Fredd's got 'the blues'

Check out the voting by county map of the 2004 presidential race: a few specks of Democrat blue here and there, but if one were pressed to pick the color of the country, everybody would say 'red,' hands down.

But if we all recall, this race 8 years ago was a close one, won by George W. Bush with the swing state of Ohio going to him by just a hair.  Despite nearly 85% of the physical dirt in the country being beet red.

It's this map that's got me singing the 'blues.'  I currently live in Illinois, and if you look at how the county vote went in this election, you would think that this state is rock solid conservative red. 

Nope.  Not even close.  About half the population of the state lives in Cook county, and in this most crooked (as detailed in a recent survey) county in the U.S., I believe there's a law against being a Republican.  And I also believe that if convicted in Cook county of siding with GOP interests, there's jail time involved, and perhaps a public beating or caning at a minimum.

As Cook county goes, so goes the rest of the state.  Illinois hasn't had a Republican majority in the state senate or legislature in my lifetime (and I'm no spring chicken, let me tell you).  And as a deep, dark blue county, which wags the rest of the nearly totally red state, Democrats led by the corrupt Daley machine and now the corrupt Rahm Emanuel machine, taxing and spending is how Democrats have retained power for generations.  They have spent us into the poor house, and Illinois along with California are now among the most bankrupt of states in the U.S.

Our former governor Rod Blagojevich just got slammed into the  federal pokey a few days ago, and he was more crooked than most Democrats, but that is not saying much.  Under his watch, the public pensions have run amok, are totally underfunded by billions, and the current governor (Rod's lieutenant governor) Pat Quinn is borrowing additional billions to keep these bankrupting public pensions afloat.

Nobody in Illinois politics knows how to spell the word 'cut,' much less have a rudimentary understanding of how to live within the state's means.  And it ain't going to get better anytime soon.  The blue staters have an iron grip on power, and they aim to keep it regardless of the impending debt disaster looming over all of us Illini in the near future.

I just keep looking at that map: I have lived in Oregon, Virginia, California and Illinois most of my life and the story is the same with them all: beet red, most of the square miles of those states, but blue-est of blue Democrats seem to always spend those states into oblivion, despite being surrounded in a sea of red.

It's got me singing the blues, I tell ya.....