RedEye's Tuesday Talking Points

Red State America:  The Roviat Union

One of the only campaign predictions the Talking TeeVee Pundit Heads got right (pun intended) was that the gop infused, media enabled, Tea Party would maintain their majority in the House of Representatives thanks to  gerrymandering.  You see,  TeaPublican controlled state legislatures redrew the voting districts to dilute the democratic vote, because they know it's the only way they can lie and   win.  Yep, gerrymandering is OK as long as it benefits republicans.  No matter how hard we try we can't vote them out of office.  Ain't that a dip?

 “Although the Republicans won 55% of the House seats, they received less than half of the votes for members of the House of Representatives. Indeed, more than half-a-million more Americans voted for Democratic House candidates than for Republicans House candidates. There was no split-decision. The Democrats won both the presidential election and the House election. But the Republicans won 55% of the seats in the House.
This seems crazy. How could this be?
This answer lies in the 2010 election, in which Republicans won control of a substantial majority of state governments. They then used that power to re-draw congressional district lines in such a way as to maximize the Republican outcome in the 2012 House election.”

Speaking of bending the rules to their benefit, Republicans threaten to shut down the senate over majority rule.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) is considering banning the filibuster, which  the republican minority used in their failed attempt to make President Barack Obama a one term President,  however they were successful in keeping him from governing.  Don't just threaten to ban the filibuster, Harry, make my day and just do it!

Republicans, who are responsible for the worst abuses of Senate procedures, have threatened to "shut down the Senate" in retaliation. There's just one problem with this threat: they've already been doing that for four years. How will we be able to tell the difference?

The school to prison pipeline is alive and well thanks to privation  and the Obama enabled  Oligarch's plan to replace teachers with computers, regardless of what parents/tax payers have to say.

Tonight, Mr. Michael Robbins “a senior advisor for the U.S. Department of Education” is meeting with a group of “parents” to hear real, honest, and heartfelt opinions about the digital transition. Didn’t hear about this? Of course not. The Huntsville Council of PTAs decided that the only way to get these real, honest, and heartfelt opinions about the digital transition is to have the meeting behind closed doors, out of the sight of the public and that the only parents who are deemed worthy of having a real, honest, and heartfelt opinion about the computers in this town are PTA Presidents. So tonight from 6-8pm at Grissom High, Mr. Robbins will meet with the PTA Presidents and whomever else the Huntsville Council of PTAs deems worthy of attending so that he can hear from people who are not likely to rock the boat by telling him the truth.

Will President Obama pick up the pace on pardons in his second term, or, are pardons only for Turkeys?

However, a major stumbling block is the pardons process itself.  Presidents rely on recommendations from the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is a part of the Department of Justice.
The problem is that these days, the office recommends to reject the vast majority of applicants.  Further, the process is rife with injustice, as applicants with congressional support are three times more likely to receive a pardon, whites four times more likely to be pardoned than applicants of color, and blacks the least likely to catch a break from the president.

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