How Barney Frank…
…lost Margery Eagan, who’s voted for him for the last 30 years.
No more.
Oh, and even though Frank won re-election handily, he still lost—his chairmanship of the Financial Services committee. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
And John Kerry feels his pain.
[NOTE: If you’re not familiar with the rather curious shape of Frank’s heavily gerrymandered district, here it is for your perusal:
And here’s another similar district in Massachusetts, the 3rd. Local humorists state that it was designed that way because Worcester felt it needed a warm-water port:
You can see how gerrymandering works if you look at the election results town by town in Frank’s district. Note Brookline and Newton. And then note the rest.]
Poor poor John Kerry
Poor poor poor poor John Kerry
Poor poor John Kerry
Fall River really seemed to like him too. I don’t know why, although he did campaign heavily there.
I see what you mean. Newton and Brookline provide almost all of his margin of victory. I knew enough about Mass to look for Newton and Brookline without seeing your prompt.
Hugo Chavez gerrymandered his districts in Venezuela so that in many instances, opposition districts had many more voters and population than did districts that went for Chavez. That is how you get 48% of the vote and 64 % of the seats.
There is an egregious example in Miranda State where a district that went to the opposition had 321,000 registered voters, and one that went for Chavez had 137,000 registered voters. That is GERRYMANDERING!
Very little in the MSM about that.
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-27/world/venezuela.elections_1_united-socialist-party-venezuela-s-national-electoral-council-president-hugo-chavez?_s=PM:WORLD
Isn’t Massachusetts going to lose a seat in Congress with the new Census? If so, that is good news to me.
To quote the schoolmarm from Blazing Saddles: We, the cheapsuits of Rock Ridge, (where innocent women are stampeded and cattle raped) . . .
I guess it’s kind of ironic because those who made the spoofs have become the spoofs themselves.
Margery Eagan has been educated and not by a propagandist movie. Her simple statement, “The contrast between a nasty, bitter Frank and his grateful, graceful opponent, Sean Bielat, could not have been more stark,” says it all.
Margery Eagan co-hosts the morning drive show on WTKK in Boston. I would rather listen to Lady Gaga covering Yoko Ono’s greatest hits while huffing helium. She is of the Eleanor Clift school of debate: if you can’t win on the merits, interrupt and yell your argument.
As far as Barney is concerned, until he dies or retires, he will retain his seat in Congress. He is not there in spite of his constituents, rather he is truly representative of them.
And with Deval Patrick firmly in place in the corner office and a solidly Democratic, nay socialist, majority in both chambers, there will be no change to the gerrymandering of the Congressional districts that does not affirmatively benefit Democrat candidates, redistricting notwithstanding.
I am very happy for the rest of the country (except notably California) having turned hard to the right, but here we are still stuck on corrupt.
Those maps look like something designed by Hermann Rorschach.
And the third district re-elected McGovern, the FARC guy. The inhabitants of Massachusetts are a strange bunch, lots of education and no sense.
We have to stop the gerrymandering: I know the technique been around for a very long time, but it’s as un-American a practice as has ever been conceived, and, I think, if the framers of the federal constitution had ever even dreamed that such a thing would be concocted, it would have been forbidden in the constitution.
The Legal Way to Rig an Election: Filmmaker Bill Mundell on Gerrymandering
One good thing that did come from California last week was the adoption of a (relatively) impartial commission to set districts rather than leaving it to the politicians. Iowa has had such a system for a while and as far as I know–I may be wrong, and someone please correct me if so-it has generally been effective.
A substantial part of the evils associated with having a huge percentage of districts gerrymandered to ensure favorable results would be ameliorated if not fully overcome by setting the districts on some sort of general geographical and objective standard.
Certainly it’s a better idea than term limits, which we have in Michigan; the main results are a musical chairs game of politicians running for this office, then that one, then another one, as well as the fully predictable result that lobbyist influence is even greater than before.
Didn’t Obama gerrymander himself into the wealthier sections of Chicago? The Won understands and plays this game all too well. It’s time to change the rules.
Iowa has it right – they can also boot out their appointed-for-life judges. What is it about coastal places that encourages insanity? Something in the water?
(note, I live in New England btw, lest anyone think I am gratuitously trashing coastal places) (which I am)