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Evangelical’s Line In The Sand: South Carolina

11 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Politics, Religion

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It comes down to South Carolina.

Mitt Romney gave Evangelicals a bloody nose in Iowa and everyone knew he would win New Hampshire, but South Carolina is the line in the sand. If Romney wins South Carolina, Evangelicals are done and the rest of the primaries become a big Romney celebration.

Bachmann, Perry, Cain all served up what Evangelicals wanted

It doesn’t look good for Evangelicals. The New York Times shows Romney favored in South Carolina with almost 32% supporting him. Newt Gingrich, who is hardly a darling of the Evangelicals is second with 24% and Rick Santorum is running a poor third with 19.5%. The problem is that Evangelicals seem to have an attention span of three year-old when it comes to supporting a candidate. Santorum’s dramatic showing in Iowa was likely because he became the Iowa Evangelical flavor of the week at the perfect moment.

Paul Kiser

Evangelicals flaw, …well, one of them, is that they have an absurd concept of what government should be and they are so passionate about their vision of owning “that which is Caesar’s” that they aren’t aware that most Americans don’t like their ‘we-know-best’ piety. Evangelicals want to hear what they want to hear and desperate Conservative politicians, like Newt Gingrich, are happy to deliver and bow down to them.

So Evangelicals are on a constant search for the next political Messiah, then drop them as quickly as they found him or her (let’s not forget Bachmann…Michele Bachmann…remember?  The one with the crazy, I’m-going-to-eat-you look? Google ‘Bachmann’ and you’ll remember her.)

The problem for Romney is that Evangelicals are married to their fantasy candidate and Romney is not, nor will be ‘it’, so getting them to vote in November is unlikely. For Romney, a South Carolina win will end the political involvement by many Social Conservative voters and leave him with two-thirds or less of the Republican party to support his bid for the White House. The scenario for Romney becomes worse if Ron Paul remains a player, but the Republican Achilles has enough heel-biters to deal with for now.

A version of this article first published as
Evangelical’s Line In The Sand: South Carolina

on Technorati.com

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9 Most Violent States In the U.S. of the Past Decade

04 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in About Reno, Crime, Government, Travel

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Paul Kiser

South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, New Mexico, Maryland, Nevada, Louisiana, Delaware, and Alaska are America’s most violent States¹ during the last ten years according to FBI statistics². Violent crime is on the decline in most States; however, these nine have averaged over 600 violent crimes per every 100,000 in population in the last decade. There is an 85 point gap between the tenth highest State (Illinois) and ninth ranked Alaska, which is a significant separation considering that there is only a 116 point spread among the top nine (see TABLE 2.0.)

Graph 1.0 - The 10 Most Violent States of the Past 10 Years and other example States

The good news is that five of the of the top nine States have made major progress in decreasing violent crime during the last ten years. Florida dropped almost 255 points from its 2001 rate to its 2010 rate. Maryland and New Mexico dropped 235 and 192 points respectively. South Carolina and Louisiana both dropped over 100 points during the decade.

Four States still had rates in 2010 that were over 600 violent crimes per 100,000. Two of those States (Delaware and Tennessee) have made little progress over the decade and the other two (Nevada and Alaska) have lost ground from where they were in 2001.

Table 2.0 - 10 Year Violent Crime Averages (per 100,000 pop.)

Nevada began the decade with a violent crime rate below California’s, but the rate jumped in 2006, peaked in 2007, and has slowly declined. Despite the decline, the significant drop of other high ranked States has placed Nevada as the most violent State for the last two years.

Graph 1.0 shows the average violent crime rates over the last ten years for the eleven highest ranking States, plus five other States that are representative of borderline, middle, and low ranking States. Two of the eleven highest ranking (Illinois and California) were ranking relatively high in 2001, but dropped rapidly during the first three years of the decade and ended up with violent crime rates that were just over the United States average.

NOTES

¹ The District of Columbia was excluded from this report as it is not a State and is more representative of an urban area.

²The violent crime statistics are from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, Table 4, years 2001-2010. The information can be found at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr.

This article first published as
Nine Most Violent States of the Past Decade
on Technorati.com