Your vote is powerful. But these ballots can be confusing! That's where a voter guide can help out. Find a voter guide for your area, or create your own guide that other people can use. It's easy.
From the PAC history page:
The League of Young Voters PAC was started by Billy Wimsatt, hip hop activist and author, in 2003. Billy was an occasional voter who never really thought his vote mattered. But one November evening when Billy went to cast his ballot at the polls he stared up and down the ballot and realized that he was only prepared to check the box for Governor but had no idea who to vote for to be judge, controller or any of the local positions. Billy left the polls with a new idea and mission: voter guides for the hip-hop generation, made by young people for young people -- in every community across the country. No more giving away votes. It was time for young people to educate ourselves and make a youth voting blocs across the country.
By November 2004 the League of Young Voters PAC had 163 voter guides across the country in 44 states. The guides were distributed at clubs, concerts, coffeehouses -- everywhere people could be reached. In addition, the League developed theballot.org, an online site where anyone can create their own voter guide for their own community, reaching hundreds of thousands of people and helping them make informed votes. The League of Young Voters PAC has been credited for swinging key elections on the state and local level and building significant influence on national elections as well. In countless communities across the country the League's voter guides are trusted sources of information about the important choices in every election.
Update: Shortly after 11:00 PM ET, NBC reports that McCain has conceded in a phone call to Obama. McCain was expected to speak publicly in 11:00 hour, with Obama to follow in Chicago. PBS reports that the crowd has assembled in Phoenix to hear McCain.
David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice.
“They took it away from him,” a longtime friend of McCain—who asked not to be identified, since the campaign has declined to discuss its selection process—said of the advisers. “He was furious. He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” Another friend disputed this, characterizing McCain’s mood as one of “understanding resignation.”
McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.
I am ambivalent about this article; on first reading, it struck me as rather too Hershy for my taste. But now we're seeing this and this:
Sarah Palin appears to be a continuing – if not an increasing – drag on the GOP ticket.
See also, in today's WaPo:
How do you sell someone as a no-frills hockey mom who sold the state plane, fired the official cook and turned down travel per diems for her family and then try to explain wardrobing her in clothes from Neiman Marcus -- a store occasionally referred to by aggrieved, frugal shoppers as Needless Markup? How do you, in barely two months, lavish her with fashion swag worthy of a starlet and valued at more than her annual governor's salary of $125,000?
Well I'm reading this poem and it's so profound and I like its rhythm and I like its sound it's by a very famous poet no critic can criticise and then I pause a moment and I start to realize he's tellin' lies lies lies on the motel TV. I dig the evangelist he'll tell you all about that and then he tell you all about this he's preachin' up a storm by the sea of Galilee he's mixin' up the truth with something funny I start to see he's tellin' lies lies lies I never had this problem with nobody in the government I guess I always figured they never mean what they meant and GOD help us all not to be so stone surprised when we wake up in the stars with the skies in our eyes if we keep tellin' lies lies lies
I believe marriage is meant to be a scared institution be a between 2 unwilling teenagers. But don't think I don't I tolerate gay people because I do. I tolerate them with all my heart.
The narrow question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president?
This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.
In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years.
It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.
What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.
Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.
