Why are you being asked to oppose these bills?  Aren’t online piracy and theft of intellectual property important issues, worthy of powerful legislation? 

Yes, of course they are.  But these bills, even though they have bipartisan co-sponsorship—indeed, S.968’s author is the estimable Pat Leahy (D-VT)—aren’t really intended to do the right thing in combating piracy and IP theft.  No, they’re backed by the Hollywood business oligarchs and designed solely to protect their products and their property.  IOW, movies, TV shows, music, and the like.

What’s worse are the invasions of privacy and heavy-handed penalties that would be permitted under SOPA and PIPA.  Run afoul of Disney or Fox, and your website can be shut down or blocked, just like what China does to a wide variety of American sites (Google among them).  Even if you aren’t the thief.  Even if you aren’t the pirate.  It would lead to outright censorship, without in any way getting at the shady thieves and pirates, who (like spammers) would simply hop aboard other sites in other countries while the legitimate businesses would be the victims.  Below, I’ve embedded a video that lays out the whole story:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Thankfully, our own Senator Maria Cantwell is leading the fight against SOPA and PIPA.  My Congressman, Jim McDermott (D-WA-07) opposes the bills, as does Rick Larsen (D-WA-02).  As far as I can tell, though, Senator Patty Murray hasn’t taken a stand one way or the other (at least she isn’t one of PIPA’s 40 co-sponsors).  So she’s where you should concentrate your letters and email, along with the other seven Washington Representatives.  None of the latter group is a co-sponsor of H.R.3261.

Most of the other 1st CD hopefuls are also in WA-01.

Yes, majority-minority, but ...

In terms of cojones, Gorton swings the bigger ones.

• The (not really) majority-minority Congressional District
• Building a district for Denny Heck

I eagerly await the results, so that we can learn the outcomes of two important issues. 

The easier one is a simple yes-no:  Will there be a majority-minority District? As my readers may recall from my post on October 10, three of the four Commissioners proposed a CD in which non-Hispanic whites constituted just under 50% of the Census population.  Only Democrat Dean Foster omitted such a District.

However, readers may also recall from that earlier post that I have serious reservations about a majority-minority Congressional District in Washington, that in my opinion such a District would not accomplish the goal of fostering diversity among Representatives.  I hold that belief for two reasons:

• Any such District would contain no defined ethnic/racial community with sufficient numbers of voters to dominate the political structure of the District.  Majority-minority Districts work when there is a large, homogeneous group within its boundaries—African-Americans in many large cities and in parts of the rural South, Latinos in quite a few cities, etc.  The broad range of ethnicities in the South King County area that would form the center of a majority-minority CD makes for marvelous cultural diversity, but it doesn’t engender political power within all (any) of those communities.
• By far the largest “minority” in such as CD would be precisely the one that creating the District was supposed to work against ... non-Hispanic whites.  The September plans contained 49.6% (Ceis), 48.9% (Gorton), or 48.5% (Huff) non-Hispanic whites, very, very close to half.  In terms of voters, however, non-Hispanic whites would surely constitute a comfortable majority in this “majority-minority” District.  The Census counts residents, irrespective of their citizenship, and of course minorities are much more likely to be noncitizens (whether documented or not) than non-Hispanic whites.  Also, the proportion of youngsters under the age of 18 is likely to be higher among minorities.  For these reasons, I bet non-Hispanic whites would make up 55-60% of the registered voters in a “majority-minority” CD.

The boundaries of the new Congressional Districts will play an extremely large role in determining whether Republicans or Democrats are most likely to hold each of those seats in the next five election cycles.  Sure, no matter how you draw a Seattle-based District, it’s going to go Democratic.  But you could take, say, the core of the current WA-08 and make it strongly Democratic by adding areas to its north and west, and removing Pierce County.  Alternatively, the same core could be made into a GOP sure-thing by lopping off its northern parts and taking the new CD across the Cascades.  The same sort of phenomenon could take place in many other Districts.

