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Too Little Too Late

A big thank you to the AJC for waiting until after the bill passed to write this article.

I Report, You Decide

In light of the news that there may be more redistricting ahead of us, I thought I'd present the two competing proposals to redistrict Athens. Speaker Richardson has said political performance will not be the sole factor when a mid-decade redistricting is done. Please keep that in mind when you view images of Ralph Hudgens' proposal to redistrict his area and Keith Heard's alternative proposal, the "Fair Madison" proposal. When you look at which plan needlessly splits counties, ask yourself which drawer considered political performance and which one merely sought to fix the alleged problem (Madison County is split) with the least invasive approach.

The images:

Special Place in Hell

There is a special place in hell, or somewhere else bad, for Larry McKinney, or anyone else who can write such an editorial as this. It's one thing to believe in business and work for the Chamber, its quite another to sell your soul to the GOP and big business and do their bidding.

Community of Interest

We heard a lot from Republicans about "Communities of interest" back in the good old days. Well, we know they don't give a crap about that as they rush through the legislature a redistricting plan that purposefully splits Athens/Clarke County, probably a political jurisdiction that is itself a community of interest if there ever was one.

Anyway, Athens/Clarke is currently in a district with a portion of Madison County as well as the entirety of Oconee and Oglethorpe counties. The Republicans propose to splice Clarke, drop Oconee (and Madison's portion) and add a part of Walton.

But the Census Bureau's non-partisan analysis of employment might beg to differ.. I thought I'd look at a fairly simple metric -- what percentage of a county's residents work in Clarke County? Since the biggest employer in the county/region is UGA, the community of interest in question here, I thought that might make for some interesting reading.

Well, here it goes: A whopping 81% of Clarke County residents (who are employed) work in Clarke County. That is by far the highest percentage of any county in the state, and that is to be expected. Coming in at #2 is Oglethorpe -- 57% of Oglethorpe's workers drive to Clarke each day. #3 is Oconee with 52% and #4 is Madison with 49%.

No other county even approaches those percentages, Jackson County, the 5th highest county in percentage of employees who work in Clarke, is way down at 16% while only 3% of Walton's citizens call Clarke county home during the daily grind.

What does this data tell us, well it tells us that the current Senate District 46, centered around Clarke County, also includes fully the next two counties where the largest percentage of citizens work in Clarke. And then when they needed a little more population they chose a part of Madison that touches Clarke, where I bet a high percentage of citizens work in Clarke.

It seems that the current district, therefore is just fine. But Ralph Hudgens wants to make Madison County whole. I'd argue that keeping a county whole is probably more important than grouping together counties based on where people work. But why oh why would you slice up Clarke, remove Oglethorpe and add Walton when there is a much easier and much less obtrusive way to do it?

Maybe it was because all along when Republicans said they cared about communities of interest it was just meaningless partisan politics. They've got a chance to do right next week. I'm not holding my breath.

There's a Bounce

In light of another mining tragedy today in West Virginia, I decided to check their governor's approval rating in the most recent Survey USA 50 state tracking poll. One line of attack that Republicans in the media quickly abandoned was that Gov. Joe Manchin was somehow partly to blame for the false information that swept through the town.

Manchin, I thought showed a real regular guy quality by praying with the miners, getting swept up in the false reports, responding to the aftermath, the whole ordeal. I was also impressed by the first lady, who accompanied the wife of the one surviving miner to various hospitals and acted as her spokesperson to the media.

Well apparently West Virginians agreed with me. His approval skyrocketed to 80%-16%. The only subgroup that SUSA splits out that isn't at least 70% in favor of Manchin are non-Hispanics, non-Whites and non-Blacks.

Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Liberals, Moderates, Conservatives, Churchgoers, Atheists, they all love Manchin. If Perdue was sitting with this type of rating, I'd be worried. But even his bump he received from cutting the gas tax was nowhere near this.

On a side note, Republicans have a higher approval rating of the Democratic governor than Democrats do. In the blogosphere, this fact somehow means you are "vulnerable" in a Democratic primary.

Political Redistricting

I hope people understand that the violation of the public trust that occurs when officials engage in nakedly partisan redistricting is a question more of when and not how they do the partisan redistricting.

What I mean is this: Democrats used partisan redistricting in 2001 to help maintain their hold on the legislature, something they felt would be in peril without drawing the districts the way they did. Republicans have now decided to use partisan redistricting in the state Senate (and who knows maybe the House soon) to maintain their hold on a near super majority -- something they feel would be in peril without redrawing the districts the way they want to.

