Politics pages

• The latest cynical Republican partisan political fix is the Texas redistricting mess, courtesy of Tom "the Hammer" Delay. The city of Austin has been split down the middle into three parts (belonging to three elongated and convoluted districts) in order to dilute liberal voting strength -- despite the fact that Austin's population is not all that different from the population needed to make up a Congressional district (most of Austin was in a single compact district under the "old" plan, adopted all of two years ago). Under the new plan, I will live in a safe Republican district, but if I were to move a few blocks north or east, I would live in a Democratic district stretching hundreds of miles all the way to the Mexican border (my location is the blue "X" on the map). Click on the thumbnail map below to see more detailed local and broad-area maps of the new plan, or go to the Austin Chronicle site to read an analysis of the plan:
  
• You can read answers to questions about the Supreme Court 2000 election decision here. In Dec. 2000, the text below was linked to cafepress.com/scaliabozo, where T-shirts with these slogans could be purchased. Now I've linked in GIF versions of the full-size 1294×1200 images from which the T-shirts would have been made:
  1. You can express your feelings about the Supreme Court's barely-veiled cynically political "fix" in the 2000 presidential race (don't get me started on Scalia!), and how this contributes to the court's historical "legacy .
     By the way, if you spell "Dubya won!" backwards, it becomes "No way, bud!".
     
  2. Another variant of this graphic is more self-explanatory, but has smaller lettering.
     
  3. This was to be on the back of one version of the t-shirts, but I didn't really get around to setting it up on time.
     Maybe I have a shallow view of history, but I don't see that the supreme court accomplished hardly anything positive between 1857 and when they had the fear of God put into them by FDR's "court-packing" plan in the 1930's. Instead, they engaged in cynical "judicial activism" which played a considerable role in hastening the Civil War, effectively negated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (neutering the "equal protection of the laws" clause, and declaring that blacks weren't protected by federal laws, but corporations were protected as "legal persons"!), and consistently placed supposed "sanctity of contracts" above all public policy goals (such as prohibiting child labor or restraining economic monopolies).
     
• Go to page on "Zero Tolerance" policies in primary and secondary education.
  
• Here's the proposed DC "Taxation Without Representation" flag: