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The commenters characterizing this as a new "civil war" where "the north lost," or some kind of centuries old revenge on the part of the south, are really diminishing the horror of the civil war. Do you think everytime there's a disagreement between Berlin and Munich they play the Hitler card? Let's stop equivocating a bill failing in congress with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the slavery of hundreds of thousands more.
That being said, I can't help but feel that a lot of the rancor over this bill's defeat is about the south more than it is about the bill failing. Lots of "F*ck the South," etc. If the roles were reversed, and southern senators were begging for a bailout of tobacco farmers or something, there would a chorus of "No!"s. And many of you would be using the same statistics about the south getting more taxes than they pay as a reason not to bail them out.
So let's tone down the neo-regionalism and look at this for what it is: republicans refusing to bail out unionized companies. For some reason, most southern senators are republican, but most republican senators are not southern.
