The Gerrymander Wars Escalate

Any regular follower here knows I am not a fan of the gerrymander.

I've railed about it often: how it distorts true representation, suppresses voter interest and turnout, and drives the major political parties to pander more to the monied powers than to genuinely represent their districts and states.

For some time there in the late 2010s, I had some hope that legal fighting over the gerrymandering efforts by Republicans in key battleground states like Florida would end the issue: That the skewing of representation and denial of voters rights would irk even conservative-leaning courts to level the electoral field and letting sanity prevail.

Alas, the Roberts Court in 2019 nuked those hopes from orbit. All I had left were my observations that even by 2022 the GOP efforts to rig the congressional elections in their favor had turned farcical and clinging to a diminishing returns cliff - all those distorted districts and they still only have a 4-5 seat lead in the House - of their own making.

With the 2026 midterms looming - and with growing evidence that the slim Republican holdings in both the US House and Senate are slipping away - you can taste the desperation of the Far Right to impose their minority rule with escalating efforts across GOP-controlled states to skew their gerrymandered districts even more. Especially as trump himself - openly noting that losing Congress this 2026 would end his reign of madness and sadism - has been running around since 2025 - when his polling numbers slipped as ICE thuggery and tariffs increased - demanding states like Texas and Indiana redraw their districts to keep Democrats from gaining control of a divided House.

The big difference this election cycle - and a big reason why the Republicans are panicking in public - is that the Democratic Party finally decided to take the gloves off and do their own extreme gerrymandering to counter the decades of GOP mapmaking that drove us to this cliff.

I've noted before that yes, Democrats were guilty of gerrymandering in states their legislatures controlled, especially in Maryland, Illinois, and California. It's just that the Dems never pulled it to the extremes the way Republicans did in Texas, Ohio, and Florida. 

Until now: California passed a voter referendum in 2025 allowing them - the most populous state - to skew their congressional districts to where Republicans may not have any seats left; and Virginia passed a voter referendum this month allowing them to redraw districts to where mathematically speaking the Democrats can win the US House by 1-2 seats.

The Virginia results are under legal scrutiny at the moment, so it may not be settled for this midterms. In the meantime, the GOP panic that they could lose the House - and lose it for a long time, because they don't have as many nationwide voters as they'd like to keep skewing the results - has resulted in map madness in the large-population states they still control.

Florida, for example, called an emergency legislative session: Not about data centers, or AI, or education needs, or funding for the upcoming hurricane season; but about redrawing a map they already skewed 20-to-8 in their favor back in 2022. It's bad enough that they're planning to divide the Tampa metro - as huge a Democratic Party stronghold in the state you can find - so that none of the seats representing that metro will favor Dems: A clear partisan attempt to negate the rights and powers of a large number of American citizens.

The funny thing about all this? All of these Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves into permanent victory could actually help them lose it all (via David A. Graham at The Atlantic):

But partisan gerrymandering does have one ultimate weakness—a foe that doesn’t always win, but whose victories are especially satisfying. That foe is gerrymandering itself. If you have never heard of a dummymander, this is probably a good time to learn the word. Dummymander is the term that the political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell coined for what happens when a gerrymander backfires, hurting the party that it was designed to help. Dummymanders are nothing new, but the bunch of new districts drawn in recent months mean that they could play an important role in the outcome of the midterms...

Now the action is mostly reaching its end as the deadline for finalizing 2026 maps nears, although some questions remain. (Among them: Will the Supreme Court issue a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act in time for Republicans to draw new maps for this cycle? (editor's note: goddamn this foreshadowing...) The consensus among election analysts is that the redistricting will end up giving Republicans only three or four new seats, if any. But Democratic prowess in recent special elections raises the possibility that rather than a cold-blooded political hit, the GOP’s efforts could end up as a Pyrrhic victory.

