- Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has some harsh words for rural America: It’s “becoming less and less relevant,” he says. “It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with folks in rural America,” Vilsack said in a speech at a forum sponsored by the Farm Journal. He said rural America’s biggest assets - the food supply, recreational areas and energy, for example - can be overlooked by people elsewhere as the U.S. population shifts more to cities, their suburbs and exurbs.
- The big demographic story out of the 2012 presidential election may have been President Obama’s domination of the Hispanic vote, and rightfully so. But as we close the book on the election, it bears noting that another less obvious bloc of key swing state voters helped the president win a second term. They’re the “nones” — that’s the Pew Research Center’s shorthand for the growing number of American voters who don’t have a specific religious affiliation. Some are agnostic, some atheist.
It’s 1789 and you live in America. You are writing a document by which you hope to outline how Americans can govern themselves, IF THEY ARE ABLE.
And you are IRRELEVANT.
You are the vision and hope of Jefferson.
And you are IRRELEVANT.
You are the men who stood at Lexington and Concord. Farmers, with Bibles, and rifled muskets.
And you are IRRELEVANT, with, as Bill Maher called it, with your stupid tri-cornered hats.
Is it good news that everyplace else is a worse place than this?
For how long?
If the values which made America what it is, are now irrelevant, what is this place?
Time to stop and think about it. And about what thinking about that means.
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