You can do a good job of predicting how a state will vote in national elections by looking at its population's average age at first marriage and childbirth.

Via Warren Kinsella's blog I came across a piece in the National Journal which fairly demolishes the "family values" soapbox the U.S. religious (or politically conveniently moral) right stands on. Please consider Do 'Family Values' Weaken Families?:

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved.

The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

The country's lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts's enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections. (That is using family data for 2006 and 2007, the latest available.)

Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It's as if family strictures undermine family structures.

The article goes on to highlight a number of findings presented in a new book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, authored by family law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone. Their conclusion? The growing cultural, and political, divide in the United States has a lot to do with sex: specifically teen and early adult pregnancy leading to family formation before their time.

When news that Sarah Palin's teenaged daughter was pregnant surfaced during the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign my initial reaction was that the "red" states, the Republican base, would abandon her as an example of a poor moral example. In fact the response from the faithful was quite the opposite, particularly after it was announced that the teen-aged parents to be would marry. In the end, after the 2008 campaign was but a memory, the engagement was broken.

The divide revolves around economic opportunity in the end. Blue states put a premium on adaptability and education and quality of family life and thus tend to be more open to any approach - including prevention - that avoids teen or young adult child rearing for the woefully unschooled, unskilled and unprepared. Red states, trapped in their own moral handcuffs preach but do not practice abstinence and fight tooth and nail against preventative measures like sex ed, condoms and other forms of birth control, and won't support abortion and in many cases frown upon adoption too.

To define the divide in a sentence: In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.

Maybe they should wrap sex education with economic awareness and drive the point home to teens that being pregnant and married young is a good way to limit ones own and family potential.

Political strategists take note:

When you understand all of that, you also understand why you can do a good job of predicting how a state will vote in national elections by looking at its population's average age at first marriage and childbirth. In 2007, for example, the states with the lowest median age at marriage in 2007 were all red (Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Utah). The states with the highest first-marriage age were all blue (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island). The same pattern holds for age at first childbirth. Massachusetts is highest (about 28 years old), Mississippi lowest (about 23 years old).

Does Canada reflect this? I believe we do have our own (colours inverted appropriately) blue Conservative (U.S. red Republicans) and red Liberal, Bloc, N.D.P, (U.S. blue Democrats) ridings. There is also a substantial urban vs. rural divide in our politics. Following in the footsteps of the so-called moral majority movement in the United States elements of the religious (or conveniently and politically aimed moral) right have long been fighting hard to gain traction in Canada. In Stephen Harper they found not exactly a friend but a politically convenient and willing ally.

We should all be asking if we are willing to accept the same cultural and economic divisions the U.S. experience has turned out.

The result of this red quandary, Cahn and Carbone argue, is a self-defeating backlash. Moral traditionalism fails to prevent premarital sex and early childbirth. Births precipitate more early marriages and unwed parenthood. That, in turn, increases family breakdown while reducing education and earnings.

"The consequential sense of failure increases the demands to constrain the popular culture -- and blue family practices such as contraception and abortion -- that undermines parental efforts to instill the right moral values in children," Cahn and Carbone say. "More sex prompts more sermons and more emphasis on abstinence." The cycle repeats. Culturally, economically, and politically, blue and red families drift further apart as their fortunes diverge.

From the we-all-knew-the-Conservatives-don't-care-about-the-environment department

In Saturday's Globe and Mail:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed tough new measures to reduce the health toll from air pollution around the Great Lakes by forcing lake freighters to stop burning dirty bunker fuel.

Hey, the U.S. is on to a good thing! But wait for the Canadian torpedo:

But the plan has an unusual opponent: The Canadian embassy in Washington has quietly asked the EPA to weaken the measures, arguing that they could harm trade. It wants ships to be allowed to continue using the high-polluting fuel and to instead install smokestack scrubbers that would clean up their emissions. The Canadian recommendation, if accepted, could delay the clean-air measure for years, because the technology for the scrubbers does not yet exist.

Notice a pattern here? The approach is the same as their approach to climate change. Rather than address the problem today with solutions that exist now, the Harper Government wants to delay actual progress by artificially pinning hopes onto some future technology that either doesn't exist at all or doesn't exist in the scale required to solve the problem.

It's the same subterfuge used by Harper and his environment minister of the day (Ambrose / Baird / now Prentice) as the Conservatives try to sabbotage and scuttle any meaningful action on climate change.

Scrubbers that don't exist are like the equally false solutions "clean coal" and effective widespread "carbon sequestration". These two technologies are often promoted as a panacea by the conservatives on both sides of the border, but neither practically exists.

Clean coal is the same pipe dream George Bush also used to smoke, and carbon sequestration exists today only in four test-sized projects around the world, including one which has already operated for years. That project, co-funded by Canadian and U.S. governments in partnership with EnCana, saw a trial carbon sequestration project started in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Since that trial has begun there has been no meaningful follow through by industry. Now the government is plowing money - our tax dollars - into these things rather than tapping on the energy industry to make the necessary investments.

