Barack Obama will officially return to politics on Thursday.

That's right, I'm coming back to help you!

Courtesy of Politico:  

Barack Obama will make the first official political move of his post-presidency on Thursday, headlining a private fundraiser for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee at a private home in Washington. 

The event, which will also be attended by NDRC chair Eric Holder and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is to support the group he’s helping back to coordinate Democratic efforts in state races and lawsuits to push back on Republican success in gerrymandering over many cycles. In many statehouses and Congress, that’s left Democrats at a baked-in disadvantage.

Of course according to the Right Wing Obama has been engaged in a behind the scenes "shadow presidency" all along.

However for those of us who did not spend our childhoods huffing paint behind the Quik Stop, this is clearly the first time that Obama is officially stepping back into the fray.

And boy we could certainly use his help.

Associated Press analysis proves that gerrymandering has given the GOP an unfair advantage in many state elections.

Courtesy of AP: 

The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage designed to detect potential political gerrymandering. 

The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts. 

Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010. 

The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority that stood at 241-194 over Democrats after the 2016 elections — a 10 percentage point margin in seats, even though Republican candidates received just 1 percentage point more total votes nationwide. 

"The outcome was already cooked in, if you will, because of the way the districts were drawn," said John McGlennon, a longtime professor of government and public policy at the College of William & Mary in Virginia who ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat in the 1980s. 

A separate statistical analysis conducted for AP by the Princeton University Gerrymandering Project found the extreme Republican advantages in some states were no fluke. The Republican edge in Michigan's state House districts had only a 1-in-16,000 probability of occurring by chance; in Wisconsin's Assembly districts, there was a mere 1-in-60,000 likelihood of it happening randomly, the analysis found.

The Republicans have old fashioned, anti-progressive policy ideas, and they are facing a growing demographic that rejects their party out of hand.

The only way they can compete is by cheating.

And that has now become the go to strategy for both local and national elections.

No wonder they are not bothered by the knowledge that their party's nominee only won the presidency with the help of a foreign government that despises everything for which America stands.

The Supreme Court has a message for Republican gerrymandering, knock it off!

Courtesy of Reuters:  

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Republicans in North Carolina unlawfully took race into consideration when drawing congressional district boundaries, concentrating black voters in an improper bid to diminish their statewide political clout. 

The justices upheld a lower court's February 2016 ruling that threw out two majority-black U.S. House of Representatives districts because Republican lawmakers improperly used race as a factor when redrawing the legislative map after the 2010 census. 

The decision came in one of a number of lawsuits accusing Republicans of taking steps at the state level to disenfranchise black and other minority voters who tend to back Democratic candidates. 

The justices found that the manner in which the North Carolina voting district boundaries were sketched violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law. The ruling may offer a roadmap for challenging similarly drawn districts nationwide.

Apparently this was such blatant racism that even Clarence Thomas voted to uphold the earlier ruling. I know, right?

Neil Gorsuch had not been seated yet so he did not participate.

This ruling is bad news for the Republicans who have determined that they can win local elections by segregating the state and keeping those nasty Democrats from getting folks elected who actually represent their politics.

I know, it gives me a case of the sads too.

Just a reminder as to what this country would look like without gerrymandering.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called on lawmakers and the public to take a number of steps "to change the system to reflect our better selves" for "a better politics." The top item on that list was to end partisan gerrymandering: "we have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around," Obama said.

In most states, state legislatures draw the district boundaries that determine how many delegates the state sends to the U.S. Congress, as well as the general partisan make-up of that delegation. State legislatures are partisan beasts, and if one party is in control of the process they can draw boundaries to give themselves a numeric advantage over their opponents in Congress.

As you can see from the chart up above if we passed laws against gerrymandering the progressives would have a much fairer shot and would more than likely control both the House and the Senate.

And if the conservatives were so confident that the country is mostly made up of like minded voters they would support doing away with gerrymandering as well.

But instead they fight the idea tooth and nail.

Gee, it couldn't be that they're afraid of fair elections now could it?

Virginia Republicans admit that they rigged the state to keep their party in power.

Courtesy of Think Progress: 

Virginia is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. During the last presidential election, President Obama won the state by three points, but Republicans still picked up 8 of the state’s 11 congressional districts under the GOP-friendly maps drawn by the state legislature. 

