Votes Matter ... or Do They?

[Sinned]

Pdx, is the earth getting warmer? You seem to assume that it is and so do millions of others. Yet official figures show that there has been no increase since 1995. So it should be "global stasis" really.

[Ray]

The overwhelming majority of scientists would appear to believe so. Looking at temperatures since 1985 is a touch arbitrary, don't you think? Try going back a lot longer than that for the bigger trends.

Yes, climate change, while not fact, is the best explanation to describe and correlate observations.

[crfriend]

Rising water levels? How does this scene from Boston's waterfront look? And that's not even at the tide at its highest point -- and it's with flat-calm water. Put some wind behind that water coupled with some rainfall trying to drain into the harbour and you've got a recipe for trouble for development that's hard up against the water.

Climate change? Hogwash. It's all a Commie conspiracy to contaminate our precious bodily fluids.

[Jim]

Pdx, is the earth getting warmer? You seem to assume that it is and so do millions of others. Yet official figures show that there has been no increase since 1995. So it should be "global stasis" really.

What "official figures"? Last year was the warmest year on record. This year is also expected to be the new record warmest year.
There are fluctuations, but here's a graph of the data:

Zero represents average of base period 1951-1980.

[Tor]

Your None of the Above plan sure takes a cavalier approach to elected offices...

Exactly which part are you referring to? In the more detailed version I wrote, I suggested that terminating the office be a voting option on the ballot. If two elections in a row more than half of voters declare the office should be abolished, then isn't that a clear direction from those the government is supposedly in place for the benefit of, and made according to the very processes you profess to be good?

...so far overall the American Experiment has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination.

Well, let's see... For a time, it was the place of greatest individual freedom. Now, there seems to be in the US, for practical purposes, an oligarchy, with politicians who claim to represent the people, but only occasionally block or temporarily stall bills that grant big boons to big business when there is a major hullabaloo raised. Politicians, per polls, seem to be some of the least trusted folk in the entire country. If The Constitution hasn't enabled this, then it has certainly been powerless to prevent it. Various scholars strongly suspect the imminent collapse of the country, often citing historical parallels with other fallen greats of their era. All this in less than two and a half centuries.

I'm sorry, life is compromise, as my first landlord explained to me. Your proposal would make the perfect, which is never achievable, the enemy of the good enough.

It seems in my reading of the Civil Rights era it was in part the more extreme voices who paved the way for less radical (compared to the mores of the day) ideas to seem moderate enough and take root. Sometimes the lack of perfect can be the enemy of the good. Isn't SC itself a place to discuss and support the perfect in the realm of men's fashion freedom?


Here's a question for you: If humans are too careless, stupid, and malicious to be trusted to do the right thing, how can the situation be improved by taking a subset of those same careless, stupid, and malicious humans and giving them the power and perceived moral right to forcibly control everyone else?

[crfriend]

It seems in my reading of the Civil Rights era it was in part the more extreme voices who paved the way for less radical (compared to the mores of the day) ideas to seem moderate enough and take root. Sometimes the lack of perfect can be the enemy of the good. Isn't SC itself a place to discuss and support the perfect in the realm of men's fashion freedom?

Indeed "the perfect can be the enemy of the good", but that's no reason to aim high to start with and to keep trying to reach it. We'll never get there, mind, but by striving we can make things better for everybody not just a select few. The notion of aiming low just to guarantee "success" is a fool's errand and does nothing but cheapen things for all involved. It's the "new think" mantra of risk-removal out in full view; one would think the sun would shrivel it up like the vampiric notion that it is. Without risk there can never be progress; sometimes even without risk one can't even stay put. So some level of aspiration is required lest we fall completely and utterly into abject despair. You don't suppose that the current "Opioid Epidemic" has something to do with the fact that there's no hope left for a lot of folks, do you?

