In Hamilton County, Ohio, a conservative Cincinnati suburb, last year, more than 21,000 residents purchased 26,000 explicit videos from one of the nation’s largest mail-order companies. In January of this year, 182,000 Greater Cincinnati residents — an estimated 70,000 from Hamilton County — visited an adult Web site at least once. Nielsen - NetRatings found that 21.8 percent of all residents here who went online visited an adult site. The national average for January was 21.4 percent.
Washington Post columnist Terry M. Neal has more on the “moral values” shaping inhabitants of the red states.
President Bush heads into his second term amid deep and growing public skepticism about the Iraq war, with a solid majority saying for the first time that the war was a mistake and most people believing that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should lose his job, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Yet, in a study to determine how much the public fears terrorism, almost half of respondents polled nationally said they believe the U.S. government should curtail civil liberties for Muslim Americans. About 27 percent of respondents said that all Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, and 26 percent said they think that mosques should be closely monitored by U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Finally, in a story that escaped major media attention, a National Guardsman who pleaded guilty to killing a 17-year-old Iraqi soldier said he shot the youth after they had consensual sex in a guard tower. Pvt. Federico Daniel Merida, 21, pleaded guilty to murder without premeditation and other charges during a court-martial in Iraq in September.