Purple

There is a very interesting article in the New York Times this morning about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02WWLN.html" target="_new">Montana and it's politics</a>.<br />n<br />n<blockquote>In Montana, the new Democratic governor, a beefy-looking rancher named Brian Schweitzer, challenged what had become over the years a smug and clubby conservative power structure by choosing a Republican running mate who showed no more reverence for his party's orthodoxies than Schweitzer showed for his. Schweitzer's display of independence worked, and red Montana, like red Wyoming, red Arizona and red Kansas, installed a blue leader, thus turning his state purple — a color the Eastern analysts seem blind to, but which Westerners recognize as the color of sagebrush and, as the song says, of mountain majesties (whatever those are).</blockquote><br />n<br />nThe author of the article claims that Montanan's are ornery folks that love their freedom and that explains how the state turned purple. Love freedom? Yea I do but check <a href="http://www.billingsgazette.com//index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/01/02/build/state/50-lawmakers-record.inc" target="_new">this out</a>. Our wonderful legislatures are introducing a record number of bills to control our lives. Everything from seatbelt use to the gas and electricity we buy to regulating home schools out of existence. Our legislature doesn't love freedom, they love to curtail the peoples freedom, mold it into their idea of the perfectly controlled populace who doesn't complain about their chains while they build their castles. That's the freedom we have, to go willingly to slaughter.<br />n<br />n<b>To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace. Tacitus</b>