This Sunday morning the tube was flooded with doctors and commentators responding to the nonsense of clowns like Governors Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida and Reeves of Mississippi, along with a plethora of other miscreants; all babbling about all the freedoms we are taking away from them by trying to keep them alive.
All the doctors, describing the situation, were very well mannered and respectful of the positions taken by a small company of denier idiots and I have not heard one refer to these fools as what they are, “imbeciles.” Maybe if we stop giving them respect and identify them as the self-serving morons they are, we will somehow bring this conversation to a point of reality.
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“Gerrymandering:” the dirtiest word in politics. Both parties use the term, which is always uttered in hushed terms because it is so underhanded. Sure it’s used way more by the Republicans but both parties use it. Everybody kind of understands what it means and how it works but a lot more aren’t exactly sure, so I’ll try to lay it out, as I understand it.
So you’ve got two voting districts, one strongly Republican and one just barely Democratic and you’ve got a Republican state legislature. The GOP state legislature takes a few very Democratic neighborhoods out of the barely Democratic district and moves them into the strongly Republican district. This makes no difference to the Republican district, which is so heavily GOP it just absorbs the new neighborhoods. But in the barely Democratic district losing the Democratic neighborhoods puts the Dems in the minority. So by moving a couple of neighborhoods from one district to another the GOP has now established two GOP districts where before they only had one. This also means the addition of one GOP House member and the loss of one Democratic House member.
The Republicans have been infamous for using this tactic for years but now, New York State is facing a situation where the Democrats can use it to change the makeup of a number of districts to an extent that they will be able to just about nail down the House in the next election. The question is, will they go all out or will they waste the opportunity? Maybe if they do go for it, the GOP will finally get to understand what an underhanded tactic it is and be more amenable to changing the statutes to eliminate the process.
What we really need to do is to lay out the voting districts according to a geographical, rather than a political criterion and then let them change only when there has been a huge numerical change in the population in one locality. I have long advocated making the district lines coincide with county lines and assigning the reps according to population level within those counties. There are other ways to accomplish this but once established the only way to change them should be with a significant population surge or loss. This may be too honest for the Republicans to stomach but we certainly should attempt something like it before the next presidential election.
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Gavin Newsome crushed the recall election in California this week and in doing so he made all 46 of the clowns running against him look like the turkeys they are. Yeah, that’s right 46! The lead clown was Larry Elder, that most improbable of all political animals, a black Republican, a man willing to sell out his race for personal gain. Just to illustrate Elder’s moral stature we found him talking about a rigged election even before he found out he had gotten his brains beat out. Just taking a page from the Mar-a-Largo playbook.
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The big uproar in DC this week is all about a phone call from General Mark Milley to his Chinese counterpart, assuring him that we had our nuclear codes under control despite the fact that then President, Donald Trump, was sending out all the vibes of a section 8 client on crack. This, of course has instigated all the treasonous Senators and congressmen who have been supporting the attack on our Capital to turn on Milley.
It’s truly ironic that these perpetrators of treachery should be so wound up in treason when it is they, themselves, who are our latest claimants to that dubious achievement.
What Milley did was see a problem and move to solve it. He understood that just about everyone in the world suspected that Trump was a candidate for the funny farm, and they were all terrified that he would go off the deep end and pull the nuclear plug in some cock-a-mamie shot at a coup.
Milley put his career on the line and did the right thing. And he did it the right way, not through an action that could go horribly wrong but by telling our opponents that we were not in an action mode and thereby removing tension from a very tense situation.
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What the hell is going on with the FBI? Our primary national investigation agency has stopped investigating. Right now there are two major controversies going on regarding the FBI’s failure to give due diligence to cases in which they should have been ass deep.
There’s a big storm brewing about their lack of investigation into the accusations of sexual impropriorities by Bret Kavanagh during his Supreme Court hearings. Accusations have been brought, which suggest, despite specific accusations by witnesses concerning Kavanagh’s conduct the FBI just let it ride, not doing any of the work they should have on such an important investigation.
There’s also the matter of the girls on the U.S. Olympic gymnastic team. The four young women who testified before congress the other day were very specific about the fact that they had contacted the FBI and the bureau had done nothing, thereby allowing more and more sexual assault by Dr. Larry Nassar, the Olympic pedophile and team doctor. Could it be that the agents are just embarrassed by sexual situations? Maybe the Bureau has to stop recruiting, as they have for decades, from Catholic Universities and start hitting the party schools.