Gerrymandered for black and white

The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission has published their maps for Congress districts and state Senate and House districts. They actually produced three version of the legislature maps and five of the Congressional map. I didn’t see an explanation of why did it that way or how they will decide which one to put into official use. In the last couple days I looked over some of the maps, guided by analysis from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. I saw the state House map labeled “Pine” which the Princeton group rated as “C” as in average, could be better and could be worse. It rated the map B for slight Democratic advantage, C for competitiveness, and F for geographic features due to non-compact districts. The Princeton analysis also noted that none of the districts are black majority, though several are minority majority. In looking at the map of the districts in the Detroit area I see a problem. Eight Mile Rd. is the boundary between the predominantly black Detroit and the predominantly white northern suburbs (the Eminem movie titled 8 Mile was given that name for that reason). This map shows nine long, thin state House districts that cross Eight Mile. Several others cross the city border to include parts of western suburbs that are just as white as the northern burbs. I think there is one, maybe two, districts that are completely in Detroit. Yeah, it looks like gerrymandering – not so much Republican and Democrat (all these districts around Detroit are strongly Democratic) but to keep blacks out of the state legislature. This afternoon and evening was the first time for citizens to give in-person feedback. Another four meetings will be held across the state this week and next. This meeting was in Detroit. I thought of attending, but didn’t think I had a particular comment to make that others would be better able to say. So I watched part of the afternoon proceedings online citizens came to the microphones and had 90 seconds to say what they though. The overall view of the maps is that the commission screwed up. Even the heavily gerrymandered 2010 maps had 12 black majority House districts (there are 110 members of the House). This map proposes two. Unacceptable. This doesn’t even fulfill the Voting Rights Act (which, alas, has been gutted). The commission must start over. Several Detroit people who worked hard to get the Redistricting Commission approved in the 2018 election spoke of their disappointment. We worked hard to get something better. These maps are better in that they may restore the balance in the legislature, but they are not better in minority representation in that legislature. Try again. Meteor Blades, Daily Kos staff emeritus, listed and commented on a few climate related stories. Here are some of them: * Congress had better act really quick so that Biden has something tangible of American plans to take to the Glasgow climate summit in about 10 days. It would be good if he could tell China and India we’re doing something, what about you? * That climate summit has a few corporate sponsors. One would think having corporate sponsors at a gathering to talk about the climate crisis would be a bad idea. At least Big Oil won’t be there. But Microsoft, Unilever, and Land Rover will. They’ll have space to tout how green they are. Sure. Unilever is among the top five largest producers of polluting plastics. * The US will need a big increase in the solar workforce. * There are two dozen fossil fuel projects waiting for some level of approval from the US federal government. If approved they will increase fossil fuel emissions by 20% at a time when we’re supposed to be cutting emissions. So don’t approve them. Sydney Pereira of Kos Prism wrote about what is now being called the Great Resignation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August. That’s 2.9% of the workforce. The reasons: The old job overworked them (or didn’t offer enough COVID protections) or didn’t pay enough. Workers are saying the old job just wasn’t worth it. Some employers are now reevaluating pay and benefits. Dartagnan of the Kos community added that workers aren’t looking for just more pay. They also want better benefits and better work/life balance. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, included a couple quotes about the Great Resignation. From Derek Thompson of The Atlantic:

Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. ... As I wrote in the spring, quitting is a concept typically associated with losers and loafers. But this level of quitting is really an expression of optimism that says, We can do better. You may have heard the story that in the golden age of American labor, 20th-century workers stayed in one job for 40 years and retired with a gold watch. But that’s a total myth. The truth is people in the 1960s and ’70s quit their jobs more often than they have in the past 20 years, and the economy was better off for it. Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out. And they’re being rewarded for their lack of patience: Wages for low-income workers are rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession. The Great Resignation is, literally, great.

And from Paul Krugman of the New York Times who asked: Why now?

Well, it’s only speculation, but it seems quite possible that the pandemic, by upending many Americans’ lives, also caused some of them to reconsider their life choices. Not everyone can afford to quit a hated job, but a significant number of workers seem ready to accept the risk of trying something different — retiring earlier despite the monetary cost, looking for a less unpleasant job in a different industry, and so on. And while this new choosiness by workers who feel empowered is making consumers’ and business owners’ lives more difficult, let’s be clear: Overall, it’s a good thing. American workers are insisting on a better deal, and it’s in the nation’s interest that they get it.

