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Teaching students at IU about partisan gerrymandering is very easy. It requires only a map of the district in which they live.

What are some of the red flags that indicate a gerrymander? Split counties. Boundaries that just barely include (Bloomington) or exclude (Columbus) major towns or cities. Irregular shape. Failure to use logical and major features like Interstate highways, rivers, or county lines to create borders. Poor compactness. It's very safe to say that this district was drawn in a manner that took into account factors other than population and geography.

Redistricting is controlled by state legislatures – in Indiana's case the process involves both chambers. In 2001, when districts were last re-drawn, the legislature was split. Democrats narrowly controlled the House and Republicans had a lopsided advantage in the Senate (32-18). The result was therefore a mixed bag. Republican influence was significant but mitigated by the Democrats' precarious hold on the House. Compromises were made; the process was not nearly as one-sided as in other states with unified partisan control.

That said, what was the political motive underlying the image you see above? First, the GOP needed to minimize the impact of Bloomington, which is significantly more liberal than the rest of southern Indiana. Second, help Congressional Republicans make competitive a seat held by Democrats Lee Hamilton (1965-1999) and Baron Hill (1999-2005) since the invention of fire.

Bloomington is a hot potato in the redistricting process. Having it in one's district would benefit liberal candidates and hurt conservatives. The irregular shape of the 9th District, which appears to have some sort of cancerous outgrowth that reaches out to engulf Bloomington, is a function of efforts to "balance" the liberal town with a wide swath of ultra-conservative but sparsely populated southern Indiana. This provides an advantage to Republicans in adjacent districts, sparing them the challenge of dealing with Bloomington. It also creates, or so statewide Republicans hoped, a 9th District that the GOP might reasonably hope to contest if not win. In other words, if they couldn't make it majority-Republican they wanted to make the Democrats sweat over it. Did it work?

Cue the news that Mike Sodrel is challenging incumbent Baron Hill in 2008. If this sounds familiar, that's because this is the fourth consecutive election in which these two have squared off. That's right. In 2002, Hill won with barely over 50% of the vote. Sodrel won by less than 1100 votes in 2004, one of the narrowest Congressional races in years. Hill won his seat back in 2006 by a slightly larger margin. Both parties expect it to be tooth-and-nail competitive again in 2008. As the graphic in the linked WSJ article shows, increasing amounts of money, national media attention, and interest from the national parties have accompanied the close results.

Most folks know almost nothing about redistricting, yet it powerfully impacts the competitiveness and outcomes of legislative races. Redistricting and reapportionment have become pitched battles on multiple fronts – political, legislative, and legal (redistricting plans almost inevitably end up the subject of numerous lawsuits and legal challenges based on the provisions of the Voting Rights Act) – conducted by self-interested legislators with personal and partisan motivations. The amount of manipulation done to district boundaries and the varying motives for doing so leave us to wonder: Are you choosing your legislators or are your legislators choosing you?

I am the world's only satisfied user of Windows Vista. Honestly. Bugs aside, it's amazing. Yes, that's an awful lot like saying "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" But this past weekend, as I talked yet another person off the Fuck It, I'm Going Back to XP Ledge, something struck me: why in the name of God is the buying public doing Microsoft's product testing?

Several factors contribute to my status as one of the first and most satisfied Vista users. I build my own computers, and I don't care what anyone says, it makes a difference. Big manufacturers use cheap components and load their machines with so much bullshit – trial versions of everything, games, help tools for idiots, ridiculous multimedia software – that even deleting it will cause problems thanks to Vista's flaw of collecting bits and pieces of old registry files. For instance, if you delete a trial version of Symantec AV your networking capabilities will be messed up beyond belief. Symantec has created specific tools for Vista users looking to uninstall the programs. Most users probably are not aware of this – they know only that they paid $400 for the damn software and they can't wirelessly connect to the internet.

This is just one example, of course. We're 18 months into its release and they are still finding new bugs and scrambling to fix the old ones. I cannot shake the feeling that Microsoft got very, very lazy here. They figured, "Hey, fuck it. Release it and we'll mop up the few bugs as they happen." Unfortunately it's not a "few." And the average consumer does not expect to pay that much for something half-finished.

