BeldarBlog

Articulate arguments from the left about redistricting

Time for kudos to those left-of-center bloggers whom Beldar has quickly come to respect, if not agree with, regarding the ongoing Texas redistricting fight.

Burnt Orange Report, run by three UT-Austin students, proves the point of my questionably-Churchilian quote about age and politics.  I enjoyed reading and commenting on several recent posts there about redistricting (here, here, and here, for instance).  I'd gladly stand any of these guys to a couple or three pitchers of beer and a platter of nachos.  Even when I think they're badly wrong, what I've read so far has been articulate and sincere.  Hook 'em!

Charles Kuffner's Off the Kuff also continues to impress me.  He's always on top of the newest news (for example, here and here), reasonably clear-eyed and non-foamy-mouthed in his analysis, and quite often very funny.  On the only occasion I've had to point out to him via email something I thought was factually off (having to do with the composition of the three-judge panel in the Gonzalo Barrientos v. Texas lawsuit now pending in Laredo), he responded graciously and quickly, and after confirming the facts, made a conspicuous correction with a polite acknowledgement -- in other words, he acted quickly and with impeccable ethics, which impressed the heck out of me.

Charles also re-posts (e.g., here and here) from his blog sometimes on Texas issues at Political State Report.  I've been rather less impressed with the commenters there -- much more an Atrios-like than a CalPundit-like place for a conservative blogger to play devil's advocate.  (Hmmm, if I publish a response there to something that Charles originally put on his blog, would that be a riposte to a re-post?)

And I'd enjoy seeing even more Texas coverage like this from Edward Still at Votelaw; I'm no specialist in voting rights litigation, but I gather he is, as well as being a fan of politics in general.

There are probably other such that I just haven't stumbled across yet.  I enjoy reading conflicting opinions on other blogs and websites, and enjoy debating folks here whose opinions vary from my own, provided they're reasonably civil.  Maybe one or two more of them will see the trackbacks and come here to help explain what the heck Rep. Martin Frost is telling the press!

Being long-winded (and since, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan in New Hampshire ca. 1980, I'm paying for this bandwidth!), I'll reprint here the comment I left on CalPundit's post about Blog Civility:

Zizka, my interpretation of Kevin Drum's original post here was that he doesn't intend this to be a "team huddle." There are certainly other blogger-hosts on both sides of the political spectrum who are running "team huddles," but they're frankly much less interesting places to visit regardless of one's own place along the spectrum.

I'm a fairly new blogger myself, and a fairly new visitor to this one. But it's clear at even a glance that there are some very bright people who visit and comment on this site -- in addition to the very bright person who writes it -- and that most of those people have personal politics that don't overlap my own. I nevertheless enjoy reading what they have to say. I'm frequently informed of new facts when I do so; I'm very, very often amused, even by things I don't agree with at all; I'm sometimes surprised to find agreement when I didn't expect it; I often admire the eloquence or creativity of someone who impresses but fails to persuade me; and I'm sometimes actually persuaded of something that I thought I never would be persuaded of.

If I leave a comment here, it's with the hope and intention of performing some of those same functions for other readers here, and also because it helps me clarify and sharpen my own thoughts and ideas.

Personal attacks contribute nothing toward any of these goals.

Demonstrating -- bragging -- that you have a closed mind isn't likely to help you persuade anyone who's persuadable.

Anyway -- Mr. Drum, thanks for the bipartisan welcome, which I believe to have been absolutely sincerely intended, and which I find admirable in itself. I embrace and endorse your ground rules and the motives behind them.

Reasons to choose life

A motto that I have framed upon my wall, drawn from Deuteronomy chapter 30, always reminds me of my kids, and vice versa:   "Before you this day is set good and evil, life and death.  Choose life, that you and your descendents might live."  Herewith, some specific reminders from today and this week:

This morning, before piling into my car so we could head for her school, my youngest daughter (age 8) spontaneously hugged me for at least a full minute.  I can still pick her up easily, but the day will soon come when I can't.  "Can you stop growing for a year please?" I managed not to say.

Earlier in the week, en route to said elementary school, my younger son (age 10) and I discussed at length his observations about the relationship between rarity and price-in-Neopoints of various items in the Neopets Virtual Pet online universe.  At a red light, I sketched an X and Y axis and elicited his answers to graph a simple supply and demand curve on a napkin.  He shrugged:   Well, duh, Dad, that's pretty obvious.

