Blue Islands, Red Seas. More on what the editors over at Stranger.com identified as the Urban Archipelago. Whatever we want to call it, the truth is “the real great divide in American politics is not between red and blue states, but between urban and rural voters.” And then there’s this. Like I’ve been saying folks, Dems need only tend to and grow their base – urban areas. We capture the votes of the cities, we don’t need the ‘burbs or rural areas. Concentrating on the urban vote is all a democratic candidate needs to do in order to win in 2008.
“They hate our policies, not our freedom.” Not that the facts will suddenly, miraculously become relevant to BushCo but JESUS, MARY & JOSEPH! So okay, this Federal advisory committee (the Defense Science Board) provides independent advice to the Secretary of Defense. What did they find? (1) The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have united otherwise-divided Muslim extremists and given terrorists organizations like Al Qaeda a boost by "raising their stature." (2) The US has not only failed to separate "the vast majority of nonviolent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists," but American efforts may have "achieved the opposite of what they intended." (3) The board calls for "an overhaul of public diplomacy, public affairs and information dissemination efforts by the Pentagon and State Department." QUELLE SUPRISE! No WONDER the Pentagon “quietly” released this report in the late afternoon last Wednesday right before the start of an extended national holiday. Jesus H. Christ! The level of incompetence exhibited by BushCo is absolutely mind boggling. A couple of ten-year-olds playing RISK could do better!
More “My God’s Dick is bigger than Your God’s Dick.” Ah yes. More bilge spewing forth from the mouth-breathers. Have these morons NO education? How about HISTORY? Were they never even required to read AMERICAN history? I mean, it’s relatively short so one would assume that they would’ve at LEAST made it through the history of the GODDAMN country where they actually reside, no? Hell, I received a public school education in back-asswards MISSISSIPPI and even I studied the United States Constitution. The level of fear displayed by these Christian fundamentalists is so completely removed from reality it’s astonishing. It definitely exposes an inordinate amount of highly effective programming. It’s the very reason they are SUCH an easy mark for the Repugs.
Well THIS should really piss them off. The US Supreme Court rejected without comment a challenge by conservative groups to the legality of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts, the only US state allowing such unions. That’s right you pompous bigoted hypocrits. “The Gays” can marry in Mass! Even “Sam from Nebraska” thinks it’s okay. Deal with it.
Paralyzed woman walks again after stem cell therapy. A South Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. Yup, that thar science kin come in real handy-like, cain’t it? Whee doggie!
Showdown over medical marajuana. Okay conservative justices. ROCK >> YOU << HARD PLACE. Will conservative justices support federalism even when it means upholding a liberal marijuana-use law that they would probably never otherwise endorse? Stay tuned for more scintillating discourse on the subject!
The war in Iraq has made moral cowards of us all. Scott Ritter, senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 asks, “More than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed - and where is our shame and rage”? Indeed. I’ve been asking myself that very same question daily since November 3rd.
Posted by lulu at November 30, 2004 08:40 AM | TrackBackNot reaching out to rural and suburban voters, and just reaching out to grow your base and get more of them registered and to the polls, is exactly the strategy Democrats followed this year.
It didn't work so well.
It also misses a crucial point: for most of the last 200 years, Democrats owned the rural vote. They owned it. Indeed, you can still see it in laces like Minnesota where it's still called the "Democratic Farm & Labor Party" instead of just the Democratic Party. Go back and look at the electoral map when guys like Roosevelt were running the party: it's almost a mirror image of today.
Democrats owned the urban sophisticate vote, the labor vote, and the farm country vote.
They pissed away the farm country vote these last two decades, and meanwhile, organized labor has been shrinking and--much to the frustration of the "Urban Archipelago" types--they very often like their guns, hate abortion, and oppose gay marriage, and so about 45% of those union members voted for Bush this year.
The other problem: of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the United States, 97 of them went Republican this year.
And in most of the country, the suburbs are growing faster than the cities they surround.
So, do you really, really think the long-term wise strategy is to basically tell everyone in America who isn't in a big city to go fuck themselves? That's how to win elections?
If that's the strategy, Democrats are going to be a minority party for along, long time--and they'll have also embraced their reputation for being elitist and snobby and not giving two shits about poor people to boot.
I'd really rethink that shit if I were you, dude.
Posted by: Dean Esmay at November 30, 2004 08:53 PMRE: stem cell. Luckily we have Republican politicians approving funding for this science!
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4142122)
re Moral Cowards: Uhhh, did you read that article "Last week's estimate by investigators, using credible methodology, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians" Thats all it says.
Credible methodology? Is that like a guess?
At least we found out what happened to all those exit pollers from the election!
Posted by: CB at December 1, 2004 06:10 AM