With respect to the Indy Star’s editorial entitled: Terminate politics of district maps which suggests that California should end partisan Congressional district making, I’d just say: Texas first.

Partisan district making is a bad idea in every state, and it’s a reality in most states. Getting rid of it would be excellent in an ideal world. But, at least part of the move afoot in California to maximize the number of Democratic representatives from that state is in response to Tom DeLay’s successful effort to redistrict Texas — mid-decade — to add Republicans to the U.S. House of Representative.

So, we have a kind of prisoner’s dilemma here. In the prisoner’s dilemma game theory scenario, where both sides do the right thing, everybody prospers a bit. Where one does right and one does wrong, the one doing wrong *really* prospers while the one doing right *really* suffers. And, where both do wrong, they both suffer a little. So, if you can trust your counterpart, you do right. If you can’t trust your counterpart, you’re a fool to do the right thing.

The Indy Star has an AP story entitled Senate sorry for inaction on lynching.

Senate by voice vote approved Senate Resolution 39, an apology for blocking anti-lynching legislation at a time when mob violence against blacks was commonplace. At least 80 senators signed on as co-sponsors.

The Reuters story is a bit more interesting. For starters, it mentions that our own Sen. Bayh had a role to play in making up, just a little bit, for past lynching injustices. According to the story

there was James Cameron, 91, believed to be the only known lynching survivor. Cameron was arrested in August 1930 in Marion, Indiana, and taken to jail along with two of his friends for the murder a white man and suspected rape of a white woman.

A mob broke into the jail and pulled the three out. Cameron’s two friends were hanged, and a noose was placed around the neck of Cameron, then a 16-year-old shoeshine boy.

But as the noose was tightened, a voice reportedly shouted out that Cameron was guilty of no crime. He was returned to his cell and later convicted of being an accessory to the white man’s death. He was pardoned in 1993, by then-Gov. Evan Bayh, now a Democratic U.S. senator from Indiana.

Also, it mentions an amazing thing. The anti-lynching resolution was not unanimous in our Senate.

No lawmaker opposed the measure, but 20 of the 100 senators had not signed a statement of support of it shortly before a vote was taken on a nearly empty Senate floor.

“I think it’s politics. They’re afraid of losing votes from people of prejudice,” Duster said of those who did not sign the statement of support.”

Reportedly there are about a dozen Senators who wouldn’t sign on to the legislation. The last published version had about 60 signatures, but another 20 or so had signed on after the last publication. Kos is reporting that the following 20 Senators: 1) would not co-sponsor the resolution; and 2) refused a roll-call vote. If all of that is accurate, 12 of the following Senators would not support the measure:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
Christopher Bond (R-MO)
Jim Bunning (R-KY)
Conrad Burns (R-MT)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Michael Crapo (R-ID)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Trent Lott (R-MS)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)
George Voinovich (R-OH)

Personally, I’m most concerned about those Senators from states south of the Mason-Dixon line as that’s the part of the country which really hasn’t seemed to make up its mind about whether that kind of thing was wrong. And those Senators would be:

Jim Bunning (R-KY)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Trent Lott (R-MS)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)

All the nattering nabobs agree that Dean’s bluntness ‘hurts the Democratic party’ (as if the D.C. cocktail circuit has the Democratic Party’s best interest at heart.) I see this report on Dr. Dean speaking in Chicago. He definitely doesn’t have that utterly bland vanilla quality that plagued pre-concession Gore and still plagues Kerry and Bayh. Some highlights from the good doctor:

“The chairman of the Republican Party has made a big deal out of attracting African-American voters. This is a litmus test. If you don’t support the extention of the Voting Rights Act, you don’t have the right to walk into a black church and show your face,” Dean said.

“My view is FOX News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and I don’t comment on FOX News,” Dean said. That was in response to vice president Dick Cheney calling Howard Dean “over the top” on Fox News on Sunday.

This passage from that article raised my eyebrows:

“They all behave the same, they all look the same, and they all — you know — it’s pretty much a white Christian party,” Dean said Wednesday.

“They’re not going to come to the Democratic party if the chairman of the Democratic Party is out there gratuitously characterized all Republicans in a truly nasty way,” said David Axelrod democratic strategist on Wednesday of last week.

I was unaware that having someone call you a white Christian was a “truly nasty” characterization. Why, some of my best friends are white Christians.

And Bill Clinton’s little tryst was a high crime and misdemeanor. My guess it that this from the Times of London, showing that Bush’s trip to the U.N. was nothing more than a ploy to create a pretext for invading Iraq, won’t even be deemed worthy of preempting yet more Michael Jackson coverage:

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

. . .

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

But, that’s the liberal media for you.

From AMERICAblog. The House Republicans shut down PATRIOT ACT hearings while Democrats were still talking. Apparently Indiana’s own Mike Pence contributed to the day’s hostility when he accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a “gulag.” (If the dog collar fits, Mikey, you might just have to wear it.)

In any case, the message is coming through loud and clear — House Republicans don’t care about the reality of whether the Patriot Act violates the rights of American citizens. They don’t care about the reality of what’s going on in Guantanamo. They just want critics to shut up already and do what they say.

