I know elections are in the fall, but "Donkey Fall" sounds like it will be just an exploration of past failures.

Level playing field. It all fits. Even environmental protection is equal opportunity for future generations.

If she spent more than Hackett (or even close to Hackett), that really proves the worth of investing in these kind of races. If they have to outspend us just to defend, they can't play offense.

about Rove or not. Like 1% of America, I am a total waste of oxygen. Please kill me.

Democrats believe in Teamwork.

As opposed to Republicans who believe in selfishness.
Strong defense=don't let 'them' mess with MY stuff.
Free markets=keep the guvmint out of MY business.
Lower taxes=don't let the guvmint take MY money.
Smaller government=less guvmint, more for ME.
Family values=everyone should be like ME.

I agree. I just didn't like the sound of "make them look corrupt". They ARE corrupt. We don't need to stretch anything, just expose what is there. And as you say we must stay on message in order to expose it.

is to expose Republican corruption, not to make them look corrupt. We don't need to spin anything, we just need to make Americans aware of it.

So dKos is Manhatten? What is Powerline--the I-4 corridor? Its an interesting analogy. Maybe liberals are inherently more comfortable in diverse settings, whereas conservatives only want to associate with people like themselves and this extends to geography. Maybe its time for MyDD Pennsylvania or whatever. Just like a newspaper with national and local sections. Seems easier than building new sites from scratch. Plus, I feel like there are already too many blogs to keep up with. It would be nice to have it in one place.  

is that without the Iraq war, no way Bush wins reelection. Look at the downward trend after 9.11. Erase the large blip from the start of the Iraq war, and Bush would be low 40s before election time. Why did we go to war again?

Oops. I missed the last line at first, then I went back to change my rating and forgot to hit the rate all button. Fixed.

separating by race? You say race and religion are better predictors so is this fairly large association with income just a spurious correlation with race? What about poor white people?

rather than liberal. It really seems to come down to a battle between those who want to preserve a pre-Darwinian white-christian way of life, and those who want to embrace modernity. Its an interesting connection you draw between the domestic and foreign issues and it seems like a good insight. The same fear of the "other" does seem to drive conservatives in both areas. When you think of how important fear is to conservatives, a lot of things make more sense (like their convention). It explains their compaign strategy--you relentlessly demonize your opponent and make them part of the scary "other". It also explains a lot of the hatred. When Ann Coulter accuse liberals of treason, she means it. And in a way, she is right. Coulter embraces an America that is a backwards, xenophobic hellhole that all liberals work against. Of course, conservatives are equally treasonous to what I think America is and should be. We have come to the point that we don't just disagree on policy, we define America differently. Its America's past versus America's future.    

As an aside, I thought this was a funny line: "It is literally impossible for liberals to keep America safe from a conservative viewpoint, because..."
Because the conservative viewpoint is everywhere! There are no earplugs that can stand up to their Noise Machine.

I agree that missionaries can be very successful. It is just that the trends show America becoming less and less Christian. Within America, I think there may be a trend among those who are already Christian to be more vocal/extreme Christians. I don't know how succesful missionaries are at recruiting completely non-religious people into Christianity but they appear to be losing to those who drift away from Christianity. I was mostly trying a silly summary of the data.

If more old people than young people go to church, that could mean that either:
1) The same people who are now old were less religious when they were young so that people get more religious as they age.
or
2) Current older people have always been more religious than current younger people. This would indicate that society is getting less religious and most of the change is between
generations rather than changes within peoples lifetime.

To separate these explanations you would ideally want longitudinal data following the same people through their lifetime (as opposed to the cross sectional data you describe). However, the trend inherent within the cross-sectional data collected at different times support explanation 2.  This makes sense to me. I know loads of people who are less religious then their parents. I know many people who have stopped going to church as they have gotten older. I know nobody that has increased their own church attendence in their lifetime above what it was as a child.

We can recruit our supporters but they have to give birth to theirs. Unfortunately for them they don't have the rapid development ability of the Star Wars clones. Maybe this is why they are so desparate to paint people who don't marry and raise lots of Christian kids as Unamerican. Reproduction is what they are good at but it doesn't work on electoral time scales. Also, this is the first time I have heard of Democrats doing well in a growing demographic. It seems to be more important than Republican's success in the fast growing suburbs. Suburban Republican growth seems to be at least in part a matter of allready conservative people moving to the burbs (a geographic realignment) whereas non-Christian Democratic growth appears to result from expansion of the non-Christian category.