According to a New Yorker piece on Election Polls, the decisive factor in the election was NOT the moral values issue but the terrorism issue. Or at least that's what it's called. Enough people believe that "the country is safer now than before 9/11 and that only Bush can protect us from terrorists" to tip the scales. Never mind that this opinion is based on ignorance and misinformation — conflating Iraq and Saddam with 9/11, for example — but some pollsters claim this is what enough people feel to tip the scales.
The moral values issue, touted in the media as the deciding factor, is thought by many to be a red herring — a conclusion based on the semantics and structure or on the polls themselves. Although some claim, and I would tend to agree, that "moral values" are code words for being against gay marriage and abortion and not for moral values like equality, peace and social justice, those who claim to be for moral values would not have stood quite so tall if their poll choice was based more clearly on the gay marriage and abortion issues.
A book review of An Empire Of Wealth in the Times points out some interconnected areas that surprised me.
The McCormick eliminated the need for large number of farm laborers, who could then be funneled into the labor needs of rising post Civil War industry. In a sense the reaper made industrialization possible.
"The rise of the automobile created a crisis for American farmers who in 1900 had devoted a third of their land to growing oats and hay for horses. By 1929 the horses were almost all gone, and the land set aside for fodder now produced food crops" — which we would initially think would be a boon to the farmers — higher overall yields! But the increased production drove down prices — the cost of some kinds of success — and drove down prices, devastating the farmers.
The Guardian seems to be giving prime coverage to the continued bombs and devastation being wreaked by the insurgents in Iraq. In the NY Times it’s a second tier story. (Today Dec. 6 they made the front page, a series of attacks rolled up into one article.) The two recent Baghdad explosions killed many and injured scores (80 over the weekend.) Maybe the U.S. media wants us to think the U.S. Falluja campaign was a success and that the insurgency is "quiet"?