I’d suggest that in a normal election the current Districts break out as 5-2-2 (Dem-GOP-tossup) or 5-3-1, with WA-08 and maybe WA-03 the tossups.  How will the 10 new Districts work out ... 6-4?  6-3-1?  5-4-1?  4-4-2?  The state can be divided “fairly” in many ways, and the outlines of the proposed Congressional District map will go a long way toward assessing the relative enormity of Tim Ceis’s and Slade Gorton’s cojones.

For those interesting in watching the presentation of the new Congressional District map, it’s scheduled for 11:00am tomorrow.  You can watch the Commission meeting live by navigating to the Washington State Redistricting Commission site and clicking on the TVW link underneath Attend a meeting by interactive webcast.  It may not be compelling television, but it’s a must-see for some of us.

[Cross-posted, and slightly revised, from HorsesAss.org]

While we wait (and wait, and wait, ...) for the Commissioners to break their long silence on Congressional redistricting, I’d like to take a step back in the process, to discuss the reapportionment that presented the Commission with the opportunity to construct a brand-new Congressional District instead of merely rejiggering the existing ones in their redistricting task, as they’re doing with the state’s 49 (no more, no less) Legislative Districts.

As you’re no doubt aware, the number of Congressional Districts in each state is determined based on the results of the decennial Census, mandated by the Founders in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution and revised under the 14th Amendment (you know, the one that got rid of that pesky three-fifths of a man thing).  How the reapportionment is actually carried out is based on laws written by Congress, and those laws have changed numerous times over the decades.  Nice presentations of background info on apportionment methodology, 1790 to the present and how different apportionment methods can produce differing allocations can be found on the Census website.  The latter link shows concrete examples of calculations and results under four apportionment models.

Since 1940, the method of equal proportions has been used for reapportionment.  After each state receives the required minimum of one seat, the other 385 seats are assigned to states in descending order of priority value (PV).  The PV for potential seats 2, 3, 4, ... is calculated as shown in this paragraph, where n is the state’s potential seat number.  In other words, the PV for a state’s second seat is its apportionment population divided by the square root of two.  For its third seat, divide by the square root of (3*2=)six, then continue with the square roots of (4*3=)12, (5*4=)20, 30, 42, and so forth.  By the time we get to the 60th seat (hey, California might someday have that many CDs), the divisor is the square root of 3540 (that’s 60*59).  After all these values are calculated, rank-order them in descending order and assign the seats until 385 of them have been filled.  For the record, the denominator in the equation is the geometric mean of n and (n-1).

I should mention a small wrinkle in the procedure.  As you probably know, the Census counts persons, not citizens; undocumented individuals, if they’re willing to participate, count as residents of their state.  For apportionment, however, the state’s resident population is augmented by the number of overseas Federal employees (including military personnel) who list that state as “home” on their employment records.  Because these home state patterns don’t necessarily match the state’s rank in resident population, this small addition can affect the allocation of CDs to the states.  In 2000, Utah might have gotten an additional seat if the Census counted Mormon missionaries for apportionment; that seat went instead to North Carolina, and Utah took its case (Utah v. Evans) all the way to the Supreme Court, where UT lost.  As an example, adding the 28,829 Washingtonian Feds overseas to the state’s resident population of 6,724,540, the apportionment population comes to 6,753,369.  Washington has the 12th highest count of overseas residents, one place better than its overall population rank.  Texas, #2 overall, has the highest number of overseas persons, while California ranks third (behind Florida).  Alaska, way down at #47 in population, ranks 26th in overseas employees.

After the calculations described above, it’s no surprise that the 51st seat goes to the largest state, California.  Texas gets #52, followed by another CA seat, then NY, FL, CA again, TX again, and so on.  Washington’s first added seat (its second overall) is #78 and its next is #122.  The state’s ninth seat, equalling its 2000 number of Representatives, comes in at #391.

