In case you have  family or co-workers who believe various conservative accounts about how President Obama is responsible for ebola or how ISIS terrorists are streaming across the border, I have included a picture here of nice flowers so you can just let go and look at something pleasant.

We can fight back and we can make progress. But we can't fix it all. So sometimes you just have to let go.

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One thing that has long interested me is how the American South strongly supported Franklin Roosevelt of New York in all four of his Presidential races. 

On the top left you see Roosevelt's big win over Herbert Hoover in 1932. The South was solid for Roosevelt. 

You could say that voters in 1932 were voting in reaction to the Great Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.

But then we see that Roosevelt also swept the South in 1936, 40 & 44.   

1936 is the top right map. 1940 is bottom left. 1944 is bottom right.

You'd think the region of states rights would have rejected and resisted a New Yorker who led the way to an expansion of federal government power such as the New Deal.  

Voters in the South were happy to take the benefits and relief offered by the New Deal and by the expansion of federal power in the Roosevelt years.

What really seemed to sour white voters in the South about so-called big government were the Civil Rights advances of the 1960's.

Nest time you here about states rights and a grasping federal government and all that, consider how voters in the Jim Crow South were perfectly happy with Franklin Roosevelt and New Deal and ask yourself what the real issue in 2014 in the time of President Barack Obama.  

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