Blue States

We in the blue states hear from the talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC that many of you in the red states are so distressed about the outcome of the elections that you would like to secede from the Union. Now, it seems that at least six of you - Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina - have submitted enough signatures (25,000) on petitions to the White House website to merit a formal response, with more petitions on the way. We wish you the best of luck with this.

If the Supreme Court decides the two gay marriage cases it heard last week the way most court watchers believe it will, expect legal and political chaos. The court seems ready to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, while ruling quite narrowly on California's Proposition 8, allowing a lower-court decision to stand. Such an outcome would make gay marriage legal in California without deciding whether state bans on same-sex marriage are constitutional. And that would allow more of what we've seen up to now: a growing number of liberal blue states moving to legalize gay marriage, and a growing number of conservative red states enacting bans.

Republicans purchase Kias while Democrats lean to Hyundais. That's the tongue-in-cheek election-year analysis of auto registrations by automotive research firm R.L. Polk & Co. Polk looked at car registration trends in so-called red and blue states, red representing a higher share of Republican voters than Democrats and blue representing a Democratic-leaning populace. “Kia's market share is a full point higher in the red states, while Hyundai, its corporate cousin, captures almost a half-point more in the blue than in the red,” said Tom Libby, a Polk analyst.

Re "GOP faces hurdles in changing voting laws," Jan. 27 Republican lawmakers in several swing states want to replace their winner-take-all system of allocating presidential electoral votes with a "proportional" system. Their proposals, however, are not for truly proportional allocation but for winner-take-all divvying by congressional district. As The Times notes, under this system, Mitt Romney would have received nine of Virginia's 13 electors. President Obama, who won 51.2% of the statewide vote, would have had barely 30% of the electors.

Red state voters are more likely to die in a traffic accident than blue state voters. That's the finding of FairWarning.org, an online, nonprofit publication that does public interest journalism. “The 10 states with the highest fatality rates all were red, while all but one of the 10 lowest fatality states were blue. What's more, the place with the nation's lowest fatality rate, while not a state, was the very blue District of Columbia,” FairWarning said in an article published Tuesday.

Every so often, Americans poke their finger in the eye of the political hierarchy just to remind it of who's really boss. It's in our DNA. But it's not uniquely American. It's a human trait that's exercised wherever democracy governs. We're amazed that in Massachusetts a U.S. Senate seat held 57 years by Democrats -- held by brothers from a revered American political family -- suddenly is captured by a little-known Republican state legislator. But free people tend to be fickle.

Republicans buy Kias and Democrats lean to Hyundais. That's the tongue-in-cheek election-year analysis of vehicle registrations by automotive research firm R.L. Polk & Co. Polk looked at car registration trends in so-called red and blue states, red representing a higher share of Republican voters than Democrats and blue representing a Democratic-leaning populace. "Kia's market share is a full point higher in the red states, while Hyundai, its corporate cousin, captures almost a half-point more in the blue than in the red," said Tom Libby, a Polk analyst.

While I think that John F. Kerry would lead us into less danger than George W. Bush and the neoconservatives would, most Americans should know that this election is a farce. In a last dying gasp, the electoral system has divided our country into "red" states, "blue" states and "battleground" states. If you live in a battleground state, your vote for president has more power than a vote from a red or blue citizen. The electoral college is outdated and is reminiscent of centuries of voter disenfranchisement.

Nothing in the Sunday comics was as funny as the Dec. 5 front-page story, "Proposal Would Hit Blue State Taxpayers." To tag conservatives with a conspiracy to raise taxes in blue states must have been a "let's see if the public is really as stupid as we think they are" discussion. Forty-five percent of Californians voted for President Bush precisely because we're overtaxed in this state. Why the majority of our state's voters poll in lock step with some unrealistic promises from liberals is the real story.

Since U.S. forces attacked in 2003, Rep. Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican from Connecticut's liberal 4th District, has been a stalwart defender of the Iraq war. "I've been carrying the bucket when it comes to the war," Shays said in September. But facing an antiwar Democratic opponent in a tough midterm election race, Shays is starting to express reservations. In a telephone interview Friday after he returned from his 14th trip to Iraq, Shays said that he believed the U.S.