In late January, a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat in Tarrant County—in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. Most House districts won’t see a shift that big, but victories like these have raised the possibility of Democrats catching enough of a blue wave that maps drawn to help Republicans might actually hurt them. The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

One thing that keeps getting overlooked in these gerrymander wars is the role no-party-affiliate (NPA) or independent voters play in how districts get won. When they're drawing these maps, the Republicans (and Democrats) look at how much they can spread out their registered voters they expect to show up, and then pray that the third-party indy voters either side with them or fail to show... which is a huge gamble to take if you're trump's party when polling shows a lot of independent voters are pissed at trump right now. You can survive independent voter outrage if your district is +5 or +8 in favor of your party, but you can't if you've got the percentages at +1 or +2.

Many of Grofman and Brunell’s examples of dummymanders come from late in the 20th century, when Democrats still held lots of southern seats because of historic party support, but were on the verge of losing them to Republicans. For example, they write that the map Georgia Democrats drew after the 1990 census looks more like a Republican gerrymander than one drawn to help Democrats, which the authors blame on “the belief that it is good to be as thin as possible as long as you still remain breathing.” Entering the 1992 election, Georgia had nine Democratic House members. Three won, but three lost, and three more retired.

In the wake of those 1990 redistricting, the Republicans rose on the demographic - and racist - shifts from social conservative Democrats fleeing a party more inclined to defend civil (Black) rights. Those shifts were accelerated in the 2000s by the War on Terror of 9/11 and the growing evangelical Christianist voting base, which led to the Tea Party/anti-Obama fervor that drives the modern Republican base to this day.

Thing is, that partisan shift is pretty much played out. For all the ongoing outrage and demonizing the Far Right produces and consumes within their own circles, they can't increase their voting base any further. At best, they can bamboozle or enrage certain voting blocs - Latino men for example in 2024 - to side with them for one or two election cycles before their hypocritical true selves emerge and drive those blocs off.

This is one of the reasons the Republicans are not only struggling to gerrymander every state they can to favor themselves, they're also desperate to take away voting rights from everyone - Blacks, women, college-age, LGBTQA+ - they don't want voting. The conservative mindset on full display that only THEIR side should have power and rights, and everyone else needs to sit there in our cages being grateful for the crumbs thrown our way.

I'm terrified of the damage these gerrymanders are going to inflict: the lack of honest representation that will ignore the needs of our communities just as we need help from government the most.

The only true way in my opinion to end these gerrymander wars is for the rest of us - all of us - to show the fuck up at the polling stations during the midterms and vote the Republicans - the ones most responsible for propping up that child-raping, grifting, sadistic trump - out of office. As much as the Democrats are playing these mapmaking games, they're not the ones responsible for this monstrous tyrannical regime arresting families, crashing economies, and bombing schools.

We are long past due holding the Far Right accountable for all the sins they've inflicted on the rest of us. To hell with their games: VOTE THE REPUBLICANS OUT.

Then we'll see an end to these fucking partisan maps.

My Trip to Appomattox Court House

As part of my vacation last week, which was in a nearby state park, I took the opportunity to visit the historic American Civil War location of Appomattox Court House. The place where Grant forced Lee to surrender. The place where the Confederacy pretty much lost their fight to keep slavery.

As much as my visit to Gettysburg, this was something as a student of American History I wanted to do. So, with camera in hand, I took a quick break from my group's park activities to enjoy myself for a few hours.

First off, I visited the nearby American Civil War Museum. Not officially a part of the Appomattox Court House National Park (I think), they had a few galleries on display: One about the Civil War and the lead-up to what happened at Appomattox, and one about Black Emancipation.

After the visit, I drove down the road to the National Park

And into the Court House neighborhood that had been refurbished back to how it looked in 1865:

Appomattox Court House was a relatively small community on a major road between
Richmond and Lynchburg.

The McLean House from a distance

The Courthouse that gave the small community its name

This is it. Where the surrender terms were signed on April 9, 1865

Had to switch to my smartphone for the selfie...

The Room Where It Happened!

If you read up the history, most of the furniture in this room were either purchased or pilfered
by the Union officers who attended the signing, knowing full well how impactful
this moment was. What we see here are replicas based on what ended up at
the Smithsonian or private collections.