It gets really interesting as we come to the final few seats.  In the spreadsheet snippet, I present the state assignments for the last ten seats (#426-#435), along with the next ten near-misses.  The new WA-10 seat comes in at #432, comfortably above the cut-off.  Minnesota’s eighth seat wins the final position in the House (too bad, as it’s likely that Michelle Bachmann’s district would have been axed had MN’s Congressional delegation decreased by one).  Minnesota just barely avoided subtracting a seat from its 2000 allocation.  At #434, California narrowly averted losing a seat in the House; if the Golden State had done so, it would have been its first-ever lost seat.  In fact, except for 1920, when Congress somehow decided not to do any reapportionment at all, this is the first time California has failed to add a district.  For the record, Washington is one of only 18 states that has never lost a seat since 1910 (and five of those have never changed their seat count in that century-plus).  It may be poetic justice that North Carolina is the first runner-up this time around, after winning the final spot in 2000.  The Tarheel State missed adding another seat by that thin margin. 

As it turns out, in 2010 using resident population instead of apportionment population wouldn’t have altered the composition of the next Congress.  There were a few flipflops in the PV list ... for instance, TX-10 would have been seat #126 and OK-2 #125, rather than the reverse.  The rank-order (but not the identities) of the last five seats would be different, with the actual #431-#435 showing up in the order #432, #433 (Washington), #435, #431, #434.  So the final spot would have gone to TX-36 instead of MN-8.

Of course, none of the above is of much interest to the Redistricting Commission.  They probably don’t particularly care how it came to pass that they’re tasked to draw ten CDs instead of nine.  It falls to reapportionment geeks like me to look at this sort of information.  There’s a pile of additional information in the tables and charts on the Census 2010 website that I find fascinating—trends in the distribution of House seats over time, states that actually lost population between Censuses (hint: several states in the plains in the 1930s ... can you say “Dust Bowl”?), states that have never lost seats, states on long seat-losing streaks (Pennsylvania has lost at least one seat in every Census since 1930), and much more.

So that’s how Washington earned its tenth Congressional seat in 2010.  By the way, we weren’t even close to reaching ten seats in the 2000 Census.  Ten years ago, its ninth seat came in as #407 on the priority list, and the next potential WA seat (#455) missed the cut by 20 positions.

Although they don’t affect my fate here in Seattle (stay in the 43rd or get shifted into the 36th?), I’m eager to review the new LD maps.  If the Redistricting Commission meets its deadline, we’ll be seeing a lot more of their products in the next couple of weeks.  Including a redrawn 10-seat Congressional District map.

[Adapted and revised from an earlier post at HorsesAss.org]

For the record, where I was was Heritage Junior High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.  Along with the other members of the school band, I had just returned from outdoor practice—we were going to play at the next day’s high school football game, a contest that never happened—and was stowing my instrument when the principal informed us of the shooting over the PA system.  The news was too much to process immediately, so we mostly sat in stunned silence.  The school was on the far side of the township from my home, but I have no real memory of the long ride home with a passel of fellow adolescents in that yellow school bus.  I do remember the weekend, as the whole family stared endlessly at the TV news reports.  We watched the lying-in-state at the Capitol.  We watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday.  We watched the state funeral on Monday.  We were in shock throughout. 

We had made plans to spend Thanksgiving with relatives in the DC suburbs that year.  It was a very somber holiday indeed.  While there, we went to Arlington Cemetery to pay our respects to the President.  On a bright, cold, and windy afternoon, we joined a long line of our fellow Americans, shuffling slowly and silently (except for the sobs) past the freshly-dug gravesite.  It was so soon after the event that we had to carefully step over the eternal flame’s gas line, which had not yet been buried.

Over the years, I’ve written a number of November 22 essays.  In addition to the previously mentioned one from 2008, they are:  Forty years (2003), The end of the innocence (2004), and 43 ... and 46 (2006).