In a court filing offered by the Republican members of Virginia’s congressional delegation, the lawmakers who benefit most from these gerrymandered maps admitted that the GOP intentionally rigged the state’s congressional districts in order to produce a lopsided delegation. The state legislature’s “overarching priorities” in drawing the maps, according to the court filing, was “incumbency protection and preservation of cores to maintain the 8-3 partisan division established in the 2010 election.” 

2010 was a very good year for Republicans, enabling the GOP to capture unusually large portions of state congressional delegations. 2012, by contrast, was a strong year for Democrats which saw the reelection of President Obama. And yet, by these Republican lawmakers’ own admission, the maps drawn between the 2010 and 2012 elections were draw for the explicit purpose of ensuring that the GOP’s unusually strong performance in 2010 would be replicated year after year — even in years when the electorate was more favorable to Democrats. The GOP’s goal, in other words, was to render congressional elections little more than political theater, an annual ritual that would produce the same 8-3 delegation every single time. 

And that my friends is why even though the country is moving to the Left, that Republicans are able to stay in office and impede any real progress.

And of course to do away with gerrymandering would take an act of Congress. And WHO is the politic la party in control of Congress?

That's right, so even though bills do get introduced in order to make the playing field level, the army winning most of the battles has no intention of giving the other side a chance at victory.

How Republicans continue to hold onto power even though everybody hates them now.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone:  

As the nation recovers from the Republican shutdown of government, the question Americans should be asking is not "Why did the GOP do that to us?" but "Why were they even relevant in the first place?" So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party that, in a representative democracy worthy of the designation, the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda. 

How is this possible? National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field. 

Despite the fact that Republican Congressional can didates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, the Republicans lost only eight seats from their historic 2010 romp, allowing them to preserve a fat 33-seat edge in the House. Unscrupulous Republican gerrymandering following the 2010 census made the difference, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Princeton Election Consortium. Under historically typical redistricting, House Republicans would now likely be clinging to a reedy five-seat majority. "There's the normal tug of war of American politics," says Sam Wang, founder of the consortium. "Trying to protect one congressman here, or unseat another one there." The Princeton model was built, he says, to detect "whether something got pulled off-kilter on top of that." 

Did it ever. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates took 51 percent of the vote across the state's 18 districts, but only five of the seats. In Wang's model, the odds against Democrats emerging at an eight-seat disadvantage are 1,000-to-1. And Pennsylvania was not alone. According to the Election Consortium analysis, gerrymandering helped Republicans secure 13 seats in just six states – including Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina – that, under normal rules of engagement, Democrats would have won. 

This tilting of the electoral playing field was the result of a sophisticated campaign coordinated at the highest levels of Republican politics through a group called the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – a Super-PAC-like entity chaired by Bush-era RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and backed by Karl Rove. Shortly after President Obama's first election, the RSLC launched the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) with an explicit strategy to "keep or win Republican control of state legislatures with the largest impact on congressional redistricting." The logic was simple. Every decade following the census, the task of redrawing federal congressional-district boundaries falls (with some exceptions) to the state legislatures. If Republicans could seize control of statehouses – and, where necessary, have GOP governors in place to rubber-stamp their redistricting maps – the party could lock in new districts that would favor Republican candidates for a decade. As Rove wrote in a Wall Street Journal column in early 2010: "He who controls redistricting can control Congress."

You know the problem with Democrats, as well as our President, is that they thought, until recently of course, that they were dealing with public servants of a slightly different ideological bent who were simply trying to serve their constituents in the best way that they could.

Instead they are dealing with power mad terrorists who will stop at nothing to win elections, and undermine their opposition at every turn.

What was it Alfred Pennyworth said in "The Dark Knight??

"Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Gerrymandering cost Democrats 1.7 million votes in the last election. The President only beat Romney by about 3.5 million.

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

A new study by Princeton molecular biologist and neuroscientist Sam Wang digs deeper into the effect of the Republican gerrymander, and finds that the gerrymanders in seven states were so powerful that they are the equivalent of 1.7 million Democrats simply deciding not to show up at the polls: 

[G]errymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted. 

Such gerrymanders can exist because five conservative justices refused to block partisan redistricting in a case called Vieth v. Jubelirer.

You know THIS is why it is important, even in local elections, to elect individuals who respect the rules and who are disgusted by cheating or attempts to stack the deck.

And right now that seems to almost completely exclude any Republicans.