Last Saturday Michel Martin of NPR talked to James Fallows, former editor of the U.S. News and World Report. The discussion was about that magazine’s ongoing ranking of best high schools and colleges and its new ranking of the best public elementary and middle schools. The magazine publishes these rankings because it is good for business. It appeals to the human desire for ranking. While ratings are good, ranking is not. Ranking West Point to Caltech to Julliard is preposterous. Ranking encourages abuse: Parents buying their children’s way into the top ranked schools, sometimes using fraud. Schools jiggering their ranking through their acceptance rate – the number of students they accept compared to the number who apply so they encourage more to apply. As for elementary schools, their quality is already tied too much to property tax differentials. Telling one elementary school they rank #2115 while another a few miles away is ranked 600 places higher is absurd, useless, and harmful. We shouldn’t rank elementary schools. Though there is a human desire for hierarchy and these rankings are not going away, it is essential to dilute the influence of one source through having more sources, such as other rankings that use different criteria. This discussion fits right in to my understanding that ranking and a hierarchy of either schools or humans are bad things. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote that Sen. Manchin’s end game is clear. He wants to decouple the two infrastructure bills, have the House vote quickly on the bipartisan bill already passed by the Senate, ... and let Biden’s Build Back Better plan die. Yeah, that’s the bill with all the climate saving programs. And Manchin has no interest in saving the planet. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on Manchin’s fellow obstructionist, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Sinema, who raised $1.1 million in the third quarter, apparently thinks she can buy her way to reelection with the backing of corporate America and GOP donors while pissing off those that brung her. Lots of corporate lobbyists from the pharmaceutical and finance sectors took an interest in Sinema, as she and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia continue to erect roadblocks to President Joe Biden's potentially transformative agenda. ... But perhaps what is truly amazing about Sinema selling out her party for dollars is just how anemic her fundraising numbers look next to those of her fellow Democratic Arizona senator, Mark Kelly, who amassed $8 million in third-quarter fundraising.

Kelly doesn’t accept PAC donations. McCarter wrote that many Congressional Democrats are getting frustrated with Biden and his passivity on what is a huge chunk of his own agenda. So he has reengaged with tweets and speeches and sitting down with various groups of Democrats. McCarter didn’t report on Biden’s discussion with Manchin. Peter Doocy is the Fox News reporter at the White House. He uses his questions to try to get soundbites suitable for his network. Press Secretary Jen Psaki is pretty good at knocking down his idiotic questions. Laura Clawson of Kos reported on the latest round. Doocy blathered on about vaccine mandates for police officers. Mandate getting the jab and they’ll quit. Then, while understaffed, how will they deal with public safety – terror, murder, robberies, kidnappings? Psaki responded, “What was the number-one cause of death among police officers last year, do you know?” ... long silence ... “COVID-19,” she said. COVID has also been the number-one cause of death among police officers this year. As for police quitting in the face of mandates, very little of that his happening. Clawson wrote:

Terror? The U.S. is currently experiencing about a 9/11’s worth of COVID-19 deaths every two days. Murder? A year’s worth of homicide deaths from COVID-19 about every 12 days, at the current rate. Kidnapping? Abduction by strangers is extremely rare—you’d have to go to the state level to express the frequency of COVID-19 deaths relative to that.

Doocy and Fox News have shown they don’t care about the police or public safety or the people who have died from COVID. “Doocy and Fox News are concerned about the appearance of supporting police, using it here as a tool to attack efforts to end the pandemic.” Clawson also wrote about the latest use of the shadow docket by the Supreme Court. This time the unsigned decisions were involved in two cases of police brutality and their protections under qualified immunity. Clawson wrote:

These actions were protected, the court said, because there must be precedent that a specific form of brutality is extreme enough to wipe away qualified immunity—and that precedent must come from the Supreme Court. It’s not enough that a lower court has told officers it is unacceptable to put a knee on someone’s back with enough force to injure them. The Supreme Court must have signed on to that very specific opinion. It’s almost like if an officer can figure out what the court hasn’t ruled out in the way of harming suspects—which is a lot—he has a free pass to do that.

It sounds like the court is saying it isn’t brutal until we say that specific thing is brutal – and we’re the only ones who get to decide. Clawson concluded by writing:

Qualified immunity allows law enforcement to essentially torture at will, knowing that the courts will protect them in all but the most gratuitous, egregious, and outright disgusting cases—and even sometimes then. The Supreme Court earlier this year showed some willingness to say that there are limits to that. On Monday it qualified that with a “but not too often, not too many, not too strict.”

Aysha Qamar of Kos reported that the Center Academy, a private school in Miami, has announced that students are to be quarantined for 30 days when they are vaccinated. One would expect a quarantine to happen after being exposed, though perhaps they do that too. The school said they added the quarantine because of concerns of the vaccine side effects and the spread of COVID-19. Yeah, it’s all bunk – vaccines do not have a living virus and anything in the vaccine cannot be spread to another person.