A CITIZEN'S BLOG

Missed Desperate Housewives on Sunday. (My wife & I's new favorite show.) I'm hoping ABC is still showing an encore performance on Saturday ... I wonder what ABC will do with Alias, my favorite show, when it comes back in January. Right now Housewives is occupying its time slot, so will they ship Alias elsewhere, or what? I hope they won't do anything stupid like burying Alias on Saturday nights.

Nice article from Sunday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette outlining the split between "red" Pennsylvania and "blue" Pennsylvania. This (Western) end of Pennsylvania is getting redder all of the time: Westmoreland, Lawrence and Greene Counties, for example, used to be Democratic strongholds but they voted for W last week. Meanwhile my old end of PA, the Southeast, is getting bluer. I was surprised to hear that Kerry came within 10,000 votes of winning my old home in Chester County, and he easily won Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery Counties, as well as Philly.

I'd count on this divide getting bigger: the Republicans have to credit the social conservatives for Bush's victory, so their stock in the Republican Party is going up. Count on them emphasizing social issues in statewide races now. They'll find that western PA is fertile ground for recruiting blue-collar ex-Democrats into the GOP.

As for the Southeast, Democrats are doing much better with educated voters and the Philly suburbs are full of educated, liberal-leaning professionals who drive SUVs, get coffee at Starbucks and have a "live and let live" attitude. This is a real big shift in Pennsylvania politics: back in 1990 the Republican candidate for Governor, Barbara Hafer, won just Montgomery County and lost every other county in the state. Now Hafer is a Democrat and people are talking her up as a Senate candidate against Santorum. (The phenomenon in 1990 of a pro-choice Republican running against a pro-life Democrat is something well never see again in our lives.)

Here are CNN's elections results for Pennsylvania.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Mark Bowden has another article in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It deals with the Iranian students who stormed the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and took the U.S. diplomats there hostage. It was interesting to see how those people had changed and how their view of the United States had altered in the quarter century since then. Typical Bowden article: always interesting, always well-written.

I don't list non-baseball sites in my blogroll, but if you want to check out an interesting web site, I highly recommend Harry Knowles Ain't It Cool News: Knowles gets gossip and inside info about all of Hollywood's big movies and TV shows before they debut. I read it every day.

Baseball ... Rivals in Exile are back on Hardball Times speculating about the future of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. Will it die? I doubt it, although Steinbrenner can inject a little heat into the mix if he were to sign Pedro to the pinstripes. I bet that the Red Sox will probably win the AL East in a walk next year: the Yankees are going to be in some trouble. Also at Hardball Times Steve Treder has an interesting piece on the Post-Brooklyn Dodgers.