Not only is Vista buggy, but frankly most of the machines out there are not powerful enough to run it properly. Microsoft confidently predicted that it would work on "95% of existing PCs" with no modification. Dual-core and newer P4 systems will handle it well, but the kinds of machines that fill computer labs on campuses, public libraries, government offices, middle schools, and so on are not going to run an OS designed to compliment dual-core architecture. We tend to forget this in tech-porn land, but the overwhelming majority of computers in use are old pieces of shit. Their users are not interested in maximizing system performance or keeping the latest and greatest hardware installed. I have no problems running Vista – on a spankin' new Core 2 Duo at 2.8ghz. But I am 0.01% of computer users. I can't imagine installing this on the PCs at your local library or in your dentist's office.

I've never abided the general public rage toward Microsoft but I certainly have cause to question their collective intelligence after this debacle. It would have been far more logical to wait another year for the product to be refined and for the end users' hardware to catch up a little. What's done is done, though. Feel free to contact me if you need to be talked off the ledge.*

*Or you could take my advice: back up, format, and do a clean install. There seems to be a growing consensus among Vista users that "upgrade" installs never work.

Every time I hear the bagpipes I realize that at that exact moment, on an abandoned runway at an air base in a friendly third-world country, the same music is being blared into a metal shipping container to torture someone.

I know this is slightly old news, but over the past week I've been reflecting upon Geraldine Ferraro's comments (which she doesn't regret in the slightest) and I have finally been persuaded. She's right. Being black is awesome. I really wish I could be black.

As a white person I will never be able to benefit from the myriad advantages black men enjoy in our society. Black men are:

This is a fairly strange request, but I don't listen to a lot of popular music and I need your help. Many months ago I did a little post comparing some particularly embarrassing rap performances by white girls. For reasons I won't bother explaining (yet) I need to come up with another handful of examples along these lines. So fire off in the comments – the topic is Horrible Rapping by White People. Discuss.

Please note that actual but laughably shitty rappers (Vanilla Ice, Snow, etc) are far too obvious, and therefore they are excluded. What I am looking for are instances of white artists who are not necessarily rappers deciding that they will give it a try to show that they are down with the black folks. Or something. Sort of like when Pat Boone made that "metal" album. Yeah, that happened.

I polled my band and they suggested Justin Timberlake. And right now I'm horrified by the idea of having to listen to his music in order to verify this claim. If I don't post on Monday, rest assured that I have shot myself and it is all Justin's fault.

There's been an awful lot written in the last week on the left side of the blog-o-world about John McCain's involvement in the recent Department of Defense decision to award its contract for new aerial refueling tankers to Airbus (a subsidiary of German-French-Spanish aerospace conglomerate EADS) rather than U.S.-based Boeing. Here is an example, by no means the only one, of the America Should Be Buyin' American commentary. Boeing claims (although I don't fully believe) that nearly 9,000 U.S. jobs could be lost as a result. And what sense does it make for our military to be dependent on foreign suppliers? Valid points, these are.

To which I respond, Where the hell have you been for the past 30 years? You'll find fewer foreign products in Pier 1 Imports than in the hands of the average American soldier.

Italian pistols (the Beretta M9), German submachine guns (H-K MP5), Belgian machine guns (various FN Herstal models), British jet engines (Rolls-Royce)….the list could go on. And that's not even counting the hundreds of "American" vehicles and products composed largely of foreign parts. The military has traditionally bought only from U.S. companies as a matter of policy. In practice, the aforementioned foreign companies would simply open up an American office; so we're technically not buying from Beretta, we're buying from "Beretta USA." To say that this is little more than a convenient legal fiction of "American" origin is an understatement.

I regularly get up in arms (pun intended) about the continued exodus of manufacturing work from the American economy, but this case feels an awful lot like trying to close the barn door long after the horses escaped. Like American consumers, the American military's buying habits focus on superior-quality foreign products and polyglot products made of parts and labor from all around the globe but branded by U.S.-based multinationals. Even if the Air Force "bought American" in this case, the Boeing 767-based entry isn't really "built" in Washington. "Assembled" is the better word – of parts made in the U.S., China, Japan, Britain, Canada, Mexico, and half of the other countries on the damn planet.

