Animated GIFS/Meme: "The GOP Is America's Katrina!"

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1. How The Republicans Are Stealing Democracy

Nov 14, 2013
Tim Dickinson

The GOP's War on Voting

In a letter to state legislators, Jankowski wrote, "We have taken the initiative to retain a team of seasoned redistricting experts that we will make available to you at no cost to your caucus for assistance." The RSLC brought on GOP operative Tom Hofeller, who has been in the Republican redistricting game since the 1970s.

Employing computer software known as Maptitude, Hofeller and his team used sophisticated data-mining techniques to draw new districts that maximally disadvantaged Democrats. Maptitude advertises the ability to merge precinct-level returns from past elections with federal census data to "identify communities of interest," including "racial or ethnic enclaves that tend to have similar interests and vote as a bloc." Explicit racial gerrymandering is illegal under the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. So Hofeller used a proxy for race, redrawing boundaries by identifying the wards where President Obama received the highest returns in 2008. According to court documents, this approach "allowed black voters to be carved apart from their white neighbors and friends, on a block-by-block basis."

The Republicans' War on the Poor

Hofeller's final state map featured 10 districts gerrymandered to give Republicans a solid edge – between nine and 12 points – matched against just three districts in which Democrats would have a massive advantage of 17 to 23 points. On Election Day, Democrats outpolled the GOP by 81,000 votes, but Republicans took nine of the 13 seats. The RSLC's map was spoiled only by Rep. Mike McIntyre, a Democratic incumbent, who eked out a 654-vote victory in a district drawn to favor the Republican by 11 points. Following Gillespie's share-the-wealth strategy, only two Republicans won more than 60 percent of the vote. By contrast, three of the four Democrats won in landslides of greater than 70 percent. Mel Watt, a black congressman from the 12th district, won an eighth term with 80 percent of the vote. Even before the election, Watt decried his new district lines as part of a "sinister Republican effort to use African-Americans as pawns in their effort to gain partisan, political gains in Congress."

read more:

http://www.davidmixner.com/2013/11/rolling-stone-how-the-republicans-are-stealing-democracy.html

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111


The GOP has declared war on America!

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2. Obama’s Katrina?

November 16, 2013
By Mario Piperni





This was the top story on my NYTimes mobile this morning, and like Michael Shear, I’ve been noting the similarities between these two events. Just outside my window, the bodies of people who haven’t been able to access a website are stacking up in the streets. The lucky who have survived are huddled together in their own filth in hot, overcrowded stinking shelters, waiting to log in.

And well I remember how Democrats worked for years to gut FEMA. Every Democratic governor pushed all disaster preparedness up to the federal government to make FEMA’s job as hard as it could possibly be, and the forty separate votes by the Democratic Congress to defund FEMA are still etched in my mind.

Agreed. People forced to deal with a buggy website is equal in suffering and pain to that of people dying from dehydration and exhaustion as they waited for help in the aftermath of Katrina. Any fool can see that.

Hey, to all Republicans who’ve brought up the ObamaCare/Katrina response comparison – good one, guys.

And while you’re congratulating yourselves for revealing the uncanny similarities between the two events, please feel free to ignore the little fact that while Democrats were intent on cooperating with Republicans in finding answers to the problems plaguing aid to Katrina survivors…Republicans are now doing all in their power to obstruct implementation and legislative fixes to the Affordable Care Act.

Let’s just leave that part out, assholes.

http://mariopiperni.com/health-care-2/obamas-katrina.php

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3. Jon Stewart Calls 'Obama's Katrina' ...

... An 'Offensive' Nickname For Healthcare Rollout

By Ross Luippold
11/19/2013

(starting at 1 minute 30 seconds)

Several pundits have dubbed the troubled rollout of Healthcare.gov to be "Obama's Katrina," a label that Stewart found to be patently offensive and reductive. "Yes, I believe we've all seen the damning photos of the presidential flyover surveying the human suffering of the Healthcare.gov website from a safe distance," he quipped, calling back to the infamous photo of President Bush assessing the damage of Katrina from the safety of Air Force One.

"Comparing the government abdication of responsibility during Hurricane Katrina, the death of hundreds of people, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, to a f***ing website, is offensive," he said in response to news personalities such as Chris Wallace blasting the president's response.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/jon-stewart-obamas-katrina-offensive_n_4301688.html