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The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

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Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Jean Shepherd used to tell great stories about working just across the river from Cincinnati in a "wide open town." Turns out it's a place called Newport Kentucky and it was famous for fifty years for its whorehouses and gambling and violence. It was essentially an experiment: what if you took the kind of people who vote Republican now and jammed them all into a city with no public assistance or infrastructure and they had to live by their wits.

As you might expect, they didn't live well. It was 1920s Shanghai for white trash.


Life is so wonderfully complex. Wendell Berry bases many of his novels on the lives of generations of farmers and merchants in Port William, Kentucky, which is a fictionalized version of Port Royal, Ky. Port Royal is near the Ohio, not far from Cincinnati. I'm sure it is a very conservative place and probably prime dump country. But one cannot read his stuff without gaining a deep appreciation not only for his craft but for the people and the place.
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Life is so wonderfully complex. Wendell Berry bases many of his novels on the lives of generations of farmers and merchants in Port William, Kentucky, which is a fictionalized version of Port Royal, Ky. Port Royal is near the Ohio, not far from Cincinnati. I'm sure it is a very conservative place and probably prime dump country. But one cannot read his stuff without gaining a deep appreciation not only for his craft but for the people and the place.

Port Royal KY is in Henry County, which went 69-26 for Dump (a very respectable 5% went third party). As recently as 1964 it went 80-19 Dem. After the Voting Rights Act passed Democrats lost 30 points in one election cycle and George Wallace took 18% in 1968.
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Port Royal KY is in Henry County, which went 69-26 for Dump (a very respectable 5% went third party). As recently as 1964 it went 80-19 Dem. After the Voting Rights Act passed Democrats lost 30 points in one election cycle and George Wallace took 18% in 1968.

An ugly statistic.

That change is something I've never really come to fully understand. Southerners feel betrayed by the Blue Dog Dems? Nixon's law and order pitch played well in rural America, especially the violence-torn South? Would the result have been much different had Bobby lived?
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Would the result have been much different had Bobby lived?

Yes. He'd have won, for one thing, so no Nixon, so no Carter, so no Reagan.

History would have been very different and it's hard to imagine, given the way things have played out, that it would have been worse. We would likely have continued on as we were in the 50s-60s, oscillating between a social democratic left and a Christian democratic right like other western democracies. We wouldn't look like Sweden now, but we wouldn't look like the plutocratic hellscape we've become, either.

It's hard to remember now with all the horror the far right has inflicted on us, but we used to be a pretty good country. Not perfect, but we were trying. And then the pigs and the dogs took over.
 
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Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Reagan would have ended up winning at some point. Bobby was an Israeli supporter and the opec issues may have begun sooner.
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Unless Cincinnati has completely regressed, when I was last there 6 years ago the riverfront area near the new baseball stadium as well as the Over The Rhine neighborhood were fantastic and bustling, albeit for variously different reasons.
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Reagan would have ended up winning at some point. Bobby was an Israeli supporter and the opec issues may have begun sooner.

No. Reagan barely beat a moribund Carter. Remember too Saint Alzheimers was very unpopular during most of his first term. He only took off because, as Mondale said, "if you write 300 million dollars of hot checks you'll look like an economic genius too." For awhile.

He and his Orange County Fraudster Lynch Mob would be a funny footnote in American history, like the Birchers. "Remember when those fringe economists came up with a Randian "theory" to appeal to the rich and soak them for think tank dollars that they were the engine of American growth. LOL, fun times."

The rot has set in so deeply on the right that nobody remembers what obvious yahoos those con artists were. Without a perfect storm (oil shock, hostage crisis, Carter being a prissy schoolmarm) they are on the ash heap of history, assuming they even win the GOP nom which I doubt ever happens. The Republicans continue as Eisenhower's center-right party and America continues to prosper by alternating between them to catch its breath and then the Dems for social and economic progress. Everybody wins relative to now except literally only 7500 people at the very top. And even they stay obscenely rich.

The history of the last 40 years is the rich bankrupted the rest of America in order to go from controlling 70 cents of every dollar of American wealth to 80. That was sure worth it.
 
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Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Virginia: we've still got a little red state in is.

Virginia has suspended a rule allowing children to be strip-searched before jail visits after an eight-year-old girl was subjected to the ordeal.
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

barely?!?!? barely?!?!?! :D

dude!! :)

The CW is had the campaign lasted two more weeks Carter would have won. Reagan was hemorrhaging and the middle class was very nervous about his crackpot economics. He won by 9 points with a big EV advantage but he was in freefall and things change quickly. Ask Hillary what can happen.

Remember, Reagan had very high negatives. He was similar to Dump: the people who loved him were mesmerized, but the people who were sane saw through him from the start. History has been very, very gentle with him. He was basically a con artist who had perfect timing.
 
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Jean Shepherd used to tell great stories about working just across the river from Cincinnati in a "wide open town." Turns out it's a place called Newport Kentucky and it was famous for fifty years for its whorehouses and gambling and violence. It was essentially an experiment: what if you took the kind of people who vote Republican now and jammed them all into a city with no public assistance or infrastructure and they had to live by their wits.

As you might expect, they didn't live well. It was 1920s Shanghai for white trash.
Sounds like this place. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/18/771371881/episode-945-the-liberty-city
 
Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.

Most surprising thing I saw on that list? I never really thought of University of Montana and Oregon State as large drinking schools, but apparently...


Also, the top seven could likely be ranked by throwing numbered darts at a map.
 
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