Within
hours of news reports citing GOP sources that a deal was near to peel off black
House Democrats for a revised congressional map, State Rep. Sandra Williams, a
Cleveland Democrat who heads the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, released a
statement denying that any such deal has been reached and reaffirming her
group’s solidarity with House Democrats and the Democratic Party.
Williams’
statement:
“There
has been no agreement between members of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus and
anyone on the Republican side on new congressional district lines. …The GOP so
far is only offering minor tweaks to district lines without fundamentally
changing the huge disparity between Republican and Democratic majority seats.
This status quo is unacceptable to us, House Democrats and the Democratic Party
as a whole. However, discussions are ongoing to achieve a workable map.”
My
oh my.
Politics
these days has become a high stakes game.
Or, as the wags put it, politics ain’t beanbag.
The
posturing going on at the statehouse is real combat as Republicans work to adjust on the fly
to yet another overreach. If we
look at the political landscape not just in Ohio but all across the land in
2011, there has been a well-organized, well-funded coordinated effort to
restrict American democracy and full participation therein. And you don’t have
to be a liberal loving, Wall Street-hating, union-worshiping, blindly partisan
Democrat peacenik to see it.
Discouraging
voters by restricting access to early voting; attacking public unions to eviscerate
virtually the only force capable in the public arena of going toe-to-toe the
most egregious excesses unbridled corporate desire; rigging voting districts to
ensure that people can vote essentially by packing up and moving: this is what
the GOP-Tea Party has ramped up since the last presidential election in
preparation for the next presidential election, now just twelve months away.
No
less an authority than the Federal Reserve provides evidence that since 2007,
the collective net worth of Americans has fallen about $5.5 trillion
[$5,500,000,000,000.00], or more than 8.6 percent. Over 85% of that decline is
in real estate, which has lost $4.7 trillion in value, or 22 percent, since
2007.
Now
we already know that those at the top have seen their wealth increase
astronomically over the past two decades. So who is seeing that loss at home,
gentle readers? All the rest of us, the 80 to 90 percent of the country who
need to be seeking out and shoring up allies of every sort, because if the
conservatives’ coordinated national effort succeeds, we’ll be in for more of
the same.
Your
representatives in Columbus know this, and you should let them know that you do
as well and that they needn’t come home if they sell out.
• • •
Quick
Bits: Today marks the anniversary of the debut of Ebony magazine in 1945.
The
US tested the first hydrogen bomb on November 1, 1952.
1 comment:
Petitions to repeal the congressional map are now at Cuyahoga County Democratic headquarters; they arrived from Columbus yesterday evening. I already have mine. This map is just too ugly to stand. District 11 now has an almost 80 percent Democratic makeup! They've crammed virtually every Democrat in the state into four districts, leaving the rest of the state — 12 districts — as a Republican playground. To do so, they split communities and counties across the state, treating voters as mere pawns in their little game.
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