Monkeyboy wrote:Republicans hate brown people....

And in a surprising twist, the bill language specifies that only rural areas are to benefit in the future from funding requested by the administration this year to continue a modest summer demonstration program to help children from low-income households — both urban and rural — during those months when school meals are not available.

Since 2010, the program has operated from an initial appropriation of $85 million, and the goal has been to test alternative approaches to distribute aid when schools are not in session. The White House asked for an additional $30 million to continue the effort, but the House bill provides $27 million for what’s described as an entirely new pilot program focused on rural areas only.

Democrats were surprised to see urban children were excluded. And the GOP had some trouble explaining the history itself. But a spokeswoman confirmed that the intent of the bill is a pilot project in “rural areas” only.

So they cut the brown people... um, I mean, the urban people, out of the program. I wonder why that would be the case. Hmmmm.

TenuredVulture wrote:So establishment Republicans kicked ass everywhere yesterday. Is this good or bad for their party?

jerseyhoya wrote:Brendan Boyle is way ahead in PA-13. I'd guess the Philly portion of the district is reporting early, but it'd take a lot for him to blow this edge.

His platform, as far as I could tell, was "I'm not a millionaire".

Race is called. He will fill the role that has been vacant since Patrick Murphy lost in 2010 - member of Congress who would not be out of place at a BSG tailgate.

ReadingPhilly wrote:I voted for McGinty. I liked her no bad mouthing the others style.

mozartpc27 wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:So establishment Republicans kicked ass everywhere yesterday. Is this good or bad for their party?

I think it has to be a good thing for the party. "Playing to the right wing of the party" type candidates (I think the "Tea Party" label for this is often misleading) basically cost the Republicans the Senate during this 2-year period. Looks like they learned their lesson.

If they hadn't gone that way, and instead gone for outlier conservative candidates (particularly of the social conservative sort), I think the Rise of the Libertarian Party that I keep thinking will happen might finally have occurred. Because I went to a mostly white, mostly secular, mostly rich college, I know a fair few Republicans - but they are almost all what I would call, broadly speaking, libertarian: they couldn't give a crap about abortion, gay marriage, if anything are even mildly against prayer in public school and anti-organized religion, in other words totally disinterested in all the normal social conservative bugaboos. The more the party nominates people who cling to that stuff, the more they alienate them and people younger than them.

Perhaps more to the point: I think there are many among my generation and younger, and even among my friends, who would consider voting Republican (because they lean that way economically), but who don't because of the extreme right of the party's more polarizing views. Granted, the left has an extreme wing as well, but they are both less visible and more likely to openly reject both parties as "corporatist" when they are seen and heard.

Monkeyboy wrote:Republicans hate brown people....

Redistricting is a perennial topic of political debate in the United States, and for good reason. House districts have important consequences. But the debate often bogs down over which maps are "gerrymandered" or "nonpartisan." I would argue that, while it has historical roots, gerrymandering is a useless concept in modern American politics. It confuses much more than in clarifies because there is no common agreement on a definition of gerrymandering. As a result, people end up talking past each other.

When thinking about districts, I always start with the six possible goals that David Butler and Bruce Cain list in their classic book, Congressional Redistricting:
Equal Population
Matching Natural and Political Boundaries
Compactness and Contiguity
Party Fairness (an unbiased seats-to-votes curve between the parties)
Ethnic Fairness (substantial numbers of minority ethnic group members elected)
Party Competition (close elections and party alternation in a substantial number of districts)
A central point Butler and Cain make is that it is generally impossible to achieve all these goals at once. In their words:
"...the problems involved in securing equitable solutions to reapportionment puzzles are complex because, at almost every point, principles or goals that everyone agrees to be desirable are in conflict with each other" (p. 65)

Gerrymandering was first used to describe a Massachusetts state senate district drawn in 1812 under Governor (and founding father) Elbridge Gerry to aid Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party. Because the district resembled a salamander, the Boston Gazette labeled it a gerrymander. Since that point, it has been all downhill in maintaining a widely accepted definition of gerrymandering.

The problem is that most contemporary people define a gerrymander as a deviation from the values that they wish districts would promote. But people disagree about which values those are. In Baker v. Carr (1962), the Supreme Court ruled that districts must have equal populations. So all plans now start by fulfilling goal #1, but people disagree about which of the five other goals maps should try to achieve. Whenever a map doesn't achieve their preferred goal, they call it gerrymandered. If two political writers are arguing about whether a map is gerrymandered, and one's goal is compactness and the other's goal is party fairness, they will talk past each other. Since people disagree about redistricting's goals, and thus what gerrymandering means, it is better to set aside the "gerrymandering" concept and just specifically discuss the values different maps emphasize or neglect.

For instance, currently Democratic voters are more prevalent in densely populated urban areas, while Republicans are more spread out in suburban and rural regions. Maps that maximize compactness are very advantageous to the Republican Party and thus lack party fairness. With all the Democrats packed into urban districts, many of their votes are wasted to produce excessive victory margins. Republicans are more spread out and thus win by smaller margins in a larger number of suburban and rural districts. On the other hand, this could be easily remedied by drawing long districts that combined urban, suburban, and even rural areas, so that fewer Democratic votes are wasted. But by improving party fairness, this would greatly reduce compactness.

