...voting in a general election. Up here we vote by mail, so it's kind of a family event. We sit around the dinner table with the two volume voters pamphlet and argue over every candidate and ballot measure. I wish all young people were half as excited about casting a ballot as she was. Or as knowledgable. She changed my mind on a couple of ballot measures and I know I was thinking them out more carefully than usual.

I guess Obama's message is getting through to Joe Diploma.

Alan Keyes is a wonderful public speaker, head and shoulders above and beyond any other big-time political figure. Barack gets praise for his speaking, but Barack is just a semi-pro speaker. Alan is Babe Ruth or Doctor J or Jim Brown.

Alan just needs to get out of politics, and use his talent and expertise in speaking somewhere else. TV? The church? Somewhere other than politics.

It was such a crowded ballot, I guess we can give the Yellow Jackets a pass. At least Obama beat Alan Keyes.

Poster EconCCX, did you invent it? Cheers to whoever invented it!

Isn't vote by mail the best? For the first couple of years I was nostalgic for the booths, but my polling place was a church my ancestors built in the 1870's, so I was always a conflicted atheist. I wish the whole nation could follow suit with VxM.

You bet, VxM is the only way to go. What would you rather do. Sit down in your own home and go over the (often way too many) ballot initiatives, discussing them over a beer with your friends and family and take the whole evening to make good, intellegent unrushed choices or stand in a voting booth hoping you can remember which initiatives and candidates you have decided upon and rushing to get out of there so the next person can vote. And this after waiting in line for up to a couple of hours. I've had to go as far as taking notes with me into the voting booth.

Every state ought to have vote by mail. It just makes the whole process so much more civilised.

And they're too cool for that.

And I think it must increase turnout, always a good thingn. How many people don't vote because they just can't take the time? I never didn't take the time, but I've known others who have. What's hard to fathom is that small percentage that gets their ballot, and then just keep it. Postage would have to go way ^ for me to not get that puppy in. VxM additionally gets the votes of the LTC population better represented.

I don't actually mail in my ballot. The dropoff point is on the way to work, so I save myself a (OK 4 of em this year) stamp. The main attraction for me is the extra time to decide how to vote.

Say: who is this Beagle pinhead and why does he thing either of us smokes?

Well, he just wrote this in another post:

Well that's only one

I'm thinking they'll just tear up the 5th and 8th amendment, then the 1st. Followed by 13, 14, 15 and 16. Which is fine by me really. You all deserve one another. I'm emigrating.

-- The Beagle of Doom

So...yeah, no answer to your question there.

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/us/2008/10/31/D945N2LO5_mentally_ill_voting/index.html

Interesting regarding the subject of my previous re LTC. They (and the mentally ill) are so marginalized in this process.

Ya think he's serious about emmigrating? Maybe he'll move somewhere without internet access.

He gets slammed around in here a lot and keeps coming back...he can dish it out pretty well all around himself, though. If you click on his letters...

Mine to my knowledge. And I've been waiting for an excuse to use it.

I'd a leif read the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" or "Race and Reason". One idiot's demented ramblings a very much like anothers.

TimtukTom offers:

Alan Keyes is a wonderful public speaker, head and shoulders above and beyond any other big-time political figure. Barack gets praise for his speaking, but Barack is just a semi-pro speaker. Alan is Babe Ruth or Doctor J or Jim Brown.

When people had the opportunity to compare them side by side Alan Keyes got 27% of the vote. Obama went on to the Senate. The rest is history.

Yes... Alan Keyes IS silly. Dead end silly.

And he is a good speaker. But one religious fanatic sounds very much like another and I personally can't tell him apart from the late Ayatollah Khomeni. The man should keep to those ignorant, fundanentalist churches where he will be appreciated and leave politics, and for that matter sensible religion, to those qualified for it. He should also stop calling himself an American since he seems to think that we should all be governed by his holy book and not the Constitution of the United States.

Economists flatter themselves with rationality, but the phrase "rational economist" is as much an oxymoron as the more famous "military intelligence."

These supposed deep thinkers confuse rationality with logic and logic with probability. By the same "reasoning," one might say that since an automobile costs several thousand dollars, no one dollar matters much, and there is therefore no reason to spend it. Run that one by your auto dealer and see how far you get.

They DO understand, don't they, that the very calculations of probability from which they make their livings depend on the assumption that special behaviors are not involved?

(Itself a faulty assumption, but that's another story).

Thought I was posting to the article on the economists, but somehow wound up here. Will copy and paste.

I graduated from high school in 1988, and I took government in the spring of my senior year. The teacher devoted most of the course to the election - happily, there were a lot of candidates that year, so there were endless issues to discuss. On the last day of class, someone from the registration office came and registered everyone who was 18, and gave forms to everyone else. By the time of the election, I was in college and had a lot of other things going on, but I wasn't going to miss voting after all that buildup. (Alas, my candidate lost...)

It's been 20 years, and I've wondered, did my classmates become regular voters after our experience in high school? We just had our 20 year reunion, and everyone was very enthused about the election, but I didn't ask if they'd been voting in the other elections in the meantime. It seems like a class in government would be a good investment if it leads to more voter participation. (And unlike Sarah Palin, I also learned about the Constitution!)