obscuring the line between voter REGISTRATION fraud and actual incidents of FRAUDULENT VOTES CASTED has really helped the Repugnicans.

The former may screw up their efforts to gerrymander districts to get more favorable outcomes; the latter is an excuse to violate civil rights and DEFRAUD THE ELECTORATE.

How quaint. Must be tough to have to play dirty to win.

>> ^bobknight33:

Agreed.
However how could any black person vote Democrat, the party that created the KKK to keep people from voting Republican? The Vast majority of Blacks were Republican all the wall up through Dr. Martin Luther King. Then things changed. Strange that the party of lynching became the party of entitlements which in-turned re-enslaved people. >> ^therealblankman:
All good points but I still can't believe Ron Paul, as smart as that man is, allowed that hateful racist shit to be published under his name.



Well, what happened was that the southern Democrats and "Dixiecrats" abandoned the party in droves thanks to the civil rights reforms started under JFK and consummated under Lyndon Johnson with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the later Voting Rights Act. Those same southern rednecks and racists found a warm reception in the Republican party and now form the base for that party and its radical wing, the "Tea Party". These same people are also behind the more recent gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, as well as the blatantly racist tactic of denying poor blacks and other minorities their franchise under the guise of "Voter Registration Reform".

Lyndon Johnson. Man, you've got to hand it to him. The man had them all fooled... they thought he was one of them, a "Good Old Boy", and would maintain the status quo of racism and segregation. He turned out to be the greatest Presidential advocate for civil rights since Lincoln. Call me a revisionist, but leaving Vietnam aside (which is impossible, I know) Johnson was truly heroic in forcing civil rights down their collective bigoted throats. A lot of heroes came out of that time, a lot of martyrs too- including Martin Luther King.

>> ^lucky760:

9 : 5
10 : 6
11 : 5
9 : 5 (or 10 : 5)
This is a website, not an SAT exam. A channel subdomain name should simply convey the general idea and do so succinctly.
If the idea of the channel is to be focused on teachers, students, classrooms, and the educational system, school is well-suited.

strlennification! I guess that means channels like Documentaries, Shortfilms, Catsanddogs, Controversy, Conspiracy, all red-headed step children now.

I'm just being cranky about channel names being inconsistent. Calling it "school" is actually a clever choice in keeping with Videosift's tradition. I just think that tradition has led to the channel list becoming quite a mess.

My point isn't to make using channels more like an SAT test, my point was to make it easier for people to categorize videos into channels. Succinctness is as much about clarity as it is about brevity, and the way to bring clarity would be to actually name channels after the category of information they're meant to contain, and not after nouns associated with the category.

People familiar with our site's eccentricities will know that we often name channels that way, but would people unfamiliar with the site intuitively understand that they need to look in the school channel for educational videos like this?

You'd also wind up with random videos that have nothing to do with education going there, like say a video of a school being demolished, or a video of Donald Trump demanding to see Barack Obama's diploma...

I'm just giving my opinion, and I fully confess to being needlessly cranky about it, but it's not like what I'm saying here is crazy talk. The word school is not synonymous with education, and it's not like education is some fancy shmancy 14-syllable word that only eggheaded people like me would understand...

I thought I heard he might go to Washington state when those gerrymandering idiots kick him out of Ohio here, I wonder if this is part of that effort to start building a base there?

Suck it, Kandinsky!

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQXij1RzDRp7HdP1xV56UgRIi5Eap50F4JcMad4L1hI0dSQRq1D

>> ^bareboards2:

Ron Paul just announced his retirement (won't seek reelection in 2012) and said that the gerrymandering of his district had nothing to do with it.

This is a more useful issue to tackle than his previous video. People can disagree about which of FPP/av/proportional feels better, but they all produce policy results in line with the wishes of the median voter.

