Vote early, vote often

Karine and I have lived 10 of the last 12 months outside the United States. We've established for ourselves a home away from home here in Honduras. We've got a dog. We're having a baby. We're comfortable and happy here and generally consider ourselves lucky to be living in such an interesting and flavorful place. There is a lot to like about Honduras and a lot to love about Hondurans. Sadly, the government here doesn't really work for the people. Poverty and corruption exist on a scale that's difficult for friends back home to comprehend.

Living abroad the last year we've come to realize what a truly awesome place the United States of America is. We proudly cast our votes by absentee mail-in ballot last week. Please remember to vote on November, 4th.

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On a related note, I was speaking to a group of fourth graders today about rights, laws, and democracy. I got carried away and ended up standing on a chair reading the Gettysburg Address.


Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.