Well, I'm a high school band director, and I can assure you I'm not in it for the money (or the glory for that matter) and my wife works in the mental health field (Yeah, I know, insert comments here, I deserve them ) so, here's one conservative that doesn't make that much money. But, on a good note, the cost of living in North Missouri is quite cheap, as you might expect.
You know, there's quite a few things I miss about living in the Midwest (I'm a Nebraska native--"bigred", get it? ), and the cost of living is certainly one of them. My salary here would be enough back home for my wife to quit working full time like she would like to.
Can you please stop lumping Texas in with "all the red states". We don't need your damn money here, thanks.
Coach in all fairness the modern Texan economy has developed in large part because of government pork. Can you give me one reason why NASA is in Houston? That's what makes all this "we need less government" rhetoric coming out of Tom DeLay's mouth so ironic.
Thanks for the head's up... I had no idea. And I thought everything in American politics was cyclical... stupid me... and stupid thread too.
It was up to the states whether free blacks could vote. Slaves counted 3/5 for congressional apportionment.
OK, the .0054% of the Texas economy that revolves around NASA I'll give you, but Texas is nowhere near a "welfare state" as some of my more left leaning friends would have you believe. In the tradition of elitists everywhere they continue to paint the "New South" with a very large brush, making outrageous blanket statements to disparage an entire region.
Be careful up there on the cross there, Coach. I for one didn't lump Texas along with your underperforming neighbors. In fact, I don't even include Texas among the Southern states - you are your own animal. But looking strictly at the taxes paid/federal fund received dropoff, my neck of the woods, the Tri-States, would be better off without the other 47. In fact, we'd almost be rich per-capita as Luxembourg! So yeah, your red friends are holding us back. Don't worry though - we'll pass a free trade agreement so you can keep selling us your raw materials and we can keep selling you our finished products.
Nah, I'm not martyring myself at this point. Kudos to you for knocking me out of the pulpit. The real fact of the matter is that there is a coming crisis in this country. Once again the nation is divided along geographic boundaries, for the most part. One thing that Lincoln did by raising the army and invading the South was to not let the concept of secession ever get to a point where it's constitutionality was tested. The CSA based their argument for peaceful secession on the fact that the original colonies joined the Union of their own free will and believed themselves to be in the right to leave it as such. Unfortunately we do not know the legal validity of the argument as it was never tested. It would not surprise me if, in my lifetime, a state or group of states broached the subject once again and put the question to the Supreme Court. My personal view is that nowhere in the Constitution is this scenario covered (perhaps the US should have had a pre-nup?) and the Union would have little legal standing to prevent such a breakaway. We can look to the former Soviet Union to see what breaking apart does for your standing in the world pecking order, so we go that direction at our own risk...
Re: Soviet Union, absolutely. In cosmopolitan terms, we'd all lose power. And we might as well also look at the former Yugoslavia, 30's Germany, etc. as well. When you start forming groups who cannot be reconciled, problems arise. And this is what is starting to happen here, with political parties establishing religious ideals as foundations to their platforms. I know that people don't like my take on this, but in contemporary political philosophy I think my take is similar to what Habermas' reaction to being a youth in Germany who had to come to terms with how the holocaust happened (I'm not comparing the two, accept insofar as Christianity and Nazism are ethos'). His view is that without true discourse, ethical views defeat moral views, and this is when groups splinter. And this is when people want their own states, in order to escape the will of groups with whom they cannot communicate.
The two narrowest electoral college victories in the past hundred years belong to George W. Bush. So you may be overstating your case a bit.