Gerrymandering on the other hand is strangling our government in the US. Legislators have crafted such safe seats for themselves that they are now beholden to homogenous and often extremist constituencies. Thus they have little incentive to compromise. Congress hasn't passed a budget in 3 years, and now is running us scarily close to fiscal catastrophe. We may all lose our jobs if they tank the economy, but their districts are safe for life.

I'm a fan of the independent commissions. We've had good results in the past decade letting retired politicians with no future ambitions and generous pensions work out sensible recommendations on a variety of issues. I'll be interested to see how it works for California and any other states who try this route.

Your video, Gerrymandering Explained, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 33 Badge!

Ron Paul just announced his retirement (won't seek reelection in 2012) and said that the gerrymandering of his district had nothing to do with it.

I just like how they throw in gerrymandering at the end. They tried to do this in Utah last year to keep democratic winners at a minimum.

If you wish to know why: Salt Lake City, it's northern neighbor city, Ogden, and the city that had most of the Olympic events, Park City, all vote democratic. However, the farther south of Salt lake City the more republicans you find. The only reason they vote Republican is for some reason we've yet to figure out in the main valley is why they vote Republican. These are typically good 'ol church going or listening to Rush/Beck type people and have a LARGE tendency of group-think and block voting.

In other words we always get screwed over (even in the suburbs) by this demographic. It's the same demographic that screwed over California on prop 8. The block or: "your religion wants you to vote this way" (which I see as a huge state versus religion debate that should be brought up) works VERY well. It's very tiring to watch it happen in EVERY election, but people are getting smarter as the cities, specifically, along the Wasatch Front (the western edge of the Rocky Mountains end in a huge corridor that runs N/S from southern Idaho to Southern Utah--close to Las Vegas) that are natural valleys that form every 40-70 miles and end with the mountain ranges on both sides "cutting off" the metropolitan areas forming about six major areas, and then some cities off to the east of the mountains (not many, some of them are: Moab, Tooele, Price, Vernal, etc...). Most of the populace lives in this area and it distinctly follows I-15 which runs straight into Los Angeles.

Strangely enough the more people that live in more urban type environments with lots of people, these people tend to have a democratic or atleast a very moderate republican stance. The smaller cities ALL vote republican. In other words, Salt Lake City is held hostage by Utah's small cities and developing cities along the I-15 corridor or cities that are not located next to I-15 and of course Utah County, just south of Salt Lake City or Salt Lake County (which has many cities, Provo being the biggest; but more importantly it has BYU; hence it's almost inane voting standard).

The politicians wish to divide Salt Lake County into an area unable to vote democratically as they would group us with just enough "typical republican voters" as to make our votes worthless. This got shot down last year, but I have no idea about this year. With our new law passed I can't even look to see if they're trying to do this--which is probably why they wanted to do this anyway.

Lots of these politicians were going to get kicked out in the next election cycle, some did. But, they got replaced by a worse setup: Tea Party or Glenn Beck followers that hide behind the all magical (R). The populace loving their block voting voted these idiots right in and of course the laws this year are inane. Mike Lee would be an example of this.

It should also be known that the LDS/Mormon church owns quite a bit of media in and around this area (the biggest is called Deseret, but there are a few more). The reach of this media reaches a lot of areas in the Intermountain West or Intermountain Region (which is HUGE): Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington--there may be more, but the largest stronghold is Wyoming, Utah, California (around the Sierra Nevada and north), and Idaho. KSL (at KSL.com) is the LDS churches right arm in Utah and in the regions I listed above; it's also the churches direct feed to their semi-annual conferences that are followed by members voraciously. Many people consider coming to Utah to see the conferences much like a pilgrimage you see in other religions.

