Election maps corrected for population density and proportions of votes cast.

[Chang Style Novice]

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

The country isn't nearly as "red" as some people seem to think. There was no landslide. There was no mandate.

[rogue]

Bush still won the popular vote by 5% points and the electoral college. Get over it.

[Chang Style Novice]

I never said he didn't. I said that's no landslide and no mandate.

These maps don't lie.

[BM2]

I saw the maps using the votes cast with the use of different methods. It makes me recall the five different methods of counting votes in 2000 in Florida, the Democrats still lost no matter how you counted or draw a map
One reason the democrats lost was due to who ran. Had they chose someone who was more in the center and if the party was more in the center, then more people could indentify with them. As a former Democrat myself, the party changed, not me. Look up Sen. Zell Miller's thoughts as to where the party is heading. Whining about maps and mandates is like p*ssing into the wind.
Let's see if they learn anything from this or chose to let Hilliary run :D Oh yeah, that will be a mandate :cool:

[Chang Style Novice]

I've never heard anything about Hillary running except from republican wet-dreamers.

Anyway, the dems aren't like the GOP - we have primary run-offs instead of annointments. We let everybody run.

[red5angel]

blah blah blah, this forum needed this thread like it needs a hole in the head, Talk about a superfulous discussion.

[Chang Style Novice]

The facts are always non-superfluous.

[red5angel]

The election is over. No one is arguing whether it's a landslide victory or not. I think some people were surprised that the margin was higher then it was but I don't see anyone creditable claiming there was a landslide victory.

[FuXnDajenariht]

so we're a big purple blob basically

[Icewater]

I think the 'mandate' came not just from the presidential election, but rather from the fact that the entire gov't swung right. Senate, House, Governors, and of course the Presidency are all now controlled by republicans.

[MasterKiller]

When you illegally redraw district lines to ensure you hold a majority, I don't think it can be called a mandate.

[Chang Style Novice]

Even so, a lot of hay has been made over the fact that GWB won more popular votes than any other presidential candidate in history. Well, so did John Kerry, with the obvious exception of GWB. The country is obviously deeply divided. The maps I link suggest that the division is largely an urban/rural one, rather than a coastal/flyover one, the way less accurate maps suggest.

[MasterKiller]

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
Consortium News

Tuesday 09 November 2004

George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

By comparison, in 2000, Bush's Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide - statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote - and losing Florida's independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html .]

Exit Poll Discrepancies

Similar surprising jumps in Bush's vote tallies across the country - especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent - have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.

Republican pollster **** Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states - Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa - was virtually inconceivable.

"Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering - as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe - Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris's conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves "more scrutiny and investigation." [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

Erroneous Votes

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it's impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.

If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater's performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

What's remarkable about Bush's increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

Bush's Gains

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush's ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore's Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

Registration Up

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear - maximize Bush's support among social and economic conservatives - including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives - and turn them out by driving up Kerry's negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry's leadership credentials.

This strategy emerged from Rove's estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush's 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

Altogether, Bush's new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush's performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.

[Icewater]

MK, I wouldn't bother much with conspiracy theory about election fraud. It's over. Bush won. Moveon.org

Hoever, I think the topic itself is valid. There was no landslide, and even in the cases of the lower seats the decisions were not landslides, but all were majorities. I would also like to see a chart showing the percentage of immigrant voters compared to the states that went democratic. Its well known that most of the world is more liberal that the US. I wonder how much of that went into winning states like NY and CA which have a crapload of immigrants and also hold 86 electorial college votes? Notice that the majority of states that went Dem were high population states. I would think that this would be a higher concentration of people that have a greater dependency on gov't than rural US where people rely more on business and community. Just some thoughts...

[Chang Style Novice]

Actually, it's rural areas where there is the most gov't aid in the form of farm subsidies and so on. Most of the wealth of the nation is generated in big cities.

http://www.nemw.org/fedspend3.htm

[Mika]

I have lived in the South and I have lived in the North. Love them both. So, I am not biased or anything, OK?

What you say about immigrants leaves some room for speculation. I am sure you will clear it up.

What someone could read from your post is that immigrants almost cost the Republicans the election and that immigrants are poor folks who depend on the US government for money.