When I entered the McLean house as part of the tour, the guide warned me to duck my head a lot. Damn, people must have been short back in the 19th Century.

There is little evidence remaining from the momentous actions of April 1865. No sign of the two armies that gathered on the town's dirt road to witness Lee's armies surrendering their rifles to the Union army receiving them. All that remains are the quiet forested hills and the brick buildings preserved to document where and how it happened.

All that's left has been the troubled efforts of this nation to build the arc of history towards a pure justice for ALL Americans...

I Survived (I Think) The Vacation Weekend

Lo, did I travel far into the hills of Virginia, where even the U.S. highways are single-lane, and from that calm and serene place along the James River did I engage in the taking of many photos.

Most of which are not fully uploaded yet, so hold yer horses, I ARE TIRED AND NEED A NAP FIRST. I will get to the Appomattox Courthouse photos in another entry.

Oy, my cats are so happy to see me. (angry hissing and mewls) Oh, wait, you're asking for dinner ALREADY?

This Should Be a Martin Luther King Birthday To Honor Peace and Justice

Instead today we got a bunch of gun nuts holding a rally in Richmond VA to try and intimidate the state government into not passing stronger gun safety laws.

This is an intentional insult towards a man who won a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting non-violence protesting, and a sharp reminder that Reverend King was gunned down because of his civil rights and anti-poverty campaigns. Yes, for a time King owned guns during the early days of the Civil Rights efforts - when his house was attacked and threats on Black lives very real - but by the 1960s he gave them up because they conflicted with his message of nonviolent protest and a realization that justice should not have to rely on violence.

But tell that to to mostly White and mostly racist Second Amendment Cosplayers taking over the streets of Richmond today.

The turnout is expected to be just the goddamn gun worshipers: the Far Left and the Gun Reform groups had declined to counter-protest to avoid triggering any violence in the streets... which is something the Far Right Gun Violence groups are eager to provide today.

This is sad. We should be focusing on what Martin Luther King Jr would be focusing on: affordable housing, better jobs, safer streets and not just for Blacks or minorities but for all the poor.

So what would Martin Luther King say about all this? From the "Drum Major" speech in 1968:

...And the other thing is that it causes one to engage ultimately in activities that are merely used to get attention. Criminologists tell us that some people are driven to crime because of this drum major instinct. They don't feel that they are getting enough attention through the normal channels of social behavior, and so they turn to anti-social behavior in order to get attention, in order to feel important. And so they get that gun, and before they know it they robbed a bank in a quest for recognition, in a quest for importance.

And then the final great tragedy of the distorted personality is the fact that when one fails to harness this instinct, he ends up trying to push others down in order to push himself up. And whenever you do that, you engage in some of the most vicious activities. You will spread evil, vicious, lying gossip on people, because you are trying to pull them down in order to push yourself up...

We are watching tiny souls give themselves over to the worship of a weapon, a machinery of death, on the one day we should be respecting life and peace. All so they can push themselves up at the expense of instilling fear in everybody else.

On a day where we shouldn't have weapons.

Happy birthday to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. We should be honoring you better.

Blood On the Streets of Virginia Beach

A gunman - apparently a long-time employee of the city - attacked the municipal center in Virginia Beach VA this afternoon. Eleven dead so far, more wounded, entire community in shock.

Another goddamn angry guy with another goddamn gun.

And this one hits close to home.

My family lived in that area when I was five, six years old. Dad was still in the Navy then, got assigned to Norfolk until he retired in 1976, and we moved down to Florida after that. I have some fond memories of growing up in the Kempsville area, and those beaches were the first ones I remember going and learning to swim. I remember riding the car past all the beach venues, an amusement park with bright lights, the deep tunnels under the Bay wherever Mom drove us, the sand-filled air and sea-salt scent...

Goddammit, America.

God DAMN YOU, National Rifle Body Count Association.

We are ALL dying one mass shooting at a time.

Our homes, past present and future, all at risk.

All because angry guys have easy access to weapons like this.