Cheating is cheating, lying is lying. Ask someone who has been lied to -- there are no small lies. The principle of partisan redistricting is to manipulate the voting process to achieve a bigger electoral result than you otherwise would with an unbiased and fair vote. For the Democrats, it was a Senate map that produced 30 seats when the real number should have been closer to 25. For the Republicans it is a Senate map that could keep them in the 34+ range without worrying about dipping down closer to 30 seats or losing their majority in a good election year for the Democrats.

Good government types should be appaled by mid-cycle redistricting such as this. In a way it worse than gerrymandering after a census. In theory our Democracy should be a feedback loop focused on the individual voters who elect individual members to Congress. Of course those voters and members choose political parties to affiliate with, but we like to think that our voters are smarter than the most base political instincts that they possess.

A crucial part of that equation is a feedback loop -- voters elect a member of Congress, the legislature, mayor, school boardmember etc and then two years later (or whenver) they get to judge that individual on their performance. Even if that person doesn't run for re-election they at least know what to expect and can make electoral decisions within that context.

When you redistrict too often, the voters knowledge of their representatives is diminished, the only thing they have to fall back on in many cases are their partisan allegiances. The problem with this is that our electoral system is based on representative democracy and not on a party parliamentarian system. And even if you prefer a party system like many other countries use, this type of mid-decade redistricting is a poor approximation at best.

This is why I hope the Supreme Court strikes down mid-cylce redistricting when they re-examine the Texas case. Even without a Supreme Court ruling concerned Georgians could push for a bipartisan committee that adopts new maps after the census and could consider petitions for mid-cycle changes.

Here's one area where the committee might do a better job than the current legislative leadership. Ralph Hudgens wants to reunite Madison county into one Senate district. So the Republicans rushed through a bill on literally the first day of the session without considering alternatives, and claimed there was no way to do the Madison county part without messing up Clarke.

That's not true. There are multiple ways to make Madison whole without splitting any other counties -- including Clarke. A nonpartisan commission could consider requests by legislators, citizens, county officials and everyone to "fix" split precincts that don't need to be split and split counties when there is a way to reunite them without splitting further jurisdictions.

Attention Flaggers

I thought flaggers might be interested in what Chip Rogers (R - Woodstock) said regarding a redistricting plan supported by Republicans that egregiously carves Clarke county in half for political purposes:

"The wisdom of the chamber of commerce, given the makeup of the chamber of commerce, may surpass that of the commissioners," Rogers said.

In this instance, the Republicans in the Senate do not agree with the non-partisan, liberal, elected local government in Athens/Clarke County. But once a principle like this has been breached the Republicans have shown their true colors. What the Chamber wants, the Chamber gets. Today it is an extra Republican senator in a liberal Democratic county. Tomorrow it could be new commercial development next to your property in a conservative Republican county.

Hopefully the voters of Georgia have been warned.

Attention AJC

Your recent Zogby poll is crap. An outlier or something like that. It claimed that President Bush's approval rating in Georgia was 60%, that Sonny Perdue's rating was 70%, and that Sonny was besting all challengers by around 20 percentage points.

Well now Survey USA has released yet another Georgia poll which shows that Bush's approval in the state is still stalled below 50%. Since May, it has only been above 50% on SUSA's poll one time. That's over 5,000 interviews and an average approval for Bush of about 48%. Simply put, there is no way his approval is 60% in Georgia right now.

Maybe the AJC should take that into consideration and stop using their poll that shows Perdue cruising to victory as a justification to kiss his butt during the legislative session, so as not to get on the bad side of the "sure thing" come November.

I know Perdue, Taylor, Cox, Reed, Cagle, Hecht, Martin et all are doing polling, and that none of them will release their polls because the information is very confidential. But I also know that none of those polls, paid for with big bucks (not cheap Zogby polls) are showing anything as rosy as the AJC's poll did.

The AJC had a choice: they could spike their poll because they know it's a piece of crap (a professional pollster would do this on his own and conduct another one) or they could report it because after all, they did commission it and they aren't in the business of deciding when to report a poll or not. I think they did the right thing by reporting it, even if the reporters and editors might suspect it's a bogus sample. That said, report it all you want, but please don't let it color your editorial judgement.

Internet Explorer Problems

Due to a screwup on the part of both me and Internet Explorer, IE users were not able to correctly view the redistricting images I linked to earlier. I've fixed the problem, but if you had that problem do yourself a favor and download a real browswer. In particular I can't guarantee that future features and fun plugins offered through this site will work on a non standards compliant browser (IE). You've been warned :)

That's all!