I don't have any stats here to convince me one way or another. I would like to see some, though.

Now, the issue of immigrants. Politics plays a major role in this. The way immigrants are issued Green Cards is by no means an equal process. Due to ongoing and decades-long apologies to the goverment of XYZ, the XYZ immigrants are automatically issued a Green Card as long as they have somehow managed to stay in the country for a period of five (5) years. There are a few other countries whose citizens receive similar favoritism.

Most immigrants will have to go through a rigorous and long process to be able to even apply for that permit. With this in mind, it would be more than safe to say that many of these latter types of immigrants - many of whom come from peaceful countries and could return at any time - are well acquainted with the lifestyle, politics, and inner workings of the USA. Thus their votes are - IMHO - just as important as anyone else's.

I know you didn't mean for anyone to interpret your message that way, but just to let you know that there was a possibility of that :)

And since I come from one of the most liberal countries on the planet, I won't get into that part of it...;)

Cheers :)

Mika

[Chang Style Novice]

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

Another nice link about who's paying taxes and who's mooching tax dollars.

[MasterKiller]

Originally posted by Chang Style Novice
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html

Another nice link about who's paying taxes and who's mooching tax dollars. Figures.

[GeneChing]

so we're a big purple blob basically That's it. We're Barney. Hey, isn't that the name of Bush's dog? Of course. It all makes sense now. It's all about Barney (http://www.whitehouse.gov/barney/).

[Chang Style Novice]

http://www.research.att.com/%7Esuresh/cartogram/roygbiv-small.gif

Best election map for drug users.:p

Not that I'm implying anything about you, Gene.

[rogue]

Actually, it's rural areas where there is the most gov't aid in the form of farm subsidies and so on. Most of the wealth of the nation is generated in big cities. Chang Style Novice, ever eat money? Since few factories exists in cities anymore most of what we call GNP is created in the burbs and in the rural areas.

[Chang Style Novice]

Homer: Awww... 20 dollars!? I wanted a peanut.
Homer's brain: 20 dollars can buy many peanuts!
Homer: Explain how.
Homer's brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services!
Homer: Woo hoo!

Don't strain yourself too badly, Rogue.

[rogue]

Ah Chang, my little Eloi. You can't have goods without raw materials and someone to harvest, mine and deliver them, and you can't have goods without someone to make them. All you city dwellers would last days at most without the Morlocks in the rural areas.

[Serpent]

Originally posted by FuXnDajenariht
so we're a big purple blob basically
You're a big purple something....

[FuXnDajenariht]

lol blob?

[Serpent]

Not a term I'd have used.....

;)

[FuXnDajenariht]

it is what it is..... lol

[ZIM]

So basically, you're all for a raise in taxes on "the wealthy" to help support "the poor", but when you find out who's rich & who's poor you b1tch, especially becoz they're politically different from you.

Have I got that right?

[rogue]

I think you nailed it Zim. I think there is something fishy about how those numbers are being used.

[FuXnDajenariht]

i live in the city but im not rich by any definition of the word....

most of new york city is a dump except for maybe manhattan....

[Christopher M]

Originally posted by Icewater
Its well known that most of the world is more liberal that the US.

I don't think so. Americans have a self-identity as kings of the neo-liberal (conservative) ideology, but it's entirely unwarranted and the rest of the world doesn't see them this way. The rest of the world sees America as the land of nationalism and corporate welfare -- both profoundly at odds with neo-liberal ideology.

Chang Style Novice's point about the central role of subsidies in rural areas is bang on -- this is one of the reasons why the Republicans are not neo-liberal, and won't be without a major ideological shift.


I would also like to see a chart showing the percentage of immigrant voters compared to the states that went democratic.

Immigrants tend to be overwhelmingly social conservative, which pushes them strongly towards the Republicans. This is one of those curious ironies, in light of the Republicans' popular image. I don't have a citation on hand, but I read that the Latino vote carried Bush.

[Serpent]

Originally posted by ZIM
So basically, you're all for a raise in taxes on "the wealthy" to help support "the poor", but when you find out who's rich & who's poor you b1tch, especially becoz they're politically different from you.

Have I got that right?
Of course they're politically different! They'll support the politics that will protect their wealth at the expense of the poor. Why would people that have amassed a fortune support a government that would charge them for that?