Here's a question for you: If humans are too careless, stupid, and malicious to be trusted to do the right thing, how can the situation be improved by taking a subset of those same careless, stupid, and malicious humans and giving them the power and perceived moral right to forcibly control everyone else?

Concentrated stupidity. What a beautiful thought. Poetic, even. Sort of like the scene from Time Bandits when the Supreme Being cautions his minions at the end, "Be careful with that. That's concentrated evil." Art imitating modern "humanity" indeed.

[crfriend]

Here's another take about the way that things may have become skewed in the US government. It doesn't address the way that congress is behaving, but may offer some insight into other ways that republics are brought down.

Rise of the Reactionary is also an interesting -- and disturbing read exploring the rise of neocons in the USA. Like the article in the Boston Globe, it doesn't go into how things are actually steered, but the neocons have certainly been a useful foil -- and a disposable one, as well -- to keep eyes off the real goings on, and that's where all the money and wealth has ended up.

However, the "Princeton Oligarchy Study" hits very, very close to home, and including Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913 and some trivial extrapolation yield extraordinary, and truly disgusting, insights into the actual running of things.

Anybody who actually believes that the United States has any "moral authority" hasn't been paying attention for a couple of decades. Or, as George Carlin once famously put it, "The reason they call it 'The American Dream' is that you have to be asleep to believe it!" To paraphrase from Ronald Reagan, "The bombing begins in three weeks."

[Pdxfashionpioneer]

I spent the last 2 hours writing a very long response to Carl and Tor and for some reason the Internet decided to vaporize it and kick me out of the Café. At 3 in the morning I'm not about to try to reconstruct what all I said. So here's the Reader's Digest version. It's probably a better read for it anyway.

Tor,

'Fess up, the main purpose of your "None of the Above" proposal is to register your disdain for the candidates that are presented to you. From there it becomes a solution in search of a problem. People not being happy with the candidates being presented by the two major political parties has nothing to do with the need for the office they're running for. The current national election is a perfect example. Are you going to tell me that just because the Republicans and Democrats succeeded in nominating the two most unpopular and least trusted Presidential candidates in history that all of a sudden we don't need a President at all?

Because it seems to me that the one condition (unpopular candidates) has nothing at all to do with the other (necessity of the office). Consequently, the one determining the other is at best, nonsensical and if it were to be acted upon, probably suicidal on a national scale.

As it is, Bernie's success has shown Hillary that there's a lot of people upset with the hand the current economic system has dealt them. And The Donald's success has shown both parties there are a lot of people who are so pissed off they simply don't care how flawed Trump is or isn't, they want to be heard!

And Carl,

Please reread your posts and mine.

I said in so many words I have said that I agreed with you about the current structure of our economy. As soon as the Occupy Movement hit the news I saw how almost incomprehensibly out of whack the income distribution has become and figured out instinctively how much of a threat that is to our system of government and our society. Not to mention our middle class livelihoods.

What I have said all along is that your posts read like there's a smoke-filled room God knows where full of unfathomably rich puppet-masters pulling the strings on everything. In addition, they are so clever they can put up strawman candidates and knock them down so precisely that the puppet masters get exactly what they want and the rest of us don't have a clue.

When I called you out on that, you said oh no, no, no. I meant the economy is so out of whack all of this happens by autopilot. Except, that isn't what you have been saying and you still haven't connected the dots in a such a clear-cut, convincing manner that I can see how the 1% reliably get from point A to point B.

I know good and damned well they've got a lot of power personally and even more collectively, but if you line them up end to end, they point in all directions.

My exhibit A is The Donald. The man's as rich as Croesus and he couldn't gather up enough of his own money nor attract enough of his cronies' to outspend either Bernie, who was financed by average citizens, or Hillary, who is most definitely financed by fat cats, but nonetheless she is now championing much of Sen. Sanders' platform. How does that work?

It's called democracy. More accurately, the workings of a democratic republic. As expensive as campaigns are, dollars still don't vote, only people do. And as charismatic as Trump may be and Hillary isn't, there's no beating the wisdom of the crowds.