For me, the death of JFK marks the day on which “The Sixties” began.  The idea of a counterculture was inconceivable on November 21, all but inevitable on November 23.  We can argue about when The Sixties ended (probably somewhere between the 1972 election and the first Rolling Stone article about disco, in September 1973), but I think it would be a real reach to put their birth anywhere other than the Kennedy assassination.

[adapted from HorsesAss.org]

Today, on the 93rd anniversary of that armistice, on this Veterans Day, we can go that timestamp one better, adding “of the 11th year”.  Hence, my decision to publish this epistle at 11am on 11/11/11.

I’ve written posts marking Veterans Day on almost every November 11 since opening Peace Tree Farm in 2003.  Somehow, I missed the day last year, breaking a seven-year streak.  In case you’re interested, here are links to those essays:

• On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (2003)
• Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month ... again (2004)
• 11th, 11th, 11th ... Veterans Day (2005)
• How will this war be memorialized? (2006)
• On Veterans Day (2007)
• A different sort of Veterans Day (2008)
• Lest we forget (2009)

But you don’t have to be a veteran to honor those who did serve.  So here’s to Shaun Dale, whose blog Upper Left has been running almost as long as my own, and to Michael Hood of the well-respected BlatherWatch.  Here’s to HorsesAss commenter-extraordinaire Roger Rabbit and to Robby, occasional HA commenter and erstwhile blogger on the late, lamented Effin’Unsound, as well as my DailyKos buddy rickeagle.  And also a salute to my Congressman Jim McDermott, one of only 90 House members with military service of any sort.  Jim was a Navy psychiatrist treating sailors and soldiers with PTSD during the Vietnam War (to be fair, both of Washington’s Republican Congressmen, Dave Reichert and Doc Hastings, were reservists).

And, in fact, greetings and salutations in honor of all of the veterans hereabouts.

[Adapted and cross-posted from HorsesAss.org]

I’ve been a Sestak fan for quite some time.  Not long after he first decided to run for Congress in 2006, he participated in the YearlyKos (now Netroots Nation) gathering in Las Vegas.  In his post-YK diary post, I wrote the following comment:

thank you, Admiral

I knew very little about you before attending YK, but since returning home I’ve made a (very small, alas) contribution to your campaign through ActBlue.

I don’t want to sound like I’m dissing Eric Massa, your colleague on the panel at YK, because I appreciate his fire.  But I found your quiet, measured, from-the-soul passion far more compelling than his fervor.  I can imagine that in a debate against Curt Weldon’s delusional bombast, your approach will be all the more effective.

Your words carry immense authority.  As a non-military person, I find myself reassessing my views on the military if a man with a style such as yours can so successfully command a carrier battle group.

I grew up across the Delaware, in Cherry Hill.  So most of the towns and locations you mentioned are familiar to me.  I wish you the best of luck in your campaign, and hope that I’ll be able to put together the funds to send along some additional tangible $upport.

I made small contributions as well to Sestak’s 2008 re-election campaign and to his Senate campaign in 2010.  In that one, he edged Republican Democratic incumbent Arlen Specter in the primary but lost narrowly to Club For Growth teahadist Pat Toomey in November.

As a longtime backer, I wasn’t particularly surprised when I received an email from Sestak a couple of weeks ago.  After all, I get messages daily, from dozens and dozens of candidates, legislators, and interest groups.  The content, however, was completely unexpected.  Noting that he’d soon be here in Seattle (though he didn’t mention the reason for the visit), he invited me and his other Washington supporters to join him for coffee on Saturday so that he could thank us for our help.  That was all ... just to thank us, just to meet us.  No request for a check or Paypal or credit card, not even to “retire his campaign debt”.  There was no “ask” of any sort.

To say this action was unusual is a vast understatement.  I don’t recall anything remotely like it in my years of political activities.  Politicians don’t go out of their way to thank (or even notice) small donors like me.  Hell, they don’t take a step from morning to night without pleading for cash.  Yet here’s Joe Sestak, 3000 miles from home, who wants to spend an hour or so doing precisely the opposite.

