Congressional districts are required to be redrawn after every census that occurs every decade. They have to be contiguous and to represent a limited range of numbers of people but beyond that the process is pretty much up for grabs. Whoever has the power to draw the lines can do so to achieve their own goals, such as to create safe seats for one party or to unite (or disperse) a particular ethnic or racial group, and so on. [Read more…]

On Tuesday morning, the news headlines on the radio that I listen to while having breakfast mentioned that president Obama had shaken hands with Cuban president Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. I immediately said to myself that this would be treated as a huge story in our shallow media and I was not disappointed. [Read more…]

The Daily Show gives a summary of all the assurances we were given about what the NSA was doing that turn out to have been false. [Read more…]

Role reversal can be a useful gauge of when something is unfair, but not always, and it has to be used judiciously. Take the case of racism. One occasionally hears complaints that minorities or people of color can say things that would be condemned as racist if others did it, and this is labeled as a form of ‘reverse racism’. [Read more…]

I came across these cartoons that seemed relevant to the recent post on the class warfare currently being waged by the one-percenters against everyone else. [Read more…]

If there is one thing that really makes my blood boil, it is smug, rich people coming up with arguments as to why people who are barely surviving on what they earn should not be paid more. These people are disgusting human beings. I honestly cannot understand how you can be so lacking in basic human decency that you think that it is actually a good thing for people to live in constant anxiety about how to make ends meet. The fact that children are also among those affected does not seem to bother them in the least. [Read more…]