Reflections on Polling

The AJC sure loves their recent Zogby poll which shows Sonny cruising, and I'm sure the Perdue camp is pleased with the Rasmussen poll recently released which also shows them doing well. That's not surprising, he's the incumbent and if he wasn't holding a comfortable lead this far away from the election he'd be in serious trouble. (Don't tell that to the AJC editors, convinced that he's going to win Perdue will continue to receive glowing coverage in the paper of record and when his political opponents point out easily referenced facts about his administration those facts will be referred to as "charges" by "confused" opponents)

More interesting to me are the snippets of a statewide general election poll commissioned by the Jim Martin campaign by Cooper Secrest. Those snippets revealed that both Martin and fellow Democrat Greg Hecht were leading Ralph Reed in a hypothetical matchup for Lt. Gov among all voters.

I doubt most Georgians know who Martin, Hecht, Reed or Cagle are at this point. Which means a question like this is mostly measuring strict partisan reflexes among those polled. So it's good to see that more Georgians by default still choose a Democratic candidate for statewide office than a Republican.

My hope, although I am sure it will go unfullfilled is that we will get better poll coverage than par from the media as the election season goes on. At the very least I would like to see some media outlets commission Survey USA polls -- they are easy to read and access online, and while robopolls have their issues I certainly don't have issues with a SUSA poll the same way I'd have with a Zogby one.

Dear God

More polls like this please.

Athens' 9th Life

When Republicans took over the state Senate in 2002, one of their immediate priorities was redrawing the Senate boundaries. From February, 2003 until the court drawn maps were implemented in March, 2004, they proposed and/or voted on 8 different maps, all called Senate Fair X, where X was the number.

Now I know, you may be thinking how can there by 8 different fair maps in a period of a little over a year. And the answer would be that each successive map was more fair concerning the re-election prospects of the incumbent Republican Senators. But anyway...

On the 8 different maps, one thing was consistent: Each time Athens and Clarke County were kept whole in one Senate district. Which makes me wonder, if splitting Clarke County is the right thing to do and county leaders are craving two Senators, why didn't the fair Senate map drawers propose that back when they still thought Brian Kemp would be running for re-election as an incumbent? They had 8 chances to get it right, afterall.

Not so sure about that!

From this article about DNA testing comes this statistic:

Maybe it is just me, but didn't something else pretty significant happen between 1998/2000 and 2004/2005? Of course I refer to George W. Bush being elevated from governor of Texas, where he was execution happy and had a large state death row to work with to President, where the federal government rarely uses the death penalty. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for DNA testing being used both to convict criminals and to exonerate the innocent, but I think George Bush no longer being Governor of Texas has more to do with the dropoff of executions than DNA (so far at least).

This fascinating page seems to prove me right. It lists everybody executed in Texas along with information about the executed and a last statement. In 2000 when W. was out to prove his conservative credentials the state executed 40 people, a little less than one a week on average. Last year they executed just 18. That difference accounts for 88% of the nationwide drop from 2000 to 2005.

Some of the last statements are potentially chilling, especially when DNA proponents finally do prove that an innocent person has been executed, which is bound to happen eventually. Many of the confessions of guilt are quite moving. Should be required reading for people on both sides of the issue.

Redistricting Images

Haven't seen any images anywhere else on the web, so I made some:

UPDATE: If this page wasn't working before, you were probably trying to look at it in IE. I've fixed that problem, but how about using that as an excuse to get a real browswer:

	Existing Districts
	Proposed Districts
	Areas with new Senate District in Red

Things that make you go hmmmm...

Republicans have wasted little time in donning the hat of hypocrisy when it comes to redistricting. Although they enjoy a substantial lead in both chambers, any threat to their power is considered too serious of a problem for the ballot box -- it must be addressed by redistricting!

Case in point: With Sen. Brian Kemp (R - Athens) bowing out of that body to run for statewide office, Republican legislators (and Kemp's brother-in-law, the potential Republican candidate) are looking at a swing district and thinking that Democratic state Rep. Jane Kidd of Athens has a good shot at winning it.

So, what do they propose: A shift of the district's boundaries. Splitting up Athens for the first time in God Knows When in the state Senate, putting half of Athens with Oconee and a portion of Walton county and putting the other half with a district that would include Oglethorpe, Elbert, Madison, Jackson and Barrow counties.

Brian Kemp gave the usual gerrymander's cop out, that a split community gets more representation and state dollars (not true). Ralph Hudgens went farther. According to the Athens Banner Herald he said: "Monroe (in Walton County) has a lot more in common with Athens than anything else".

Now let's think about this for a second. Athens/Clarke County (they are one and the same) is currently whole. Hudgens proposes splitting it in half and putting half of the city/county with Walton County because they have a lot more in common with Athens than anything else. Presumably Hudgens means that the portion of Athens that will remain in SD 46 has more in common with Walton county than it does with the REST OF ATHENS they are taking out.

That's like cutting off my right arm because a transplant would make a better match. I doubt Perdue, Richardson and Johnson will go along with this blatant partisan redistricting. If so, we'll be able to confirm that years of blathering on their part about keeping communities whole was just that -- blathering.