I want my childhood homes safe again, America. When? When will this war on our neighborhoods end?

Deeply A Problem

As a followup to my previous blogging, the situation in Virginia is getting crazier by the hour.

Northam has NOT resigned as expected and is trying to refuse accountability for the photo he originally apologized for (his argument afterward was that "Oops I got that confused with ANOTHER time I wore blackface" and that "Oops I was Halloweening as Michael Jackson")

Thing is, Northam is now politically isolated with his own party as most Democrats in-state and nationwide are denouncing him/asking him to resign. He may think he can endure the rest of his administration but it's likely his own state assembly will block him on any objectives he hopes to achieve.

Problem is, the next in line Lt. Governor Fairfax is now facing sexual assault charges dating back to 2004. It apparently had been cursory investigated and dismissed then - by both law enforcement and the media - but because of the current situation now has regained public notice.

This all went into Florida-Man level madness today when the state's Attorney General - by state constitution the second-in-line to the Governor's seat - admitted he too donned blackface in his youth, and unlike Northam is openly apologizing for it. There's a likelihood calls for his resignation are bound to start as he's politically wounded as well. This gets into crazy mode because if all three resign at once, the next in line is the State Assembly Speaker... who is a Republican, and who is only the Speaker because a goddamn tiebreaker had to be settled by drawing lots out of a goddamn jar.

So let's recap: One of our major states - 11th overall in population, 10th in the economy, a key part of one of our largest metropolises (the North Virginia-DC-Baltimore area), home to many Presidents and key historical figures and places - is about to go sideways.

Granted, a lot of this could be easily resolved if 1) Northam resigns NOW for the good of his state and his party, 2) Fairfax uses his time as Governor to immediately find a Lt. Governor replacement, 3) Fairfax steps aside if the sexual assault allegations prove true, allowing the new Lt. Governor to replace him, 4) the new new Governor replaces the Attorney General with someone WITHOUT a racist or sexist background.

Also granted: A lot of this bullshit wouldn't be happening if enough of our political leaders avoided being (alleged) racist idiots or (alleged) sexual harassers. If only, God help them, they ever took the time to examine their life choices and noticed particular moments in their pasts that should have warned them "Oh SHIT this will come back to bite me on the ass at the worst possible moment."

But that's the world we live in, isn't it. If we just focus on the racist part of today's problem, we'd see that particular blindness of White Privilege as a major concern.

I am completely with John Cole on this:

Again, this shit was right there in the open. That doesn’t make it acceptable, but the over the top “wtf” from people is a little crazy- THIS HAPPENED IN YOUR LIFETIME. Kids are still doing their High Senior senior pictures in Confederate garb. The entire god damned tea party was a racist ass reaction to a black President.

This is a deeply racist nation- it’s part of who we are. So yes, there was black face going on, but let’s not lose sight of the other really racist shit that is happening. Let’s not all pretend that this shit is news to us, but remember to work on all the other stuff that is still ongoing and problematic. Like disfranchising millions of black people. Like the racial disparities in the criminal justice system that range from being more likely to be charged, more likely to be convicted, more likely to receive longer sentences, more likely to be sentenced to death. The racial disparities in the medical system that range from being less likely to receive preventative care, receiving lower quality and less effective care, to higher infant mortality rates to lower likelihood of being insured to worse pain management and quality of life. Or racial disparities in education which range from lower reading and achievement levels to lower graduation rates to less exposure and access to advanced classes to lower quality schools to on and on. Or racial disparities in the banking system, to christ do I need to go on?

Again, I’m 48, white, and from West Virginia and not particularly woke, but fer fuck’s sake, if you’re surprised that a bunch of college kids in Virginia were in blackface in the 70’s and 80’s there are a lot of things about this world that are going to shock the shit out of you. You should start by listening to some people of color. And voting for them.

The United States need to stop paying lip service to honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and start paying attention to the goddamn warnings the good Reverend was trying to tell us about the destructive nature of racism. King kept mentioning his biggest obstacle wasn't the Racists - he could see them coming and knew how to fight them - but the indifferent Whites who lived within their privileged world and had no idea the damage they were doing.

