Congratulations Pennsylvania! Each of your citizens are worth 1.25/5ths of a human in regards to having your say in our supposedly democratic federal government. You can thank the GOP for that.
Remember how they consolidated control after they grabbed power in 2010 elections promising Job Jobs Jobs. Their real goal was reducing your say in government, therefore giving their fat cat backers substantially more power over your lives than they are supposed to have. All the wealthy have to do is dump money into the GOP coffers.
As we have seen, the GOP then decides what is good for America and for your state is to let the wealthy control everything through privatization, the destruction of unions who protect workers, even offering partial support to non unionized employees through their existence. ( I am not working for a union, nor am I in one.) The GOP is also behind many laws that allow, even reward the outsourcing of our jobs. Do you know that they even have passed laws that give tax cuts explicitly for outsourcing? The GOP now wants to take your Social Security money that you pay over 15% of your salary for each year, and reduce your payments so they don't have to force their backers to take fewer tax cuts on their incredible salaries to fix the budget, and so they can continue to spend more on wars.
To see what happened look to the left. That is a map of the counties of Pennsylvania showing which went for Obama and which went for Romney with the usual colors. The gray ones were too close to call. I'm not sure if they are now or not. That doesn't matter because counties do not get 1 vote each, like US House districts do. Neither does the larger red area indicate more Republican support. Acres and mile do not vote, people do and the large populations in the blue areas went for Obama.
Out of 18 US House districts Democratic voters were highly packed into only 5, even though Obama and liberal leaning Jill Stein won 51.4% of votes for president while Mitt Romney and conservative leaning Gary Johnson won 47.7% of the presidential vote. 5 out of 18 seats equals .28 of the total available. But we have to weight that with the fact that liberal presidential candidates won 1.099 times more votes than the conservative candidates for president so we divide the .28 by 1.099 and get .25 or 2.5 10ths or 1.25/5ths of a person. Unfortunately that's a worse scenario than Louisiana. YIKES! And a lot worse than the 3/5ths of a person that slaves were considered before the Civil War. I would consider a score of 4.5/5ths to be decently represented considering candidate variability", but 1.25/5ths of a person is ridiculous.
Being a member or siding with the Republican party does not fix that scenario, since, if you can't change your mind and keep your rights, you don't have those rights, only the same number of rights as those who are most denied theirs.
That is why the Republicans are able to sell the rights of all the people of PA to the fat cats, and are working on the rights of the rest of us in the nation.
To the left here are the US House districts of Pennsylvania. You can see some special Gerrymandering aspects from here. Where counties are somewhat boxy utilitarian lines, for the House districts you get crazier shapes than a Kindergartener would draw (no disrespect for kindergartners -- I admire their unfettered imaginations, and have seen some drawings by them that put any artist out there to shame by how they capture the true essence of their subject without the noise we usually consider to be "realistic"). At it's original site you can see that the PA 1st District and 7th District have areas that are completely separate from their main bodies or linked by a tiny corridor--that's a Gerrymandering tactic, and how about that crazy shape above on the right? What is that, a flying dragon? Also,if you see the race results on that the blue dot on the left you will see that it is so heavily dense with Democratic voters that it drains three to four other districts of Democratic majorities, so Republicans win by small margins. Now if the districts were not crazy shapes already, you could say that is just the luck of the land. But every one of those red districts is the type of meandering blob typical of Gerrymandering to prevent certain groups from getting their rightful majority.
Can you rely on your state's court system to help you out, folks? Probably not.
Ohio politicians tried taking their egregious Gerrymandered legislative districts through their legal system all the way up to their Supreme Court filled with Republicans except for one of their justices. Guess what. They were denied a redo, the decision coming down just days ago. If they're smart they will start a referendum vote through petitions, and even a special election. I'm betting that PA will need a state wide referendum, to get theirs changed as well. You should work on the Gerrymandering of your state government too, and fix it all.
The right for your vote to be equally weighted is the foundation of democracy, and prevents warmongers from taking you or your children off to unnecessary war. (A plan for a universal draft of males and females aged 18 to 35 was created in 2004 by the Selective Service System and still exists today, waiting for a trigger since SSS plans do not expire with the end of a presidency.) As we saw in 2003, wars are too easily cooked up by presidents and Congress flush with Gerrymandered districts.
Keep yourself and your children or grandchildren safe. Fix your state government. Demand the end to Gerrymandering for both state legislative and US House districts. You may recall that Texas won the right from the US Supreme Court to redo their state's US House districts within two years after they had been set up. (Remember Tom Delay's gambit and the Texas legislators who went into hiding?) You can do it too, in an equitable manner. California voted and forced our legislature out of the redistricting job market, handing it to a special balanced committee focused on good governance.
Start a state-wide referendum. Statewide you have your power, as can be seen by the election of a senator in the same party as your presidential vote. If you can't before then, get a Democratic governor for 2015. It's time to get on with it. Or maybe make your shackles a nice fashion statement. Until they drag you off to war. (Israel could, with the help of the US House get the US involved in a disastrous war invading Iran after they destroy the world economy by attacking Iran's nuclear facilities as I have explained before, even if we have a Democratic president. They continue to feed the press the same kind of pro war propaganda they used to get us into Iraq and which was then shown to be completely bogus. )
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Picture at top of a PA stream is used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0). Thanks to Flickr user digitalArt2 who has no connection to this blog or blogger.
