I was just thinking about redistricting a little more. The idea is to ensure that the undesirables’ votes be concentrated together in urban areas in deference to Real Merkins®. I think one could achieve the same goal without the absurdity of gerrymandering. Stick to simple boundaries. Rather than partitioning the representation by simple population, however, one could moderate the allocation to the ethnics and other city dwellers according to some reasonable ratio. There is a good historical case for 3/5.

By the way…

It seems yesterday I missed an important facet of the stealth redistricting in Virginia:

After doing the dirty deed, the Republican senators adjourned their Rev. Martin Luther King Day session not in honor of the civil rights icon but “in memory of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson.”

From The Nation.

This Talking Points Memo story pointed to a Republican State Leadership Committee REDMAP Summary Report:

REDMAP
How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010
Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013:

[A]ggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.

This document was to review

its strategy and execution of its efforts in the 2010 election cycle to erect a Republican firewall through the redistricting process that paved the way to Republicans retaining a U.S. House majority in 2012.

Right up front, there is the reason for this effort:

Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify conservative policymaking at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.

So they boldly admit that their major effort was to dilute democracy by essentially putting all the undesirables in enclaves such that they are dramatically underrepresented in the House of Representatives essentially in perpetuity. The brilliance of this is that there is no undoing it so long as the media can be counted on to portray any outcry as Democrat whining. It’s a good thing the filthy wogs are underrepresented in Congress, or something might be done about this. Of course, one can always resort to sneaking in a vote to redistrict during a long-planned absence of a key Negro. An aging civil rights veteran attended the Inauguration ceremony of a black President on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, only to have all the people of a certain kind lumped together (segregated, if you will) in order to insure they didn’t “muddy the waters” (if you know what I mean) of the more -ahem- reliable districts.

Frum pointed this op-ed in the New York Times by former conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard:

I Went After Guns. Obama Can, Too.
JOHN HOWARD
January 16, 2013
SYDNEY, Australia

I was elected prime minister in early 1996, leading a center-right coalition. Virtually every nonurban electoral district in the country — where gun ownership was higher than elsewhere — sent a member of my coalition to Parliament.

Six weeks later, on April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant, a psychologically disturbed man, used a semiautomatic Armalite rifle and a semiautomatic SKS assault weapon to kill 35 people in a murderous rampage in Port Arthur, Tasmania.

After this wanton slaughter, I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35 innocent people. I also knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Our challenges were different from America’s. Australia is an even more intensely urban society, with close to 60 percent of our people living in large cities.

…

Because Australia is a federation of states, the national government has no control over gun ownership, sale or use, beyond controlling imports. Given our decentralized system of government, I could reduce the number of dangerous firearms only by persuading the states to enact uniform laws totally prohibiting the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons while the national government banned the importation of such weapons.

…

The fundamental problem was the ready availability of high-powered weapons, which enabled people to convert their murderous impulses into mass killing.

…

Passing gun-control laws was a major challenge for my coalition partner: the rural, conservative National Party. All of its members held seats in nonurban areas. It was also very hard for the state government of Queensland, in Australia’s northeast, where the National Party was dominant, and where the majority of the population was rural.

…

In the end, we won the battle to change gun laws because there was majority support across Australia for banning certain weapons. And today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate. The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996. The American Law and Economics Review found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996.

Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control.

I’m not sure I can add anything substantive to the results of a well thought-out approach to minimizing the availability of assault/terror weapons to the general public. But I should say one thing I’ve been telling everyone I know: “If you can’t do it with a standard bolt-action high-power rifle, then it is illegal or should be.”