WASHINGTON - A concerted Republican effort to alter the balance of power in presidential elections by changing the rules for the electoral college is facing significant hurdles - including from some GOP officials in the affected states. All but two states currently award electoral votes under a winner-take-all system. Plans to replace that with a proportional system are under consideration in half a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan. All were presidential battlegrounds that President Obama carried last fall.

WASHINGTON - In the end, it wasn't close. Despite predictions that the presidential election could end in an electoral vote tie, or that the winner of the popular vote could again be denied the White House by the electoral college, President Obama won his anticipated 126-vote landslide Monday as the 538 electors officially voted in statehouses. Twelve years after Al Gore's defeat prompted some Democrats to call for a fix to the constitutionally prescribed method of choosing the president, Republicans are now mounting efforts in key states to end the winner-take-all method that most states employ.

There may be secessionists in all 50 states, but Texas can boast of the biggest cohort of independent-minded (unhinged?) folks who want to cast off the "tyranny" of the federal government and go it alone. Well over 100,000 Texans have signed a petition to the president of the United States requesting that he let the Lone Star State depart from the Union peacefully and amicably. The last time Texas and 10 other states tried this, of course, a rather nasty fight ensued - - the 150th anniversary of which the nation is observing right now.  Abraham Lincoln was not keen on letting the slave states go. He sent armies south to bring them back into the fold and that should have settled the issue.

Red state voters are more likely to die in a traffic accident than blue state voters. That's the finding of FairWarning.org, an online, nonprofit publication that does public interest journalism. “The 10 states with the highest fatality rates all were red, while all but one of the 10 lowest fatality states were blue. What's more, the place with the nation's lowest fatality rate, while not a state, was the very blue District of Columbia,” FairWarning said in an article published Tuesday.

We in the blue states hear from the talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC that many of you in the red states are so distressed about the outcome of the elections that you would like to secede from the Union. Now, it seems that at least six of you - Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina - have submitted enough signatures (25,000) on petitions to the White House website to merit a formal response, with more petitions on the way. We wish you the best of luck with this.

Journalist and gay activist Dan Savage often writes about the urban archipelago -- the American cities that are comfortable, safe islands for gays and lesbians set amid a vast sea of countryside where being openly homosexual remains a chancy, even dangerous, proposition. However, after an election in which four more states approved same-sex marriage, perhaps that sea is receding. In fact, the map of states that now allow men to marry men and women to marry women is beginning to resemble the now familiar chart of red and blue states.

It may come as a surprise to many of her constituents, but for seven years California Sen. Barbara Boxer has been moonlighting from what she calls her "day job" -- as an elected official from the state that boasts the free world's fifth or sixth largest economy -- to write a novel. "A Time to Run" is a for-whom-the-bell-tolls story of a liberal blue-state senator who braves the political mud wrestling in Washington for the sake of her ideals.

As President Bush lays the groundwork for a possible overhaul of the U.S. tax code, one option under consideration would deal its biggest financial blow to citizens of blue states such as California and New York. Some conservative activists are urging the Bush administration to scrap the federal deduction for state and local taxes as part of a broader plan to revamp the nation's tax system.

Flight Behavior A novel Barbara Kingsolver Harper: 436 pp., $28.99 Strange things are happening in Appalachia. The natural world as we know it is coming to an end, overheated by human greed. "Global warming" is a dangerously loaded expression in the rural, Republican-loving, God-fearing Tennessee of Barbara Kingsolver's didactic and preachy new novel, "Flight Behavior. " The people of the fictional Feathertown have been taught by talk radio that it's a big-city scam concocted by Al Gore.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- President Obama appeared here Saturday with former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, whose presence the president cited as evidence that his plans aren't partisan, but sensible. Crist's support, Obama said, shows that his values "are not Democratic values or Republican values. They are American values. " Introducing the president to the crowd, Crist said he is no longer in the GOP because "they left me. " The break-up occurred in 2010 after Crist left the Republican party and ran for U.S. Senate unsuccessfully as an independent.