The first thing White America has GOT TO DO IS ADMIT THEY LIVE WITH A PRIVILEGE that many non-Whites do not have, and that this privilege is blinding them to the harm they commit.

This doesn't mean all of a sudden falling to our knees and begging forgiveness. It doesn't mean inviting every Black or Latino person you know over to pot luck where you'll be serving potato salad with raisins in it. Or suddenly turning around and offering billions in reparations (although if we are being honest for the love of God we SHOULD do that because a lot of minority poverty stems from our racist history of Ghetto-As-Policy).

But it does mean first and foremost we need to stop going out of our way to be assholes towards other ethnics. Christ. This should be the easiest thing to do. JUST STOP BEING ASSHOLES.

/headdesk

One Year Later, A Ray Of Hope

So it's been a year since... well, one of the most horrifying Election nights I'd ever been through.

Last night was an off-year election, when some states hold their own elections for the governorships and legislatures, and also referendums. In particular, Virginia's election is viewed as a bellweather / measuring stick to let the Parties know the mood of the electorate.

If last night's election was any indication, the mood of the electorate is PISSED OFF. At Republicans.

To quote EJ Dionne:

Tuesday’s Democratic sweep obliterated a series of outdated story lines in American politics and opened a new era.

Forget those repetitious tales about some piece of President Trump’s base still sticking with him. It’s now clear, from Virginia and New Jersey to Washington state, Georgia, New York, Connecticut and Maine, that the energy Trump has unleashed among those who loathe him has the potential to realign the country.

In droves, voters rebuked his leadership, his party and the divisive white nationalist politics that was supposed to save Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia Governor’s race, the centerpiece of the GOP catastrophe.

Instead, Ralph Northam, the Democratic lieutenant governor who was much-maligned until election night for being boring, swept to victory on a massive turnout with the largest percentage for a Democrat in Virginia since 1985. On top of this, Democrats picked up at least 15 of the 17 seats they need to win control of the Virginia House of Delegates and were within 200 votes in four other districts. There were comparable Democratic gains in state and local contests elsewhere.

Washington State in particular flipped their Senate chamber to Democratic control, giving Dems both houses and the governorship and clearing the way for a more progressive agenda to pass. Back to Dionne:

Other right-wing narratives died as well. Anti-Obamacare sentiment was once an asset for the Republican Party. Not anymore. On Tuesday in Virginia, the exit poll found that health care was the top issue in the governor’s race, named by close to 40 percent of voters. Health care voters backed Northam by better than 3-to-1. In Maine, voters defied their erratic arch-conservative governor, Paul LePage, and voted for the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

LePage, a jackass to the bitter end, is swearing to deny the Medicaid expansion, but it's becoming clear that the Republican Party no longer represents the interests or needs of the general voting electorate when it comes to health care coverage.

In a tragic twist, the Republicans were blindsided by the sudden shift in public mood towards gun safety because of recent mass shootings in Vegas and Texas that showed the GOP were firmly in the pocket of the bloodthirsty NRA...

The gun issue was supposed to hurt Democrats whenever it was salient. It was the No. 2 issue in Virginia, after health care. But in an historic rebuke to the National Rifle Association, voters who said they cast ballots on gun policy split narrowly. Sane gun policies are no longer a political third rail. It’s time for fearless opposition to the NRA’s extremism.

What stands out is not so much how Democrats won, although it was interesting to see the uptick in challenging GOP-safe districts and running candidates who were clear rebukes to Republican elitism. What stands out is badly Republicans lost, and why.

Gillespie for example tried to campaign in the trumpian mold: attacking immigrants, defending the Confederate Flag, dismissing every concern voters had about making Obamacare work, etc. He got his ass stomped.

For all the "success" trump had in 2016, Republican strategists forget he actually LOST (62 million to Hillary's 65 million). The only reasons he's sitting in the White House are that he had a broken Electoral College in his favor, he had Russian interference up the wazoo, and the mainstream media was too busy attacking Hillary to where that all depressed Democratic turnout.

