No doubt about it, the Scots-Irish are an ornery bunch.
I didn’t realize that about “live free or die” being common in the mountains and hills of the upper South.

This reminds me to call him tonight.

Heavy urban traffic and aggressive driving produce lots of wrecks and few fatalities. States with high fatality rates tend to have open spaces with high speeds.

A problem in the northeast is low speed limits on freeways. That creates crowding because the slower you go, the longer you are on the road. Nanny state government agencies want to slow you down to make you safe.

Here in California we just saw the the triumph of the policy of enslavement and fear. The winners are losers and the losers never stood for anything. The one who almost won, Van Tran, was the exception.

Pamela Geller has a nice list of what we need to keep focused on:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/

and also quotes the same Churchill as Neo.

And the October surprise continues:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/11/fasten_your_seatbelts.html

Thanks for the link to the Dave Carter piece. He is dead on about the CT and Mass drivers. They are not very nice people.

Many years ago a fellow by the name of William Least Heat Moon wrote a best selling book called “Blue Highways” which gave some revealing insights into the regional differences between Americans. He traveled all over the country in a beat up Ford van. I recommend it highly.

State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award electoral college votes were eventually enacted by 48 states AFTER the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution.

The Founding Fathers only said in the U.S. Constitution about presidential elections (only after debating among 60 ballots for choosing a method): “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”

Neither of the two most important features of the current system of electing the President (namely, universal suffrage, and the 48 state-by-state winner-take-all rule) are in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was the choice of the Founders when they went back to their states to organize the nation’s first presidential election.

In 1789, in the nation’s first election, the people had no vote for President in most states, Only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote.

In 1789 only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all rule to award electoral votes.

The winner-take-all rule is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. The current 48 state-by-state winner-take-all rule (i.e., awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in a particular state) is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the debates of the Constitutional Convention, or the Federalist Papers. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all rule.

The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding the state’s electoral votes.

As a result of changes in state laws enacted since 1789, the people have the right to vote for presidential electors in 100% of the states, there are no property requirements for voting in any state, and the state-by-state winner-take-all rule is used by 48 of the 50 states.