Talking to your Kids about the Election

From Anonymous D:

I was talking to my daughter last night. She was asking me about the election, what I thought so forth. She knew I voted for President Obama, and that her mother did as well. It’s also well known in the ward that I did. She was telling me that her friends were giving her a little bit of a hard time about it. I told her just to let it go. It isn’t worth losing a friendship because of a disagreement about politics. She then informed me that one of her friends told her that she needed to look up a scripture, Helaman 5:2 and that would pretty well explain our situation.  

“For their laws and their governments were established by the voice of the people, and they who chose evil were more numerous than they who chose good, therefore they were ripening for destruction, for the laws had become corrupted.”  

That’s when I got a little annoyed. I fancy myself as at least competent in the Book of Mormon, I was a aware of the verse of course but I was also aware of the context. So I sat down with my daughter to explain the context.

Live-Blogging Election Night 2012

Well, I was running around to Utah County and back for my kids. Oddly, I was in Utah County for election day four years ago with my oldest boy and his now wife. I was in McD's briefly in American Fork checking Twitter and CNN and now I'm back at home with CNN and MSNBC on TV. I guess I could check how they're doing on FOX. Maybe we'll wait a while.

We'll try to keep up with some updates. I have an interruption coming with our Scout Commissioner to work on registration renewal. But we'll try to keep up. Nobody is calling Florida, Virginia or Ohio, but Florida is looking surprisingly well for the Prez on CNN analysis.

Early Voting Lines

Many people have already voted. Sacrificing time, some say a "poll tax" of time, if time is money. There has to be a better way. But everyone who hasn't voted, should go vote tomorrow and wait in line as long as it takes. This is America.

Iowa

Absolute Truth? Absolutely! Except . . . .

For some reason, perhaps inspired as it turned out, I was up late enough to be turning the clocks back in the actual 2 o'clock hour. I checked the blog and e-mail as compulsion requires before I finally headed off to bed and found a message from my freshman son at BYU who was also up late with some worries. Knowing his dad, he gave me permission to use some of it in the blog. I appreciate that trust. His slightly edited message and my response follow:

Why I Voted for Obama

Now that I have through early voting, I suppose I should explain myself. I have frequently referred readers to a general perusal of this blog to explain my support for the President which should give a fairly good understanding. I link some of those as we go along, but it is very hard to explain things that are a mixture of sentiment, logic, feelings, study, experience, inspiration and all kinds of different electrical impulses darting through my brain. Let me start with this:

Four Days to Go! My Picks for Tuesday

Time for Final Predictions. Obama by 2% in the popular vote. A solid win 303-235 in the Electoral College. If this link right here works, you can see my predictions on the CNN interactive map for the Electoral College by state. I couldn't figure a way to save or cut and paste.

Oh, and the Dems stay in control of the Senate. I'm going very optimistic to call it as 52 Dems, 46 Repubs, and 2 Independents who will caucus with the Dems. Not quite enough for the 60% cloture rule (only Constitutional in that the Senate can set its own rules, but it's a stupid rule), but the Republicans put up some really bad candidates for the Senate and Dems are doing better than originally expected. Repubs keep the House mainly due the short coat tails of the President. They will hold the House by a smaller margin, unfortunately not as unbounced as Tiggers should be.

Finally Figuring out Math

My wife is a Science Teacher. She used to teach Math. She's a lot smarter than I am in these areas. In fact, that applies in almost every area. The smartest thing I ever did was to marry her. Our kids do pretty well with Math. They get that from their mother. So far, none of them want to be a lawyer. They get that from me. 

Math has always been a problem for me. I'm smart enough, but still struggle with the Math Anxiety I developed in Mrs. Sather's class at Finn Hill Jr. High when she introduced something called polynomials. I've been lost in Mathematics-land ever since.