Besides the California recall election, one of the other things I am enjoying in national news recently is the Texas redistricting. For those of you that are unfamiliar, redistricting is when you group people and make them vote in blocs. For example, a favorite tactic of those doing the redistricting is to group their enemies very densely in a couple of groups, and to give themselves [50%+margin] majorities in the other groups. This insures control of the maximum number of blocs (but exposes yourself to major failure, should your policies experience a mild setback). You can also eliminate powerful opposition leaders by getting rid of their blocs. Redistricting increases reward, but also the risk of being able to hold on to power should a minor political shift occur.

The interesting thing about this redistricting is

1) How stupid the Democratic constituents and leaders are. They completely fail to offer any rational argument against the redistricting. All their arguments studiously avoid any issue of a fair representation of what the people actually believe. All their blathering studiously avoids any rational measure of past or present unfairness. Their main arguments seem to be viciously circular and self-referential in nature.

2) How unfair and whiny the democrats are. Here are the simple facts:

The three-judge panel working on the new map concluded, in Bensen's words, that Texas plan used in the 1990's constituted "a Democrat gerrymander." Michael Barone, author of "The Almanac of America Politics" and one of the most astute analysts of election data in the country reached a similar conclusion.

Writing in one edition of the almanac, Barone called the Clinton-era Texas map "the shrewdest gerrymander of the 1990s."

The Democrats won 70 percent of the Texas congressional seats in 1992, the first year in which it was operative, while taking half of the total number of votes cast for Congress statewide. This measure, while imprecise owing to factors like uncontested races, is nevertheless a very good gauge of party support among the voters at the congressional level.

The map put in place for 2002 is somewhat more equitable, but is, as a number of analysts suggest, still a gerrymander. Republican candidates running for the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2002 won 57 percent of the total statewide congressional vote while winning 15 -- fewer than half -- of the seats in the 32-member delegation.

In that same election the Republicans won every statewide office on the ballot and, for the first time in 130 years, became the majority party in both chambers of the state Legislature -- and by sizeable margins.

To make it ultra clear, the map in place the last 10 years perverted the people's wishes by (70%-50%) = 20% in favor of the democrats. The new map is perverting people's wishes in favor of the democrats by (57-15/32) = 8% or (100-57)= 43%, depending on which of the two paragraphs you pick.

I would like to support democrats. I would like to support fiscally conservative democrats. But until the party leaders stop being elitist, and untill the sheep that vote for the party leaders show some small sign of independance, I can not. So I am reduced to heckling the republicans and trying to get them to have sex with male monkeys so they become gay. Gay republicans are funny. They make other republicans froth at the mouth.

Redistricting is why California, a known ultra democrat state (but not more extremist than the conformist lemming-like Massachussetts), can all of the sudden vote 65% for republicans in statewide elections (the Recall). When the districts fail to contain the power of the enemy, they fail big and spectacularly.

About primaries, For those of you that are curious, elections with primaries are frauds because elites get to vote twice for their favorite candidate. Once in the primary and once in the real election.

One possible bad outcome of a double vote (besides the inherent unfairness - other people didn't vote twice!) is:
With the first vote, people close in positions to the winner's preferred choices are eliminated, thereby disenfranchizing moderates in the non primary election, and radicalizing the final vote.
-posted by Bad Commie @ 10:12 PM