Next Week's Time Magazine?

I think a lot of us have seen this week's Time Magazine:

I just wonder if next week they'll have this cover:

Because that's the real story of corrupt DC.

Directory Listing Denied

For the first time, the state Ethics commission will be handling campaign disclosures instead of the Secretary of State's elections division office. Why? Well, it's either Republicans taking a cheap shot at Cathy Cox and taking away one of her responsibilities because she's a Democrat, OR, in one of their occasional moments of wisdom, they are pre-emptively removing this power from future Secretary of State Bill Stephens who can't even fill out one of his own reports correctly, much less manage a system that is in charge of everyone's reports.

Well anyway, as of now the website for the Ethics Commission, probably the most pinged site by policital operates in the state today, is currently down. Thanks legislative Republicans!

Update: My bad, I jumped the gun. This is technically the last report of 2005 (even though it's 2006). Ethics will takeover for the first report of 2006. Hopefully their website will work by then, and maybe they will have a new executive secretary seeing as how they fired the last one for being too impartial.

Oh My God!

This is like the worst idea I've ever read. Let's just put a critical state representative in charge of MARTA! She runs a small art gallery successfully -- that's equivalent to running a multi-million dollar cash strapped public agency. Why not? She can't do worse than the current gang in charge.

Among Jill's criticisms that show she doesn't exactly do that great of a job overseeing MARTA:

• Critical of MARTA for buying soap because they don't have public restrooms -- they do


• Critical of MARTA for hedging their fuel costs with natural gas and gas futures contracts because one such contract was purchased from Enron -- at a time when Enron was the darling of Wall Street -- fuel hedging is crucial for the transportation industry, just ask Delta if it wishes it had locked in better prices for its fuel


• Critical of MARTA for focus group testing new fare technology to see what types of questions, concerns and problems average riders would have with the system, and also how to better market it to increase ridership -- Just about every company that deals in technology uses focus groups to develop, launch and improve their new technologies.

So if you think someone who bitches at MARTA for buying soap because she doesn't even know that some transit stations have public restrooms WHILE she was chair of a MARTA oversite committee should now be put in charge of the organization, and you sit on the board of a company in an industry that I know nothing about, then I am currently looking for a job as CEO of your company.

Jill Chambers (R - Enron)

MARTA, like many other entities that have a lot of fuel to purchase, enters into contracts with energy firms from time to time to guarantee both quantities and prices of gas and natural gas. In a volatile energy environment (like the one we're currently in) it is often ideal to get a fixed cost on a commodity to match the fixed costs of fares. If we were talking about an airline, those fares would be plane tickets, with MARTA it is the expected number of tokens and monthly and weekly passes that will be purchased.

One such energy trader that MARTA purchased a contract from was Enron. In retrospect that seems like a bad idea, but at the time MARTA was just contracting with a company whose CEO had earned a personal nickname from the President of the country. MARTA agreed to pay a certain amount of money to purchase natural gas, and Enron agreed to supply that natural gas for that price when MARTA needed it.

When Enron filed for bankruptcy, they had to unwind most if not all of their contracts. At the time, MARTA's contract was in the money -- it would have been cheaper for MARTA to buy the gas at the current market price than from Enron. But since then natural gas prices have skyrocketed, and the agreed upon price would have saved the transit authority a significant sum of money over the past few years.

According to Enron, MARTA owes them big bucks because at the time of their bankruptcy exiting the contract was favorable to MARTA. But MARTA disagrees, it doesn't see why it should pay a penalty to Enron because they happened to file for bankruptcy at a convenient time for natural gas prices -- even though backing out favored MARTA at that moment they'd have happily stayed in the contract if given the chance.

For some reason, state Rep. Jill Chambers, one of just four Republican legislators representing DeKalb County, which along with Fulton funds MARTA's operations, takes Enron's side. What??? She says she doesn't understand why MARTA enters into such contracts (I guess she's never locked a rate on her natural gas price).

What Jill clearly doesn't understand is that getting a hold on the prices your business pays is essential to its continued operation going forward. Especially so for an organization like MARTA that doesn't have much breathing room year to year. People frequently buy items like cars, airplane tickets and even new homes from sellers who go belly up before the full product can be delivered (whether it is an extended warrantly, scheduled flight or 4 bedroom house), but I don't think Jill's advice to those people would be to reconsider future cars, flights and homes.

All throughout the '90's residents of DeKalb and Fulton were promised real action on MARTA if Republicans ever took over. The holy grail GOP obsession used to be state takeover (please!). Instead, all we've gotten is partisan nitpicking from an endangered legislator desperate to score some cheap points -- even if it means taking Enron's side. Can we please put the Democrats back in charge of this committee?