PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tag vote

At first, it sounds like a bad joke: What if a woman, a black, and a Mormon ran for president? Yet with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney running for the White House, this welcome burst of diversity in US presidential candidates is no joke. Each of these politicians comes with enough experience, patriotism, and popular support to be taken seriously for the 2008 contest. Yet polls show a number of Americans still hold some prejudice against them simply for their sex, race, or religion. Polls find that, while a strong minority of Americans say the US is "not ready" for a woman or black president, a vast majority of them say they could vote for one. A more worrisome poll finds 37 percent would not vote for a Mormon - a much higher negative response than for an evangelical Christian, a Catholic, or a Jew, although not as high as for a Muslim.

Don't Be MIA on Election Day You might not be in the military, but you can certainly still fight for freedom, right here on our own shores. How? By voting! With the culture wars at full tilt, it is somewhat surprising that expected voter turn out is forecasted as low as 35 percent. This is particularly troubling since Democrats only need to pick up six seats to gain a majority in the 100-seat Senate. They need only 15 seats out of the 435-seat House to achieve their first majority since being swept out of power in 1994. To not vote is simply a vote for the opposition. As British statesman Edmund Burke once said, ''Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.''

Democrats can't not be crazy. They will instantly set to work enacting a national gay-marriage law, impeachment hearings, slavery reparations and a series of new federal felonies for abortion clinic protesters. The only way to get Democrats to focus on terrorists would be to convince them that the terrorists are interfering with a woman's right to choose or that commercial jetliners exploding in midair are a threat to America's wetlands.

These should be easy days for Republican Gov. Mark Sanford who's far ahead of his Democratic challenger in cash and ads in the final week before Election Day. Despite leading the GOP ticket that's dominated state politics for a decade, Sanford's penny-pinching political style and libertarian leanings have peeved party regulars. He often says he's running his campaign like he's one vote short of securing his second term.

Not all Americans can be classified as liberal or conservative. In particular, polls find that some 10 to 20 percent of voting-age Americans are libertarian, tending to agree with conservatives on economic issues and with liberals on personal freedom. The Gallup Governance Survey consistently finds about 20 percent of respondents giving libertarian answers to a two-question screen.

Senate Democrats late Thursday refused to accept a bill raising the nation's minimum wage because the bill also would have eliminated the "death tax" on estates up to $5 million. Republicans needed 60 votes to cut off debate and bring the bill to a vote -- but in the end, they managed to muster only 56 votes. Furious Democrats called it "sham" legislation and they accused Republicans of "trickery."

Each judge was asked to nominate a few programs for the 2006 list of the 10 Most Harmful Government Programs. We then sent them ballots listing the nominated programs. They ranked their choices 1 through 10, with No. 1 being the program they believed to be "most harmful." A program earned 10 points for each No. 1 vote it received, 9 points for each No. 2 vote, and so on. ()()One program that didn't make the list was the "War on Drugs." I think that belongs at No. 1.

The state Board of Education voted today to reject a challenge to how evolution is taught in South Carolina high schools. On an 11-6 vote, the state board upheld its previous evolution-only science curriculum for 10th grade biology. Last month, the state's Education Oversight Committee voted to add the phrase "critically analyze" to the evolution guidelines. [soap] Gee, that's really intelligent. Discouraging students from critical thinking. Guess, it's true. Public schools want mind-numbed little skulls full of mush. What's wrong with asking students to talk about the holes in Darwin's theories?

They may opt to use a statewide referendum to repeal the law, denying those who supported the ban the opportunity to take it all to the way to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Should Planned Parenthood lost the ballot vote, it could still file a lawsuit against the ban. ()() I'm pretty sure they would have trouble even getting a referendum on the ballot. Who's going to sign a petitition in favor of killing babies?

This week, more than two months after President Bush nominated him, the Senate will finally vote on Judge Samuel Alito’s elevation to the Supreme Court. In a final, all-too-typical move, the vote was put off a week at the behest of Alito’s opponents. Why? Nobody seriously expects another week to make a difference. With a few exceptions, senators probably knew how they were going to vote before the hearings. So, why put off the vote?

Most debate about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has focused on his propensity to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade and the similarity between him and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. But despite the superficial parallels between the two conservative, Italian-American Catholic jurists, it is important to recognize that Alito has a substantial libertarian dimension to his jurisprudence as well as a conservative one. In several key fields of law, he is more likely than Scalia and other conservatives to be skeptical of assertions of government power. More important, there is much in his record that should appeal to libertarians and -- to a lesser extent -- even left-wing liberals.