View original postView original postThe dem gerrymandered districts are much more visually gerrymandered, they look like Ink Blot tests or the blood spatter pattern on a wall after, presumably, one of the redistrict committee blew their own brains out in frustration. The caveat on that, to be fair, is that Blue territory is very compact, much less than 1% of the land area, so when they're gerrymandering its much more visually obscene then the GOP's large rural versions. The GOP can add a pretty red chunk by just grafting on an entire rural county of 50k people that's bigger then NYC, the Dems usually need to slice down an urban road half a mile wide to get to a spot a mile in diameter that's got a demographical tilt to them and 100k people.
Yes, I always hate bringing that up because I would sincerely say that the Dems do gerrymander worse then the GOP, which is sort of like comparing Hitler-Stalin-Mao admittedly, and the visual appearance of those districts is what we use to prove it but its not really the best proof. The cautionary there though is that most 'objective' district concepts, which are sincere, basically are far more likely to create a republican flavored map because they typically operate by adding land parcels out from some starting points geometrically rather than, say, following a river or highway which is what populations generally do and city boundaries often do. A township in my area is, barring a big river or lake, a square, 8 km a side. Further west it's typically ~10 km, 6x6 mi. The villages incorporated inside them look like no such thing, take this map, only one of those especially craggy corporate boundary lines is a river. Those villages (<5000 pop) and 3 cities (5k+) annexed mostly by water pipes and dead end residential roads. FYI the colored-in sections all have equal population +/- 3.1%
View original postView original postIn any event both sides do it as much as they can whenever they can, and the population is so mobile in address and outlook over a decade between census and redistricting that planning for 'tomorrow' is an exercise in futility. People often talk about changing up districing so it was more objective and computer-controlled but that's not the answer. The better answer is to draw up visually appropriate districts all about 50-200% of the ideal size and just give reps a vote that isn't 1. Then you just divide an area into 2 if it jumps above twice the ideal and otherwise my congressmen has 1.22 votes, or 122 votes or whatever an our neighboring district has .965 or 97 or whatever and the next census the districts don't change, just the voting power does. So long as all the districts are close enough in size that you don't have some congressmen with 10 times as many people getting his speaking time on the floor curtailed for some minor district it works out just fine and its not like having a congressmen have 1,235,768 votes while the guy next to him has 789,123 votes would be a huge calculation issue. Not only could the simplest computer keep a running tab of their total votes faster then they could raise their hand or push a button but even a single clerk having to do sums out of a table with pencil and paper could do the bloody math in minutes on the off chance the capital needed to vote after a massive EMP strike blew out even hand calculators.
View original postThe idea has its merits, but I don't think I need to tell you it'll never fly - too complicated for people's taste (and it'll get more complicated still when you get into points like whether you should count all inhabitants, or only inhabiting nationals, or only actual voters, and so on). Some countries do employ voting systems that seem surprisingly complex to outsiders - the Australian Senate voting with its several preferences comes to mind - but this one I really can't see being applied anywhere.
You're likely right, but I do think it is the inevitable terminus of District Representation and I don't think its too bad an idea. I got a lot of practice gaging comprehension of phys/math word problems over the years so I can usually tell when people are following something and I've run it by people. The most common objection, too my surprise, was to my habit of using blocks of a thousand or decimals around 1, very commonly I just got a repeat of my own preference before I dumbed it down, "Why don't they just have votes equal to their district's population?"
As to who gets counted, that's pretty easy, nobody would ever count partial because the three-fifths baggage so its all in or no, citizen or not, binary. Non-voters always count though. My county has 101,000 people, 60,000 registered voters, about 42,000 that voted in Nov2012, and about 7,000 who showed up for the spring elections. Our norm for non-presidential General Elections is 22-30k. But man, woman, child, felon or non-voter are all counted. We've got a state pen in the district for instance, none of those guys are allowed to vote, they're convicted felons serving their term, but the ones who are citizens which is most are counted to the District population.
View original postRedistricting after the census being handled in a non-partisan way, though - that's entirely feasible.
Only if you can convince them to do a random seed as part of it. There's a lot of tricks you can do if you know how the computer algorithm functions which would have to be public and if its not computerized its probably going to be partisan.
View original postView original postWell we have actually defaulted before, back in spring of 1979 between two of the shutdowns. Something of an 'oops' moment more than brinksmanship but there is precedent. As to now, well I've no Crystal Ball. People are currently blaming the GOP more than the president as an average thing but they're both taking hits from the indies, obviously most GOP and Dem blame it entirely on the other side and they can bank on that support no matter how the wind blows. The indies though see this as a shads of gray argument with POTUS defending his unpopular bill and the GOP just being obstinate. In large measure the GOP's faring slightly worse in the public eye because Obama is seen as such a weak-kneed negotiator, especially post Syria/Russia that its assumed they are the ones not compromising since they think he rolls in a stiff breeze. As it drags on, I'd guess the GOP will be publicly saying what it wants and Obama will have to explain why he is standing his ground. If the GOP says "We want, in exchange for funding Obamacare, a removal of all the Exec Branch waivers granted from it" odds are good POTUS is screwed. The public is inclined to view those waivers as unfair and if he doesn't roll on them, in part, it makes Obamacare look even worse along with his position and makes it more like him desperately defending bad policy that has his name literally on it.
View original postHuh. I did not know that. And 1979 wasn't precisely a great year for the world economy either, as I recall... you'd have thought someone would have brought that up before.
Reporters are mostly lazy and people tend to think 'read an article' constitutes serious research. 
View original postHarsh, but not inaccurate, the assessment about how Obama is perceived. There are certainly very few instances of him winning clear victories over the GOP - and still less of victories that didn't look poisoned and/or Pyrrhic from the start (i.e. Obamacare).
It's harsh, and also deserved. He made a great deal of effort to coming off as the middle of the road neutral arbiter in his early dealings with congress when he was actually pretty polar relative to the senate. The price for that spin is when he did get victories they were portrayed as a left-leaning compromise and his defeats looked even more a GOP victories over him. This probably was beneficial spin at the time but it made him look weak to his own and of course the GOP is happy to insult him as weak, and indies simply accept it as true. Pile on his initial portrayal as the man who would make other countries love us again and how badly that turned out he essentially got himself pinned as looking like a pushover. I suspect history will be much kinder to him then Carter but he's not likely to have a positive legacy to point to. Even if we eventually go the single payer HC route as I now think likely I suspect ACA will be credited less as the first step and more as the monstrosity which convinced people 'better Single-payer then ACA, if neither is an option'.
Vast numbers of companies have gotten waivers, some bordering on cronyism, many quite reasonable like high-turnover companies.
View original postP.S.: If you haven't seen the latest xkcd yet, fairly sure you would enjoy that one.
Not a normal reader but yeah that's a good one. I've often pointed out that shadow conspiracies are unlikely because they'd require too much competence to realistically exist based on what we've seen of things.
