Report to the closest newsstand ASAP, and get this month's Harper's.

[Bunny]

There's a great Notebook from Lewis Lapham on the National Reagasm. It's really good.

Then there's the Harper's Index. Check out this statistic:

Chance that a member of New York's Army National Guard was in Iraq in June: 1 in 4.

Chance that a member of Texas's Army National Guard was: 1 in 31.

What do you make of this, if anything. Can anyone explain the deployment figures?

[proud patriot]

1. The local news here in the Bay Area did a story

a couple of months ago that they were going to
continue investigating the high number of
recalled troops from California vs. Red states.

I haven't heard anything since .

[Bunny]

3. I really don't want to think that unit deployment is

directly related to blue state status. I realize that anything is possible in George Bush's America, but can the red or blue status of the state REALLY be involved?

I assumed it had something to do with the particular training experience of each unit, perhaps NY units had more relevant training than TX units?

I'll take a back seat to no one in my loathing of the Bush Administration, but can they really be so cold-blooded and calculated as to call up primarily the blue states? If nothing else, it would eventually become pretty obvious that that's what they were doing.

Do you know which news agency did the story in your area? Perhaps we could contact them to see what they found out.

This is a little disturbing, isn't it?

[markses]

16. Because NY's climate is so much more like Iraq's than Texas?

Or perhaps because New York State is at so much a lower risk for terrorist attack than Texas...

er...ummm...errrrr.

[Jane Austin]

17. Didn't the entire National Guard from Vermont get

notice of call-up recently?

Something like 1500 people?

[KittyWampus]

2. Bunny, I'd Be REAL Interested Knowing If Those Call Up Statistics

break the same way between ALL the red and blue states.

[Bunny]

4. Me too. How could we find that out?

There are plenty of DUers with service experience. Maybe they could point us in the right direction?

[ncrainbowgrrl]

6. Now you have me interested too... If I find anything, I'll post...

Interesting- especially in light of another call up from NC- RIGHT after Edwards (D-NC) is added to the Kerry ticket, and people speculate about NC goin' blue this time around...
Perhaps this is the tin foil hat speaking, though.

[Bunny]

7. Okay, good. That's another interesting thing that might not be

so tin-foil hattish!

[MissB]

14. I know that Oregon has an unusually high call up rate this time around

And we're usually a blue state, although it was remarkably close in 2000.

[Warpy]

5. Bush doesnt' want to leave his home state unprotected in case

there's a massive disaster. He doesn't give a rip about the rest of the country. That should be abundantly clear.

Most Texans think Texas (hot, dusty, backwards, nasty) is the place good people go when they die. I've always wished their secessionist movement would get somewhere and they'd take the Bush family and DeLay with them.

[Bunny]

8. So long as they leave our Texas Duer's, I'd be okay with that!

n/t

[BillZBubb]

24. Now wait a dang minute!

Not all of Texas is hot, dusty, backwards and nasty. Where I live in Texas it is almost never dusty!

[ncrainbowgrrl]

9. March 2004 DOD Statistics

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2004/d20040317.pdf
- breaks it down by state and unit. It's about 240 pages long in pdf format.
the link to the page to get more information can be found below

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2004/nr20040317-0465.html

[FighttheFuture]

10. Nice way to shitcan unwanted military votes...

Units form blue states... oopps... lost with the microfilm. Units from red states... copied in triplicate with each one counted, including all copies!!

[Hoping4Change]

11. I just sent an email to the Editor of Stars & Stripes asking what

he made of this. If I get a reply, I'll post it.

[agincourt]

12. Nothing suprising here,

Bush would send blue-state troops to Iraq because he wouldn't get those states anyway in an honest election. He will try to not send red-state troops as he loves to give favors to his base. Likewise he doesn't want to offend these people, either. It's almost 4 years, the insidious behavior of these crooks should no longer suprise us.

[Imperialism Inc.]

13. My sister is vying for an editor job at Harper's right now.

I've never really read it before but it looks like great magazine. I like the Index section. Pretty cool.

[grasswire]

20. Harper's is a national treasure

...as is its head, Lewis Lapham. He once (about ten years ago) asked me to write something for the magazine and I was so awed that I couldn't even do it.

[progdonkey]

15. one caveat

I would just like to mention that the stats shown could be extremely misleading. Primarily, it could be that the New York units are actually more adept at what is needed (or believed to be needed) in Iraq. Also, Texas is of course a much larger state than New York (and presumably with a larger military population), so it would follow that a single soldier that is called up in New York would reflect a higher ratio of call ups to the state's Army population than in Texas.

While I doubt that the 8 to 1 ratio is as simple as it appears with this stat, it is admittedly a very large ratio, and it certainly points to possible bias in favor of Bush's home state or red states. I just think the "real" bias, if it exists, would be closer to 2 or 3 to 1.

Now, if you could show that it really is that all blue states have a much higher call up rate compared to red states, that would definitely lean greatly towards blue states being specifically targeted for call-ups.

[markses]

18. Texas is so much "larger" than New York?

Is this the old "red state" logic again, wherein land mass trumps population?

Populations/ from the US Census Bureau, 2000:

New York: 18,976,821
Texas: 20,851,790

Wow! What a disparity! It's like, 1:4 as compared to 1:31. or something...:eyes:

http://www.census.gov/statab/www/part6.html

[Hoping4Change]

19. But I beilieve thtat Texas has many more Guard troops than

does NY.

[markses]

21. Show me

n/t

[Literate Tar Heel]

22. this is all interesting, but I haven't seen

any discussion of exactly what Bush gains by sending National Guard from the blue states as opposed to the red ... does he just want them killed because there's a better chance that they're Democrats? are National Guard troops more likely to vote Democrat than a random person in the same state and he wants them out of the country where it's harder for them to vote? is he planning on carrying out some hijinks at the polls in blue and battleground states and doesn't want a bunch of National Guard around to get in the way? ... nothing he would do would surprise me and my tin foil hat is always within arm's reach, but I'm having a difficult time catching on to what his angle would be here

[progdonkey]

23. hardship

He wants to put the hardship of serving on the blue states. He has no chance of carrying New York, for instance, so he has no worries about pissing off New York families by sending their sons and daughters to war. He needs to carry Texas, however, so he wants to make the whole war as easy on them as possible.

It's not really that he just wants blue state voters to be killed in Iraq (though, I'm sure he doesn't mind that collateral damage...), but that, if there's going to be a grieving family, it should be one whose members either weren't going to vote for him, or whose votes were pretty useless to him in the first place (Republicans in Mass. and NY, for instance). He has nothing to fear from creating Lila Lipscombs (F 9/11) in New York, but he needs everyone he can get in the red and battleground states.

Plus, since this is all dealing with reserve forces, the impact of call-ups is rather insular. An Active Army unit normally has soldiers from all across the country, since they are permanently stationed at a base; if you start screwing with a lot of active units, you're hitting all kinds of states. The Reserve units however, are based out of each state with everyone being at least residents of the state (hence, voters in that state), so it's much easier with the Reserves to focus the harship on units from politically unfriendly states.

[Literate Tar Heel]

25. yeah, that makes sense

sounds Rovian enough to believe in