Use Project Vote Smart to learn more about your candidates

You may have noticed it’s election season. If our feature this week wasn’t signal enough, you can look to the deluge of campaign ads on street corners, television sets and billboards as markers that voting time is upon us. This Tuesday, Nov. 7, when you head to the polls to partake in the fall festivity, you’ll have a number of choices to make. Many of said choices will hopefully be aided by our election guide in this issue, but you may want to do some of your own research as well. If that’s the case, Project Vote Smart is your answer.

Semantics on the Fritz--To deal with today’s political climate, my favorite coping mechanism has always been apathy. After the election of 2004, I, in disbelief, ceased to care. And it works well, for in my microcosm, responding to the daily actions of the president seems all too obvious. That is, I have refused to become caught up, and am not compelled to join the leagues of Bush bashers, that world of tiny liberal pundits with tiny soap boxes stating the obvious and sometimes making wild and unfounded claims in an already saturated Bush-hating market. Sigh.

Wes Naman

An interview with pollster Brian Sanderoff

When New Mexicans want to know about the numbers behind local elections—or any numbers, really—they turn to Brian Sanderoff. You’ve probably read his name at one time or another in a newspaper or on a blog, or heard it on the radio. Sanderoff’s Research & Polling, Inc. conducts the vast majority of election polls throughout the state, most of which grace the pages of the Albuquerque Journal.

Courtesy of the Tillman Family

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

The importance of the Land Commissioner race

If you saw the Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, you probably came out of the theater wishing there were a simple way to do something meaningful about the frightening scenario the film so indisputably lays out.

The 2006 Election is upon us. What a show.

To loosely quote a famous philosopher whose name I forget: Elections are the process by which the people are free to choose the person who will get the blame later.

Dateline: Canada--The city of Richmond, British Columbia, under pressure for alleged sexual harassment within its fire department, will now be assigning gender-neutral underwear to it firefighters. The city has spent C$16,000 ($14,200) to buy six pairs of boxer shorts for each of the city’s firefighters in a bid to make firehalls in the Vancouver suburb more gender neutral. “We supply firefighters with various pieces of gear such as gloves, now it’s underwear,” city official Ted Townsend told the Vancouver Sun, saying it was all part of the “integration of the sexes in the workplace.” The underwear policy comes in the wake of a recent investigation of the department, which described its workplace culture as “characterized by juvenile and hostile behavior” toward female firefighters by their male colleagues. Firefighters strip off most of their clothes in order to don protective gear when responding to fire alarms.

Letters