Today I picked up my older daughter (age 12) from her middle school, where she'd been on a "casting call-back" for the school's upcoming production of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, in which she's hoping for a modest speaking part; I, of course, think she's perfect for the lead.  (This will be her third musical, having had chorus parts in Fiddler on the Roof and Brigadoon the past two years.)  I was very relieved to see that not even the eighth-grade girls there had tongue studs, nor did they otherwise look remotely like the young actresses with digitally superimposed tongues in the new movie, "Thirteen."  I resisted the urge to extract again the ritual promise from my daughter that she won't even consider a tattoo of any sort until she's at least 30.

Then, for the first time ever, I was a passenger in my own automobile as it was being driven by my oldest son, a young man of 15 who's taking Driver's Ed.  I was calm, and limited myself to sidelong glances at him, and tried not to babble about my vivid memories from the night he was born.  He drove very cautiously; he's still blazing the neural pathways that connect hand and eye and foot and inner ear.   By Thanksgiving, when he's 16, I expect I'll have an impulse to make very different comments from the one I bit back today:   "You can go a bit faster now, son."

Can you not hear a loud hissing from the rapidly deflating prospects of the Ten Truant Texas Dems™?

On Tuesday, the defendants in Gonzalo Barrientos et al. v. State of Texas et al. — the lawsuit filed in federal court in Laredo by the Ten Truant Texas Dems™ — filed a very short motion asking for expedited consideration of the State's pending motion to dismiss the Dems' case. 

On Wednesday, the three-judge panel issued a notice that at 1:00 o'clock p.m. on Thursday, September 11, in Laredo (mips! I was hoping for Houston so I could go watch!), it will conduct a hearing on all pending motions.  This hearing will  presumably include both the State's motion to dismiss and the Dems' application for a Temporary Restraining Order to immunize them from "arrest" by the Senate's Sergeant at Arms if a third special session is called; the latter becomes moot if, as expected, the former is granted.   A ruling from the bench, followed by a short written opinion (either that same day or perhaps a day or two later), would not surprise me.

On the following Saturday, September 13, Texans go to the polls to vote on a series of proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution.  Unfortunately, none of these amendments authorizes the live, statewide telecasting of the handcuffing of, administration of sodium pentothal to, and vigorous cross-examination by a volunteer blogger of state legislators who've recently fled the jurisdiction to destroy legislative quorums.

I imagine that state Republican leaders are doing some serious head-knocking behind the scenes to achieve agreement between the House and Senate Republicans on a redistricting bill.  Democratic state senators Whitmire and Armbrister may also be a part of some of those discussions, and could quite conceivably play a nontrivial role in both negotiations and a third special session, which may well be called for Monday, September 15. 

By contrast, the Ten Truant Texas Dems™ have made themselves effectively irrelevant — and if they remain outside Texas for the third special session, they will quite literally have "disenfranchised" themselves.

Beldar asks a question

Friday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram has this quote from US Representative Martin Frost (D-Texas), one of Leticia's children:

"This is a national issue," said Frost, who saluted the Texas senators for their stand. "The Republicans are trying to overturn the results of the elections two years ago. This cannot be permitted to happen."

I assume he means the elections of 2002, since there were neither statewide nor national elections two years ago in 2001.  I assume he's not talking about the California recall election either, even if he thinks that it and the ongoing Texas redistricting fight are part of some sinister master plan. 

Please:    Would someone who's left-of-center — or at least very familiar with their arguments — leave a comment to identify for me (a) what "elections" Frost is referring to, and (b) in what sense the Republicans are attempting to "overturn" their results?

This is a sincere question.  I genuinely have no idea what point Rep. Frost is trying to make other than the sort of general "Republicans are bad" meme.  My best current guess as to the answer to part (a) is that he's referring to the election of 17 Democrats (including himself) as part of the Texas delegation to the US House of Representatives, but I'm not confident that is what he means, and whether it is or not, I have utterly no clue about part (b)'s intended meaning.

UPDATE (Sat Sep 6 @ 12:30pm):   Edward Still at Votelaw offers an articulate response to my question on his own blog.  He too assumes that Frost was referring to the 2002 Congressional elections, and has this to say:

The Republicans are seeking to "overturn" the elections by redrawing several congressional districts where the voters split their tickets and vote for Republican candidates most of the time, but continue to re-elect Democratic representatives.

One of the pithy little sayings about redistricting is that it is an opportunity for representatives to choose their voters. This applies to a body redistricting itself, but in this case it refers to the Republican Party — from Karl Rove and Tom DeLay to Rick Perry and David Dewhurst and the Republicans in the Legislature — to rejigger the election results till they get the "right" result.

I will admit that most redistricting has the goal of determining in advance the composition of the body to-be-elected. But usually we restrict ourselves to once a decade.

Overall, this is so commendably honest, it makes me want to give Mr. Still a big hug. 

I agree with him entirely that accomplishing a legislative redistricting once a decade is enough; it's just right, in fact.  We still haven't had ours in Texas yet for this decade.  Instead, we had a court-imposed redistricting that — for reasons I've previously blogged (here and here, for instance) — not only gave no opportunity for the new majority party in the state to express the democratic will of its people, but instead actually had the self-acknowledged effect of further entrenching incumbent Democrats who were artificially protected by the 1991 pre-Democrat gerrymander.  This is why I continue to insist that yes, this is a battle about democracy — but the Democrats are on the anti-democratic side of it.

I also expect that Mr. Still's polite formulation is about as good a job at defending Rep. Frost's word choice as can be done.  But it's still off the mark — trying to make square words fit in round holes, so to speak. 

The Republicans whom Mr. Still names — and add "Beldar" to that list, along with the millions of other Texans who voted in 2002 to put both legislative chambers and both top executive offices into Republican Party hands — are indeed trying to accomplish a different result for future elections "by redrawing several congressional districts where the voters split their tickets and vote for Republican candidates most of the time, but continue to re-elect Democratic representatives."  We're being very candid about it — we think that especially since 9/11 and the overt beginning of the War on Terror, Texans want a Congressional delegation that supports our native-son President — and the publicly announced goal of redistricting is to do that.  We'd probably reformulate the description to say that we're trying to redistribute loyal straight-ticket Republicans who were disproportionately packed into a few districts by the 1991 pro-Democrat gerrymander, but I don't even quibble much with Mr. Still's description of the means being used. 

I do, however, strongly object to Rep. Frost calling this the "overturning" of past elections.  That is simply an untruth — indeed, from someone as experienced and knowledgeable as he is, I have to conclude that the choice of those words makes it a lie.  And it's a particularly powerful one because it accuses the Republicans of trying to do something politically illegitimate, instead of politically routine.  Yes, redistricting a/k/a gerrymandering is indeed "rejiggering" something until you get the "'right' result."  But you aren't rejiggering the results of past elections, you're rejiggering district boundaries to try to get a different result in future elections.  The latter is (ugly) small-d democracy in action; the former is an anti-democratic coup d'état. 

Rep. Frost and MoveOn and the Ten Truant Texas Dems™ want Texas redistricting to be about coups d'état and "stolen" elections because it fits their overall theme against the Bush administration.  I understand the theme.  But to make it fit here in the Lone Star State, you have to tell lies, and that's simply shameful.

Ignoring Judge Kazen, MoveOn.org begins $1 million ad campaign based on racial scare tactics

Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report has a link to a .pdf file with the first of MoveOn.org's print advertisements, due out in today's New York Times and paid for out of the $1 million that it recently raised over the Internet.  The ad is also up on MoveOn.org's own website now (warning: several large pix, not for the impatient or timid of bandwidth).

Contributors will be comforted to note that none of the $1 million has been spent on fixing the sentence fragment previously noted in BeldarBlog when I fisked the printed justifications for their sexist and anti-democratic "Defend Democracy in Texas" program.

No, the $1 million is apparently going into racial scare tactics which are calculated to create the sort of unjustified public alarm in the minority community that US District Judge George P. Kazen deliberately went out of his way to squelch at last week's hearing on the lawsuit brought by the Truant Texas Dems™ in federal court in Laredo.

The MoveOn.org print ad contains three paragraphs of hysterical text tied together with the subheadline, "It's the worst setback for minority voting rights in four decades."  News reports indicate that radio and TV ads to like effect ("accusing President Bush and other Republican leaders of trying to disenfranchise Hispanic voters, especially in the Texas redistricting fight") will also begin within the next two weeks.

