EARLY VOTING times/sites in Hillsborough County FL

The Supervisor of Elections website includes a page about Early Voting. The page includes a PDF listing early voting locations and hours. Here is that same list of the 13 early voting sites in Hillsborough County; I've added a link to a map for each location. If you are registered to vote in Hillsborough County, you can go to ANY of these locations to vote early; if you go to vote on election day (Tue, Nov 4th) you will have to go to the voting location designated for your precinct.Please note that if if you’ve requested and received an absentee ballot and you later decide to vote at the polls, you must bring your absentee ballot with you so that your absentee ballot can be canceled.

Locations for early voting (Mon thru Sat from Oct 20th thru Nov 1st) in Hillsborough County, Florida:

County Center (map) 601 E. Kennedy Boulevard, 16th Floor Hours of Operation: 9am – 5pm	SouthShore Regional Library (map) 15816 Beth Shields Way Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm
Robert L. Gilder Elections Service Center (map) 2514 N. Falkenburg Road Hours of Operation: 9am – 5pm	Temple Terrace Public Library (map) 202 Bullard Parkway Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm
Plant City, City Hall (map) 302 West Reynolds Street Hours of Operation: 9am – 5pm	Riverview Branch Library (map) 10509 Riverview Drive Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm
College Hill Branch Library (map) 2607 East Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm	West Tampa Branch Library (map) 2312 West Union Street Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm
Bloomingdale Regional Public Library (map) 1906 Bloomingdale Avenue Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm	New Tampa Regional Library (map) 10001 Cross Creek Boulevard Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm
Upper Tampa Bay Regional Public Library (map) 11211 Countryway Boulevard Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm	Jimmie B. Keel Regional Library (map) 2902 West Bearss Avenue Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm
Jan Kaminis Platt Regional Library (map) 3910 South Manhattan Ave Hours of Operation: 10am – 6pm

With the availability of absentee ballots, early voting, and regular Election Day voting, there is ample opportunity for each of us to exercise our right to have a say in our government!

McCain Is Not a Terrible Person

I'm going to take a minute to clear the political air. It's not secret that I am a democrat, a liberal, and an Obama supporter. But let's take a breath here, and realize what we're actually doing.

I flat out do not agree with anything that McCain says. I don't agree with his policies, his politics, his morals, or any number of things. I do, however, respect McCain for his service and sacrifice for America. I don't believe him to be a terrible person. I think, at heart, he's a good person, with different ideas of right and wrong for the country than I have.

I just don't think that his service should be the only qualifier. In the not so recent past, past Presidents Kennedy, Carter, Dole, Ford, and many others all served in some branch of the armed services, and while admirable, they did not fall back onto their service as a shield when things went awry for them.

Senator McCain should be respected for his service, to be certain, but I really think we ought only judge the man's ability to run the country by his public record, not by smear.

War Veterans grade Obama a 'B', McCain a 'D'

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) has rated the current members of the US Congress using a letter grading system of A down to F, where A is excellent and F is failure. Guess who got a 'D'? Yup, McCain; he tries to get folks to think he supports veterans since he served and was a POW. But he won't support the vets! Obama and Biden, however, each received a 'B' grade. You can click each of the images below to see more details from the IAVA site.

Shame on you, Senator McCain!

Desperate McCain campaign LIES about Obama

From this article on FactCheck:

McCain says Obama "lied" about his association with
William Ayers, a former bomb-setting, anti-war radical from the 1960s
and '70s. We find McCain's claim to be groundless.

It was recently reported that 100% of McCain's TV ads are negative, two thirds of Obama's ads are positive. And the negative ads from the Obama campaign are focused on issues, not on attempts at character assassination.

The degree of desperation of a political candidate is indicated by the proportion of their ads that are negative. McCain is now 100% desperate. The man who used to preach against negative advertizing has, sadly, once again reversed his position.

Credit Crisis Did Not Begin with Housing Decline

(Much of the credit goes to Scott Kelley
for most of the opinions in this article, and explaining at length
what caused a majority of the problems that we are seeing today.)

Understanding the history of the credit
and liquidity market as it stands today requires looking further back
than the past several years, long before the housing market drop.
Remember the .com bust? I do. Lots of other people do. When stocks
dropped like rocks after the .com bust, the Fed panicked, certain
that we were on the verge of a recession. So they did they one of the
only things they knew how to do; dropped the Federal Interest Rate,
to an extraordinarily low rate.

What this meant for financial
institutions and corporations was that they could borrow absolutely
vast sums of money for next to nothing, and when you factor in the
effect of inflation on these loans, essentially you have huge
institutions borrowing money for negative interest. They should have
ended up owing less back than they borrowed. This could have been a
great idea, in the VERY short term, but unfortunately, the Fed
dragged its feet for far too long, leaving the interest low for a
ridiculously long time; and when the Fed was slow to act, the banks
were slow to repay these loans.

Suddenly, the Fed realized that the
short term positive effect of this interest rate drop was just that.
A short term effect. So, they do the only other thing they seem to be
good at; they raised the interest rate.

In a matter of weeks, these companies
that had borrowed so much money for nothing, now had a huge loan out
that was costing them more and more on a daily basis. They needed a
quick income fix for their steadily declining status. What to do?!?
Let's give everyone more money than they need to do and buy things
that they don't need.

Now we have a loose credit market. A
VERY loose credit market. This was the start of the sub-prime lending
that would later come back to haunt us. Banks (and others) started
hurling money at absolutely everyone who walked through the door,
with little to no checks into their personal credit history. People
with terrible credit were getting loans that were far too large,
loans that anyone should have known they'd have no capacity to pay
back.

But before the mortgage payments
stopped coming in on these houses, the banks thought they were doing
okay, so long as everyone paid and paid on time. Too bad that reality
stepped in. Payments stopped coming, banks stopped profiting. Credit
stopped coming out of these institutions like it previously was.
Stocks started falling, and we have a rather aggravating credit
crisis.

Banking giants were starting to fail,
and fail at an alarming rate. Predatory larger firms were buying out
smaller firms, the FDIC was taking banks over left and right, and in
the process, the stock market was flailing. Suddenly, we have a
larger credit crisis, which spilled over into an economic crisis.

Housing, credit, economy, nothing was
looking good. Small businesses couldn't get loans, which means no
expansion in the small business sector. People started cutting back
purchasing goods and services, which only further served to depress
our economic situation.

So our grand solution to this is to
throw seven-hundred billion dollars into the market. Sound good? It
shouldn't. We should have already figured out that throwing money at
a broken system won't do anything to repair it. You don't put a
band-aid on something that needs surgery. It might mask the problem
for a while, but it will come back. We need an overhaul of the
system, more oversight, regulation. Deregulation didn't work. We
should see that now. We take for granted that government interference
in the market is essential to preserve private power. The Great
Depression should have dispelled any belief that capitalism was a
viable economic model. I realize it sounds Socialist, but we can look
at the past and realize that the government steps in whether you
agree or not.

Remember that rate drop that I
discussed earlier? As of today, the Fed dropped the interest rate to
1.5%. It seems that they only have one solution to any crisis, and
they don't seem to see that their new solution is the same as their
old solution, the one that didn't work, the one that got us into this
mess in the first place. Henry Paulson still admits that some banks
will fail. Unless they fix the root of the problem, we're most likely
not going to get out of this mess anytime soon.

It may seem relatively bleak, but as Joe pointed out, it's not quite as bad as Black Monday  in 1987.