About the districts, what a travesty. No idea why I wasn't paying attention at the time. Maybe because I was too busy --considering the year-- chasing skirts. One skirt especially. . Ahhh, those were the days........................ Your idea of a Puppy Party sounds better and better the more I think about it. Billy ===================================================== In a message dated 3/26/2010 10:46:48 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
Yes, it was an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that applied to all of the old Confederacy EXCEPT Johnson forbid them to include Texas. Jimmy Carter decided to rectify that situation. It only applies to race, not gender. This is what caused the 1991, 1993, and 1995 redistrictings in Louisiana. Louisiana is close to 2/7 black. It was supposed to get 2 black congressional seats out of the 7 it had. Problem was, outside of New Orleans, they are not concentrated enough in any one location to easily cram into a district. So you got the "mark of Zorro" district that started in Shreveport and went across the top of the state then down the Mississippi jumping over to Alexandria, down to Lafayette, and across I-10 to Baton Rouge in 1991. Supreme Court threw that out. Then you got the oblong football that went from Shreveport to Baton Rouge encompassing Alexandria and Opelousas. It touched every TV market in the state except New Orleans. VERY expensive to campaign in. Supreme Court decided that Shreveport and Baton Rouge did not constitute a valid "community of interest" and again tossed the map. Then the Justice Department caved, and Louisiana was left with 1 black district. Currently held by a Vietnamese Republican. The DeLay redistricting of Texas in 2002 was changed by the Courts according to the Voting Rights Act, because they reduced the minority population in the 23rd district. They were told that they had to maintain roughly the same percentage of Hispanics that the district had before. This impacted the 23rd, 28th, 11th, and 21st districts, causing special elections in conjunction with the 2004 elections. The 23rd went from Republican to Democratic as a result. Some state representative districts were also adjusted to increase Hispanic representation in the Texas Legislature. Yes, this helps the Democratic Party. It also helps the Republicans if you get all of the blacks in a black district, most of what is left here in Texas are white Republicans. So we have 2 black districts that Obama won by 80/20. We also have some other districts that McCain carried 76/24. They aren't that far from the Obama landslide districts for some strange reason. BTW, Democratic Socialist Workers Party was a jab at the Democratic Party. David "A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force."--P. J. O’Rourke On 3/27/2010 12:12 AM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: WTH ? Guess my secret name is Rumplestiltskin. The Voting Rights Act requires set %s for minorities in Congress ? How is that constitutional if women don't get close to 50% of the seats, or Hispanics 12 % or whatever their fraction of the population is these days ? Asians come in at about 5 % now also, and while I'm all in favor of more Asians in office ( they tend to be conscientious and smart ), what's wrong with a fair fight for every office ? About the "Democratic Socialist Workers Party," there is no such animal except in Russia. Here in the USSA you need to pick either the SP, which is Democratic Socialist, or the Socialist Workers Party, which is Communist and at least somewhat Trotskyist. OTOH, the idea of a party headed up by your daughter's puppy, considering the alternatives we usually end up with, is kind of a good idea if you ask me. Billy ==================================================== In a message dated 3/26/2010 9:40:01 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) writes: There are only 2 things I don't like here Ernie: 1) his predisposition to call the tea party folks "nuts" and 2) your prejudging that I wouldn't like the article. He was MIA in making the call of "nuts" against the BushHitler demonstrators for eight years, so I think that his current diagnosis of the tea party folks is extremely partisan in that regard. Neither party is going to unilaterally agree to "non-partisan" commissions redrawing legislative districts. It would be unilateral disarmament. This might be forced on the parties in states with referendums (like California), but it is less likely in Texas where it would probably have to pass the legislature as a constitutional amendment and then be voted on by the public. That's just how Texas works. That faces more practical hurdles than philosophical ones. In addition, something would have to be done to the Voting Rights Act which now REQUIRES minority representation close to the percentage of the population that said minority makes up. Thus, if Texas winds up with 36 Congressional seats and the black population is 2/36 of the states population, then 2 districts have to be drawn with a black majority. The Act also applies to state representative and state senate seats. One can SAY that such districts are not drawn in a partisan fashion, but with the black population voting over 90 % Democratic, everybody knows that such is bullshit. Libertarians have LONG been looking for such an alternative voting system. Glad to see that someone else is actually talking about it. Then I could 1) Libertarian, 2) Republican, 3) Constitution, 4) My daughter's puppy, 5) Democratic Socialist Workers Party. On second thought, I might move the puppy up to 3. David "A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force."