Ahem.  Well, this is again rather curious logic.  It appears that the folks at MoveOn.org are keen on keeping the map drawn up by the Balderas v. Texas three-judge panel in 2001 (which essentially perpetuated the pro-Democratic gerrymander from 1991).  And they don't want to have a democratic vote in the Legislature determine redistricting in the manner intended by the US Constitution, as interpreted by the US Supreme Court.  And the "four decades" is a loose reference to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it seems.

But their trust in the Voting Rights Act and the DOJ and the three-judge panels of the federal court and the Supreme Court that hears direct appeals from such panels' decisions seems to be ... rather selective.

MoveOn.org's ad campaign entirely ignores the fact that any redistricting bill will have to undergo preclearance under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and that if any redistricting bill has either the purpose or effect of harming minority voting rights, it will be blown out of the water in the proverbial New York minute.

Currently serving as Chief Judge of the Southern District of Texas, Judge Kazen is a Carter appointee before whom the Dems were thought to have a "home court advantage" (although I genuinely don't believe that mattered much, if at all).  At the August 27th hearing, he rejected the Dems' requests for immediate emergency injunctive relief, and expressed extreme skepticism as to whether they'd managed to state a viable claim that could survive a motion to dismiss.  He did, however, grant both sides' requests to ask Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King to convene a three-judge panel under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make that decision. 

More significantly for present purposes, at this same hearing, Judge Kazen deliberately went out of his way  several times to reassure everyone concerned that minority voting rights will be protected when and if a redistricting plan is eventually passed.  He repeatedly directed these comments not just to the State of Texas and to the Truant Texas Dems™, but specifically to the members of the press who were present, with the obvious intention that his comments should be widely reported to the public.

However, the press has, of course, completely dropped that ball — thereby leaving the entire field in the battle for public opinion wide open for MoveOn.org's misleading and inflamatory ad campaign.

Here's what Judge Kazen said in open court last week:

[THE COURT:] I would stress again, and I think it's important, especially, for the media to understand, that — that if, in fact, a redistricting bill passes, then there's no question the voting act applies and there's no question that it has to be precleared and there's no question that it will be in litigation and there's no question that a three-judge court can say it violates minority rights.

(Official Transcript, page 12, line 21, to page 13, line 3.)  And again:

[THE COURT:] But if, indeed, a bill passes and if, indeed, it is as pernicious as it is feared [by the Dems], there are remedies.  There are at least two remedies.  And that's — it seems to me that that's the way it's supposed to be.

(Official Transcript, page 17, lines 16-20.)  And again:

[THE COURT:] And as I say, if then — I mean, look, I don't know when this is ever going to end.  As I say, if, in fact, some day a bill is passed, then a whole new round of money and time is going to be spent inevitably on a real voting rights case, which is — you know, whether the statute discriminates against minorities, but — so, you know, we're just somewhere along the way here.

(Official Transcript, page 32, lines 5-12.)  And again:

[THE COURT:] I would say — and I'm — and again, I'm not predicting anything, but I'm — I would say that if a three-judge panel decides that this [case as presently on file] is not a voting rights case and if DOJ has decided it's not a voting rights case, then it may be that people need to step back and take a deep breath and see where we are at that point.  Understanding, again, that — and I can't repeat this enough, especially for the news media, so that the people of Texas who care — I mean, they already care, will really understand, if and when a redistricting bill is passed, it will unquestionably be covered by the Voting Rights Act and it will unquestionably have to be precleared and it will unquestionably generate a lawsuit, and then all the business of charts and drafts and whose perspectives — and, you know, is it discriminatory and all that.  All that will do is generate this whole new round of litigation.  So that's there.  That protection is there.

(Official Transcript, page 35, line 15, to page 36, line 7.)  And still again (referring to the letter from the chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which confirmed that  no preclearance was required for Lt. Gov. Dewhurst's decision to enforce the Texas Senate rules as written, rather than continuing to manipulate the Senate calendar in the second special session by using the "blocker bill" procedure to give a minority the power to deadlock the Senate):

THE COURT:  Okay.  Well, we'll put this in the record.  I note their [the DOJ's] conclusion, which is what we talked about.  If and when a new redistricting plan is actually adopted and submitted to the [US] Attorney General for review, the Attorney General will review it and the — well, he says, and the process by which it has been adopted to ensure that the submitted changes have neither a discriminatory purpose nor a discriminatory effect.

(Official Transcript, page 57, line 19, to page 58, line 2.)

