The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

"OR conservatives are a scary bunch in general"

Heh. Aren't they strongly pro-gun and rather libertarian in nature? When I went to a town near Crater Lake, the gas stations were scary. They contained ammunition and automatic knives; umm yeah; I would want to leave that place. Also, certainly not vegan friendly.

In any case, those who have lived for a long time have seen the political pendulum swing back and forth; it's hard to believe that so many people are as passionate as they are.

I suppose that this is the last election I'm too young to participate in,but I'll probably vote for some dead write-in candidate to protest the Democratic system or something.

And as for informed voting, well, suffices to say that the majority of voters are barely informed at all. In rural areas, it's often "vote what your neighbors think," "vote for this single issue that matters," vote for the party, bleh bleh bleh. It's also why I generally dislike democracies, although there aren't really any viable alternatives.

Hiya Simmy. Long time, no see.

By the by, there's an NPC in Neverwinter Nights 2, a game which I shall discuss in depth once I beat it, with the name of Simmy. It was slightly disconcerting not to see the old familiar fish avatar when I conversed with it. :P

Anyway. OR conservatives tend to, IME, be yeah, pretty gun-toting, bible-thumping, tax-hating types, in a sort of rabid way I don't really feel elsewhere except maybe the South. We had a guy that ran for a long time, I forget his name, who was as I recall trying to pretty much wipe out all the taxes. I think they hit him for tax fraud. We're kinda special like that.

OTOH, all the urban voters, and a surprising number of rural ones, tend to vote Dem, which is why we keep going blue state all the time.

For my part, I feel that if you're going to vote, you need to be an informed voter, hence my decision on the subject. And yeah, there is that tendency to vote your neighbor, but I think that's less so in OR, especially since it's made so easy to vote. Not only does the state mail you a ballot which you can mail back in, they also mail you a voter's guide with all the issues, a bipartisan description of whatever the measure is (or a candidate-supplied bio, as appropriate), and various pro/con positions supplied by whoever wants to pay the $50 or whatever it is. It's really amazing. I voted on things all the time in OR I hadn't heard of before I picked up the ballot, just on the strength of that guide.

Oh, and there will be an alternative. You just need to wait until Marechal and I are old enough to run.

Ah, I see, interesting voter guide. Couldn't you just have voted for Lieberman/Lamont and avoided the other issues though?

Interestingly enough, Oregon is among the least religious states in the nation.

http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060723/3613/

What's particularly surprising on that survey, though, is that Wyoming and Idaho both rank high in the number of non-religious people - even though they are deeply red [do you think it would be accurate comparing Eastern Oregon to Idaho/Wyoming/Montana?]. From what I can read at CNN exit polls, most of these non-religious vote Democratic; it's just that the religious vote Republican even more overwhelmingly. Furthermore, Nader grabs his largest share of the vote in the Rocky Mountain states. I suppose that they have some extremely intolerant Christians along with a number of non-Christians. They don't go as heavily for Democrats as the African Americans in the southeast do, perhaps explaining why they are even redder than the Southeastern states, although also why the Rocky Moutain West tends to give Nader and libertarians more votes than any other region.

Isn't Oregon politics Portland + Eugene + some coastal cities like Astoria vs. the rest of the state?

http://atheism.about.com/b/a/037170.htm

It says here that Medford is very unreligious, even though Medford overwhelmingly went for Bush in 2004 [or the county containing it].

And it's actually amazing how many people have so little trust for atheists/non-religious [US News just described them as the least trusted group in America]. But there is a key difference between self-identified atheists and the merely non-religious - many of the merely non-religious just haven't really encountered religion for whatever reason. I see that in a lot of my Chinese classmates - they just adopt areligious moral values but do not think so much so they never really encounter religion at all. It also seems that the unreligious are abnormally common on Internet forums, although that was probably more true 6 years ago than now, since a wider spectrum of people use the Internet now.

I'm considering going to Oregon State or UOregon for graduate school, by the way. My GPA isn't very hot [it may change for the better though] and I've heard that they tend to be very generous in giving grad student positions to undergrads.

Meanwhile, the Lieberman/Lamont exit polls were extremely amusing. Despite Lieberman's liberalism on some issues, they looked like Democratic vs. Republican ones. Aka the extreme ends of the education spectrum go to Lamont, so do the extreme ends of the income spectrum, and then even the African Americans go for him. It would be interesting to see the trends for marijuana legalization though. In the Colorado exit polls for those, the working-class cities that normally go Democratic [like Pueblo] overwhelmingly reject it; it's just the libertarian ski resort towns that overwhelmingly support it.

I could've voted for Lieberman, but I would've felt fairly irresponsible voting just on that.

OR politics is, yeah, pretty much Portland + Eugene + Corvallis versus the rest of the state, though Portland metro by itself I believe is still like 2/3 of the state pop or something.

