Whither, Southern Politics?

Reflecting on the election results, Mark Schmitt gives Thomas Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie thesis a B:
Obama easily collected enough electoral votes to win without any Southern states. But that Senate seat in North Carolina sure is useful for the new president to have, and those Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida victories certainly reduce the sense [...]

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Random Fact of the Day

Ernest Hemingway’s youngest child was a transsexual alcoholic doctor and father of eight children.

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The Complicated Politics of Progressive Foodism

Kurt Michael Friese at Grist takes up KFC’s challenge to “create a family meal for less than $10″ (rather than, you know, buying their family-size bucket of chicken with biscuits and mashed potatoes). And he succeeds. Unfortunately, he concludes his tale with the sort of well-intentioned, accidental elitism that hinders the effectiveness of much environmentalism:
I [...]

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A Few Election Reflections

1. When in doubt, blame the South. A Daily Kos commenter did some quick number crunching and found that when you take out the former Confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma, Barack Obama and John McCain evenly split the white vote. McCain won the white vote on the whole only because of his 68 to [...]

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2008 Electoral College Vote Predictions

Alabama: McCain. Large (27%) black population, but the white population is simply too conservative to make this a viable possibility for Obama.
Alaska: McCain.
Arizona: McCain, but closer than he’d like.
Arkansas: McCain. Smaller (16%) black population than Alabama and similar problem with conservative whites makes it a difficult state for Obama. One place where Hillary Clinton might [...]

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Really, That Guy?

Sometimes it’s easy to forget why I chose academia over journalism, but then I am reminded. Stephen Hayes is a liar, a charalatan, and a fraud. He is probably one of the worst journalists ever, in the sense that he is not only of dubious talent but supplements this with a propensity for sheer distortion [...]

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