Political trivia: red state, blue state

Here's a fun political fact...
Did you know that the now-common [universal] usage in the United States of red colouring for Republican controlled states and blue for Democratic states only came to be used by virtually all news media after the 2000 Presidential election? Before that, the colour-coded representation of Republican and Democrat areas depended on the pollster/journalist/whomever created that political map. Outside the US, it is not uncommon for red to actually represent liberal, blue for conservative (I know that this is the case for the Labour and Conservative parties in the UK, and have seen it elsewhere).

Oh yeah, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion USD and the news is full of nuclear discussion today (i.e. N. Korea and Iran)!

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