21ST CENTURY RACISM vs

21ST CENTURY DEMOCRACY
Johann Wagener 10-20-13

The white hoods and robes are in the closet but racist are not.  They just changed their MO to what we call "gerrymandering"  a clever and cynical strategy to manipulate votes and stack the cards in one's favor.

A close look at these  "gerrymandered extremists" in Congress says it all. What you see is a handful of loud mouth, flag waving, self-proclaimed patriots pulling one-liners out of the Constitution to rationalize what any rational person can surmise fairly quickly. Racism at it's worst.

The then presidential candidate, and now President; Obama had it right when he said;

 “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.“

Not surprising, California has taken up the issue and came up with a fairly simple plan to pull the plug on this new generation of purists. For post-shutdown reform ideas, many look to California

NOTE; For those of you who don't know the meaning gerrymandering ;
A gerrymander sounds like a strange political beast, which it is, considered from a historical perspective. This beast was named by combining the word salamander, "a small lizardlike amphibian," with the last name of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusettsa state noted for its varied, often colorful political fauna. Gerry (whose name, incidentally, was pronounced with a hard g, though gerrymander is now commonly pronounced with a soft g) was immortalized in this word because an election district created by members of his party in 1812 looked like a salamander. According to one version of gerrymander's coining, the shape of the district attracted the eye of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who noticed it on a map in a newspaper editor's office. Stuart decorated the outline of the district with a head, wings, and claws and then said to the editor, "That will do for a salamander!" "Gerrymander!"came the reply. The word is first recorded in April 1812 in reference to the creature or its caricature, but it soon came to mean not only "the action of shaping a district to gain political advantage" but also "any representative elected from such a district by that method."