[at-l] Hiking AND the political stuff

[athiker89 at yahoo.com (Tim Rich)]

Greetings, 
 
I've been in lurker digest mode for a while, and I've purposely stayed away from the political threads. I'd like to thank Ryan for the list, and his patience. Over the last eight and one-half years, I've gained a ton of knowledge from the list.  On topic, I've learned much about hiking, trail and town specific information, and I've been able to hook up with listers to receive and provide shuttles in my and their section hikes.  I've enjoyed the list immensely, and I'm now 220 miles from completing my section hiking goal.  If all goes well, I'm two trips from Katahdin.   
 
My experience here is that no one is swayed by arguments on these off-topic debates.  They're the AT-L equivalent of rough horseplay - everybody has a good time until someone gets hurt or breaks something.  Then Mom or Dad cleans house.  I'm grateful we have a permissive "parent" in Ryan, and that he's not heavy handed.
 
That being said, I'll toss in my view that two recent statements by Steve and Bryan are both correct.  Bryan's statement, ?All objective measures show that conservatives are more educated, score higher in standardized tests and are generally more intelligent than liberals. In this country anyway. Even democrat pols admit it.? is correct. 
 
Steve's contention that "Democrats have a much higher number of people with graduate degrees than do Republicans." is correct. For example, many liberals gravitate toward teaching, a field that is awash with graduate degrees. That field is only a subset of the liberal/democrat constituency, though, and does nothing to disprove Bryan's point. If you begin to add other democrat core constituencies (blue collar union workers, for example), the *general* education level would drop rather quickly. 
 
Also, I believe "pols" is short for politicians.  And liberals can be capitalized, or not.  Now, "lease liberals" is a new term for me - I always thought they were bought, not leased. :)
 
Take Care,
 
Tim
 
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040225.shtml





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