Re: One Day at Home Depot

Frank,

Maybe she’s a Red state agent, trying to subvert our beautiful Blue state progressiveness. She’s just not very good at the job.

California Red staters are feeling mighty oppressed these days. The best they can do is a rock star governor who’s really not very good at his job and who avoids the (kaff!) “culture war” nonsense like the plague. Recent studies find that even if the Governator Arnie’s attempt at a Tom De Lay-like redistricting wins, which looks doubtful, the Dems would still hold a majority in the state Legislature.

It’s mainly due to people like me, college-educated and/or colored moving in off the coast. Last February a spokesman for the Greenlining Institute, which works to provide low-income and “people of color” access to financial services told me that of the one million African Americans in Southern California, only 200,000 lived in the “traditional” core areas of Compton and South Central L.A. So the local Red staters are feeling screwed.

In response to this, they’ve come up with an idea which is rotten for just California, but a pretty good one for the country as a whole.

Their idea is to apportion electoral votes by congressional district, not just statewide. Maine and Nebraska do this, and it ends up with an electoral college vote more representative of the state than the current winner-take-all. It means that the islands of blue and red inside every state could have a voice, and an effect on the statewide total.

All 2004 we kept hearing about ‘battleground states.’ In short, both candidates spent most of their time and money in around ten states, a fifth of the Union. California, New York and Texas, were completely ignored. Under this plan, every state’s electoral votes are in play, which means we’d get a truly “national” campaign, and actually less of this divisive Blue vs. Red stuff, which makes for cool maps on CNN and Fox, but really don’t help national discussion or truly represent the states themselves.

As the lady at Home Depot proved.

Terry Preston

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From: Frank Hay [mailto:anonymous-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 8:27 PM
Subject: [From the Mountaintop] 10/21/2005 08:23:07 PM

"White Power in Black Hell."

You saw this in CA? Sad.

It's inherently contradictory.

Let's not tell them.

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Posted by Frank Hay to From the Mountaintop at 10/21/2005 08:23:07 PM