Beldar's blunt translation of the subtext of all these extraordinary statements (that is, the private advice that I'd give the Dems as their counselor if, god forbid, I were their lawyer):   Quit scaring the public with this nonsense in the press about "disenfranchising minorities."  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 as enforced by the DOJ, a three-judge federal panel, and the US Supreme Court, will make very sure that doesn't happen.

Remember Landru!

The New York Times of course manages to completely miss the distinction between "rules" and "traditions," swallowing and then regurgitating the agitprop of the Truant Texas Dems™ by reporting in tomorrow's edition that

[b]ecause of quorum requirements and a longtime rule requiring a two-thirds majority to bring up a bill, the Republicans need two Democratic votes to move legislation.... After Democrats thwarted a first special session in June, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst suspended the two-thirds rule, angering Democrats and prompting the flight.

(Say it with me, friends and neighbors:   It's ... a ... LIE!)

But I was more interested in two more minor bits from this story.  The first was the report that Sen. Whitmire is "known as Boogie from his avid partying in younger years."  My respect for him grows hourly by leaps and bounds.

The other was this quote, referring to Sen. Whitmire's status as the longest-tenured member of the current Texas Senate:   "As dean, I have a responsibility to protect the integrity of the body," he said.

These are wise words, for those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Spinners spun by sharks, but transcript scrapes scales from Senator's sockets

Who ya gonna believe?  Your own lyin' eyes and a transcript, or your high-priced lawyer from Washington?

Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) did something smart this past weekend:   He read the actual transcript of last week's hearing before US District Judge George P. Kazen in Laredo in the Voting Rights Act lawsuit in which Sen. Whitmire is one of the co-plaintiffs.

What can I say, Senator?  You coulda just read BeldarBlog on the Internet from Albuquerque!

My poor, loyal dog just thought I was having a heart attack.  She was switching into her "Lassie-go-get-help" barking and scratching-at-the-door mode because I was laughing so hard that I was doubled up and gasping for air. 

Here's the just-posted report from the Houston Chronicle that did it to me:

While in Houston, Whitmire read the transcript of a federal court hearing on the Democrats' voting rights lawsuit.

Though the Democrats portrayed U.S. District Judges George P. Kazen's decision last week to send the case to a three-judge panel as a victory, Whitmire found the transcript troubling.

In it, Kazen said the case had little merit.

But the Democrats' lawyers told their clients the news was good, Whitmire said.

"Somebody really did one on us," he said. "We were told in no uncertain terms to be optimistic."

Reporters were allowed to listen in on a teleconference call between the lawyers and the senators last week in which the lawyers gave a rosy view of the judge's statements. The lawyers and senators also talked behind closed doors.

Gerry Hebert, one of the lawyers, declined to respond to Whitmire's complaint.

I'm a frankly a little surprised that the press accounts hadn't tipped Sen. Whitmire off to begin with.   But Sen. Whitmire, despite being a lawyer himself, evidently got caught up in the enthusiasm of some lawyers trying to put the best face on a very bad situation. 

Of course, inviting reporters in to hear the post-hearing report from the Dems' lawyers was an extraordinary farce.  Doing so absolutely destroys attorney-client privilege, and thus ensures that you are not going to hear your trial lawyer's candid advice in his distinct capacity as your private counselor, but instead that you'll continue to hear your lawyer in full-blown (non-objective) advocate-mode.  Lawyer Hebert had already found his way to the TV cameras that morning to engage in a bit of the Politics of Personal Destruction with respect to one of his own (Janet Reno-promoted) successors at DOJ, so perhaps the spin RPMs were just too high to wind down from in whatever private discussions he and his fellow sharks had with the Truant Texas Dems™.

But once out of the New Mexico highlands — with the benefit of Houston's warm August breezes off the Gulf, lightly scented with the petrochemical perfume that means "home" and "commerce" to all of us who live here — apparently Sen. Whitmire had no trouble reading both the text and the subtext of Judge Kazen's comments in the full transcript from the hearing.  As I blogged last week after reading the same transcript, Judge Kazen's actual remarks were even less encouraging than the way they were reported in the popular press.  And as interpreted by anyone with much courtroom experience, the only question would be whether you'd pick the term "catastrophic" or "apocalyptic" as most apt to describe the subtext.

Meanwhile, in the "30 years in the Legislature but what have you done for me lately?" category, we have this report from tomorrow's Dallas Morning News:

Several Democrats ridiculed [Sen.] Whitmire at a news conference.

