How to draw new legislative maps

All the states in our nation will be drawing new legislative maps in the next few months. 

The whole issue is under widespread criticism for politicians creating maps with almost predetermined voting outcomes.

I live in a Congressional district that looks like two fists joined by the thumbs.  That cannot be explained except by map drawers who have a certain agenda in mind.

The courts have even supported some mapdrawing to create certain desired effects, like majority minority districts to ensure minority representatives get elected, but what does that do for the other people who live in that district? 

I submit that when the people who draw the maps have detailed information about their constituents, it allows and encourages all manner of mischief, all under the guise of fairness.  But then it all works both ways.

For example, one of the tactics of gerrymandering is to put as many of your opponents into as few districts as possible.  You give them those districts, but in the end, they have fewer total representatives in office.

Yet we are told that this is what we must do for minority communities.  We must create majority minority districts so that they get their minority candidate, but wouldn’t they have better representation if they had minority status in a lot of districts?  Their voices would be heard in more places by people who will listen to them rather than in those few.

I submit that the only fair or unbiased way to draw maps is blindly.  The only thing the people drawing the maps should know is where the people live.  Let natural boundaries like city limits, county lines, major geographical dividers, like major expressways, rivers, mountains, etc., be determining factors and try to make the districts as compact as possible. 

If we create minority majority districts, are we not also creating Democratic districts?  If there are large white areas, will we try to dilute them for the sake of fairness, or something like that?

The Republican proposal calls for the Illinois Supreme Court to appoint 16 independent citizen commissioners with 30 days of the bill’s passage.

So how do they expect them to do that?  Where will they get these people from?  How will they choose them?  Independent?  How will they ensure that? 

Too complicated.  Just remove all demographic data given to the mapmakers.  Simple.  And I won’t care who draws the maps.

 

an open letter to all future primary candidates in upcoming elections

This is an actual letter I sent to the third Republican to announce a bid for governor in my state.

re: winning the primary

I hope you are doing well.

I was very happy to hear that you are running for governor. 

I am now going to give you the single more important piece of advice you will hear in your campaign.

The election system in our country is broken.  It is only made for races where there are only two candidates.   When there are more than two candidates, almost every election in our country allows a candidate to win with less than the majority of the votes.

You are now the third Republican running for governor, which means that one of you can win the Republican primary with as little as 34% of the vote.

Not only is that wrong, it is stupid.  It means that 2/3 of the voters may not even support the winner.  That is absurd, but that is the system.

What should happen is that in a three-way race, you have a runoff with the two leading candidates if no one got more than 50% of the vote the first time around.  But that is expensive and time-consuming.

The alternative is ranked choice voting, where the voter can rank the candidates in order of preference, or even if they just could vote for every candidate they could support, then you would learn which candidate had the most support. 

You want the winning candidate to have the most support, and these are the only ways you can do that.  Without that, you could easily face an opponent who spends a lot more than you, flooding the media with ads that call you extreme, and they will win that 34%.  That would be criminally malicious in my mind, but not in the eyes of the media or too many in the political arena.

I hope you read this and agree.  I hope you do well but, without heeding my advice, I think your options will be limited.

Thank you.  And may God bless you!

Larry Craig

Socialism in America

Socialism is on the rise in our country, and Democrats often feel like they are being accused of something they are not.

People in our country need to be reminded often that we have a two-party system in our country.  Not because the Founders created or wanted it that way.  But because it seems the two parties like it that way, and nobody outside of those two parties seems to have enough power to break it.

With a two-party system, we allow candidates to win elections without getting the majority of the votes.  This happens when there are more than two candidates running.  So the result is that we don’t get viable candidates outside of those two parties.

This means, of course, that socialists don’t run on their own party name generally; they run as Democrats.  There are no socialists in the Republican Party.

And socialists are far more politically active than the average Democrats.  They have louder voices and get more media attention.  e.g. Bernie Sanders

No, the average Democrat is not a socialist.  And even the socialists of the party realize it will be a long slow slide to get to socialism, so they try to make incremental changes.  When people get used to those, they make more.  They are patient. 

It starts with increased government involvement and regulation and control of more and more things, and the drive for equality and equity that keeps taking more from those who have and giving it to those who have less.

No, the average Democrat is not a socialist, but the forces within that party are feverishly at work to make it a reality. 

If anyone is looking for a solution, I would suggest ranked choice voting, which is the only way I see of breaking up the two-party system, so socialists will begin to run as socialists and leave the Democratic Party to Democrats.

what to do about gun violence

We have had two mass killings recently that have caught the nation’s attention.  Of course, the response of a lot of politicians is to make more laws.

I suppose if you make it harder to legally purchase and own certain kinds of firearms, you might save a few lives.  I would think a better solution would be to get people not to want to kill other people in the first place.  Maybe we can get them to actually care for them.

After all, we already have laws against killing people.  Anyone who won’t pay attention to those laws won’t pay attention to any others.

Unfortunately, they tell us that we live in a secular society.  A secular society is not supposed to talk about God, because that might offend somebody and that would require singling out one particular religion out of many, and that is considered illegal. 

But a secular society can’t make people care for other people.  That requires a religion whose God also cares for people. 

We have forgotten that our country is based on the belief that God gave rights to human beings.  When we ignore God, we will lose those rights, because we won’t see them as from God but from people, and they can make mistakes.  And people then become obstacles in our lives rather than companions.

We have always had a lot of guns in our society.  If they now all of sudden have become a problem, then I submit that they aren’t the real problem.

 

mass shootings and a peaceful country

We had another mass shooting in our country.  We’re tired of that, and we want answers.

I’m old enough to remember when we had a peaceful, safe country.  This is not wishful thinking.  We didn’t really think much about locking doors, whether the car or the house.  Yes, there were neighborhoods that we still avoided, but not because of guns.  But we felt safe.

As for guns, they were a lot easier to get then than now.  No FOID cards, background checks, waiting periods, just free unencumbered transactions, like you were buying a screwdriver. 

We are forgetting the founding principles of our country. 

Guns were considered essential to a free country.  History is replete with nations that turned despotic with the disarming of their people. 

Contrary to many today, our country is founded on God.  Our rights come from God and not the government.  So that means that we are not and cannot be a secular nation, because in a secular nation, there is no higher power than the government. 

It is a sense of God that gives value to human life.  If you just try to remove the means of killing people but not the hate, the anger, the evil, then you are not really solving the problem. 

making out elections better

Congress wants to make some fundamental changes to our election system.  They are labelling it the For the People ACT, like it’s for the people or something like that.

Their feeling is that voting in its present form is an undue burden imposed on a subservient public that essentially drives the will to vote out of a lot of people.  And mostly minorities. 

Well, we have already eliminated the flaming hoops and the 3K run, so all a person has to do now to vote is to show up at a facility somewhere near their house once every four years for the big election, and once or twice a year other times for the other ones.

Not any harder than going to the store to buy groceries. 

We seem to be forgetting some of the basic principles of our elections.

When we vote in person, we vote alone.  Nobody else knows how we vote, and nobody else can influence that vote.  The only way we can ensure that is if the person comes into the polling place themselves.

When people vote at home, we don’t know if that is true.  We don’t even know who actually voted.  Maybe their spouse voted and forged the signature.  Or maybe they never even got the ballot and somebody working in the election office randomly filled out ballots and copied signatures off the election rolls.  The point is we just don’t know anything about those ballots.

This one fact alone says that mail-in ballots should only be used in the most necessary of cases, like as in military personnel overseas and very sick people who can’t leave their homes.

A second very important principle in voting is knowing who is voting and whether they are legally able to vote.  People complain all the time about things like the electoral college and how that apparently undermines something like one vote, one voice.  If we don’t ensure that the person voting is the person registered and that that person is indeed a citizen of the United States, then we make a mockery of our elections.

People can’t even function or fully participate in our society without a photo ID, yet many deem that an incredible hardship in voting. 

The For The People Act will essentially do away with these two basic principles of voting in our country. 

Voting is a privilege and a responsibility of the utmost importance.  The question is not about making it harder or easier but ensuring its validity.

possibly the single more important political reform issue in our country

 a letter sent to the Republican House leader in Illinois

Mr Durkin

I hope you are doing well.

I am a lifelong Illinois resident who would happily move out of state, except that my kids live here.

I am concerned about my state and the Republican Party in it.  The Republican Party seems non-existent.  I think about the ballots I cast in the elections and how so many races are uncontested, because there are no Republican candidates running.

Recently we had candidates for Congress and state rep and senator in my district, but their campaigns were essentially non-existent.

I have a recommendation for our legislative branch.  I sent it to the new speaker but got no response.  I don’t know if he even saw it.

I hope the Republicans will embrace it and show the nation by example how important this is for the life and wellbeing of our nation.

I am suggesting that all legislative bills be as short as possible.  One item one bill.  Let bills be one page, two pages, at most three. 

Then all bills will be read by all the legislators, and then they can be fully discussed and debated.  No hidden agendas, no compromises where you permit something you hate to get something you want. 

I don’t expect the Democrats to accept this, but if the Republicans did this, this would soon gain national attention and bring the issue to the nation’s attention. 

For far too long, politicians have been trying to make bills as large as possible, so they cannot be read let alone debated, and you cannot get good things without taking a lot of the bad.  This one simple change can transform our state and our country.

I hope you agree.

Thank you

 

Larry Craig

Pope Francis and gay marriage

I am not a Roman Catholic, so I don’t look to the Pope for the answers to life’s biggest questions, nor do I regard him as my spiritual leader. 

But the Tribune printed a major article disputing a major ruling of the Pope, so it seems the Tribune considers this topic up for discussion.  (You’re wrong, Pope Francis, about gay couples, March 16)

Like most discussions, at least the ones where there is disagreement, what is important is clarity.  Clarity of definitions and sticking to the real issues.

First of all, the Pope’s ruling has nothing to do with who you love.  The Bible and the Church (all of them) recognize that loving people is the second most important thing you can do, after loving God.  Nobody is denying or discrediting love, wherever it is found.

What is sin in the eyes of the Church and the Bible is homosexual behavior.  God created two different sexes so that they have a complementary role in the life of the other.  The union of the two creates new life.  God could have had human beings create new life without the union of human beings, but He chose this way for profound reasons. 

What the Pope said that the Church could not bless is ‘homosexual marriage.’  I use the single quotes, because the Church believes the whole idea of calling it a marriage is a misuse of the word, a redefinition of the whole concept. 

Gay marriage advocates insist that we consider both forms of marriage as equal.  As a result, gay couples insist on being able to have children, knowing that at least one of that child’s natural parents will be removed from that child’s life.  Is that fair to the child? 

The Church believes that modern society has tried to bend immutable laws of life given by God to meet the fancies of a culture that no longer recognizes God.  The Church has been consistent on this issue for 2,000 years, and modern society wants it to think like it, as though we have reached the pinnacle of human understanding and wisdom. 

No, the Church believes that God had told us the rules of life, so we don’t spend our lives trying to figure them out only to reach the end of our lives and realizing that we had made a mistake.

How much free stuff should the government give people?

The Sun-Times thinks that community colleges should be free in our country.  (Making the case for free community college nationally, March 15)

Who can be against free stuff?

I think it’s time we had a serious conversation in our country about money.

It seems that the Times is expecting the federal government to pay for this, so we can limit this discussion to that.

Our federal government will soon be $30 trillion in debt.  We used to borrow the money to pay our debt.  Now we just print a lot of that.

Does nobody see any problems with this?

First of all, when you carry debt, everything becomes more expensive.  We are currently paying about a half trillion dollars a year in interest.  That is simply wasted money.  Like you bought a large flat screen television on sale, but then you never pay it off.  You just keep paying interest on it forever.  Or never paying off your car.

The whole role of government has shifted in our country.  According the Declaration of Independence, government exists to secure our rights.  Our rights is what freedom is all about.  Free speech, free press, right to assemble, keep and bear arms.

Now government exists to take care of people, meet every need, solve every problem.  And we are finding there isn’t enough money in the world to do it.  Raising taxes won’t solve it, because they will always spend more than they get. 

The government says there is no inflation, but if you actually spend money in the real world, you know that isn’t true.  You can find graphs on the internet of long-term federal spending, long-term federal debt, and inflation, and the graphs match perfectly. 

Now they want to work on a new infrastructure package that will be another couple trillion. 

Our politicians have lost any sense of reality and responsibility.  They think we can have it all.  Just borrow the money or create it.  What could go wrong?

children living in poverty

I agree with the Sun-Times editorial that children should not be growing up in poverty (12 million children in America should not be growing up in poverty, March 11).

If this is a problem that the government wants to solve, then I submit that the government should work harder on the causes of this rather than just spending money it doesn’t have as a fix.

If you don’t deal with the root of a problem, then the problem can continue forever.  Like if your boat is filling with water, you can keep bailing it out, but you really need to try to stop the leak. 

Our governments, federal, state, and many locals, believe that it is the role of government to solve every problem, meet every need, care for every person.  The answer is always to spend money, and the problem is that there is never enough. 

We used to just borrow the money.  Now we rely more on just printing it.  And that devalues the money we already have.  And it always costs more to borrow money than to spend only what you already have.  We are already spending a half trillion dollars a year just on interest.  That is like burning money. 

That’s no way to run a country. 

a letter to the news station on firing a newscaster

General Manager

ABC7Chicago

Re: Mark Giangreco

Greetings!

I am reading today that Mr. Giangreco will lose his job because he made an insensitive comment about a fellow worker on air.

I hope that you don’t do this.

I hope you sit Mr. Giangreco and Cheryl Burton in a room together, possibly with a third party, and get them to make amends between them.  And then insist that Mr. Giangreco make a public apology during his broadcast.

Our society and country have gone plum crazy in that we now insist that people lose their jobs and livelihoods over things they have said, even once, even a very long time ago. 

This is absurd and poor public policy.

One of the founding principles of our country is freedom of speech. 

But now we threaten people with losing their jobs, careers, and livelihoods for any speech deemed inappropriate, and we essentially stifle free speech, making people overly cautious to speak freely.  This could happen to you yourself someday, and it’s not right.

People make mistakes, and we should not cripple them as punishment.  Let the parties work things out between them and show the world that you are above pettiness and can resolve problems rather than try to destroy lives.

Thank you.

Larry Craig