Unfortunately, money talks, especially in a country like the US where there are two fundamentally extremeist religions governing everything - Evangelical Christianity and Capitalism.

[Mika]

Originally posted by Christopher M
I don't think so. Americans have a self-identity as kings of the neo-liberal (conservative) ideology, but it's entirely unwarranted and the rest of the world doesn't see them this way. The rest of the world sees America as the land of nationalism and corporate welfare -- both profoundly at odds with neo-liberal ideology.

Hmm...that's a doubled-edged sword. I am just giving you my 2 cents, because this is a matter of opinion - of course it turns scientific the minute a global interview study on this is released (never, no reason to).

I think many people in the developed Western countries at least see the US both as the land of opportunity and the land of conservative values. Anything goes, but it's not supposed to.

Religion plays a huge role in this. Religion is a thing of the past as the most important matter in people's lives nowadays in many countries (again, the developed Western countries), so in that respect the US is far behind. But it's understandable because the US as a culture is so very young, a mere 200 years. That coupled with the fact that melting pot as it may be, it's a country all by itself, really (no offense to Canada or Mexico, you know what I mean), and thus hasn't had to adjust to a lot of changes so many other countries have had to adjust.

Mika

[MasterKiller]

On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide

Published: November 14, 2004


AREWELL to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.

"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on "Will & Grace." William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies ..."

And let's not even get started on the two most dreaded words in American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi Goldberg.

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.

[MasterKiller]

The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry. And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a former employee's accusation that the two had had a ****sexual encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000 settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock alternative to MTV's "Rock the Vote."

But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.

But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than the number of gay Republican voters.

When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national polling on the issue.

If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be able to win a national election must be a cross between Gomer Pyle and Billy Sunday - a Scripture-quoting Sun Belt exurbanite whose loyalty to Nascar does not extend to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was fined last month for saying a four-letter word on television.

According to this argument, the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical "Bush votes come to life" apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes," support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met.

[SifuAbel]

"Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met."

Perhaps, but being a busybody in somebody else's life tends to distract and ease the burden of living your own. Its a panacea.

In this instance, "the opium of the people".



(not a jibe at faith, just at the political machine)

[Christopher M]

Mmmmm... opium.

[red5angel]

hey MK, when you going to stop posting propganda?

[SifuAbel]

you first

[Christopher M]

Originally posted by Mika
Religion plays a huge role in this. Religion is a thing of the past as the most important matter in people's lives nowadays in many countries (again, the developed Western countries), so in that respect the US is far behind.

I'm not sure that this is the case. I think the problem is more the sort of religion which dominates American culture -- America has a very idiosyncratic religious tradition, very distinct from Christianity generally, for instance. I think that religion is generally not so much problematic in itself, no matter how much emphasis it is given -- but rather, problematic when it becomes intermingled with the state. Following this, we can make some predictions as to what religions/states might have this particular problem.

I think it is a particular shame that so many Christians seem to ignore the theological foundation for separation of church and state which their religion, I think uniquely among major religions, has given them.

[FngSaiYuk]

http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

[Christopher M]

Originally posted by FngSaiYuk
http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

Only, I think the guy means that 19.6% of America is truly, truly sorry -- not "half", let alone "most."

[Mika]

Well put, I agree.

You know what's really funny? Christianity is the state religion here, but you never see or hear anything about it. It's very personal.

Whereas in the US there is separation of church and state. Like heck there is! Maybe theoretically, but definitely NOT in practice.

Maybe that's just it: religion is such an important thing that if its officially separated from the government, there will be a demand for it.

Next time I will tell you about an interesting experience I had visiting a Southern Baprist church once...Separation my butt...

Mika

[norther practitioner]

he he (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&e=12&u=/ucru/confessionsofaculturalelitist)

[Chang Style Novice]

Ted Rall is an ass, and I'm saying this as someone who agrees with him a lot of the time.

[FuXnDajenariht]

has any other paper besides the Lancet confirmed the statistic about 100,000 Iraqis being killed?

[MasterKiller]

Originally posted by FuXnDajenariht
has any other paper besides the Lancet confirmed the statistic about 100,000 Iraqis being killed? http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/