None of those factors applied here: the state-level candidates had to play by more consistent rules and they couldn't justify attacking Hillary (although they sure as hell tried). As a result, they couldn't stir the anger and ire of their base voters. They had to stand on unpopular talking points of killing an increasingly popular Obamacare, of doing nothing on gun control, on obsessing over tax cuts to the rich that nobody earning under $70000 a year would support.

Other than a win in a special Congressional election in Utah, the Republicans were beaten in every other election night ballot issue, elective office (well, most of them), and referendum. Outside of Presidential election time cycles of massive shifts (2008, 1980, maybe 1994 midterms) this kind of turnaround is unheard of.

Why this is a clear rebuke of trump is because while he wasn't running for anything, these elections were a response to the ongoing corruption and ineptitude of his administration.

For the Democratic Party, last night was epic: after the debacle of losing the White House in 2016, these wins reflect how popular the Dems' political stances are with the electorate. This is vindication for the #Resistance efforts by outraged anti-trumpian forces getting into the local elections and defeating their Republican rivals. That a transgender woman was able to beat a hardcore homophobic Republican candidate is a perfect example of how Democrats are facing Republicans head on... with positive results.

NOW IS THE TIME WHEN WE DANCE

Things are looking up.

KEEP WORKING, DEMOCRATS. The 2018 Midterms are yours to win if you keep hitting the Republicans on issues they can't defend. Go after them on gun control. Stand up for Obamacare. DANCE MUTHAFUCKAS DANCE LIKE YOU'RE NUMBER 5 AT A CHRISTMAS PLAY.

And for the Love of GOD, America, recognize just what the Republicans are right now: Openly cavorting with racists, sexists, and Nazis; Pushing tax cuts for the rich we don't want NOR need; Trying to kill off healthcare coverage that more Americans realize they DO need; Trying to kill off Americans by letting the gun nuts shoot anybody they want...

This is both postscript to a bad 2016 result and prelude to a 2018 Democratic resurgence. This is still work to be done. Get to it.

It's Schadenfreude Time: Crooks In Virginia Edition

Yesterday's post was about a court ruling that angered me: not the ruling itself, but the bastards - BP Corporation - being held to account for their reckless greed and destruction.

There was another ruling that day that amused me: because it was ex-Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell's jury finding him and his wife guilty on various counts of bribery, corruption, and sheer arrogance.

So now I'm getting around to the schadenfreude portion of this blog.  This is the part of the malicious enjoyment where I lean my head back and guffaw.  A deep, throaty, almost maniacal laugh.  Kinda goes like this:

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

McDonnell is... was... one of those defendants where the sympathy train left the station years ago.  An up-and-coming Republican pol from Virginia, with enough charisma to swoon a room full of fund-raisers and a background catering to the social conservative platform of "family values" (aka Full-Me(n)tal Patriarchy, Pro-Fetus agenda).  He lucked into the national stage as a successful governor of a swing state, able to retain his Far Right credentials yet position himself in public as the "sane and normal" one when compared to his fellow Virginian wingnuts (Hi, Cuccinelli!).  This was a guy getting vetted for being Veep in 2012.  This was a guy who could have parlayed his position into a front-runner for (what is turning out to be wide-open for Republicans) the Presidential ticket in 2016.

This was a guy who couldn't figure out how to keep his corruption on the down-low and in the back rooms.  I mean, corruption is a bad thing no matter which politician is committing it, but there's something to be said about being savvy enough to keep it off the radar...

The feds were able to catch McDonnell's family hanging around with a deep-pocket fund-raising buddy (Jonnie Williams), not only taking money and gifts from him but also turning around and avidly promoting their buddy's diet supplement company.  While Quid Pro Quo is painfully rampant in modern politics, most other politicians tend to be a little more subtle about their deals.