GringoMan: Rather than dwelling on how little you perceive our beloved President won the election by, you should consider how large your group of radical friends lost the election by! You and your band of radical misfits lost not only the Presidency, but the House, Senate, numerous Governor races, and the Minority Leader. I can't even imagine a worse defeat by Democrats, and that's saying quite a bit! The long-term consequences are even more severe: you have no leader to your party and your largest lobby group, the Democratic National Committee, faces the imminent departure of its occupant, Terry McAullife, for an unknown replacement. Your party even lost votes of its largest backers: African Americans, who crossed party lines to vote for George Bush in larger percentage that those voting for Al Gore! Overstating our case? Good Lord Gringo... do you even have a case anymore? IntheNet
I'm sure you enjoy paying 2 grand a month for a shoebox apartment in Chicago, and 8 bucks for a brew at your local pub, but I'll take my $275 a month rent and $1.00 taps anyday.
Even the most exclusive yuppie strongholds in Chicago don't rent shoeboxes for 2K a month. You're thinking of San Francisco. In the past year, I went to seven or eight soccer games (including the US Nats and the Man United debacle), seen two operas, seen the symphony, gone to several museums, eaten at amazing restaurants, seen several movies with words on the bottom of the screen, watched a cutting-edge park get built in the center of my city, and enjoyed numerous shopping trips downtown. This is just scratching the surface. Point is, you get what you pay for. Compare this to the Dakotas, where a "wild" Friday night consists of playing "How Deep Do Y'all Think the Permafrost Is?" and "Let's Guess Whether that Rumblin' Sound Yonder Is a Group of Hell's Angels Coming to Sell Crank to Our Children or Just the Wind Crossing the Vast, Depressing, Endless, Endless Nothingness!"
I'd just like to draw the triumphalists attention to Federalist Paper 51, by James Madison. So, f*** off. And keep your grubby mitts off the Constitution.
Oh, and another thing: See, here's the deal: your ignorance affects the rest of us. That's what we're pissed about. When your kids who don't believe in evolution, hate gays, and are filled with sexual repression and self-loathing cross the borders into blue America, we have to deal with that ignorance. And it is ignorance. Can we just call stupidity what it is? It ain't about religion. It's about stupid f****rs who can't catch a break in this f***ed up country when it comes to jobs, health care, wages, and real security who rely on the one thing they have, faith, and then are manipulated by power-mad ministers and politicians into translating that faith into policy. I've been there. I've seen it all firsthand. And you know what? They've been beaten into stupidity by their stupid f***ing communities and all they want is their stupidity to spread, as if stupidity were the greatest value of all. And when we, the so-called "enlightened," actually say we don't want their stupidity infecting our country, we're called intolerant. That's like when the a**hole in the bar, who keeps shoving you and feeling up your girlfriend, says, "You wanna step outside?" and then after he's gotten his friends to beat you with pool cues, you pick your battered ass off the ground and spit blood in his face, then the a**hole says, "That's not fair" before he starts to kick you in the nuts repeatedly. "Freedom of religion" really means "freedom from religion," whether that's your religion or all religion. Sadly, I can't claim it. Rude Pundit did it
My family has a ranch in North Dakota. I've spent many summers and a few winters there. I've ice fished, hunted the biggest mule deer you've ever seen, spent all day on horseback, calf roped in Indian rodeos, conversed with all of my neighbors in a bar, had coffee with Louise Erdrich and built my own barn. I've day-tripped to Bismark for museums, symphonies, operas and theater. When I want to see a foreign film, I pop in one of my 500 DVDs and I've read more great literature while spending time up there any place else. All for about $300 an acre.
He gets credit for this one, too: The problem is not that Democrats are out of touch with Americans. It's that these so-called "Americans" are out of touch with America as a concept. While all of these pundits are decrying the division of America as somehow the province of "liberals" and their misunderstanding of the middle and south of the country, how about just the occasional ********ing word about how Bush's constant berating of "intellectuals" and "Massachusetts" is more divisive, as if somehow Illinois, Pennsylvania, California, and New York are filled with eggheads who only theorize and refuse to get their hands dirty in the real work that all those amazing "real" Americans engage in every day. Bush's anti-intellectualism is a calculated effort to pander to the worst elements of human beings - voting with your gut, not your mind.