[geeks] Re: [rescue] It's official, the U.S. is screwed for 4 more years

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 @ 18:21 -0800, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez said:

> No it doesn't cause any fits of confusion, 

Yes, it does, all the time.  Just because it doesn't confuse YOU doesn't
mean the OP wasn't correct about it confusing others.

> last time I
> checked real estate did not vote in the US.... Unless that
> somehow has changed in the past decade. That map only
> shows one thing: Rural areas lean republican, whereas
> urban areas lean Democrat. 

Some of the largest cities in the USA were in those red areas, and some
large rural areas were in the blue.

Some of those blue states were just as close as the red states too.

> Which is a well know fact, and
> which is why the DNC needs to get their head out of their
> collective asses.

I think the DNC needs to get their heads out of their asses for a lot
more reasons than that, but yeah... :)

> It is more likely that she was refering to the economic
> output of the democratic "counties" vs. the republican
> counties. 

That makes her statements even more absurd.

Economic output has nothing to do with the worth of a county.

In fact, if you count only the part of GNP necessary for people to
survive, it is the red areas that are keeping the nation alive.

I think trying to draw conclusions from that map based on red versus
blue is stupid, because so many of the states were quite close.

> I am an optimist, so I see this actually as a good thing.  Maybe
> the DNC will finally grow a pair and kick McAullife and the rest of
> spineless wimps and get an actual liberal platform... just "not being
> Bush" proved to not be enough specially when you go agains a Rove
> led team. And I believe it is fair... if that happens to be what the
> American people agreed with.

The Democratic Party ceased to be a liberal party many years/decades
ago.

> I do, however, find alarming the rise in the whole "moral based"
> voting as "morals" are relative and hard to point as real policies or
> issues.

I don't see a rise myself, just a lot of noise about it.

However, if you mean all the noise about things like abortion, then I
agree: it's not something we should be judging the President about.  It
isn't his responsibility anyway.

However, I find it odd that people are harping about the moral issue.
It's hardly the only noise in an election year that is really irrelevant
in regard to the duties of the office in question.  This has been going
on for decades, and has been worse in the past.

Why is it suddenly news?

Having said that, I hope you don't mean morals and ethics have no place
in voting.  I'd hate to think that people dismissed them entirely when
they voted.

Neither of the two major party candidate avoided the morass of
irrelevant issues and noise, but then the campaign managers is really in
charge of that, so it's hard to judge them on the basis of how the
campaign ran.

In fact, I pretty well ignored the campaign in terms of deciding who to
vote for.



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