Today a Honda Accord (built in Ohio and Indiana, containing 65% domestic parts) is a foreign car while a Chevy Aveo (built in Korea, containing 4% domestic parts) is American. If it hasn't already become so, the concept of American- or foreign-made is on the fast track to becoming completely meaningless. The reality of this situation is no different than the reality of your consumer purchases. Do you make yourself buy a Ford out of a sense of duty to the country? Or do you remind yourself that American cars are merely cheaper – and in every other way inferior – on your way to the Honda or Toyota dealership? Let's can the phony outrage at the idea that the military is doing exactly the same thing. If Boeing's creaky, four-decade-old design had anything going for it other than "It's cheap!" and "You're honor-bound to buy 'American'!" we might not be having this conversation.

James David Barber is rather famous - or about as famous as professors of political science can get in the Real World – on account of his landmark study and classification of presidential personalities. Since you're not my damn students I won't sit here and lecture you at length about his work. Let me give you the brief version before explaining why you might care.

You and I have no contact with presidents or presidential candidates. We can't get to know them or understand their personalities. All we get are carefully staged, often scripted words and images through the media. So it's not possible to engage in armchair psychology and claim that we can assign some personality disorder or qualities to George W. Bush. But what we can do is observe them and get a basic sense of what kind of person we're dealing with based on two simple questions: is he a positive or negative person? Is he active or passive?

On this basis he created a four-part typology (active-negative, active-positive, passive-negative, passive-positive). Long story short, active-negatives are the folks to watch out for.** Examples include George W. Bush, Nixon, and LBJ. Because of low self-esteem, they crave power, surround themselves with toadies, and are psychologically incapable of admitting that they are wrong. They're paranoid, seeing threats everywhere, and often consider themselves to be above the law. Barber wrote his book right before Watergate broke, and his description of Nixon as a classic active-negative was soon borne out by the events of the day. Hence Barber's fame.

Active-negatives are not always "bad presidents." One could argue that Nixon, W, and LBJ accomplished some valuable things in office. But they have obsessions – Vietnam, Iraq, or a list of "enemies" – that bring out their bat-shit insane side and their eventual downfall. Self-esteem is the fundamental concept in Barber's opinion – active-positives have it, and thus they quickly rebound from embarassing failures (Clinton, FDR, Lincoln). Active-negatives don't, and they are too insecure to admit defeat or accept criticism. They develop an Ahab-like obsession with proving themselves right. Hence the years of hemmoraging lives and money into Vietnam long after Johnson stated that the war had become a lost cause, for example.

Why do you care? Maybe you don't. But as someone who is very familiar with the analysis, let me offer you two cents on what we're dealing with right now.

Barack Obama is a classic active-positive. Relentlessly optimistic, ambitious but not craven, able to move past his fuck-ups, and utterly undaunted by the fact that going from State Rep to President in 6 years is ludicrous. One thing that many people misunderstand about Barber – active-positive does not equal "good." Clinton wasn't that good of a president. But he fit active-positive to a tee. Obama does too.

John McCain is the classic passive-negative. Military men turned politicians usually are. He's not energetic and doesn't look like he's really enjoying what he does. He does it because of a sense of duty (snicker…"duty.") He's not chock-full of ambitious ideas (most of his platform appears to be recycled, standard GOP fare). He lets the action come to him, choosing to react rather than act. Note that passive-negatives are not "bad." Washington and Eisenhower did alright.

Hillary Clinton is pure active-negative. Her win-at-all-costs mentality, and a complete inability to accept defeat, officially scare the shit out of me. She baldly craves power and appears to be willing to behead her own mother to get it. When it became mathematically impossible for her to defeat Obama in the delegate count, her immediate reaction was to unveil a new strategy of trying to corrupt pledged delegates. How, she does not say; threats, bribery, coercion, pleading….there doesn't appear to be a depth to which she will not go to win. And she isn't stupid, so certainly it must be clear that doing something so inimical to the democratic process will devolve the nomination into a months-long circus of disorder and bad publicity. 1968 all over again, while McCain sits back and smiles. Hillary Clinton understands but does not care; the attitude is simply "If I can't have it, no one will."

