Politics pages

• The latest cynical Republican partisan political fix is the Texas redistricting mess, courtesy of Tom "the Hammer" Delay. The city of Austin has been split down the middle into three parts (belonging to three elongated and convoluted districts) in order to dilute liberal voting strength -- despite the fact that Austin's population is not all that different from the population needed to make up a Congressional district (most of Austin was in a single compact district under the "old" plan, adopted all of two years ago). Under the new plan, I will live in a safe Republican district, but if I were to move a few blocks north or east, I would live in a Democratic district stretching hundreds of miles all the way to the Mexican border (my location is the blue "X" on the map). Click on the thumbnail map below to see more detailed local and broad-area maps of the new plan, or go to the Austin Chronicle site to read an analysis of the plan:
  
• You can read answers to questions about the Supreme Court 2000 election decision here. In Dec. 2000, the text in the first few items below was linked to cafepress.com/scaliabozo, where T-shirts with these slogans could be purchased. Now I've linked in GIF versions of the full-size 1294×1200 images from which the T-shirts would have been made:
  1. You can express your feelings about the Supreme Court's barely-veiled cynically political "fix" in the 2000 presidential race (don't get me started on Scalia!), and how this contributes to the court's historical "legacy .
     By the way, if you spell "Dubya won!" backwards, it becomes "No way, bud!".
     
  2. Another variant of this graphic is more self-explanatory, but has smaller lettering.
     
  3. This was to be on the back of one version of the t-shirts, but I didn't really get around to setting it up on time.
     Maybe I have a shallow view of history, but I don't see that the supreme court accomplished hardly anything positive between 1857 and when they had the fear of God put into them by FDR's "court-packing" plan in the 1930's. Instead, they engaged in cynical "judicial activism" which played a considerable role in hastening the Civil War, effectively negated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (neutering the "equal protection of the laws" clause, and declaring that blacks weren't protected by federal laws, but corporations were protected as "legal persons"!), and consistently placed supposed "sanctity of contracts" above all public policy goals (such as prohibiting child labor or restraining economic monopolies).
     
  4. I couldn't let the latest Supreme court scandal go by without commenting on the activities of my favorite "Justice"
     (click text above to see large image)
     
• Go to page on "Zero Tolerance" policies in primary and secondary education.
  
• Here's the proposed DC "Taxation Without Representation" flag:
  
• The "China Peace flag":
  I idly dreamed this up while lying awake in the wee hours a few nights ago. The current flag of China (like the flags of Vietnam and the former Soviet Union) is a pure Communist banner, which symbolizes only Communism and nothing else except Communism -- and so basically completely ignores all aspects of Chinese history, culture, and nationhood other than the triumphal march of Communism. I think that by now the Peking authorities should be sufficiently mature to acknowledge non-Communist symbols of China's history (especially if they wish to accomplish a peaceful conciliation with Taiwan), considering that China's overall unification is now solidly established, and China is no longer a pure Communist society, and will not be one for the forseeable future. (It was slightly pathetic that when China issued several large coins in honor of the 120th anniversary of Sun Yat Sen's birth in 1986, the Chinese authorities didn't dare include any of the symbols associated with Sun Yat Sen's nation-building efforts on any of the coins.) So keeping in mind that the twelve-rayed sun is a symbol devised by Sun Yat Sen (not Chang Kai Shek), I came up with the "China Peace flag" shown here, which includes all of the main national Chinese vexillological symbols of the 20th century. The basic layout and some of the color-choices were intended to make reference to the five-striped horizontal red-yellow-blue-white-black Chinese flag of 1912. The five yellow stars (arranged as an arc from a 24-star circle) are all equal, to symbolize hopes of democracy (while the one large star and four small stars on the current Chinese flag effectively symbolize Communist autocratic centralism). The dragon shown here was taken from the flag of Bhutan, and so would presumably need some artistic touching-up to be part of a real Chinese flag.

  You can say whatever you like about the unrealistic and naive politics of this proposed flag, but at least this flag is interesting and actually about China (while the current Chinese flag is boring, and about communism).

  

  A PDF version of the "China Peace flag" is also available