Hi Mary Anne-

Having lived in small town America (and soon to move back to a Big Blue City this fall), I completely agree with you that small towns and burbs have their own unique pathologies. (Domestic violence in rural areas definitely being one of them.)

But I still maintain that the person who wrote "Dear Red States" was cherry-picking his or her data. They want to claim New York and California and Maryland, etc, as "Blue," and point out the lower rate of social problems than, say, in the poorest slums of rural Mississippi, but they totally ignore the reality that the very safest and healthiest parts of New York and California are actually the Red counties, not the Blue cities. The "Blue" parts of the Blue states, with the exception of college towns and a few liberal suburbs, are deeply screwed up places, with Blue turnout driven up by massive (and in some cases fraudulent) urban turnout of the usual suspects: unions, old folks, minorities. Like I said in my joking reply to the "Red States" letter, Kerry won in places he'd get shot in for walking after dark.

Pennsylvania, where you live, is a perfect example. Sure, some of the tony burbs went Blue, but by and large, Pennsylvania is a state of Red counties that get swamped by the big votes in the two blue cities. (I worked in Pennsylvania politics, ironically enough, so we have a connection there.) Even in your cities, you basically have a mostly-Red west where people like Santorum run well, and a mostly Blue east dominated by liberal Philadelphia--a true mess of a city from which industry has been fleeing for years. But in any case, to claim Pennsylvania as a "Blue" state is sleight-of-hand, and if the writer of "Dear Red States" wants to take it, he or she better be ready for the huge bill of supporting the Blue disaster areas that is largely picked up by the rest of the state's Red voters. (I love that people who work in Philadelphia, for example, have to pay a tax to the city, no matter where they live. It's a nice shakedown they use in DC, too, and one they have to resort to since very few of the professionals who work in the city will actually *live* there.)

I guess the point I was trying to make in my little jibe at the "Dear Red State" letter is that in fact, the very virtues that the writer was extolling about Blue states are actually found mostly in the Red counties in the Blue states. Rural and suburban areas have their problems, but who would live in Blue bastions (and raise their children there) like Camden or Overtown Miami or the Bronx or Northeast DC if they had the choice? Really?

If the Blue *counties* ever seceded from the United States and formed their own country, they'd essentially look like Mexico: A couple of huge, impoverished cities surrounded by upper-class intellectuals who would immediately gate their neighborhoods, but who would keep voting for liberal policies in the cities while making sure their own zoning boards and police commissions were controlled by iron-fisted Red-stater types. (I will never forget watching one of my radically liberal friends cheering on the cops who were beating up the guy who tried to break into his luxury sedan. A Kerry voter who was happy to see the cops go all Rodney King on some guy's ass when it was crime in *his* neighborhood.)

PS: Don't you think the Hollywood celebs who kept threatening to move if Bush was re-elected ought to...well, you know, keep their word and...do it? :)