I THINK THIS THEORY actually originated with Jim Henley, but it’s probably right:

Since last November, there’s been plenty of speculation about a vast disconnect between Red and Blue America. Here’s a new theory: Many urbane blue-staters are actually refugees from the red-state heartland, where they were once picked on as kids.

On the other hand, perhaps there’s a certain lack of social skills involved:

Jones, who grew up in Tennessee, told the crowd that he’d felt out of place as a kid — like many of them probably did — and moved away. But over the years spent in more liberal places like the Bay Area, he somehow forgot how to talk to folks from his old hometown. He said that when he goes back to Tennessee for Thanksgiving and launches into a 10-minute monologue about politics, he’s met by embarrassed silences from his relatives, the very kindest response being: “Well, that was a mouthful.”

Most people don’t really want to hear 10-minute monologues about anything at Thanksgiving dinner, and I doubt that making the monologue about politics makes it more appealing. This isn’t how most people act, which — to be fair — is precisely his point.

UPDATE: Reader Anthony Calabrese emails:

As a native New Yorker, living in Chicago (with a stop off in DC), I think that is on the money. For a while I lived in a very artsy neighborhood of Brooklyn, and it seemed to me that the real deep blue types were originally from Iowa or something.

They complained of the local church bells as the old Italian ladies went to Mass.

It seems that way to me.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Roger Simon notes a Pajamas Media exclusive in the oil-for-food scandal.

NOTE: If you are going to email me with an obscure question, and I go to the trouble to answer it only to get a response from a spamblocker service that requires me to fill out a form to ensure you get my reply, I won’t fill out the form. You won’t get the reply.

Sorry, but I find those services very irritating, and doubly so when I encounter them after responding to a question.

MORE ON BLOGS AND BIG MEDIA, over at GlennReynolds.com.

JACK REESE HAS DIED: He was my mentor when I was an undergraduate, and we stayed friends. I’ll miss him, and so will a lot of other people.

TENNESSEE GOV. PHIL BREDESEN has started a blog. And he’s already getting feedback from the blogosphere!

IN THE NEW REPUBLIC, Lee Siegel is comparing Elvis to Michael Jackson. The comparison between a liking for young, but sexually mature, women, and younger, and sexually immature, boys, seems to be a bit strained. Is it sweeps week at TNR?

My own take on Elvis can be found here. Or as Webb Wilder says in this immortal film: “It’s bad enough that he bad-mouthed poor old dead Elvis, but he had to do it while blowing pot smoke in my face.”

I wish they’d rerelease that gem on DVD.

ENGADGET has an interview with Steve Heiner, head of Nikon’s digital SLR division.

One question not asked: “Why did the autofocus on Glenn Reynolds’ D70 crap out? And right after the camera came back from being fixed?”

PHOTO-MOWERBLOGGING.

INSTA-TV: My TechCentralStation column is up, with a report from the BlogNashville conference and an extensive video report featuring interviews with Dan Gillmor, Chris Muir, Cox & Forkum, Rebecca MacKinnon, Hossein Derakshan, LaShawn Barber, Henry Copeland, Chris Nolan, and more.

UPDATE: Photos from the conference here and here.

RYAN SAGER:

THE Republican promise of smaller, less-intrusive gov ernment is getting harder and harder to believe. Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to pursue a political strategy based on big spending.

Perhaps Democrats will start agitating for a Balanced Budget Amendment.

FOUNDATIONS CAN EXPECT MORE SCRUTINY in an age of weblogs, according to this article:

The news media’s treatment of foundation involvement in public policy may have changed forever on March 17. That was the day the New York Post published “Buying ‘Reform’: Media Missed Millionaires’ Scam,” an account by one of its columnists, Ryan Sager, of the massive spending by several mainstream foundations to secure passage of the 2002 overhaul of campaign-finance laws and to keep the issue alive. . . .

Traditional journalists tend to take at face value the research on public policies generated by major foundations and nonprofit organizations. . . . Any foundation interested in public-policy activism can now expect its implicit political inclinations to be vetted far more thoroughly and publicly than before. It will be much more difficult for donors to operate beneath the radar, justifying their low profile by saying that they are simply objective servants of the public interest. After all, the new networks were born of a reaction against precisely that claim by mainstream news media, and so are inclined to suspect hypocrisy whenever it is made. All foundations — not just those on the right — that want to shape public policy will now be treated as political actors.

Pew discovered what that means, when its response to the allegations by Mr. Treglia came out this way on Fox News: Pew said “it did nothing wrong and is proud of the $40-million it spent to get other people’s money out of politics.”

Read the whole thing, which is quite interesting and, I think, right.

AUSTIN BAY has thoughts on Bill Cosby.

HOWARD KURTZ looks at Arianna Huffington’s new celebrity blogsite. But all I’ve learned from that site so far is that Hillary Rosen doesn’t know how to import files in iTunes.

BUSH IN EASTERN EUROPE: Publius looks at his travel schedule and notices something interesting.

AN ANALYSIS of the interesting events at MIT’s time-traveler convention.

NEWSPAPER, HEAL THYSELF: The New York Times is looking at ways to improve its credibility.

Jeff Jarvis has a big roundup, including some stuff that’s only in the print edition and not available elsewhere online, and The Fearless Critic offers some further thoughts: “I don’t think the problem with media credibility is that the media aren’t responding vociferously to attacks. It’s that the media often gets things wrong, covers things from a biased perspective, and often spotlights the wrong topics.”

MICKEY KAUS:

Today it’s hard for politicians to wait out bad publicity because O.C.D.-like blogs are there to make sure the bad publicity doesn’t go away. … Example: How many days has it been since John Kerry said he’d sign Form 180 releasing his military records? Once upon a time an embarrassing promise like Kerry’s might have been forgotten until the next campaign. Now he’s nibbled to death by blogs.

Indeed.

CHRISTINE HURT has more thoughts on blogger ethics.