Deep Throat's advice, "Follow the money," is still sound, but it takes you to places as quirky as the folks who contribute it!

And we're certainly living proof of how quirky folks can get!

[Tor]

It's often prudent to write long messages elsewhere, or at least to copy them to clipboard before attempting to post.

Dave, if you were paying attention, I actually suggested two separate NotA options - one merely registering a dislike for all of the candidates (and which might trigger a re-vote with the original crop disqualified), the other specifying that the office should be abolished - and further limited that by requiring the latter to win the vote twice in a row to permanently abolish the office. The only conflation of the two options I recall was counting Office Abolishment votes also as candidate rejections, which I think a very clear implied vote. If one thinks the office shouldn't exist, then all the candidates are obviously thought unfit to hold the office.


Nah, there's no smoke-filled room of unfathomably rich. Just some friendly golf matches and expensive dinners, with a few conferences and plenty of board room meetings. I forget where I saw it, but I recall reading a study which found that (most of?) the big corporations were all basically owned by each other in assorted branching paths. Sure, on the face of it, the players look like they're pointing in all directions, but strip a few layers and they're all clearly pointed in the same direction: using the machinery of government to profit at the expense of everyone else, as demonstrated by the Princeton Oligarchy Study linked by Carl.

[crfriend]

I spent the last 2 hours writing a very long response to Carl and Tor and for some reason the Internet decided to vaporize it and kick me out of the Café. At 3 in the morning I'm not about to try to reconstruct what all I said. So here's the Reader's Digest version. It's probably a better read for it anyway.

If one is composing something that's very complex or highly detailed it's usually best to compose off-line, do your proofreading then, and once happy with it, copy/paste into the composition window, check for formatting problems, and then hit submit. If I'm writing anything that's going to take more than a few minutes that's what I do.

Sometimes, creative use of the browser "back button" can get you back to the page with your text still intact, at which time it can be copied into the "copy buffer" and subsequently "pasted" in once you've logged back in.

Please reread your posts and mine.
[...]
What I have said all along is that your posts read like there's a smoke-filled room God knows where full of unfathomably rich puppet-masters pulling the strings on everything. In addition, they are so clever they can put up strawman candidates and knock them down so precisely that the puppet masters get exactly what they want and the rest of us don't have a clue.

I fear we have been "talking at each other" instead of "with each other" -- which is a very common problem in on-line fora.

The full gist of my idea is that the level of wealth that the elites have confers power unto them that the general "working stiff" simply does not have access to. These individuals likely aren't in active collusion, but because their interests are very much in common the overall effect -- which is observable -- is what becomes visible. I allude to the notion all the time that "the candidates are on the payroll" (or, to be slightly more crass, "have been bought") and that's also likely not the case, but any one of the candidates who voted against the desires of the wealthy would not hold a seat for very long. The observable effect is that bills that appease the common interests of the elites always pass quietly whilst bills that appeal mainly to the general public get fought over and nothing seems to get done.

The above came out of a thought-experiment I started playing with back during the (first) Clinton administration (second term) when a common mantra was, "The system is broken". Nature, and humans, abhor things that are broken; humans actively fix things, and nature uses extinction as a powerful tool. The former is active, the second passive (nature has no will). So, with that in mind, I asked the question, "What happens if the system not only is not broken, but is, in fact, working perfectly?" This led to an immediate secondary question of, "If the system is working perfectly, who is it working for?" This after some contemplation and further study (and a whopping big tax bill one year) pointed up the notion that the only individuals that the system was working for are the folks who are already fabulously wealthy (There is a distinction here between "wealthy" and merely "filthy stinking rich"; "old money" vs. "nouveau riche" and all.) and have access to those who "hold power". The implication here is that those who "hold power" do so because they have benefactors willing to support them. This has a subsequent knock-on effect that the ones "holding power" quite naturally become beholden to the benefactors, naturally wanting to hold onto that position, and (possibly) subconsciously "looking after" the benefactors' interests. So, conspiracy is not required; collusion is to an extent, but not conspiracy.

