Viva MICRC

 Well hats off to the MICRC.  I think I may have caught a whiff of this when I was googling for a Michigan gerrymandering article, but it didn't look quite like what I was looking for so I passed it by.  I should have looked deeper into it, this is just the kind of thing I have been hoping for.  

All the states should do it, but neither the dems or the reps want to do it unilaterally thereby giving the other party the edge.  There should be some mechanism for enforcing it on everybody, like the supreme court.  But the supreme court has had a case and refused to get involved in it.

The language is vague, and I have to agree with Beagles that the two paragraphs are contradictory.  That thing about you had to have a district for like Blacks and Hispanics was something we liberals were in favor of, but it turned out to work badly.

Say you had five districts, mostly white but with some minorities, and then you redistrict it to give the minorities one of the districts.  
Since the minorities were all districted into that one district, there are not many left in the other four, and the representatives who had once had to consider the minorities in their district now didn't have to consider their interests at all, and since there are now four white districts to one minority they were consistently outvoted and in effect the minorities now have no representation at all.

When I was in Austin they had an election, I think for something like aldermen, but instead of each ward voting for its alderman, everybody in the city could vote for any alderman.  You could tell by their speeches who was for like the downtown or the southwest side, and you could vote for the guy who appealed to where you lived.  But also they could run more generally as just a conservative or a liberal and if that seemed more important to you you could vote for that guy.  It seemed to work well enough but more importantly it removed the possibility of gerrymandering.

Like I said before the language is vague and likely there will be much wrangling, but the fact that there are four reps, four dems, and four independents indicates that they could work it out.  I will put this commission on my radar and I will be following it.

Though westerly winds are prevalent in the United States there are local conditions to consider.  Living by the lake for thirty years I know this from experience, but you don't have to take my word for it, you can see what the world's greatest newspaper has to say:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-01-0704010265-story.html

My Yahoo weather map is zoomed in on my zip code and my temps forecasts are often like ten degrees cooler than the forecasts in the world's greatest newspaper.  Every now and then I aim it at Sheboygan where the temps are often similar.

I  was hoping for a photo of gusty little Groot, but I will take Old Dog's word for it that he is fighting on and I certainly send my best.

The experiment with cut flowers and other bits of flora sounds very interesting and worthy of a gentleman scientist.  I am wondering what has happened to the pasta project.

No Catfish today, but I will have one for Friday