I edited the voter and pollworker education videos being used by the state, so I’m no stranger to voting procedures and equipment operations. My boss closed our office on Thursday, saying that it was too nice for everybody to be stuck in the office, so I used the time to saunter down to the City/County Office Building on north 5th Street to vote. Then I took my little boy down to the sandbar to watch the machines tearing apart the bridge debris and to throw sticks into the river.

I was surprised to see how many people were there! I had no problem strolling right in and getting my ballot, but by the time I had left the line of eager voters ran all the way out into the hall. Because early voting locations serve multiple precincts, there were multiple optical ballot scanners in the room. Each scanner and ballot was color coded to make sure that ballots were counted for the proper precinct. Since I did the training video on the M100 Ballot Scanner too, I watched the display on the machine as I fed it my ballot. I was number 477 for that machine for the day. I think that’s pretty decent turnout!

Then I saw an AP story this morning that indicates a quarter of North Dakotans may have already voted! More than two thirds of the vote-by-mail ballots have been returned, nearly three quarters of the absentee ballots have been submitted, and nearly 20,000 people had taken advantage of the six Early Voting centers provided in our state. Wow!

After working on all those videos, I pay particular attention to pollworkers and equipment. I must say that the pollworkers at the Bismarck location were very professional, friendly, and obviously knew what they were doing. Handling a voting center serving multiple precincts complicates things, too. Hats off to the folks running the voting center!

If you have any confusion about the measures, I’d like to point out a couple of things that may help in your decision.

Measure #1 puts oil money away into a “rainy day” fund. There are some questions about the way in which it does it, and government types are moaning that getting money OUT of the fund is too difficult. But look at it this way: North Dakota’s government budget has SKYROCKETED in the past few years. Governor Hoeven is a big spender, and nobody in the state legislature wants to argue with him. When they start instituting all these bigger budgets and new expenditures, they’ll never go away. What happens when oil revenues level off or decline? Let them have the money now and they’ll spend it. Put it in a trust fund, and it will indirectly help control state budgets and spending now.

Who’s against Measure #2 (the individual and corporate income tax cut measure)? It has only one opponent: a group of PUBLIC EMPLOYEES’ UNIONS dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly from outside of North Dakota, into fighting lower taxes for North Dakotans. I’ve met North Dakota residents fighting to get this measure on the ballot and see it passed. I’ve posted pics of them from the motorcycle show, for instance. But the only people trying to run ads against it and putting money into fighting lower taxes for North Dakotans are a unions trying to keep those taxes as high as possible so their members benefit from your money. Think about that before you vote.

Measure #3 looks like a good thing, fighting tobacco use. But the part that really caught me was the funding. After to tobacco money runs out,”If in any biennium, the tobacco prevention and control trust fund does not have adequate dollars to fund a comprehensive plan, the treasurer shall transfer money from the water development trust fund to the tobacco prevention and control trust fund in an amount equal to the amount determined necessary by the executive committee to fund a comprehensive plan.” Marrying the tobacco program dollars to a Dept of Health water program raised a red flag in my book. No mention of any water trust fund is mentioned on the ballot itself; you should click here for a PDF of the full text of all ballot measures to get the full description of the measures.

Measure #4 wants to make the head of WSI a political appointment, rather than someone hired by the board. I don’t think this is necessarily a good idea, and I don’t think WSI’s problems were on the part of its leader. I have good inside information that there were a few other disfunctional people lower down the ladder causing the problems. But the bottom line on this measure is the fact that WSI management is not broke enough to “fix.” We don’t need governors installing friends or supporters in that position; we need people who the WSI Board feels are qualified. Let them continue the hiring.

There you have it. Remind everybody to get out and vote on Tuesday! Try to be as informed as you can. If you can’t decide who to support for a particular office, write me in. I wrote myself in for one of the County Commission positions, for instance. It would be interesting if I got enough write-in votes to actually show up statistically!

Oh, I didn’t get an “I Voted” sticker this year. I recycled that photo. Maybe they save those for election day, not early voting centers.

– Turnout was GREAT. I haven’t waited in a line like this since Sammy Hagar tickets went on sale at the Civic Center.

– I’m not funny. I was walking to the building with a woman who was going to pick up her son, and she told me she’s a Democrat. We were talking about why the Democrat caucus hours were 2 to 8 and the Republican hours were 6:30 to 8. My response: “Our guys are employed.” Judging by her reaction, I’m not funny…although I think the look on my face illustrated that I was just funnin’ around. We continued to joke a little until we got to the line a few seconds later.

– There are a lot of Ron Paul supporters here. That doesn’t surprise me, since we have a lot of libertarian types in our state. I agree with Ron Paul on a LOT of issues, but there are some key issues in which I don’t. Besides, he stands no chance in the long run. I predict he’s going to make a pretty remarkable showing in North Dakota, at least in certain precincts.

– Our country is polarized. It’s not George Bush’s fault, either. Look at the forces aligning on either side of the ideological divide. Consider how the states were moving their caucuses ahead on the calendar. Note the reports of unusually high turnouts.

I voted for Romney. I originally said I’d never vote for a Mormon, because I object to their cult (I’m not into identity-based voting, but Christianity trumps any other principles.) I wanted to vote for Fred Thompson, but sadly that’s no longer possible. The most important issue at this point has become tanking John McCain.