Of note is that this idea was already fully formed before the "Occupy Movement" came on the scene (and was subsequently gassed and pepper-sprayed off the streets). "Occupy" likely was an offshoot of John Edwards' "Two Americas" thesis. Unfortunately, both got the numbers wrong; the actual physical number of the "elites" possibly amounts to about 500 families, or about 0.001% of the population. So the 99% versus the 1% is rather off the mark. These days, if you're not born with a billion dollar trust fund [0] you're a nobody.

Also of note is that under my operating hypothesis, ethics and ethical behaviour can have no place; it's got to be bald bare-knuckle competition and the winner will take the spoils. Had ethics been playing a role things would not have gotten to the point where they are now; and while most folks play with at least some notion of ethics, that does not apply in business where it's all about profit and acquisition with precisely no care whatsoever about what damage may be done.

So, there it is. No vast conspiracy, just human nature with humanity mostly removed and a lot of money added. As the fictional character of Gordon Gecko pointed up, "Greed works. Greed is good." That was supposed to be a warning; instead, it became a mantra. Money, after all, is power in a capitalist system.

It's also how republics and open societies in general are undermined and fall.


[0] This points up precisely how lousy a businessman Trump is. He gambled -- and lost -- most of his billion-dollar trust fund and it was down to his daddy's accountants to make the best of the situation using rules specifically intended to benefit that class of individual. At least this rule has now been exposed for the travesty it is. Needless to say, nothing will get done about it, and how many other similar rules are in place that we don't yet know about is open to conjecture.

[Yonkas]

Pdx, is the earth getting warmer? You seem to assume that it is and so do millions of others. Yet official figures show that there has been no increase since 1995. So it should be "global stasis" really.

Sorry, but that's not true. That argument has been debunked numerous times. There is no "global stasis" or as it is better known, "pause". Any flat/downward trendlines plotted from 1995 onward characteristically have slopes that are smaller or as large as their uncertainties, which is almost never a good thing when you are measuring. At best, they tell us that the slope could be positive, flat, or negative.

The period from 1995 to the present is simply not statistically significant enough to reliably tell us how the climate is changing. For that, you need larger time periods, which are generally taken to be 30 years or longer. A while ago, in an argument with another person who did not accept the consensus, I made a nice little image, using the WoodforTrees site, that demonstrated how unreliable measuring climate trends with this magnitude of time interval is.

http://imgur.com/kM4UGjI
The above is an image of trendlines plotted from 1995 onward (I believe for a specific month, but I forget which one). You can see how wildly they vary from year to year.

http://imgur.com/9x9YvaR
However, if you plot the trendlines, starting from 1980 through 1990, you see that they get much more stable, which means that they are more reliable.

Likewise, the further back you go, the more the more stable the trendlines get. Essentially, they CONVERGE to a specific slope. This stability is precisely why we insist that it is happening, because it doesn't disappear over long periods of time. Putting it another way, we know from the trendline that ON AVERAGE, the temperature will increase by a certain amount from year to year. It's those short periods of time that can be misleading. (But even here you need to be careful. Raw climate data is also fraught with systematic error, so getting a converging line is just one step. For example, there is a well known systematic bias which produces a cooling period in between 1940 and 1970).

I have already probably written too much (SKIRTS. There, happy, now?), but I will make one more point. There is A LOT of misinformation spread by climate skeptics about climate data (actually, about climate science in general) and the methods scientists used to understand it. On prevailing myth is that the data is "cooked" or "doctored", but in reality, it is no more doctored than a photo would be if I took its original and removed the noise to reveal something closer to the true image. Indeed, noise is a small part of a much larger problem--which is that climate data is afflicted by lots of different types of systematic bias, as I noted earlier. Climate Scientists are less frauds doctoring photos, and more detectives, painstakingly analyzing data from all angles, and piecing together the most likely picture of how things really are.

