I'm Just Saying...

I've been fighting really hard to stay away from blog posts that are political in nature. I'm going to continue that fight...but a couple of things hit the news today that I thought were interesting.

1. If all the money tied up in the various rescue, bail-out, spending, whatever bills that either have already passed or will pass (including funds to guarantee bad debt) were applied to the mortgages of every American household, 90% of them would be paid off. Hey, I'm not an economist, but I'm just saying, that sounds like a great way to spend $9.7 Trillion. Except we're going to blow it on a lot of other stuff. I'm going to stop now before I get started. I'm just saying... (Article)

2. The White House took over control of the census from the Department of Commerce. While that sounds fairly benign, remember it's the census that is used to re-district all of our Congressional districts. There's also the matter of how the counting gets done. One side prefers to go out and actually count people, the other prefers to estimate block by block in urban areas. When you let one party control the census, the odds of that being done fairly are pretty much nil. The way that's likely to play out is that the party controlling it will estimate in urban areas (which happen to be strongly in the favor of the party that is currently in power) and most likely over-estimate the actual population of those areas. Then they'll send people out to actually count the rest of the country - which may or may not lead to under-counting these other areas. Either way, the party who has control of this function has a definite leg up when it comes to ensuring that it gets to hang onto power in say 2012. Does this seem like a conflict of interest to anyone else? I'm just saying... (Article)

3. There is a report that Congress will be taking up legislation that would give the District of Columbia full Congressional representation - a Representative that has a vote (currently theirs does not get to vote because the Constitution only allows states to send voting representatives) and 2 Senators. Again, on the surface doesn't seem so bad. But let's remember that DC is heavily, heavily left leaning. The net result of this would be to give a virtually guaranteed 2 additional Democrat seats in the Senate. If we're going to add states, that's one thing, but working around the Constitution to load the Senate for one party over the other is going a bit far. I can't find a substantiated article with this report in it, only one from last fall where this effort failed. I'm just saying... (Article from last fall when it failed)