Wyoming and Idaho, as they do not have major news/media stations (or atleast in the past they didn't-this is still true for western Wyoming), KSL fills that void, as the church and the members have more than enough money to make this a very far reaching media outlet for the Intermountain West/Region. KSL plays it's role well when it comes to group-think and spreading the ideas created by the church and even LDS politicians, along with the churches run newspaper "Deseret News"; with the "satanic" or democratic/moderately conservative and more level headed news publication provided by "The Salt Lake Tribune" which is a very good newspaper. Even if you're a republican and not LDS, you'll find it to be a good source for news for anyone that isn't a "Republican Mormon"; they are very centrist in their opinions and provide a VERY MUCH needed counterweight in the region. KSL tends to follow Deseret News or likewise, Deseret News follows KSL--obviously following the LDS churches thoughts and opinions on subjects. Though they tend to do fine as long as they're ONLY reporting the news, like a breaking story...

Anything that has time to become an op-ed becomes an obvious religiously slanted opinion and more annoyingly, lately (the last decade or so), it has a politically charged republican view. Recently some Tea Party views have crept in. The LDS church doesn't seem to like or hate the tea party and I've never heard an opinion making their stance on that issue official at any level; but, at the same time I know a lot of Mormons that love Glenn Beck and Rush, so that situation to me seems "fuzzy" at best. As the church has never reprimanded Glenn Beck (as far as I know). If I said some of the same things that Glenn Beck has, would most certainly be incurring a disfellowship or even a excommunication. I'm an atheist, so if I made that known I'd certainly get the excommunication. But, you may need to go to the meeting to see that happen; which I wouldn't--I'd have to ask someone more "in the know" to get an idea what would happen as even when I was a Mormon no one ever talked about these meetings, they were taboo. Anyway...

Typically the Intermountain West or Intermountain Region is the "Mountain States or the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and the Rocky Mountains" and the "Great Basin or Intermontane Plateaus and Colorado Plateau". Which is VERY large.

So that is my experience with church vs. state and the members of said faith trying to hoodwink others by using gerrymandering or other unscrupulous ways to change the vote in their favor. These people should be the excommunicated ones... But, since they aren't it makes me think MUCH less of the LDS church (but, since Proposition 8 I've had little faith that they were anything, but another religion trying to force people to see things there way--there is no middle ground). So if you live in "The Intermountain West", which is a huge region, make sure you find out who is behind your media. You may be surprised.

I think that should cover everything I wanted to say.

It's been awhile since intro polisci, but I recall the upshot was this:

Any reasonable electoral system on a 1 dimensional spectrum (i.e. left/right)will eventually gravitate toward the preferences of the median voter. This is true of first past the post, proportional representation, and ranked preference systems.

If you model voter preferences in more dimensions (for instance one dimension on social policy, one on economic) theoretically you can have fairly chaotic and divergent results based on different electoral systems, but in practice it tends to end up near the median on each dimension anyway.

So it might feel good to be able to point to your green party representative in congress under a proportional system, or a candidate that shares your cultural background under a gerrymandered system, but you end up getting the same policies either way.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'democracy, now, state houses, redistricting, districts, gerrymandering' to 'democracy now, state houses, redistricting, districts, gerrymandering' - edited by xxovercastxx

Only in America can a Congressman, who takes in the most amount of political contributions from the industry he regulates and whose state borders the largest man-made catastrophes in US history, apologize to the company that created the largest man-made catastrophe in US history for "a shakedown."

Fuck you, you gerrymandered tick. It's the fault of enablers like you that this happened.

Glad to do it. And I see you just got your bronze star from it. Congrats!

In reply to this comment by mattsy:
Thank you kindly.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
*promote

Thank you kindly.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
*promote

>> ^jwray:

If Sarah Palin gets the republican nomination, I will laugh as that party disintegrates.


Sadly,that never seems to happen with our two party system. One of the two parties is always the party of opposition. They are who the center of the electorate turns to whenever the party in power doesn't seem to be doing a good job, and the party in power never seems to be doing a good job. The repubs know this better than anyone, their entire strategy at the moment consists of two points 1. Do nothing 2. Criticize everything.

As long as we have the two party system, private election financing (bribe financing), and rampant gerrymandering, this will never change.