[dillon]

Do votes matter...?

Regarding the supreme court appointees. I don't want Republican justices, I don't want Democratic justices. I want justices that rule based on the letter of the constitution of our nation- point blank. I find it disgraceful that we have a partisan high court. That being said, I have an interest in justices that are more liberal minded, though I disagree with the notion on principle, it would be better than mandatory Protestantism imposed on everyone. Although I will admit that Trump may surprise us yet.

If you want justices that rule on the letter of the constitution the last thing you want is democratic appointees. If Hillary gets in and she appoints a liberal democrat to the court. In a very short time the constitution as we know will cease to exist. The job of the supreme court is to rule on cases based on what is written in the constitution not adjust the constitution to what is fits in the current social climate.
I do not like to foster conspiracy theories but no way do I believe that a certain recent death was self inflicted

The Constitution is not a perfect document, and its authors knew as much. They understood that attitudes and goals change, and that's why they included in the document the instructions for revising and reforming the inevitable issues and needs and social change that the Constitutional framers could not foresee. That process is the Constitutional Convention, and I have no doubt that Jefferson, hamilton, Adams and others are rolling over in their graves to know that we have never utilized that process. The founders erred in presuming that the nation would be governed by reason-oriented and self-sacrificing patriots, and not by the McConnells, McCains, Kennedys, Bushs etc who are essentially professional (i.e. lifetime-career) politicians. The professionalism of politics, and the consolidation of power in the Federal Government have made the dream of a major revision of the document essentially impossible; the two-party system coupled with a rapid-fire media that has discovered the profit in political drama, means that even the most general agreement on principles cannot happen.

Therefore, we have a constitutional reform process driven by the Judiciary. But, despite the whining of the right-wingers, The Court, until Scalia's demise, was not a liberal court, and today, thanks to a partisan political decision by the majority party, it is a uniformly split court. It is simply silly to think that anyone appointed to be a Justice was raised and educated in, or has since operated in an ideological vacuum. There is no such thing as "justices that rule on the letter of the constitution" and there never has been. Whenever some right-winger starts babbling that nonsense, we immediately understand is is merely propagandized code for "Politically conservative Republicans" and has absolutely nothing to do with any possibility of an impartial court. So please do us a favor and abandon that nonsensical rhetoric...we all see right through it.

We do need broad Constitutional reform, because the 230 year old Constitution simply isn't functionally grounded in the realities of today's America. It is a trusting document that infers a level of faith in humans to which they seldom prove worthy. We must also remember that the document was written in a time when the nation was less a "nation" than an affiliation of former colonies; it required a bloody Civil War to change the functional concept of this country from "These United States" to "The United States." Yet I think few would argue that that change was not essential or that the evolution of governmental authority has not placed us among the global dominants, at least for this transient era of history. Sans the changes, both to the Constitution and apart from the Constitution, we might still have racially-based slavery and women might not vote. And a student of history knows that conservatives of thar era resisted every change; they still do; they are still just as wrong now as they were then, but it's human nature to fear change, despite it being in the collective best interest. We could hardly have united to fight wars abroad or reduce economic disasters at home without the various deviations from the original Constitution, so imagine what the face of the world might look like. If that consolidation of authority had not happened, we would not have the very good national life we have.