Former NDP Premier of Manitoba Gary Doer is heading to Washington to take up his new post as Canadian Ambassador to the United States. Given his previous support for Kyoto, clean air and water legislation, his plans to eliminate coal burning factories, and his support for many other environmental initiatives, can we expect Doer to stand up to his new boss Stephen Harper and stop launching torpedoes at U.S. efforts to clean up our planet and most importantly, our own act?

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development cuts through the right-wing rhetoric boiling the U.S. healthcare debate and destroys the notion that Canadian healthcare is inferior to that found in the U.S.

Our costs are lower - 47% lower - and our outcomes are equal or better. We live two or three years longer than our U.S. neighbours. Contained costs and as good or better outcomes - these are indicators the U.S. should be looking at, not the propaganda being flouted shamelessly by healthcare reform detractors. From Bloomberg: Canadian Health Care, Even With Queues, Bests U.S.

"The real difference has been [Canada's] ability to control technology costs," said Anderson, who directed reviews of health systems for the World Bank and developed U.S. Medicare payment guidelines for the Health and Human Services Department. "The only thing the U.S. is consistently No. 1 in when it comes to international comparisons with Canada and other OECD countries is cost."

I don't agree with everything President-elect Obama is planning for his economic stimulus package (building new roads and bridges is surely not the most important of America's needs) but I do agree fully and completely with this:

Third, my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.

As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world. President-elect Barack Obama, December 6, 2008

Live election tracker widget:

It is a shame the White House's back-door won't be hitting Bush on his keester sooner than January.

Shades of Jean Poutine (Mercer pranks Bush), Quebec pair prank Palin with faux-Sarkozy phone call (CTV News)

Two notorious Quebec comedians have pranked Sarah Palin, tricking the Republican vice-presidential nominee into thinking she was speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy during a Saturday afternoon phone call.

"Oh my God, seriously, it's probably the biggest we've ever done," Marc-Antoine Audette, a member of comedy duo The Masked Avengers, told CTV.ca Saturday afternoon.

And for those outside of the Montreal listening area, thanks to the magic of the internet, la prank est ici. (audio) Hopefully Mr. McCain and Mrs. Palin will be unsuccessful in their bid for the White House, otherwise an apology might be expected.

The piece is sung to the tune of Don't cry for me Argentina, and starts out stronger than it finishes but is funny nonetheless. A tip of the hat to Antonia Zerbisias at The Toronto Star.

A vote for John McCain is a vote for George W. Bush. This face.

Hat tip to Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying

Members of Congress getting avalanche of mail and deluge of phone calls urging them to reject the Bush-Paulson 700 billion dollar financial sector bailout

Unlikely comrades Paulson, Bernanke, Bush

Its heartening to see some ideological rigour coming out from an unlikely corner, as a splinter group of apparently free-market driven Republicans are leading the charge, with plenty of backing from the public, to quash Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's huge 700 billion dollar bailout of the financial industry. I say this because supporting this unconscionable bill are most of the free-market crowd, plus an unseemly number of Democrats who, apparently eyeing the election, are deciding their course of action ought to be based on optics rather than principle.

In a more perfect world the few renegade Republicans would have the full backing of the Democrats and this bailout would already be deep-sixed in the Potomac.

Hank Paulson

Bush, Paulson (a former Goldman Sachs CEO), Treasury Secretary Ben Bernanke and others have been crying out for urgent action, claiming financial market panic may result if this unprecedented bailout package is not approved on an urgent basis.

Hundreds of economists including Nobel laureates and financial crisis experts have weighed in via a joint letter which calls upon the White House to reject the bailout and take a slower, conservative, free-market approach.

What seems to be holding the Democrats back from outright opposition is what might happen to financial markets really can't be predicted with certainty, and they don't want to wear the outcome. Markets will go down, to be sure. Lacking a conclusion of the plan, and with news of Washinton Mutual being forced out of business, market futures are off more than 1.5 percent. If the bailout package fails to go through (as U.S. taxpayers should hope) how far might markets go? Maybe 1000 Dow points in one or two sessions. Perhaps double that. Its possible we could see Dow 8,000 in short order (and serious pressure on Canadian markets too). No one can really tell.

But opposing the "solution" is the right thing to do.

Among the controversial elements of the Paulson plan is the clause which if enacted would give Paulson effectively dictatorial control over the funds with no recourse through Congress or the courts. Imagine!

Ultimately what everyone needs to know is that this is not needed. While there most certainly is a crisis of confidence, there are those who stand to make enormous sums of money exploiting the crisis and I am not talking about the convenient boogeyman of late, short sellers. No, its the remaining financial companies which take part in this bailout plan stand to gain billions and billions of profits off the backs of taxpayers. This last paragraph in this quotation sums up the gambit being played:

Erik Brynjolfsson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, said his main objection "is the breathtaking amount of unchecked discretion it gives to the Secretary of the Treasury. It is unprecedented in a modern democracy.''

Advocates for a rescue plan this week point to a seizing up of credit markets, reflected in elevated inter-bank lending rates, as reason for action. Some economists are unconvinced.

"I suspect that part of what we're seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout,'' said David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies liquidity constraints and game theory.