By at least some plausibly important criteria, any plan will fall short. No statistical or computer technique, nor any nonpartisan commission, can avoid making a choice among goals. Relying on these methods rather than the legislative process to draw lines only gives the nonpartisan commissioners or those designing the computer algorithm the power to make this trade-off, whether they realize it or not. How we trade-off among goals is a moral and political choice, not a technical challenge.

Finally, this makes clear how redistricting can have important consequences. Political science has shown fairly conclusively is that redistricting is not a major cause of the growth in congressional polarization in the past several decades. The simplest way to see this is consider that polarization has increased almost as much in the Senate, with obviously fixed districts, as in the House. But just because it didn't cause our polarization, doesn't mean redistricting doesn't have consequences.

The tradeoffs involved in redistricting can still have big political effects. As discussed above, you could draw districts that favored Republicans by making them geographically compact and packing lots of Democrats into urban districts. This sacrifices party fairness, but achieves compactness and even allows for ethnic fairness, because you get some districts with high percentages of ethnic minorities. After the 2010 census, Republican state legislatures drew districts in just this way, producing a Republican bias in the national seats-to-votes curve. It is also theoretically possible to draw lines that pack Republicans into a small number of districts where many of their votes are wasted and spread out the Democratic vote. You would just have to sacrifice compactness and ethnic fairness.

Competitiveness versus incumbent protection is also a choice. You could draw lines so that most districts have a close to even partisan division with only a few safe seats. Or you could make almost all seats safe for long-term incumbents with just a handful of closely divided swing districts. But you couldn't have both, and to get either extreme, you would probably have to sacrifice compactness. Finally, if you wanted, you could even maximize party fairness by drawing lines so whichever party had the majority of votes was highly likely to win a majority of seats. But you would likely have to sacrifice compactness and ethnic fairness to do that.

But none of these possibilities is indisputably "gerrymandered" or "not gerrymandered." Nor is any indisputably "nonpartisan." These are all just different tradeoffs among many reasonable goals. You can achieve a lot through redistricting, just not everything at once.

WikiLeaks has threatened to unilaterally release the name of an as-yet unnamed country in which every cell phone call is recorded by the National Security Agency, despite the decision by other news outlets to withhold that information for fear of stoking violence.

That announcement comes after a war of words over Twitter between WikiLeaks and journalists at The Intercept, which reported Monday that the NSA collects cell phone metadata in Mexico, the Philippines and Kenya, and records and keeps for up to a month all cell phone calls in the Bahamas and one unnamed country. The Intercept declined to release the name of that country, the outlet says, due to “credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.” The Intercept report is based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
The Intercept is a media group launched earlier this year by a group of journalists including two of those originally granted access to the Snowden documents, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The existence of this specific NSA recording program, code named MYSTIC, was previously reported by The Washington Post, which declined to name any of the countries involved.

WikiLeaks’ threat to publish the identity of the redacted country, if credible, suggests the organization has obtained access to documents leaked by Snowden or has been informed of the country’s identity by someone with access to the documents. Snowden has said he did not leak documents directly to WikiLeaks, but the key players in both organizations—Greenwald, Poitras, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange—are well acquainted with one another.

GG - By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey. /GG
NSA is spying on Oprah! Stop the presses! But no, if you read all the way down to the 54th paragraph (!!) Greenwald tosses in a token mention of NSA’s rules about preventing data collection against U.S. Persons, whether or not they happen to be inside the U.S. There are very strict “minimization” procedures to eliminate the data that might’ve been inadvertently collected. Why? Because it’s illegal to spy on Americans without an individual warrant. And, by the way, Greenwald & Company noted that the SOMALGET program is, yes, legal.

The article refers to five nations where MYSTIC is used: the Bahamas, Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines and nation that Greenwald redacted because, to quote the article, “The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.”

jerseyhoya wrote:Our system of representation emphasizes individual representation over the party and representation of constituency in addition to the interest of the state/country. If you're going to draw districts, you're going to get imbalances. The political science lit looking into the post 2012 have argued pretty unanimously that geographic imbalances in the Dem coalition is responsible for Republicans controlling the House (even though it would be closer if Democrats had controlled redistricting in more states) - see here and here for a few. This is another decent, longer look at it that confirms your suspicion that Democrats have benefited from this in the past. On the flip side of the GOP edge in the House, Democrats seem to have a bit of an entrenched edge in the electoral college right now. Obama defeated Romney by 3.86% nationwide, but beat him by 5.36% in Colorado, which was the state that put him over 270. In 2008 the tipping point state was also Colorado, and Obama won it by 8.95% while winning nationwide by 7.26%.

Every system has its pluses and minuses. Nationwide proportional representation would eliminate the seat/vote bias, but would introduce all sorts of other negatives (as well as other positives). Statewide proportional representation would maybe keep some of the local representation ties, although the selection of who goes on the lists might place more control of the nomination in party elites rather than grassroots voters. Might need to increase the size of the House also to make the statewide proportional work as well.

Bucky wrote:Faux report explicitly to generate real outrage

tl;dr version: Fake story about Obama using a loophole and announces he's running for third term. PEOPLE BE PISSED!