Redistricting–There Has to be a Better Way

Florida’s decennial parody of “fairly” redrawing Congressional districts continues.  I’ve written about this before, wondering if this time, with a state constitutional amendment to try and control it, we’d see something other than this:

Because that’s clearly not a sleazy, political ploy to keep Corrine Brown in office.

Aside from the nonsense of the end result, there’s also the expense.  Millions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, your dollars, will be spent on this redistricting process.  There will be studies and proposals and counter-proposals and negotiations … all designed for one political party to gain advantage over the other – or, at least, to not lose any seats.

How about this for a simple, fair, non-political process:

Divide the population of Florida by the number of Congressional seats.  This is the population each district should have.

Now start with the lowest numbered zipcode in Florida.  Add sequential, surrounding, contiguous zipcodes until the selected population meets or exceeds the desired population of a district.  This is Congressional District 1 for the State of Florida. 

Move on to the next zipcode and repeat for the remaining zipcodes.  Representation by geography – it will take about an hour and maybe $1.57 for a pencil and sheet of paper to keep track of things.

That’s Option 1.

Option 2:

Forget about geography and make all of Florida’s Representatives statewide races.  Given that Corrine Brown currently “represents” a strip of land from Jacksonville to Orlando, would statewide representation be such a hardship?  We are not, after all, reliant on horses for travel anymore.

The races are statewide and whichever candidates get the most votes go to Congress.

Option 3:

Forget about any semblance of impartiality or that Congressional Representatives aren’t elected for race and economic status.

Still hold that delusion?  Take a look at the demographics of each district and it’ll cure you.

Make the races statewide, but divide people by class, race and religion.  The Catholics can choose a representative for themselves, the blacks can choose theirs, etc.

Thoughts?

“I can watch American Idol and child porn at the same time while giving the dog a reach-around”

http://www.popehat.com/2011/03/21/so-apparently-theft-snivelling-and-nutjobbery-are-patriotic-now

Not me! Not me!  No, the title of this post is not mine and not about me, but it made me laugh too damn much not to use it.  The full story’s at the link above, but the gist is this:

One of the blogs I read had a post about what to do if you’re awakened in the night by the Feds asking questions – essentially, shut the fuck up so you don’t accidently say something incorrect (because no one can avoid that at three AM) and get tagged for misleading law enforcement.  With the number of incidents where someone is never charged for a crime other than misleading law enforcement, it’s good advice – or not, if you’re able to perfectly recall every meeting and conversation you’ve had for the last ten years.

So PopeHat makes this excellent post and bullshit, aggregator-boy copies it whole-cloth onto his site.  PopeHat makes a polite comment about fair-use and copyright violations, to which dumbass-who-can’t-format-a-decent-post-twice-in-a-row responds with a bullshit rant.  The quote above is from PopeHat’s response post, which is well worth a read and addition to your RSS feeds.

And there’s a certain temptation to add canine-reach-arounds to my tag cloud, but I’ll resist.

In any case, the reason I was bringing this up was to start a post on copyright and fair-use for blog content, but as I type this, I realize that it’s pointless.  It’s really, really useless to even make the argument …

Because either you get that it’s not okay to copy someone else’s work in its entirety to your blog, even if you “give attribution” – or you don’t.

Either you get that even something as simple as a blog post was created by someone and they have the right to determine its use – or you don’t.

There’s no real way to change the “content should be free”-mentality, because people that think that way simply cannot understand ownership of an intangible.

People who create content deserve to control that content’s distribution.  Period.  They’ve traded a portion of their lives to create something that, hopefully, others find useful or entertaining.

Even this simple post, short as it is, represents a portion of my life that I traded to create it.  It represents time I could have spent doing other things …. like playing Halo: Reach with my girlfriend and listening to her yell “eat it old man!” after shooting me in the back of the head …

Okay … yeah … it’s a fair trade … 

Libya: I Agree with Michael Moore? OMG! WTF?!

Maybe it was last night’s Supermoon or maybe the coming Rapture on May 21 effecting my brain, but Michael Moore and I are close to almost being in agreement on United Nations intervention in Libya.  Sort of.  Maybe.  For different reasons.

Okay, so I can retain my self respect a bit after reading his tweets and reasoning on the subject, since I don’t agree with his 9/11 and WMD and Daddy lunatic comments, but in general I have to add my voice to his in questioning why and under what possible justification we’re involved in attacking Libya.

More like the 1991 Gulf War than the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the action against Libya has real international participation and support from the United Nations … but why?

Libya has not attacked a neighboring country in any way.  Yes, there is an internal uprising.  Yes, I support the Libyan people’s right to demand change.  Yes, Qaddafi [or however the hell the media is spelling his name this week] is a comical brutal, laughing-stock tyrant (despite his awesome taste in bodyguards).

But none of this changes that it is purely an internal matter for Libya.  (Unless the bodyguards need liberating, in which case I’m signing up for the insertion extraction mission.)

The 1991 Gulf War involved Iraq invading neighboring countries.

9/11 was backed by the Taliban which, in my opinion, justifies giving that group something else to think about, such as a platoon of Marines lobbing grenades into their cave.

The 1991 Gulf War never actually ended (a cease-fire is not a peace treaty) and Hussein did not comply with the terms of that cease-fire, so 9/11, WMDs and Daddy aside, kicking his ass out in 2003 was simply the final consequence of 1991.

But none of this applies to Libya – and so, partisan politics aside, I simply don’t understand why we (the US) and the International Community feel justified in attacking Libya at this time.

There was no “no-fly zone” over Beijing after Tiananmen Square --  does the International Community only support popular uprisings in countries that don’t sit on the UN Security Council?

Oh … yeah …

But what about, say, Miami Cuba?  There’s strong support for an uprising against Castro in South Florida, which is almost in Cuba, so do we only support the overthrow of dictators who don’t have strong ties to a country that sits on the UN Security Council?

Oh … yeah …

Okay, so maybe the conflict in Libya has escalated to the use of military weapons, which didn’t happen in 1989 at Tiananmen Square (well, at least for one of the sides).

And Cuba is fairly low-key as far as tyranny and oppression go … not a lot of air assaults going on there, after all.

So maybe it’s just the fact that the uprising and Qaddafi have escalated things to the point where truly large numbers of people are going to die, sort of like Rwanda in 1994 when the United Nations Security Council …

Oh … yeah …

So … why the fuck are we bombing Libya?