Class warfare? Maybe. But the war has been going on for awhile now. It’s about time the middle class realized it’s being assaulted. Krugman:

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the result of wives’ entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I’ll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class America didn’t emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and progressive taxation. Since the 1970’s, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families – and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy “reform” that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era.

Read that again, then remember that folks like our good Senator Bayh decided that repealing the estate tax was more pressing than eliminating or further cutting the income tax. That is to say, when deciding whether a worker had more claim to his paycheck at the end of the week or an heir had more claim to his daddy’s estate, Senator Bayh sided with the heir.

Personally, I would have kept the Clinton tax structure in place. It was working well for us, and I really, really hate deficits. But, if I was determined to cut taxes, I would’ve felt the person who worked for his money had a greater claim to it than the heir.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article entitled Bayh gets closer to to run for president.

“Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., said Wednesday he’s laying the groundwork to make a decision about running for president in 2008.”

Maybe I’m still mad at him for voting for a repeal of the estate tax — something which jacks up our national deficits without actually benefiting too many of us who have to get up every day to make a living. If he’d sunk us deep, deep into debt so we could have a little more in our paychecks every week, I’d have some sympathy.

But, mostly I think he’s just too stiff to be a good candidate. He’s good enough looking, but he always speaks in that content-free, carefully parsed politico-speak. If I wanted to vote for a stiff Senator’s son, I’d ask Al Gore to run again. At least he knew that Iraq was a shit sandwich from the get go.

My preferred candidates would be a list something like: John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Howard Dean, Brian Schweitzer, and Barak Obama.

What in the name of sweet Jesus is going on in Ohio? You may recall the scandal in which the Ohio Bureau of Worker’s Compensation gave a sweetheart deal to Ohio GOP mover & shaker, and rare-coin dealer Tom Noe, by investing $50 million through his rare coin fund. Noe’s attorney is reporting $10-$12 million of that money “missing”.

Now, the Toledo Blade is reporting about another Ohio Worker’s Compensation fund investment gone wrong, wrong, wrong. $225 million in Worker’s Compensation funds were invested in something like a hedge fund. The fund lost $215 million of that investment as of last year.

Although the bureau has known about the losses since September, it wasn’t revealed until yesterday, a day after The Blade began making calls upon learning that state investigators had uncovered huge losses at the bureau.

A spokeman for Gov. Bob Taft said last night that Mr. Taft had been told in September that there was an investment loss at the bureau — a loss of $10 million to $20 million.
. . .

In mid-April, The Blade reported that Ohio Republicans received more than $455,000 in campaign contributions from employees of the fund managers hired by the bureau for the “emerging managers” program in which Mr. Noe participated.

The big winners included the state Republican Party committees, which received $200,750, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who received $67,130, and Governor Taft, who got $61,875.

Mr. Lay also confirmed that Mildred Forbes, the daughter of George Forbes, the vice chairman of the bureau’s Oversight Commission, works for his firm [MDL – the firm managing the $215 million loss]. Ms. Forbes is a senior vice president who works on human resources and compliance issues for MDL.

Sounds like, in Ohio, you might as well take your Worker’s Compensation premiums and flush them down a toilet.

According to an AP report on a survey:

Americans are far more likely to consider religion central to their lives and to support giving clergy a say in public policy than people in nine countries that are close allies, according to an AP-Ipsos poll. Religion and public policy often mix in the United States. Recent examples include the bitter fight over the appointment of judges and the fate of Terry Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman whose feeding tube was removed despite efforts by the GOP-led Congress.

Clearly we’re not teaching our citizens enough history. Religion and politics has a long, long history of being a toxic mix.

The New York Times has an article entitled Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind which reports that the “hyper-rich,” which is to say the top 0.1% or the top 144,000 families have almost more than doubled their average annual income since Ronald Reagan first took office — from $1.2 million to $3 million per year, adjusted for inflation. This 0.1% controls 7.4% of the nation’s income a number which has also more than doubled since 1980. This 0.1% also receives 15% of Bush’s tax cuts. People making $87 million per year in income pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as people making $50,000 per year. All of these numbers are based only on reported income. You can be sure that, if you’re making $87 million per year, you’ve found ways –most of them legal– to shelter your income.

Income earned by the bottom 90% fell during the same period. Our current structure is turning a meritocracy into an aristocracy. Economic mobility has stagnated or decreased during the last 30 years. The ultra-rich and their apologists are going to get indignant and claim that this is nothing but jealousy. Maybe it is, but I’m not jealous of the ultra-rich. I’m jealous of my grandfather who got to live in a society where you were more likely to rise or fall based on your merit and where you could expect that your children would be better off than you. Not a society where the Paris Hiltons and the George W. Bush’s of the world are rewarded while the rest of us are left to tell our kids to ignore their lying eyes and believe us when we tell them that a good education is the way to succeed. (In fact, 3 of Indiana’s 9 Congressional Representatives do not have college degrees. Thanks to Taking Down Words for that surprising bit of news.)

And, let’s not forget, we’re a country at war. It’s an honor for a poor man’s child to die for his country, but god forbid you ask the ultra rich to pay for the damned thing. Just charge it up and pass it along to our kids. Shameful.