It saddens me to hear the whining of those who have apparently drunk the kool-aid of right wing rhetoric. It's easy to spot them; they all know every tagline, slogan, and buzz-word by heart now, and always regurgitate them verbatim, as if image is more virtuous than intellect. They become especially annoying when they keep simplistically pretending that they can somehow legislate away all the social evolution that has already happened. Some folks need that delusion, I suppose, because without all the media-fed imagery and rhetoric they could not function. Sadly, accepting that version of reality demands that they ignore both history and economics, and deny the inevitability of social change. I would hope by now it is apparent that if we want to stay a competitive force in the global economy, we have to advance the freedoms and opportunities that attract the young and energetic and creative from around the world. We have to stop trying to protect by-gone industries, stop pretending that we can revive the lifestyles of yesteryear, and embrace change. If not, it will steamroll us. The steps this country needs to take in order to hold our place are the very things that Trump wants to stop or reverse. Neither candidate has a license on intelligent policy, but I at least trust Clinton's competence and stability, despite her many character flaws, way way way above Trump's questionable competence and his clear and disturbing Pathological Narcissist Disorder. They both choose to lie, but at least Clinton cognitively knows the difference between fact and fantasy; Trump clearly doesn't.

If you look at the main causes of Rome's decline, despite what sanctimonious pulpit-politicians generally claim, little of it had to do with decadent behavior; Rome thrived for centuries of decadence. Most of Rome's fall had to do with economic protectionism and the failure to integrate natural human migration into an overly rigid social order. The decline came because of reactionary politics - emperors trying to protect the economy by establishing a rigid and unyielding social order - and the failure of the empire to adjust and adapt to social evolution.

[crfriend]

The Constitution is not a perfect document, and its authors knew as much. They understood that attitudes and goals change, and that's why they included in the document the instructions for revising and reforming the inevitable issues and needs and social change that the Constitutional framers could not foresee.

Indeed. In fact, if one reads it in the proper frame of mind, it's a masterpiece of how to keep the landed gentry (the elites) in power to the exclusion of all others.

Note also, that there was much argument as to whether the nascent United States were to be a commerce-oriented nation or an agrarian one. Thomas Jefferson championed the latter and Alexander Hamilton the former. Of note is that both systems are capable of -- and have produced -- glorious good and heinous wrong. Jefferson's vision produced stability in the early days of the USA but also the Confederacy and its rules on slavery; Hamilton's vision produced prosperity for a middle class, but also the travesties of the Gilded Age and where the USA is today as an oligarchy. I'm pretty sure if it were possible, ALL of the "founding fathers" would be spinning in their graves with several of them calling for an immediate overthrow of the current system (that is, if they even recognised it as their progeny, which they might well not).

Therefore, we have a constitutional reform process driven by the Judiciary. But, despite the whining of the right-wingers, The Court, until Scalia's demise, was not a liberal court, and today, thanks to a partisan political decision by the majority party, it is a uniformly split court.

It's "evenly split" at the moment, but is merely waiting to see which pack of rascals will appoint the next "justice" packing the court to foster their own agenda (which will dovetail into further erosion of civil liberty and a further destruction of the middle class).

We do need broad Constitutional reform, because the 230 year old Constitution simply isn't functionally grounded in the realities of today's America.

Do we? The demographics of the USA today look nothing like what they looked like 230 years ago. It might be entirely safe to say that a governmental structure similar to that of Pinochet's Chile or Argentina's Peron might be more appropriate, or an oligarchical system such as that in today's Russia (which is hot it's operating now) might be more appropriate. The similarities between the modern-day USA and Germany in the 1930s are striking, although I'd really rather not see things go down that path. How about Assad's Syria? Idi Amin's Uganda?

So, what would a Constitutional Convention bring about given the facts on the ground now? Would it produce something workable for the vast mass of the population, or would it be entirely lopsided in favour of a small group? Would it produce nothing at all? Would it cause a revisit of the 1860s (and don't think for an instant that might not happen, save that this time it'd be the south that'd be the aggressor)? Would you want to roll those dice? (And the dice may be loaded, and possibly tossed into a corner that not everybody can see.)

It saddens me to hear the whining of those who have apparently drunk the kool-aid of right wing rhetoric. It's easy to spot them; they all know every tagline, slogan, and buzz-word by heart now, and always regurgitate them verbatim, as if image is more virtuous than intellect.

