WAR WOUNDS

If you are already against the Iraq War a photo like this may not surprise you. If you support the war you ought to have enough enough guts to stare its consequences in the face:



http://content.nejm.org/content/vol351/issue24/images/large/03f9.jpeg

As of this posting 1,294 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq and 9,766 have been wounded in action.

An entire photo essay about treating the wounded in Iraq can be found in this weeks New England Journal of Medicine:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/24/2476

FAMILY VALUES BY THE NUMBERS

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Massuchusetts (haven of liberalism, gay marriage and other unspeakables) has the lowest divorce rate in the country. That, people, is not a fluke. The state that rightwingers like to call "The People's Republic of Massachusetts" does 2 things pretty damn well: it educates it's citizens in decent public schools; and it creates a safety net of healthcare, welfare and unemployment benefits to make sure it's citizens don't fall into true desperation and despair. It turns out to be a great formula for keeping families intact. Not even Gay Marriage seems to affect it! Huh...

Andrew Sullivan, an honest Republican if ever there was one, provides the rest of the numbers:

"Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas - which until recently made private gay sex a criminal offence - has a divorce rate of 4.1. A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates in the U.S. are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. And the states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Every single one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every single one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate, in fact, is roughly 50 percent higher than the national average."

Shall we try another bellweather statistic?

How 'bout "Pregnancies per 1000 teenage girls." As you can see from the graph below, our poor Red States are still working to get them family values in order: