The Local Puppy Trainer has a brief article on them today covering the explanation by the Supervisor of Elections, Paul Lux, GUIDE: Get the lowdown on the 6 proposed state amendments.

Not a lot of detail, but my state senator managed to get a Republican talking point slipped into the article about Amendments 5 & 6. The Republicans already lost their bid to negate these amendments when the court threw out Amendment 4 7 [my mistake] as a con job.

These are the amendments on redistricting, and the Republicans don’t want to give up their power to control everything by creatively constructing the districts to guarantee them a majority of legislative seats at the state and Federal level.

Fair Districts Florida is the group behind the amendments which are very simple and straight forward – districts should be compact and not drawn for political purposes.

On their web site they have examples of the current districts to show you what the problem is. If you look at the voter registration statistics you will see that the state is 42% Democrats, 36% Republicans, 19% independents, and 3% minor parties. Compare that with the reality that 65% of the state legislature and Congressional delegation is Republican. The 22% who aren’t members of the two major parties have no representation at all.

Elections shouldn’t be decided in party primaries, but that’s the way the system currently works.

This is an important change. This is a way to attempt to bring accountability back to the state government.

The people in the US are really a bunch of wimps. The era of the Hedgemony has left huge swaths of the country filled with paranoid xenophobes.

I dealt with the difference between the US and the UK before, but skippy has another wonderful example that discusses the reaction of a British school to the unexplained appearance of a Dalek on the school grounds.

The British school officials were concerned about returning something that they viewed as valuable to its rightful owner. The British police didn’t set their sonic screwdrivers to “disassemble”, but initiated a found property investigation.

I mentioned not long ago that an expensive toy pony appeared on the grounds of a school in Orlando. The Orlando police blew it up.

A survey noted that nearly 99% of British children knew what a Dalek is – an evil device bent on conquering the universe on the Dr Who television series, while most of the world views ponies as non-threatening, but the British are investigating a found property inquiry while the Americans set off explosives.

Ellroon reminded me about Banned Books Week (Sept. 25 – Oct. 2, 2010) which fits with my latest addition to the Quotes on my sidebar:

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.” [Where they burn books, in the end they will burn people.]

That was written by Heinrich Heine, a poet, at the beginning of the 19^th century. Over a century later his books were burned in Germany by a government that did, indeed, burn people in the end.

If I am willing to tolerate the existence of the ordure… excuse me, oeuvre of Ayn Rand without grabbing charcoal starter fluid and a Zippo anything should be acceptable.

Actually, that should be plural, as there are two out there: Matthew and Lisa.

Matthew is still causing trouble in Mexico south of the Bay of Campeche with the rain associated with the system. It will officially dissipate shortly, but the remnant low may be absorbed by the new wave forming in the Caribbean that may cause trouble during the week.

Lisa managed to become a hurricane for a day last week, but hasn’t accomplished much. The storm is wandering vaguely northward towards the Azores, but fading in the somewhat hostile environment off the West Coast of Africa. A lack of steering currents left Lisa stuck for days before the march to the North began.

After a slow start things got very busy for a while. It is not a season Canada will forget soon, and there are still two months to go.