--P. J. O’Rourke On 3/26/2010 2:13 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote: Our friend Thomas L. Friedman pushing the Radical Center. I like many of his ideas, but (as with the NAF) worry that it is still defined in terms of a) reaction, and b) a grab-bag of policies, rather than a coherent new philosophy. - Ernie P. P.S. Yes, DRB, I know you don't like his proposals... _http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=F1D5E68C1D76F3A6055E5844372865 AD.w5?a=566866&f=28&sub=Columnist_ (http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=F1D5E68C1D76F3A6055E5844372865AD.w5?a=566866&f=28&sub=Columnist) OPINION OP-ED COLUMNIST A Tea Party Without Nuts Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: March 24, 2010 President Obama's winning passage of national health care is both exhilarating and sobering. Covering so many uninsured Americans is a historic achievement. But the president had to postpone trips, buy off companies and cut every conceivable side deal to just barely make it happen, without a single Republican vote. If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we're headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do - from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center. Say what? I write often about innovation in energy and education. But I've come to realize that none of these innovations will emerge at scale until we get the most important innovation of all - political innovation that will empower independents and centrists, which describes a lot of the country. Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert, put it best: "If you don't get governance right, it is very hard to get anything else right that government needs to deal with. We have to rethink in some basic ways how our political institutions work, because they are increasingly incapable of delivering effective solutions any longer." My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America's disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots. The radical center is "radical" in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America's shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea. How best to promote these hybrid ideas? Break the oligopoly of our two-party system. Diamond suggests two innovations. First, let every state emulate California's recent grass-roots initiative that took away the power to design state electoral districts from the state legislature and put it in the hands of an independent, politically neutral, Citizens Redistricting Commission. It will go to work after the 2010 census and reshape California's state legislative districts for the coming elections. Henceforth, districts in California will not be designed to be automatically Democratic or Republican - so more of them will be competitive, so more candidates will only be electable if they appeal to the center, not just cater to one party. (There is a movement pressing for the same independent commission to be given the power to redraw Congressional districts.) Second, get states to adopt "alternative voting." One reason independent, third-party, centrist candidates can't get elected is because if, in a three-person race, a Democrat votes for an independent, and the independent loses, the Democrat fears his vote will have actually helped the Republican win, or vice versa. Alternative voting allows you to rank the independent candidate your No. 1 choice, and the Democrat or Republican No. 2. Therefore, if the independent does not win, your vote is immediately transferred to your second choice, say, the Democrat. Therefore, you have no fear that in voting for an independent you might help elect your real nightmare - the Republican. Nothing has held back the growth of independent, centrist candidates more, said Diamond, "than the fear that if you vote for one of them you will be wasting your vote. Alternative voting, which Australia has, can overcome that." Obama won the presidency by tapping the center - centrist Democrats, independents and Republicans who wanted to see nation-building at home "to make their own lives and those of others better," said Tim Shriver, the C.E.O. of the Special Olympics. They saw in Obama a pragmatist who could pull us together for pragmatic solutions. But hyperpartisanship has frustrated those hopes. (Alas, though, it is not equal. There are still many conservative Blue Dog Democrats, but the liberal Rockefeller Republicans have been wiped out.) If that radical center wants to be empowered, it can't just whine. It needs its own grass-roots movement to promote reforms like nonpartisan redistricting and alternative voting in every state. It's tea time for the center. 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