Dianne Feinstein Continues to be a Good Argument for Term-Limits

I predict a biting reply along the lines of 'no u! '

No longer valid? Edit is your friend.

Why yes, unless they forsee it coming back and biting them in the ass.

In this case, if they do so, then they might force the Democrats to change those unwritten rules to the Democrats advantage or have it happen to them. Either scenario is not to their advantage. The last thing they want right now is for a mere majority to pass any changes. Manchin and Sinema are not enough to block that now.

@Volpone is a total pussy, he doesn’t reply

I think it might have something to do with @Ancalagon fucking him up so badly in the Seattle thread. He just hasn’t been able to muster anything other than a stupid one liner here and there. Anc broke him

LOL! What a coincidence, I just posted an update a minute before seeing this.

there's a distinct difference between shameful turnout, which I agree is a bad thing, and living in a system in which the officeholders have selected their voters to such an extreme they can never lose either their seat or their majority (except to a more extreme primary opponent)

Until THAT ends turnout only matters on the margins or in statewide/national races.

Also, while I don't dispute the idealism of "every citizen should be well informed and vote" the real world that we live in is that a considerable cohort of those who do vote believe the most insane stuff, a considerable portion (with a lot of overlap) don't let the information they have received overcome the animas that drives their vote, many vote in utter ignorance for the party their family or friends always voted for in the past and so forth.

There's no reason to assume that if 90% of the population turned out that this would change at all. Thus, there's no reason to assume outcomes would be better or that DiFi and Chuck wouldn't have gotten reelected

Key word being "primaried"

And in most cases you draw a primary opponent because you're not extreme/compliant enough for the base. It's not like Cantor or Cheney were not unfailingly conservative.

Redistricting by party and having the ability to “select voters” is corruption.

Districts should be drawn by computer based solely on population and geometry. And nothing else.

Disagree. WA has in its guidelines that when possible local and county political boundaries should be respected which makes sense to me.

Basically they start off trying to use only county lines to make districts. But if they have to divide a county then they try and make sure city lines are respected. If they have to break up a city (I think Seattle is only one) then try and do it along council district lines, etc, etc.

So you get something like this:



v

Most compact:

And when the computer loses it you confuse it like Kirk style?

The US also requires arbitrary things like a presidential candidate being born in the US and being 35 years old. Good luck killing either.

What does "by population" and " by geometry" mean?

Lanz can speak for himself, but I assume that he means "some base number of people, divided evenly across the state's population" and "as close to a standard sort of shape such as a rectangle/triangle/circle as is feasible" as opposed to random squiggles that are clearly intended to force some people in or out of a district for partisan advantage (i.e., the "salamander" of where the word gerrymander comes from.)

I can understand a certain attraction to respecting historical county boundaries. Logistically, it makes sense as counties tend to run elections to not have a district span counties. And there's something to be said for tradition.

At the same time, being bound with tradition also may mean being bound with various -isms that were in full effect when those traditions were established. Assuming the logistical challenges of dividing voters into strict grids by population could easily be overcome, wouldn't that be a more neutral way of setting districts?

I'm not opposed to keeping or killing either. Only "added to". Like, if you were born in Panama, to US citizens, you're a citizen. Even if your parents weren't in the military. If you were born in Mexico and even if your parents came here without papers while you were a minor but have lived as and conformed to US laws in adulthood, then sure, you can be a candidate. The age thing ... I'd lower it and include "can't be older than ..."

Oh hey look, there's those South Eastern places where that awful wine comes from

And hey, whaddaya know ... Republicans are moving to block Schumer from replacing her on Judiciary.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/17/dianne-feinstein-judiciary-committee-00092360

Anything to facilitate maintaining their grip on minority rule.

So in her delusional state she did an RBG and is fucking up the courts for decades because of her ego.

Just let her stroke off the planet so we can be done with the worthless cunt.

First you need to know the population of the state of X. Say it's twenty million. Now you need to know how many representatives you have. Say the state of X has five. You divide those twenty million into five groups with as simple a set of geocoords as possible. Those coordinates define your lines, and hence your districts. In my simplified for your convenience example, you'd have five districts with four million people each. This would likely pull all the candidates for representative office toward the middle of the political spectrum, where most of the people are. Pandering to the fringes would get you insufficient votes, assuming high voter turnout.
This of course leaves out the entire "how many representatives should we have in total" debate. Many people seem to feel that the current House is too small, which I agree with. But if it gets too big - a few thousand representatives, say - it becomes unwieldy.

I don’t think you grok just how much heavy lifting those two sentences are doing. There are at least a few algorithms which could be used for this purpose and most of them have edge cases which produce geometrically worse outcomes than the current system in at least one state (usually Colorado, sometimes Oregon), usually things like very obtuse triangles, or long, skinny bubbles.

Yeah, it's fairly trivial to make unfair districts that look very simple and geometrical.

As long as the districts all have as close to the same number of people as practical, there shouldn’t be any “unfair” ones.

one of the problems is that the dispersal of people is "biased" when one party claims they are the rural option making the other the default urban/suburban option. When you start to draw towards population density you are going to get odd shapes due to rapidly changing density.

It used to be that rural agricultural representatives had different needs than urban and suburban development representatives. That meant a familiarity with one side or the other was preferable. However today we have more traveled people between the two and people who experience and understand issues on all sides so maybe those old ideas that kept rural areas and city areas developing for their own interests are now better able to communicate and districts should have both types of people to get both concerns represented in one local representative.

Enough of the lie that city people hate country people because it simply is not so. It also amazes me the idiots who say they are for agriculture and rural country people are the most eager to dump the city pollutants onto the rural bumpkins. Environmentalism should be the mantra of the farmer, but instead it is pollution, waste, and taking in waste from the big city.

I guess one question is how you define simplicity.

Arguably the simplest approach, shapewise, would be to just divide the state into latitudinal or longitudinal slices. Washington has eight representatives? Just start at the coast and start drawing straight lines (in Washington's case, probably longitudinal, because latitudinal would be even weirder) at whatever distance from each other results in each slice having the same population. In any state with more than two or three districts, I assume nobody would seriously advocate that approach.

Respecting local government boundaries makes sense because people within a city or a county generally have a certain commonality of interests and share elected officials at local levels; local media outlets also often define their coverage areas along county lines.

Feinstein is supposed to return to the Senate today.

I find it tends to be the other way around... hicks have a hate on for the city, even though they keep coming here to play and work-not too mention sending us all their unhoused and addicted because, I dunno, NIMBY?

the current provincial government also seems to revel in fucking the city over... like when they cut our council in half and redrew municipal wards to match provincial/federal ridings in shape and size.

here's mine of University-Rosedale




here's what it looked like before being redrawn



here's how we vote... note that the blue and red are some of the wealthiest properties in the country. Note also that they cut everything below Dundas street (i.e. an area that had traditionally voted "orange") while tacking on an entirely new neighbourhood that traditionally votes against the incumbent, but not for change.

Weekend at Bernie’s style.

"Weekend at Bernie's" is pretty much right on the nose.

Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dianne-feinstein-return-senate_n_645be374e4b03e16f1a07dda?hca

"Shingles" my ass. It's shameful, and I can't stand Feinstein, but she should be forceably retired immediately.

If her brains are really coming out of her ears, how would she know that she wasn’t a Senator anymore if her staff faked a resignation letter from her?

Some folks are saying that it is her staff that don’t want the music to stop so are convincing her to keep going.