"We've had enough of powerful, special interests, and we've had enough of puppets and liars," said Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo.

[Sen. Eliot] Shapleigh [(D-El Paso)] alluded to Democrats' suspicion that Mr. Whitmire stands to gain personally or politically from his move.

"I have no doubt that he will be rewarded upon his return to Austin by those whom he serves," Mr. Shapleigh said.

This reminds me of a crazed, frenzied animal gnawing off its own leg to escape the teeth of a steel trap.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the Ten Truant Texas Dems™ (at last! my alliterative impulses are satisfied!) are gnawing off the wrong leg.

Blog Civility

Kevin Drum a/k/a CalPundit has a post up about Blog Civility that I embrace and endorse.  I just want to go on record to that effect, notwithstanding that my politics (as reflected here) are likely to be the opposite of his on many issues.

Connecting the dots between Sen. Whitmire's quotes

From quotes in today's papers, I remain convinced that Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) is sincere when he says he's not just "giving up" by returning to Texas, but that he has some sort of plan in mind that would result in an overall compromise, and he's in active if secret negotiations with Texas Republicans toward that end.

From the press comments I've linked and quoted below, my strong hunch is that he sees a serious danger that the "blocker bill" procedure — misleadingly and disingenuously referred to as the "two-thirds rule" — will be done away with not just for the present redistricting fight, but for all Senate deliberations in the future.  And that would indeed change the fundamental nature of the Texas Senate.  Among other things, it would make all of the minority-party state senators something close to irrelevant, as they watched vote after vote pass by simple majority rule without any influence from themselves on the process.  Sen. Whitmire may have concluded that winning the redistricting battle — to save the skins of white male incumbent Democratic Congressmen like Charlie Stenholm, or even his old friend Gene Green (who met him at the Houston airport last night) — isn't worth the price of losing that war.

From this morning's Houston Chronicle:

Whitmire said Tuesday night that he had assurances he was safe from arrest for a few days, but did not elaborate.

From this morning's San Antonio Express-News:

Whitmire said he's confident Perry will not immediately call another special session.

"But if he does, my spies will notify me. I have an escape plan, and if need be, I'll leave (Texas) again. I have not given up, I have not surrendered," Whitmire said.

He denied that Republican leaders influenced his decision.

"I am working on a plan that will restore the collegiality to the Senate, and I am fearful that if the two-thirds rule is permanently removed, the Senate will no longer exist as we know it," Whitmire said.

From this morning's Austin American-Statesman:

Whitmire said he is concerned that continuing the boycott would cause irreparable damage to the Senate. He likened the standoff to the vitriolic debate of a campaign.

"Both sides, we're polling, we're running advertising, we're holding daily news conferences," he said. "Elections have an election date, but we don't have an election date for this campaign."

He said he intends to talk to both sides to try to "lower the rhetoric."

UPDATE (Weds. Sep 3 @ 11:45pm):   Seems I was right (and that the Houston Chronicle's Rachel Graves is still getting the "rule vs. custom" bit wrong):

Whitmire feared that staying in Albuquerque would push Republicans to permanently scrap a Senate rule that gives a third of the Senate the power to block a bill from being considered.

Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst abandoned that rule during the second session, a move that prompted the Democrats to flee.

"Without it, 16 members run the entire Senate," Whitmire said, adding that he does not want that to be the case on other legislative issues. "Redistricting is really important, but so is school finance. So is criminal justice."

Farberware and blogging

One of the things I never anticipated about blogging was how much fun it would be to see, from the stats pages you can get through various services, what searches on Google, Yahoo!, etc. have led people to your website.

Earlier tonight, for instance, someone found his or her way to one of my first posts, entitled "Warning: Overpressurized African nations may EXPLODE into litigation," via a Google search on the phrase "Farberware Programmable 8-Qt Pressure Cooker." 

The amazing thing (to me, at least) was that the link to my post was on page 13 of Google's results ... meaning someone presumably clicked through 12 prior pages of search results about this no-doubt-very-fine pressure cooker, then found the link to my website, then clicked on it.

I'm not even going to begin listing some of the ... urrrrmm, weird (let's leave it at "weird") searches involving the term "Olsen Twins" that have led people here.  Let's just say that most of them, probably, have been disappointed.

BeldarBlog!  Now entering its second month of bringing you exclusively SFW content — highly pressurized!