Why I will vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday

Although I view the Democratic nomination race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a choice between a mediocre candidate and a truly worthy candidate, there are several key reasons why I cannot in good conscience cast a vote for Clinton. She reflects more mainstream Democratic positions and has endorsed universal health care for a decade, but she is also a war hawk, and there is not much sunlight between her and McCain on many issues. In fact, she is more conservative than McCain on several key issues, as evidenced by Ann Coulter's endorsement of Clinton over McCain. That endorsement should tell you everything you need to know, but here are five major points on which Clinton and I diverge:

1. She is in favor of maintaining the Patriot Act as it is, sections of which have been ruled unconstitutional multiple times by multiple U.S. courts, and is in clear violation of both our 4th and 1st Amendments.

2. She is in favor of military action against Iran, a country whose nuclear program we ourselves established in the 1950s, and for which no current evidence exists. In fact, our National Intelligence Estimates put the Iranians about 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb and state that they shelved the idea of maintaining a nuclear arsenal about 4 years ago. Despite this, Hillary unapologetically goose steps with the Neoconservatives when Bush rattles his saber at Iran, displaying the same gullibility that led her to so enthusiastically follow him into war in Iraq.

I believe that Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospect, as it most likely still harbors the Al Qaida operatives who planned 9/11 and was one of only two countries in the world that recognized the oppressive Taliban regime as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. But Bush has rewarded Pakistan by dropping the sanctions imposed by Clinton, selling them boatloads of military planes and equipment, and has given them 10 billion dollars in aid since 9/11. All this while the father of their nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, gave secrets of their nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran while riding back and forth from those countries on the aircraft we sold them. He now has been pardoned by President Musharraf and lives free in Pakistan. Agencies of our government are not permitted to detain him and to this day have not been able to even interview him. With key allies like Musharraf, who needs enemies? Clinton criticized Obama for stating that "...if we have actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives [in Pakistan] including Bin Laden, and President Musharraf cannot act, then we should."

3. She is in favor of building a fence along our border with Mexico. This is the most inane idea in recent history. If you really want illegal immigrants out of the country, there is a cheaper solution: impose much stricter fines on the corporations, agriculture companies, small business owners, and contractors who employ them, and then enforce those fines. We might even be able to win back some of our budget surplus that Bush squandered on the Iraq invasion. Without available jobs, aliens will have no other option but to return to their home countries -- if there is no wall at the border to stop them. Of course, doing this would impose a huge financial burden on those American businesses, which would have to hire more expensive citizen workers. Many of them would suffer and even go bankrupt, but that's the cost of not having illegal labor in our country. So instead, let's just throw up another billion or two and build a modern Great Wall of China -- which didn't work for them, either -- because it looks impressive and we can all go back to eating our cheaply farmed food and working in our spotless office buildings.

Alternatively, if you're hankering for a large federally mandated construction project, why not build better levees in New Orleans? They currently are engineered to hold up against a Category 3 hurricane (Katrina was a Category 3.5), and the entire levee system is still sinking so over time it will be less and less effective. Coincidentally, Obama wants to protect New Orleans against even a Category 5.

4. She is in favor of the death penalty, while I believe that, with all the recent exonerations of death row inmates using DNA evidence, a moratorium on executions is needed to prevent the sanctioned murder of innocents who had bad lawyers. I also believe that for the guilty, lifetime imprisonment with one's conscience in a cage under armed guard is a far more effective punishment than the escape and quick release of an early demise.

5. She is in favor of torture. Simply put, Hillary Clinton supports the use of torture by American forces and intelligence agencies, while even John McCain does not. This is one of the reasons why Ann Coulter despises McCain.

Regardless of who you vote for, please vote on Tuesday. If you don't yet know who your candidate is, visit The Pew Forum's website, where you can choose an important issue and compare the candidates' views on that issue. Also, there is this nifty tool that allows you feed in your positions on a variety of political issues and then spits out a chart displaying the candidates which agree with you the most and enumerates the topics on which you disagree.