Just wanted to share these.
I love maps and statistics like this … this map shows how the country has changed over the past twenty years. Each county is color coded for how the county changed racially — a very red county means that the county’s new residents were overwhelmingly white, and a very blue county went overwhelmingly non-white.
This is important for elections in that it shows how the minority-heavy districts (which tend to be more Democratic) can change places like Virginia. It also shows something bad for Democrats in that they are tending to concentrate in the urban areas, making the rural areas even more white and Republican than they had previously been.
Anyway, there is a very good analysis of this here. There is also an interactive map where you can zoom in and check on your county. You can click on each county and see the county’s population change. For instance, take Monroe County, Pennsylvania, where I live, just over the New Jersey border. It went hugely blue over the last twenty years and added about 17,000 new residents.
Please do not be scared away by the fact that this is from a liberal blog — the information is presented clearly and without bias, and contains information that is interesting to anyone who likes these kinds of statistics.
From a recent Fox News show.
This is why we can’t have nice things. And why we can never find a common ground. You can’t negotiate with someone who really doesn’t care about anyone but themselves.
Conservative wise guy Michael Medved claimed today that no state has ever banned gay marriage. “That’s a liberal lie,” he says.
Seriously, he said that. I am not making this up.
Thirty state Constitutions and dozens of state laws which are easily found contradict him, as well as about half a dozen Federal Court decisions striking down those very laws.
What he is doing, besides lying, is being deceptive. His claim, which is only accepted by the gullible and the idiotic, is that gays can always get married! There’s no prohibition to gays getting married! Just not to each other.
Got that?
I can’t believe he actually believes this is a legitimate argument. It’s the same one used by bigots who fought against interracial marriage.
Anyway, I certainly hope the GOP keeps this up, as it is just another nail in their coffin. Eventually, the current Republican party will die and perhaps a new GOP not run by the extremists will rise from the ashes, phoenix-like, and then maybe we can get back to the days when we had two parties debating issues instead of one party trying to get things done and the other one just saying “no” to everything.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court yesterday ruled that it is not illegal to take pictures of women in public who wear short skirts. Well, sort of. I guess the perverts aren’t exactly taking pictures of all of the women, just the skirts. Or the parts under the skirts …
Anyway, here’s the thing that people aren’t getting about this decision.
When I did a search for “upskirt photographer” it didn’t quite give me anything safe for work. So here’s a picture of Massachusetts.
The court is not saying “This is a good thing” or “We approve of this practice.” They merely pointed out that under the current law, it was not prohibited. It was a loophole, if you will.
The law in question made it illegal to photograph people in “partial nudity” — and the court said, rightly, that the law did not apply in this instance, because no one on the subway was “partially nude.” Further, you do not have a complete expectation of privacy on a subway. (Existing Peeping Tom laws protect people from being photographed in dressing rooms and bathrooms when nude or partially nude, but the way the law is written, it does not protect clothed people in public areas.)
Anyway, the Massachusetts legislature has already snapped into action to update the law to include this, so it should be fixed soon.
ventrellaquest.com 