And thousands of good men and women in the military that are sitting idle when they, with a little training, could be deployed to take care of that Boom properly.

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There are a lot of things where I would just roll my eyes when both sides play political games. But this game that Jindal is playing is resulting in the physical destruction of part of the United States of America. Same can be said for any of the states that are holding back on using these soldiers that can and should be doing something very useful in this disaster. Because if you are doing this because you don't want the government to be seen doing the kind of things that it can and should do...

Then the government isn't broken in this case but you, Gov. Jindal,  are clearly busted:

From C4AF's Eric Loftke, that's Gerrymandering with a hard G:

Gerrymandering goes far to explain why dissatisfaction is so high, debate is so partisan and problems so unsolved. An elected official in a seat designed for safe reelection need do nothing else. Politicians in gerrymandered districts pick their constituents, not the other way around.

I especially like the scene with Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative describing a city council seat in tiny Anamosa, Iowa. The council member is elected with only two votes, his neighbor and his wife. Everyone else who makes up his districts is in a nearby prison. They can’t vote but they still count for purposes of political apportionment. Prison-based gerrymandering brings “representation without population,” Wagner complains.

I learned something else about gerrymandering. I’ve been saying it wrong, all these years (though I probably still will). It’s pronounced with a hard G, named after colonial era governor Elbridge Gerry, hard G, who redrew his state’s district lines in 1812 to secure party advantage. A period newspaper observed that the district map looked like a salamander, and dubbed it a “Gerry-mander.”

And with another Census recently behind us... A little reminder that s/he who controls redistricting controls the future of voting results to a large degree. Just ask Tom DeLay. Even if his efforts were pretty darned illegal when taken on its proven face value:

Promoted. Originally posted 2009-08-24 15:40:40 -0400. -- GH

Compare and contrast the kiddie version of law and order, and the grownup version.

1. A Republican Congressman is yelping that he may launch yet another doomed lawsuit against Obama regarding his birth certificate.

And…

2. The Attorney General has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA’s illegal use of torture. Also Obama is reopening an FBI investigation which Bush blocked, regarding the massacre of prisoners in Afghanistan, a war crime. It is not impossible that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Wolfowitz and others could be subpoenaed, indicted….

Hey, Republicans! Obama didn’t want to declare war on the GOP, and spend four years investigating Bush’s crimes. He wanted to move on, to build a new post-partisan world. But you Republicans weren’t interested. Obama extended the hand of bipartisanship to you, and you tried to chop it off with an axe, time after time after time, on the stimulus package, on health care, even on the Somali pirate case. You attacked him with lies, you sent armed goon squads to his speaking engagements, you called him an alien, a traitor, and Nazi….And the whole country saw it – that’s why support for the Republican party outside the South is below ten percent.

You people didn’t really think through what it means, when you dare a popular sitting President to take the gloves off and fight bare-knuckle.