Provisional ballot.

I'm somewhat dreading voting tomorrow. We moved about a month ago and it looks like I'll be casting a provisional ballot. My fault. You know, the kind you get when you live in one of the predominantly black precincts in Florida where they take your vote, "thank you," give you a sticker and shuttle it off to an election judge who holds it up to the fluorescent light, flips it over a time or two and puts it into a plastic ballot box to be set adrift on the Gulf of Mexico. You get to keep the sticker though.

As everyone else has said twenty times, it will be nice to have the ads end. But of course, nothing else will change. I think we had a two party system at some point, but there is so little movement on anything significant lately I don't even know what we are doing voting besides getting a little civic exercise. I can't imagine the Democratic or Republican representatives or senators creating some kind of paradigm shift. Abortion and gay marriage, while huge, seem like the tailings of much larger issues. And even with those issues the discussion is at the fringes. We talk about parental notification and imagine pedophilia is the natural outgrowth of homosexual unions.

Maybe I'm just cynical but imagine the parental notification laws are intended to set up a system whereby parents can be charged with murder for sanctioning the abortions of their teenage daughters. But hey, we still won't put the boy in jail, he didn't have the abortion. He got the girl pregnant, creating life - not destroying it. Just jail that slutty little daughter and her no-goodnik parents.

And the world turns upside-down again. I love the preacher who got nailed. Day 1: I bought meth, but I didn't do it. I did not have gay sex. Day 2: I may have a drug problem. The gay prostitute is still a liar though. Day 3: I am a sinner with a gay sex and drug problem. I guess he was for the sex and drugs while he was against them. I can only assume that because he theoretically believes what he did was wrong, he will see the light and the way. In his own mind.

I can't stop thinking that we now live in something a little darker than a democracy. The president seems more interested in turning the machine of the state to effectively and efficiently fight Al-Qaida than in maintaining its original intent of serving the constitution and the will of the people. I can only believe that type of administration best suited to destroy Al-Qaida is something other than what most people would chose to live under. But hey, Dancing with the Stars is pretty cool and there are only a matter of shopping days left before Christmas.