Maybe I'm wrong; people frequently disagree about something as subjective as Barber's psychology-from-afar analysis. If I'm right, the best-case scenario is a Lyndon Johnson-type presidency; that is, one marred by a single fatal flaw. The worst-case scenario is a woman who, denied the power her ego needs, salts the Earth behind her.

The muckrakers over at Pravda USA have provided yet another example of their unique brand of hard-hitting journalism, running a non-sequitur "story" entitled "List of Thwarted Terror Attacks Since Sept. 11" apropos of absolutely nothing. Even for the average FoxNews.com copy writer this must have required several bouts of pride-swallowing. Such a difficult job – they must continually propagandize about how much safer we are thanks to Our Leader (and waterboarding!) while simultaneously reminding us that we are in great danger. But let's leave that little inconsistency alone for the moment.

Note the introductory copy: "The following is a list of known terror plots thwarted by the U.S. government since Sept. 11, 2001."

And then the first entry is Richard 'Shoe Bomber' Reid. Um, if my memory serves, Reid was "thwarted" by two things: the fact that he's apparently unable to operate matches and a doctor/passenger who sedated him. By what stretch of the imagination and poetic license did "the U.S. government" thwart that attempt? Why let reality interrupt a propaganda narrative, I suppose.

This list appears to consist of either unsubstantiated charges (note Jose Padilla, who is "accused of seeking a dirty bomb", a charge so baseless that it was not mentioned once in the criminal trial or conspiracy charges of which he was convicted) or the sorriest excuses for "terrorism plots" that we could imagine. It's sad and pitiable how desperate the right is to wave around some War on Terror / Patriot Act / Wiretapping / Waterboarding success story. It has them digging up every nutcase who ever dreamed of committing an act of terrorism and hoping that we won't object to how low they set the bar for defining a realistic or credible threat.

Let's see, there's Dhiren Barot, who "plotted" to bomb financial centers. He was arrested with no funding, no promise of funding, no vehicles related to an attack, no bombs, and no bomb-making materials. Who could forget Iyman Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge terrorist:

Faris' investigations into obtaining the necessary tools for the dual-operation involved asking a friend where he might purchase welding equipment, and researching the structure of the bridge on the internet. He concluded that the operation was unlikely, and sent a message back to Pakistan calling off the plot.

Looks like he "thwarted" himself! But not before he engaged in detailed planning like typing "Brooklyn Bridge" into Google and asking a friend where he might purchase a blowtorch. America may never know how close it came to tragedy. The list goes on to dredge up FBI "successes" like the so-called Sears Tower Plot and Fort Dix Plot. Nevermind that those two groups of beyond-amateurish retards couldn't have successfully planned and executed a fucking 7-11 robbery. They talked about blowing up the Sears Tower, ergo the threat was REAL! If you had a spare two hours to research each of the items on the list, you would come away with a very different perspective on the nature and extent of the threats these incidents actually posed. But Fox News knows that you won't.

The right-wing media's zealous efforts to convince you that you are in imminent danger have officially jumped the shark. Their narrative would have you believing that America was on the cusp of tragedy in these instances, saved only by George Bush, Waterboarding, Domestic Spying, School Vouchers, and No Child Left Behind. Personally, I don't think "fear" describes how I feel when I read about a guy who did some Google/Wikipedia reading and became convinced that he could not in fact destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. "Amused" might be a better term.

Much has been made in the national media of the fact that former Speaker Dennis Hastert's seat was won by a Democrat in a special election. That has shock value as a headline – "Democrat wins GOP Speaker's Seat" – especially if one knows Chicagoland and realizes that the district is in DuPage County (high-income, ultra-conservative festung suburbia). What the media crucially neglect to mention, however, is that Johnny Democrat was running against Jim Oberweis, who is categorically out of his fucking mind. He is also the Los Angeles Clippers of Illinois politics, losing Senate races in 2002 and 2004, a race for Governor in 2006, and now this. He is the ultimate Find a Warm Body Who Will Waste a Few Million of His Own Money on This Race guy. If anything, I think the results of the special election are depressing – this bag of fluid, whose policy positions consist mostly of ranting against immigration, got 45% of the vote.