Contemplate that the brighter of the founding fathers espoused strong public education and an intelligent electorate. Public eduction in the USA have been under vicious and unrelenting assault and degradation for 20 years now federally, and longer than that at the various state levels. The average citizen likely now cannot draw their own opinion based on what's presented to them. Is that "informed"? I posit not -- and this is by design, and has been brought about by the neocons and the reactionaries. An intelligent and informed electorate is precisely what the reactionaries fear and loathe.

Which brings us to today. We have a system that's managed to produce two "electable" candidates, both of whom are widely reviled and universally distrusted. One's a narcissistic megalomaniac and the other has committed crimes that would have gotten anyone in this community disappeared faster than you can say, "classified?", but who got a pass on that one from the Institution of government because of the candidate's status. The other two sets are in there for comic relief. Is that any sort of "choice"? Whichever candidate "wins" in early November, the general public will be the loser.

Perhaps it is time to hold a Constitutional Convention and finally and concretely affirm that the place is an oligarchy and get it over with. Enough of the charade.

[Darryl]

I really doubt a Constitutional Convention is needed.

I'm all for conservative SCOTUS justices, defined as "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and "that's nice, have you thought about the unintended consequences," and possibly "try again after you figure out how to fund it without unbalancing the budget," and "raise taxes? National plebiscite required." Federal, State and local mandatory balanced budgets. And possibly the groundwork to take Federal, State and local one-time "offerings" ("passing the plate" for voluntary donations) for special needs.

-- A Bible-thumping, gun-totin, skirt-wearing Southerner

[dillon]

I guess the point that I intended is simply that whining about having a liberal court or a conservative court is the mark of those who don't have the courage to "roll the dice" as the framers provided. Neither side is certain they would prevail in doing so, therefore both prefer to let the courts do the heavy lifting. When the courts act, the losers always triumph, because they have earned their whining rights, ignoring their own sad abdication of Constitutional responsibility.

As far as the notion of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" please tell that to the states who are trying to reshape the national landscape via gerrymandering. In the last two congressional elections, the total number of votes cast for Democrats far exceeded the total number of votes cast for Republicans, yet the GOP still controls the House. That's only possible by gaming the system through the drawing of districts at the state level. So, in that regard the election is indeed "rigged". But the next time Trump whines about it, he better be pointing his pudgy little finger at his own party.

In NC, the GOP, having employed the best demographers and statisticians in the country to draw electoral maps that secured long-term congressional and legislative majorities for themselves, has now learned that every silver lining indeed has its dark cloud. In this case, the GOP has found that redistricting to secure a statistically indomitable advantage may have rendered debate between Democrats and Republicans pointless in the legislature, but also has its own unintended consequences. Once the debate is no longer between liberal and conservatives or between two parties, it then becomes a debate between garden-variety conservatives and insane hard-core conservatives within one party. So the NC GOP ended up in an ideological circle-jerk culminating in periodic ejaculations of sanctimonious ignorance, the greatest of which is that travesty of legislation called HB2. And though most of the GOP legislators are still insulated safely in their gerrymandered cocoons, their extremism is threatening to take out their statewide office-holders, Governor, Lt. Governor, judges, and possibly even a US Senator. Not that they don't deserve a good trouncing, especially that ineffectual excuse for a governor NC currently has. He ran as a reforming moderate, but soon butted heads with the "I'm a nuttier conservative than you are" pissin' match that has become business as usual in state legislatures where religious extremists run the show; unable to beat back the nut-job theocrats in the legislature, he capitulated and joined them. He had the opportunity and responsibility to be the moderating adult in the situation, but he failed miserably.

So how about we have Constitutional reform requiring Congress to establish uniform rules for the drawing of electoral districts? Then let the chips fall where they may. That will go at least a little way toward returning the focus of an election back where it belongs. Can anyone really think our country is well-served by one-party governments?