McCain isn’t just a liberal. He’s got his name on bills designed to limit free political speech (McCain-Feingold); to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants (McCain-Kennedy); and legitimize the hoax of man-made global warming (McCain-Lieberman). These bills are sponsored by this joker, folks…they aren’t just simple votes on issues. This man is responsible for, among other things, a law to stifle political discourse, in direct violation of the First Amendment. He is not a conservative, and I’m ashamed he’s a Republican.

Added 2/6/08:
The big thing with McCain is that he’s a liberal, and pretty much a Democrat. Don’t forget, he was in negotiations to switch parties and run as John Kerry’s VP in 2004! Remember the infamous “Gang of 14” that stalled the President’s conservative judicial nominations? That was McCain, too.

Even if you can ignore the other policy nightmares, consider this: we conservatives cling to the hope of the governmental Holy Grail of getting conservative justices on the benches of our government’s courts, to stop liberal activism on the part of current justices. Well, we had that chance…and who sabotaged it? John McCain.

My goal with my vote is to assist in stopping a McCain nomination. If we’re unsuccessful in that, I’ll write in Fred Thompson on election day. But if given the choice in November to vote for two liberals for President, I’m going to vote Neither.

I got a response back from Senator Gaylord Kent Conrad which admitted that he didn’t know the context of Rush Limbaugh’s comments, so apparently he was simply being a good Democrat so he could continue to receive the over 90% of his out-of-state campaign contributions. You can read the post about his response letter here.

I just got my response from Senator Dorgan in the mail. He maintains that Rush Limbaugh was critical of soldiers who disagree with the war…no problem there, we’ll just have to disagree. To his credit, the letter contained the following: “However, in retrospect, I wish we had not started down this road of having the Senate involved in expressing support or opposition to various kinds of speech.” Later on he says, “…I think it would have been better had the Senate not rushed to express itself on either of these issues involving Moveon.org or Rush Limbaugh. Frankly, there will always be people on all sides of controversial issues that say things we might object to, but I think we should not have started down that road.”

While Senator Conrad gave me some sort of nonsense answer and apparently stuck to his guns on the issue, at least Senator Dorgan agrees that the Senators participating in the letter should not have done so. He’s not afraid to say so in a letter to one of his constituents. We’ll just agree to disagree on the intent of the comment on the radio that started it all. I’m fine with that.

Case closed, I suppose. I wish that our state’s Senate delegation had not signed on to the letter in the first place. It seems that only half that delegation can at least own up to it and say it was the wrong thing to do.

North Dakota’s delegation to the Senate signed a letter to the CEO of Clear Channel, the syndication partner of Limbaugh’s show, attempting to pressure Clear Channel to influence what Limbaugh says on the air. Doesn’t that fly right in the face of the first amendment? Here we have nearly half the Senate, acting in official capacity, attempting to influence political speech by a private citizen by bringing the presence of the US Senate to bear. This is precisely the kind of thing that the Constitution prohibits!

I don’t care if it’s Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken on the receiving end of this letter, it’s an affront to the idea of free speech in this country. And who’s jumped on board like the good little lap dogs we know them to be? Conrad and Dorgan. And you can bet they didn’t do it because North Dakotans were flooding them with complaints about Rush Limbaugh.

I wrote a letter outlining the points above, because I believe in free political and religious speech. I want to beat the crap out of anyone I see burning a flag, but I won’t…in fact, I believe it’s their right under our nation’s Constitution. I think most liberal talk show hosts are out of their skulls, but I defend their right to spout their lunacy for their dozens of listeners. So my motivation in going after our Senators is not conservative vs. liberal. It’s simply a free speech issue.

Back to Gaylord’s return letter to me. He states “I do not know what Mr. Limbaugh was thinking when he uttered the words “phony soldiers.” Okay, Senator Conrad…if you didn’t know, then why would you enter some very frightening territory, constitutionally speaking, attempting to influence political speech by using the power of the Senate as a bludgeoning tool? Because the national Democrat Party told you to, I’m sure.

Rather than behaving like a North Dakotan, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan showed their true colors and act like east coast liberals. Maybe that way they’ll continue to get the support of the DNC to keep their Senate seats. In the mean time, this Congress has accomplished pretty much nothing while wasting its efforts on trampling the Constitution for political gain.

Why do people continue to vote for these idiots? Haven’t they run out of farmers and senior citizens to scare into voting Democrat?

The Bismarck City Commission meets on Tuesday nights in the basement meeting room of the City-County Office Building on 5th Street in downtown Bismarck. You can view their agenda for upcoming meetings online in PDF format by visiting their website* using the link from the Links section of this page (upper right).

If you cannot make it to the meeting and you would like to hear what is said, you can view it online in real-time or when it’s replayed by visiting the Community Access TV website at www.freetv.org. The same is true for all their content, by the way. Check their schedule.

Windows Media stream from CATV

City government is something in which we should all take part. Have you heard the phrase, “All politics is local politics?” Well, in this case you can be heard personally. I’ve been able to get things done in and around my neighborhood simply by going and making the commission aware of problems that simply needed attention.

* Pet Peeve: When someone says “log on to their/our website” it really irks me, unless that website requires you to actually log in. If you are not required to enter a user ID and password, you’re not logging in. Get it right, TV journalists! 🙂