Straight from Newsweek's Gullet to Your Ears

Or eyes…  But I real­ly need to know now: is Penn­syl­va­nia like West Vir­ginia or Alaba­ma or Ken­tucky? It will make such a dif­fer­ence in my life, I can't tell you. Pffffttttt. But here's the quo­ta­tion, from… no one, I guess, gaug­ing from the article,which has no byline. Carville maybe?

What makes the Democ­rats' predica­ment in Penn­syl­va­nia espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that they will actu­al­ly hold a Sen­ate seat in neigh­bor­ing West Vir­ginia. Penn­syl­va­nia, in Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­sul­tant James Carville's for­mu­la­tion, is "Philadel­phia and Pitts­burgh with Alaba­ma in between." The in-between part—sometimes called "Pennsyltucky"—is a lot like West Vir­ginia: white, rur­al, blue-col­lar, and poor. The iron and coal min­ing and heavy indus­tries have giv­en these regions an eco­nom­i­cal­ly pop­ulist tilt with his­tor­i­cal ties to the Democ­rats, but also a sus­pi­cious atti­tude toward envi­ron­men­tal leg­is­la­tion that, cou­pled with the electorate's social con­ser­vatism, has led them to vote heav­i­ly Republican.

They for­got to slag off Ken­tucky, too, where­in the name "Penn­syl­tucky" comes from. By the way, I always thought Penn­syl­tucky referred to any­place any num­ber of Ken­tuck­ians lived in PA, like maybe in Pitts­burgh, but Wikipedia–cough–says I'm wrong. Can you Ken­tuck­ians out there back me up?

There weren't  many Ken­tuck­ians where I grew up, I can tell you that. I would have wel­comed them instead of the gas com­pa­ny shills and flat­landers the region did get. I don't even live there any­more and I'm still pissed off.

And let's not mess around. Nobody wants the Oba­ma taint in their elec­tion process. It's that sim­ple. The stim­u­lus, the tax cut, the var­i­ous promis­es he kept (too small to mat­ter). It's too bad. Penn­syl­va­nia, even from this Mass­a­chu­setts view­point, is like all the oth­er states in this. Did we need Newsweek to glee­ful­ly point it out for that T‑shaped por­tion of the PA elec­torate? As if they were the lone­ly hold­outs who hate any­thing Oba­ma stands for? As opposed to rest of the nation, who're all hunky-dory?

Thank you Face­book friends N. and S., for bring­ing this to my attention.