The trial just finished was a soap opera drama worthy of a Lifetime Channel miniseries.  Rather than present a unified defense, Bob and his wife Maureen decided on a finger-pointing approach of accusing each other of being manipulated by a sweet-talking businessman who took advantage of a crumbling, loveless marriage.  Bob especially went with a "crazy wife" defense that essentially threw Maureen under the bus (figuratively, but if someone brought a bus to the front of the courthouse he well could have tried it literally).  For a politician who once stood on the virtue of a husband "defending and providing for his family," this was pretty hypocritical.  It was also pretty tone-deaf.

But the signs were there early: when first charged, McDonnell was offered a plea deal on just one felony charge (meaning minimal jail-time) that would have included all charges on his wife getting dropped (it's a standard practice by prosecutors to pile on charges to make sure a deal can get enforced made).  Even then, McDonnell said no to the deal, figuring he was better off winning over a jury and walking away clean.

Turns out the prosecutors were able to win more than one felony conviction after all.  Hindsight can be a pain, right Gov?

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

As Jim Newell at Salon noted, How could McDonnell be so stupid?:

...In modern politics, corruption charges are usually more tediously complex: Money was wired here and then laundered via a pass-through, which made its way through another pass-through and was distributed through a foundation before ending up at a nonprofit designed to help such and such’s interests with a client trying to change regulations in foreign markets, or whatever. Not in this case. The prosecution just had to show the jury images of the idiot governor showing off his flashy watch that was given to him by the rich businessman for whom he did favors in return. How much simpler could this get? It’s only a degree of reality or two away from an old-timey political cartoon of a tuxedoed plutocrat, smoking a cigar, handing over a big bag marked “$$$,” to a crooked politician slapping his back and cackling.

God, the stupidity...

...Because the defense — the now infamous defense — that they took in court reeked of desperation all the way through. If you’re willing to testify for days about the stunning levels of dysfunction in your marriage, as the best hope for your exoneration, doesn’t that suggest that you may not have the strongest case? Doesn’t that suggest that perhaps you would’ve been better taking a plea deal? It didn’t even cohere...

I would argue it wasn't stupidity.  It was arrogance.  Hubris, the Greek word for Pride: Pride, the highest of the seven deadly Christian sins.  You'd think a rock-solid self-promoting Christian like McDonnell would have learned about the price of Pride in Sunday schools.  That it leads to one hell of a fall.

They Did WHAT To the House Majority Leader?

I was going to write about the increase in gun violence putting lie to the NRA's obsession to turn the Second Amendment into a License to Kill, but then I got home to the current news coming out of Virginia:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is losing his primary to a virtual unknown Far Right challenger.

This is part Schadenfreude, the part where I laugh my moderate RINO ass off as a solid conservative party leader is getting creamed because he wasn't Far Right enough for his own district.

Cantor's positions are - well were is the operative word now that we're talking past tense - very much anti-abortion, anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-gay, anti-matter, anti-ante, auntie-anti, anti-Audi, pretty much anti-Obama across the board.  And he still lost his base.  BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Enjoy the Purity Purge now, boys!

Cantor's the Majority Leader, pretty much the Second-in-Command of the House behind Speaker Boehner, essentially one of the key players who was keeping Boehner's ass protected by the wingnuts decrying Boehner's unwillingness to pursue a more hardened "Impeach Obama With Any Excuse" (for all his opposition and obstruction, Boehner genuinely wanted to get things done: after all, a Speaker's reputation stands on the things done under his/her watch).

That's the public stance, by the way.  Cantor's also one of the backroom players who keeps, uh kept, stoking the grumbling ire of the Far Right back-benchers as part of a long game towards making himself Speaker whenever Boehner falls.  It seems as though Cantor's falling first...

Cantor's losing tonight, by the by, because he wasn't hard enough being anti-immigration.  His opponent Dave Brat (I'm a minor self-published writer, even I don't go out of my way to name my characters so blatantly... somewhere Charles Dickens is spinning in his tomb) went after Cantor's occasional attempts to push an immigration reform bill that included "amnesty" - a wingnut no-no - as a sign of Cantor's failure to represent true Republican dogma.  As Joan Walsh notes:

...In a GOP primary season where the big story had been the GOP establishment beating back the Tea Party, the story turned on a dime with Cantor’s stunning defeat. He is the first majority leader in history to lose in a primary in his own party since 1899...

