The states of Mississippi and Alabama have both had voting rights in 44 federal elections (Alabama had voting rights a 45th time, in 1868, while Mississippi was still under a Reconstruction government).
The two states have cast their electoral votes for the same presidential candidate in 42 of those 44 elections.
The last time they completely disagreed? 1840.
(In 1960, Mississippi cast all of its electoral votes for the states rights' candidate, Richard F. Byrd, while Alabama cast only half its votes for Byrd.)
Two parts thought-provoking; one part hippy-dippy silly.
2 > 1.
(Towards the end of the movie, "Someone Somewhere in Summertime" by Simple Minds looped insistently through my mind; but that's probably an idiosyncracy.)
Looks like four more years.
God help us.
I was pleased to see that after talking so much about hard work during the first debate, President Bush actually put some in for the second debate.
I give a slight advantage to Bush, if only because he finally stated his case with some supporting detail. And he didn't get the taste slapped out of his mouth this time around.
Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
The Democrats put their lightweight in the lower spot on the ticket.
(Does anyone else feel deprived of a Kerry-Cheney debate?)
I wonder whether the reason why so many people use "assume" when they mean "presume" is that "when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me" makes so much more sense than "when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me"?
(Jokes about President Bush will not be allowed in the comments. Thank you for your consideration.)
I'm puzzled to have heard no mention since Thursday of the 1984 presidential debates.
Remember the first one? Reagan looked old and sounded confused. The post-debate Gallup poll showed that 54% thought Mondale had won, versus 35% for Reagan. The polls started to move, and Mondale thought he could get back into the race.
Then the second debate came. Reagan was well-rested and better-prepared, and he wiped the floor with Mondale. And that was that.
I don't know what will happen Friday in St. Louis, but I do hope the Kerry folks aren't over-confident about it.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote a better summary of the first presidential debate (and the years that led up to it) than anything I've seen from the pundits.
("Listen to the voice of innocence", the father says at the end. I want someone to write a history of neo-conservatism, and call it Songs of Innocence and Experience.)
I'm not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he is right on this one:
[W]hat strikes me in [David] Brooks' defense of Bush is how it's traditionally a liberal defense of a liberal president. It's liberalism that has historically enunciated grand, abstract themes and conservatism that has always emphasized the difficulty of translating abstraction into reality, of finding the proper means to achieve certain ends, of the limits of our intellect when faced with the world of practical life. In that philosophical sense, it is Kerry who is the practical conservative in this race; and Bush who is the airy-fairy idealist.
Back in the day, I knew people who used to laugh at liberals as being people whose hearts were in the right place—they "meant well" was the sneer—but whose brains had been fried in the '60s.
It depresses me to think of how many of those people will vote for Bush next month.