I keep telling myself I’m going to quit typing about the election results, and then I’ll get an email (pointing to a site like this) or have a conversation that puts me back on the subject. It doesn’t make me especially happy, and I’m fairly sure it’s not what you want to hear, but I keep needing to vent. Sorry.
On a lighter note, I had fun at the ABE show at the Turf Club last night. One of the bands following them brought toys they handed out to the crowd, including little LED flashlights, hopping frogs, and some sort of noise-makers. Fun toys, and I probably should have figured out who to thank. No pictures from the show, since it was dark enough that I couldn’t hold the camera steady for anything worth posting. Drat.
- Davezilla has some Rules to live by that are more useful than I expected. Of course I had the time to read all twenty… [davezilla]
- In Maine: Welcome to what used to be Centerville, a town that dissolved to avoid higher property taxes. It’s not quite a libertarian dream, since folks are expecting the state to take over things like plowing the roads, but maybe it’s a step in the right direction. [fark!]
- Maciej tells Dave Winer and Glenn Fleishmann to Calm The Fuck Down and that the Republican death-squads aren’t coming for them just yet. Well said.
- Doc has similar words of wisdom in Getting over it, already. It’s not that people who voted for Bush (or Reagan) were stupid, but that they considered other things more important. Doc says It’s the Morality, Stupid, and also points out that it was less than 22% of the land-mass of the US that went for Kerry (I read it as about a sixth, looking at the USA Today map I’ll reference below), and it’s hard to drive more than 100 miles from anywhere in the US without ending up in a sea of red. [doc]
- But in Retaking the “Moral Values” High Ground, the Ornery Liberal points to the fact that Vioxx was known to be harmful eight years ago and asks
what kind of morality says it’s okay for you to watch silently as somebody knowingly kills people for profit?
I agree with that, but neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to be able to field a candidate that I would trust to be moral in cases like this where the drug companies are going to throw huge chunks of money at them. - Looking further into the maps and data, if you look at Minnesota’s Election Reporting and then the county-by-county numbers, like I did the day after the election, not only was the difference in the state the 5th Congressional District, but if you toss out just Hennepin County, Bush would have taken MN.
- But it’s more complicated than just simple geographic divisions. In The Red-Blue Myth there’s a map from the 2000 election showing that the country really isn’t that divided. Here’s the map from 2004. There are only a few counties nationwide that were radically one way or the other.
- I also found, while digging through the election results, that I was one of just four Badnarik voters in my precinct. It might be interesting to crunch the numbers further, but I don’t think I’m going to have the time.