This is a huge victory for anti-immigration extremists, including Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Laura Ingraham and Mickey Kaus... Brat had accused Cantor of shoving immigration reform down the party’s throat – why is the right obsessed with things being forced down their throats? – and with recent news about children crossing the border from Mexico vainly hoping for congressional sanity in the form of an immigration deal, the issue had new heat...

...But it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy. Cantor is another conscience-free Republican leader who courted the Tea Party when it seemed politically advantageous and then tried to run from it when it was clear it was going to bite him in the ass...

The chatter about a GOP Civil War is bound to go major coverage on the blogs and political talk shows for the next few days.  Deal is, it's not really much of a Civil War as it is a shift between the Establishment Republicans who want to wield their political might for their own ends and the Radical (Tea Party) Republicans who want to use that political power to truly achieve their destructive "kill the government" agenda.  Either way, the conservatives - and their deep-pocket uber-rich overlords - win because they share the same true agenda - massive tax cuts and the shredding of the social safety net - that remains on the table.

What's really happening here is the increase in the voting base outrage and anger - some of which is expressed through the scary increase in gun violence the last few weeks - which is not getting mollified or controlled by a party leadership starting to show signs of losing touch with its own base.

This is the scary part of tonight's results: the growing possibility that the Republicans are going to not only field more radical candidates coming out of the primaries this midterms, but also the now-certainty that the Republicans are going to pursue a radical Far Right agenda in order to appease that angry base regardless of being Establishment-types or Radicals themselves.  For the voters to willingly turn against an incumbent with massive political power - almost unheard of in this era of incumbency entrenchment - is a huge blow, a terrifying reminder to those other incumbents that their own political survival is at stake.  The talk right now is how the immigration reform efforts are dead in the water (again) and how the existing House leadership is going to outdo each other in the "Wingnut Purity" contests to keep their own asses safe (meaning the likelihood of seeing an Obama impeachment before the 4th of July).  "Bipartisanship" is now going to be a dirtier word than "Twerking".  ...what the hell is "twerking" anyway...

The other scary realization is how more dangerous the election results this November are going to get.  Like it or not, we're in an electoral process of a winner-take-all zero-sum system between two major parties (Rep or Dem).  Given the obscene gerrymandering of "safe" districts, the possibility of a crazed radical candidate - someone spouting a lot of anti-rape rhetoric for example - getting elected to an office where he/she can cause major damage is high.  In a Senate race where a whole state - which diminishes the strength of a radical voting base in a sea of more moderate voters - could get repelled by an uncaring or unthinking candidate (as we've seen with Todd Akin), the risk is less: in a House race where a radical voting base is in the majority, the risk is serious.

The only thing lessening the risk of a wingnut getting elected is the possibility - even in a hard Far Right district - that Brat will do something so offensive during his victory lap between now and November that even the Far Right voters will go "oh God, we voted for THAT idiot?"  Sadly, the only offensive thing I think Brat can do is say something stupid like this portion of the sentence has been filtered by the Decency Board, who would like to point out that what is being described here not only violates the Laws of God but also violates the Laws of Biology, Physics, and Field Hockey.

While there is a Democratic challenger Jack Trammel in that district - someone from the same college where Brat teaches - there is no certainty that Trammel can win over enough voters: the 7th District went heavily for Romney in 2012 and given the rancor the Republican voters are feeling in that district they're bound to keep that enthusiasm well into November.  It wouldn't hurt, and indeed might help, to send Trammel all the support that can get mustered: in some ways, this seat is up for grabs (losing the incumbent weakens the party's hold on it).

There are more primaries on the way: more possible challenges by Tea Party types versus Establishment Republicans now shaking in their faux cowboy boots.  The Peak Wingnut that John Cole worries about has yet to hit its limit.

God help us.

P.S. Don't Vote Republican.