Comments (0)

By Mark D, November 13, 2012 8:58 pm

After being totally routed by Obama, despite spending the last 4 years doing nothing but stopping anything Obama tried to do, you’d think Republicans would try to change course. Millions upon millions of dollars spent by Republicans and they didn’t get their way. 9 of the 10 senate elections in which the Crossroads PAC (Karl Rove’s pac) spent over 10 million dollars the Democrat won. Maybe, just maybe people saw through what the Republicans were up to and decided to punish them.

Now in a sane world, maybe the Repubs would move more to the center, open up their party to minorities and women. Maybe it’s time for a Republican party that doesn’t just kowtow the line of the super wealthy while taking advantage of some of the most ignorant voters in the country. But of course we don’t live in a sane world, so that’s not going to happen.

As you might have noticed, despite losing the Presidential election and losing seats in the Senate, Republicans continue to control the House. Since they had control of the house following the 2010 Census they were able to redraw Congressional districts. Pretty much they shoved as many democrats into as few districts as possible, basically assuring themselves control of the house.

Now why might this matter? Because the new thing that the GOP is looking for is to base electoral votes not on winner take all state wide, but instead on congressional districts. If for example a state has 30 districts and 30 Electoral Votes, each district would be worth 1 electoral vote. Now look at some of the states that Obama won, such as Pennsylvania. Most of the Congressional Seats that were up for grabs went Republican, except for Pittsburgh, Philly and a few burbs. It’s not a wild guess that the rest of the districts went Romney (Obama supposedly won Philly with nearly 4-1 ratio).

This means instead of getting all of the electoral votes for PA, he would have likely gotten votes for 7 of the 19 districts. This is almost worse then actively trying to keep people from voting. It marginalizes people’s votes, especially as some of the districts aren’t exactly proportional in population. It’s bad enough that your vote is a lot more important depending on what state your voting in (I find it funny that neither candidate campaigned in New Jersey) but this is outright marginalizing people’s votes.

Winner take all when it comes to electoral vote in states has been fine for years. There’s no reason to change it now. Instead of looking for ways to marginalize the vote, maybe just maybe it’s time to start changing with the times. When your starting to lose major chunks of the Solid South, it should be a sign. It isn’t the voters to blame for your failures.

Comments (6)

By Mark D, February 9, 2011 11:11 pm

Republican Chris Lee, a congressman from Western NY, has announced his resignation today. In the end, it really isn’t that surprising. Republicans time and again brag about being the Family Values party, about being anti-homosexual, yet it seems like they are the most likely to either cheat on their family or be gay. The best part about Chris Lee getting busted is that he actually said his real name in emails with woman on craigslist. That’s right, a congressperson got busted by responding to ads on craigslist.

Although he still doesn’t take the cake. Vito Fossella probably does. See, Vito got busted on drunk driving charges while driving in Virginia. The interesting thing was that he has a staff and a driver, so why he was driving himself around was odd. Then it came out that he was having an extramarital affair with the woman who he had bail him out. The icing on the cake? He also had a 3 year old child with the woman. Of course Fossella was someone who consistently ran on the “Family Values” line.

I guess in the end these guys cheat because it would be so risque to get a divorce. They have to keep up appearances because it’s more important to them to keep getting elected then to do whats right for their family. If you get to that point that you feel like you have to cheat, you should take a step back and take stock. Your hurting your family, your kids, and people you know for your own gain. In the end it’s almost always going to be discovered and people are going to sense something is off. In the end whenever you cheat you are stealing from your family.

But once again, these are people to whom it is more important to keep up appearances then to actually admit they might be wrong. It’s why the government is run so badly, because in the end its not about running the government well, it’s about keeping up appearances for constituents. It’s about getting that pointless earmark or pork barrel so you can say you got something for them instead of standing for whats right. It’s an overall bigger issue which needs to be fixed, but never will until the Republicans and Democrats lose power. Until then it will be a desperate attempt to keep the status quo until it can no longer even be maintained. But by that point the status quo will be set so low that anyone can reach it.