Here’s how I plan to vote Tuesday… feel free to try to change my mind.

• U.S. Senator: Claire McCaskill (D). Frankly, I despise both major party candidates with a passion, and every campaign ad makes me despise both of them more. Both Talent and McCaskill are lightweights, but that’s fine for a state that has a storied history of sending lightweights to Congress. This is simply a vote for divided government—no more, no less.
• U.S. House: whatever Libertarian is on the ballot; I can’t even remember if I’m in District 2 or District 3, but my vote has been gerrymandered out of meaningfulness either way.
• Stem cell initiative (Amendment 2): for. As far as I can tell, the only substantive effect is to prevent the state legislature from banning stem cell research if it so chose; unlike California’s initiative, it creates no funding for research in and of itself. Plus the opponents just sound like idiots—I get about the same visceral reaction to people who use the term “cloner” as those who use the word “abortionist,” which is basically “run for the hills before this creep can corner me.”
• Tobacco tax increase (Amendment 3): against. It’s a tax increase, and a regressive one at that. Not to mention it’s an intergenerational transfer: the old people who were dumb enough to smoke 17 packs of Marlboros a day get their health care paid for by kids who smoke a pack a week. Besides, wasn’t all that tobacco settlement money supposed to pay for this crap in the first place? No thanks.
• Judicial pay amendment (Amendment 7): for.
• Minimum wage increase (Proposition B): against; the Earned Income Tax Credit works better and actually helps poor people, unlike minimum wage increases (the effects which primarily accrue to union members well above the poverty line whose wages are often tied to multiples of the minimum wage). The Economist explains why.

I am in the rather odd position of now having two declared gubernatorial candidates on my blogroll, which has to be some sort of record.

Incidentally, Karlson’s rhetorical question—can’t they both lose?—has been plaguing my thoughts about the Missouri U.S. senatorial race too, wherein we have a choice between an anti-cloning clone of John Ashcroft and someone who was clearly out of her depth as state auditor, much less as a national legislator. At this point, I’m trying to decide between exercising my nonseparable preferences and voting in favor of divided government, even though I’d rather be represented by a broken vacuum cleaner than Claire McCaskill, or voting for Frank Gilmour, the Libertarian candidate, for purely symbolic reasons, even though I think his position on Iraq is dopey and his moustache is creepy-looking.

At least there will be some ballot propositions to make my election day amusing.

Before watching Talent-McCaskill on TiVo-delay, I need to make two very important points:

• Claire McCaskill doesn’t look anything like her picture.
• I am too sober to watch this crap, even though I was cruel and sadistic enough to make my American politics students watch it and write an essay for extra credit.

More thoughts when some braincells are numbed enough to listen to these twerps.