As noted by
Atrios, there are exactly
two Starbucks retail locations in the state of Vermont.
Let's do a little more research here.
There are 395 locations in Texas. There are nearly 200 times as many Starbucks locations in Texas.
Even when you work this out on a per-capita basis, there is one Starbucks location in Vermont for every 307,000 Vermonters, versus one Texas location for every 53,987 Texans. In other words, there are over five times as many Starbucks locations on a per-person basis in Texas than there are in Vermont.
Since the market would never lie to us, we can safely assume who the real latte-sippers are.
This is only the beginning of the the untrue stereotypes offered by the newest
Club for Growth ad, which offers this wisdom:
"Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." before the farmer's wife then finishes the sentence: "... Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs!"
Some of these facts are easy to refute. As Governor, Howard Dean cut taxes in Vermont on multiple occasions. And between 1995 and 2001, Vermont state government expenditures grew at roughly the same annual rate as state government expenditures in Texas (about 9 percent for Vermont; about 7 percent for Texas).
According to the SuperPages.Com yellow pages informs us that there are not a single sushi restaraunt listed in Vermont! By comparison, there are dozens of sushi restaraunts listed in Texas.
Sushiref.com yields a different result. According to that site, there are two restaraunts which offer sushi in Burlington, and two in Rutland. A total of four locations.
In contrast, there are more sushi restaraunts in Austin (home of so many Bushies, e.g. Scott McClellan and Karl Rove.) alone, which has roughly the same population as the state of Vermont. There are 86 sushi restaraunt locations in Texas.
I don't conveniently have any statistics on vehicle registrations, New York Times subscriptions (which would probably be internal information anyway), or any means to effectively quantify "Hollywood-loving".
But it seems to me that many of the same attributes the Club for Growth would ascribe to Dean and his supporters could apply equally to Bush and his supporters.
Now, when can we expect George W. Bush to take his government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, right-wing freak show back to Texas, where it belongs?"
Perhaps a better question might be, when will we get past our shallow regional stereotypes about "cultural elitist" New Englanders (and the equally disingenuous stereotype that all Red Staters are "just folks")?