I'd say that on your liberal/conservative scale, Portland and Eugene are right up there, most of the Willamette Valley and coast are somewhere in the middle, and the east/south are generally conservative. I think except for the eastern folks, we're generally more liberal than not, though. Eastern OR used to be a KKK stronghold back in the day, and opinions vary on how much that sort of thing has changed since, I think.

As far as UO/OSU go as schools, you could definitely do worse. IIRC UO is a pretty good humanities school, and a pretty good school in general if only because so much money gets pumped into it (think Nike, among others). Too, Eugene is justly famous as a liberal hotbed (think Ken Kesey and a lot of aging hippies here). I give it a lot of shit, but it's not actually a bad place to live.

I'm (obviously) an OSU fan, personally. They're kind of the state science/engineering school (Linus Pauling, Agent Orange). Corvallis is a pretty nice, fairly low-key town, pretty moderate in outlook.

I'm not sure how the graduate applications for either one work, though IME state schools in general tend to be pretty accepting in general - I got into both OSU and UO in my undergrad application phase based on a crappy HS GPA and pretty good SAT scores. For my graduate apps, Western Oregon didn't let me in (I blew the interview), but Southern Connecticut State DID, based on a REALLY crappy cumulative undergrad GPA and pretty good GRE scores.

This means you'll wanna do good on the GRE when you take it. I didn't find it astonishingly difficult - it's kinda like the SAT except a bit harder.

Also, Suzanne was the one of us who majored in a science degree at OSU. She probably knows a lot more about the experience and the graduate school than I do.

Suzanne isn't sure she's going to get her Master's, so she knows little about the grad program. But I suppose she knows a bit about the undergrad science program experience...

Also, I give another big YAY for Oregon vote-by-mail.

While we're at it, how about a big YAY for OSU? (I've held Linus Pauling's Nobel Prizes in my HANDS. These hands RIGHT HERE that are typing this.)

Ah, I see. Thanks for the comments. Yes, GRE, I've seen it, it's almost identical to the SAT. I think I'll be able to pull decent scores on it => I definitely have to pull very good GRE Subject test scores to offset my poor GPA. Oh, and recs too.

On religion . . .

Minnesota elected the first Muslim to the US House of Representatives. I haven't seen him around on local TV or anything, which is a little surprising, but then again I think most of his votes came from Minneapolis (i.e. the Somali Muslim immigrant community district).

[appropriate news link]

There is definately a problem with the pop evangelicals and the GOP and as of late, I haven't quite figured out who exactly is fooling who. Are the evangelist megachurch leaders actually helping run the GOP or is the GOP actually running these megachurches/using their leaders?

For clarification, I am NOT to be confused with these pop evangelicals or GOP fundie nuts. I am a Confessional Lutheran, not to be confused with the Ted Haggerts, Rick Warrens, Joel Osteens, Hour of Power, Coral Ridge, or any of those clowns. Am I deeply religious? I like to think so, but following in the steps of Dr. Luther the Reformer, Confessional Lutherans hold to the Right-Left Hand Kingdoms Doctrine. In other words, Christ rules the spiritual kingdom and our President/Congress/Dictators-for-Life rule the physical kingdom. Lots of confusion among the evangelical camp about whose kingdom starts and stops where.

First ever Muslim in the HoR? Huh. Cool.

The impression I get about the pop evangelicals/GOP debacle is that each thought it had the other in its pocket. Pop evangelicals thought they had a party which was made up of their own, and GOP leaders thought they had a faithful flock - all they had to do was keep emphasizing the religious/good and evil undertones to the war on terror and periodically raise the specter of gay marriage (as you pointed out), and they'd be able to keep America red.

It'll be interesting to see the GOP try to regroup over the next few years, especially because even though the party itself is a mess, they've got the strongest prospective candidates for '08 - Giuliani and McCain are much more palatable to a lot of moderates and liberals than are, say, Hillary or Pelosi or...who the heck else do the Dems even have at this point? Kerry again? Obama? Rendell?

Well Regina, you can't discount the ability of dark horse candidates to pull the election. There may have been no dark horse candidates who have won their party nominations as of late, but that's because we haven't had an election where neither president nor vice president was running in a long time.

Obama seems to have considerable popular appeal.

But whatever, I'm casting a write-in ballot for Edward O. Wilson.

Another comment to address: If say, a moderate Republican runs for president, how many of its conservative constituents will refuse to vote for him? How many of them will vote for a person who abandons their core principles in favor of pragmatism? Perhaps the majority, but the question is => just how many are just going to be so inflexible as to refuse to vote? The same question will apply to liberals as well, however, I believe that such an issue will cost the conservatives more votes, since the conservatives have more inflexible and un-open bigots on their side.