Voting...the busy medical student way

So I used to be fairly educated about politics. Participated, lobbied, listened to NPR incessantly, read the New Yorker and the Economist, and generally hung out with progressive, intelligent people who were always teaching me something about passion, democracy, and um, yes, "patriotism".

These days, I take flashcards to the bathtub with me and dream of getting these kinds of questions on my exam:

A 65 year old AIDS patient with Diabetes who smoked for 30 years and worked in an silica mine before moving to a very dusty and windy Arizona town comes in with cough, fever and mild hemoptysis. Chest x-ray shows patchy, diffuse infiltrates, bilateral hilar lymphadenopathy, and coin-lesions in the upper left lobe. A culture is taken from bronchoalveolar lavage. Is this organism:

a. catalase positive, coagulase positive, motile with M-protein antigens?
b. novobocin sensitive but optocin resistant
c. motile with "tumbling motility"
d. dimorphic with hyphae and budding yeasts
e. "flying saucer" shaped with dark oval bodies with sporozites
f. "flying saucer" shaped with dark oval bodies with trophozoites

Anyway, I got my ballot in the mail the other day and had no idea about any of the people and propositions on it. I can't bring myself not to vote, so I did the second best thing (well, probably the second best thing would have been not to vote) and went to the endorsement pages of Sacramento's progressive street rag (Sac News and Review) and San Francisco's Chronicle and compared notes. I'm not sure if this is the best idea, but at least these editors share the majority of my values, stay informed about news and events every day and don't sit in their bathtubs with flashcards, trying to learn the difference between Filoviridae Filovirus, Rhabdoviridae Lyssavirus, and Paramyxoviridae Rubulavirus.