice it until recently, and those who did know about it sure weren’t inclined to mention it in public.

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The other thing I’ve been contemplating is that little brawl at a pro basketball game in Detroit a couple of weeks ago. One of the paying customers shoots his mouth off a lot, then throws a beer in the face of one of the millionaire players. Players go into the stands and beat the snot out of a couple of fans. Who’s going to get your sympathy in this story. The answer, of course, is no one.

Pro sports seem to be encountering more encounters of a violent nature between the players and the fans, or at least we’re hearing about it more often, and it raises the question of whether the professional athlete has some obligation to take verbal abuse just because he’s getting paid and the abuser is doing the paying. Verbal abuse? No doubt. But does he also have an obligation to take a beer in the face?

In a way, it’s kind of like the atrocities of war; the people have plenty of personal responsibility, but they’re acting within a much larger context. The players clearly were wrong in Detroit as they were in the incident a couple of months ago at a baseball game in Oakland. If you’re a pro athlete on the playing field, you’re obligated to take whatever the fans throw at you, verbally or otherwise. At least wait until the guy comes onto the field before you punch his lights out. But the fans in these incidents weren’t just engaging in some good natured needling, either.

Larger context: the world is violent. The US makes war halfway around the world for power and oil, so the guy probably thinks throwing a beer in Artest’s face isn’t that big a deal. Sports are a way of acting out conflict and rivalry, supposedly in a sporting manner, but in a violent world, people get a little carried away. A soccer coach in the Bay Area recently assaulted a referee in game involving nine and ten year old kids. Sure, the guy should be prosecuted, but he’s no more a criminal that George Dubya.

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San Francisco County supervisor Chris Daly recently caused a stir by publicly dropping an "F" bomb on some of his political opponents, much as Dick Cheney did to Senator Patrick Leahy a while back. A Chronicle staff writer wrote a piece for last Sunday’s edition complaining about such lack of civility in public life, but the entire premise was that the words these people chose to use, not their hostility, constituted their vulnerability to criticism and condemnation. I think public officials should behave politely in public meetings, but I really don’t care if they use every forbidden word in every sentence. I guess Lenny Bruce lived and died in vain. People still believe it’s the words that are more important than the feeling behind them. Words are just collections of alphabetical characters. The order in which you place those characters has little to do with what you’re trying to say. The idea that a handful of words shouldn’t be spoken is just as immature as speaking profanities just to irritate people. I think it would be healthy if we all told the FCC exactly what Dick, oh excuse me, Richard Cheney told Patrick Lehey.

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I’m going to give someone else the final word, today. This is from one of those "person on the street" type columns in The Chron, and the speaker’s name is Brian Feinberg. The question doesn’t matter. His reply was, "You have to remember that the only reason TV news programs exist is to keep the commercials from bumping into each other.