A Few Comparisons

Rox Populi has a good eye. Starting from a post by Ezra Klein, she’s taken graphs of unemployment, who voted for Bush, and who has died in Iraq.

While she didn’t draw explicit conclusions, a few things do leap out at you:

• The Red counties, i.e., voted for Bush, had the best employment.
• The Northeast corridor and southern California, coincide strongly with soldiers killed in Iraq.
• The areas of California with the highest Iraqi casualties coincide with the areas of highest unemployment.

This suggests a couple of questions to me.

1. Did people essentially vote their jobs in the 2004 election?
2. Is it part of the Rove strategy to reward Republican-leaning regions with more jobs?
3. Does military recruitment depend on unemployment?

I ask these questions for two reasons. The first is that the notion of political games being played with people’s livelihood is outrageous. The second is that if military recruitment is being gamed to regions that didn’t vote for Bush, then… I just don’t know what to say.