Not to suggest a deeper meaning, I’m macabrely amused by the keynoter choices of the WA Dems and WA GOP at their big fundraisers.  On Tuesday, the WSRP’s Fall Dinner featured political trickster/Plame unmasker/US Attorney firer/Dubya inventor/secret superPAC creator Karl Rove.  The guy whose friend Dubya calls him Turd Blossom.  The guy who, through his shadowy American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS organizations, funneled nearly $5,000,000 into last year’s Murray-Rossi race.

Make of the Sestak vs. Rove comparison what you will.  In the meantime, I’m looking forward to shooting the shit with Joe on Saturday.

Before explaining what I mean, we need some background information.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 contains several provisions that bar racial discrimination in redistricting plans.  Sixteen states are required to go through “preclearance” of their plans, automatic submission to their plans to the feds; Washington is not one of those states.  In practice, application of the VRA has resulted in district lines that collect members of a racial group into one district, thereby greatly increasing the probability that that CD will be represented by a member of that group.  One might call it “reverse gerrymandering”, concentrating a group instead of diluting their influence by drawing districts that put small pockets of the group into several districts dominated by other ethnicities.  In creating such Congressional Districts, you can end up with some really ludicrous maps.  For instance, look at Illinois’s 4^th District, in which the two convoluted sections of Chicago’s Latino communities are connected by the median strip of I-294.

Another majority-minority district is the 12^th District of North Carolina, which crawls along I-85 picking up African-American communities while skipping past other towns.  It even looks a little bit like the original 1812 gerrymander.

Those two CDs, and others around the country, achieved the goal of fostering diversity in the House of Representatives.  Luis Gutiérrez represents IL-04 in Washington and the Congressman from NC-12 is African-American Mel Watt.  But I doubt that the same could easily happen if our Redistricting Commission takes the advice of Jayapal and Cheung, because any such district would be majority-minorities.  Unlike the largely Mexican-American IL-04 or the mostly black NC-12, a Washington district would be Eritrean and Pakistani, Thai and Guatemalan, Indian and American Indian, Vietnamese and African-American, Iraqi and Filipino ... on and on and on.  No race, no language group, no national origin would predominate.  Some of those groups are antagonistic to others—would a Bengali vote for a Pakistani? a Honduran for a Salvadoran? an Iraqi for an Iranian?  With such splintering, in a multi-candidate electoral race, it just might turn out that someone from the largest single demographic group in the CD (non-Hispanic whites) would win.

This is not to suggest that racial identity would be the reason for any citizen to vote for a particular candidate.  I’m merely saying that the situation wouldn’t be nearly as cut-and-dried as it would be in a locale with a large concentration of a single racial/ethnic group.

There’s another issue as well.  Republicans love majority-minority Congressional Districts.  Racial minorities are generally Democrats, and concentrating a racial group into, say, a 75-25 Democratic district may make it possible to generate a bunch of 53-47 Republican CDs around it.  That’s probably not the case in Illinois, where the excluded middle of IL-04 is largely a black community, but it certainly applies to North Carolina.  And it could happen in Washington as well.

In their op-ed, Jayapal and Cheung summarize the first round of Redistricting Commission maps (emphasis added):

Republican commissioners Slade Gorton and Tom Huff and Democratic commissioner Tim Ceis made strong and positive statements that reflected their appreciation for people’s participation in the process and their belief that there was a real need for this change. Huff’s map exactly matched our unity map. No maps had all of our asks reflected but many had some and we will continue to push for as much representation as possible for people of color.

Tomorrow, we’ll get to see each Commissioner’s second iteration.  It will be interesting to see who has moved his boundaries the most, as well as who has hardened his position.  I still have confidence that the Commission will agree on a final map by the end of the year.  And I think it’ll have a majority-minorities Congressional District.  But I don’t have much confidence that the m-m district will be represented by a minority group Congress(wo)man.  If Tom Huff or Slade Gorton gets his way, it will be slightly more difficult to elect enough Democrats to retake control of the House from the crazies who run it these days.  And a Democratic Congress would do far, far more for Jayapal and Cheung (and the rest of us) than building the Congressional District they seek.

As for me, I’d previously made plans to extend my visit through the weekend.  This was, after all, only six months after I’d moved from working with the Medicare quality improvement contractor for NH/VT/ME to the one for (at that time) WA/ID/AK, so my East Coast ties were still very fresh.  My intention had been that after finishing the conference on Friday, I would take light rail to the Baltimore train station, Amtrak to Philadelphia, and SEPTA regional rail to Doylestown.  From there, my brother would pick me up so that I could visit his family at their place 20 miles farther north, near Lake Nockamixon.  I was scheduled to fly out of tiny Lehigh Valley International Airport ("international" equals puddlejumper trips to Toronto) on Sunday afternoon.

Now, however, Amtrak would be full beyond capacity.  Every seat between Baltimore and Philadelphia was long-since reserved, with dozens and dozens of other hopefuls already turned away (if they got through the overloaded switchboards at all).  So how was I going to get to where I needed to go?

Thankfully, one of my former NE/VT/ME colleagues had chosen to take up his rental car company’s offer to allow long-distance rentals.  He was going to drive back up to New Hampshire when the conference ended, and was happy to offer me assistance.  And it was a lot of assistance ... not just to 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia, not just to the SEPTA station in Doylestown, but right to my brother’s door.  Couldn’t ask for better help than that!

By the time I was ready to head back to Seattle on Sunday, the airlines were running something approximating a normal schedule.  The backup of unflown Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday trips had been handled.  I wasn’t worried about the short hop from ABE to PIT (the principal USAirways hub back then), but the PIT-SEA nonstop hadn’t restarted until Friday or Saturday.

Even at little ABE, concrete barriers already barred parking near the terminal.  Which was a bit awkward at ABE, as virtually all of its parking lots were close-in.  My brother went into the terminal with me, if only to observe the reconfigured security procedures.  It was nothing particularly onerous, actually less stringent than today’s.  No shoe-removal, no 3-ounce rule. 

Once through security, I sat quietly awaiting boarding.  The gate wasn’t even close to filled with travelers.  How unfilled?  Well, in those days, I had lots of USAirways miles, some of which I’d used to upgrade to first class for this cross-country flight.  So I was ready to go at the first boarding call.  But before I could show my ticket to the gate agent, the “all remaining rows” announcement was made!  The plane (a 737, I think) was only about 1/10 full.

It was just about the same on the long trip home from Pittsburgh.  Any passenger who wanted a private row could get one.  I had a bit of company in first class, but not much.  I think they may have already established the rule against metal utensils, but at least they still fed passengers in those days.

Being that close to the nexus of the attacks was disconcerting.  In the end, though, my own travels were only slightly affected.  What I most remember about that fateful week is the utter shock, the utter feeling of this can’t be happening.  I had read Debt of Honor (Tom Clancy is a bit of a guilty pleasure), but this was even more preposterous than a real pilot crashing his plane into the Capitol.  Especially with the twin towers collapsing in on themselves an hour or two after being struck.  Especially with four hijackings at the same time.  Especially with the Bush Cheney administration’s criminal unpreparedness, treasonous shift of war target, corrupt thievery, insults to freedom and liberty, ruination of the nation’s and world’s financial activities, bombastic false patriotism. 

Of course, that last laundry list was still in the ruinous future on September 11.  In the initial jolting shock of that fundamentalist sociopath Osama bin Laden’s outrageous attacks, we didn’t know anything about the rathole they were plotting to shove us into. 

We were, in a sense, brought together as a nation, as a society, by what transpired on September 11.  The “they” I just mentioned—the ones who have ripped us apart, destroyed our national and international fabric, brought us to the depressing uncertainty of the present day—were our own domestic sociopathic (mal)administration in Washington DC.

Even bin Laden, and even Clancy, couldn’t have written that scenario.