Steaming Turd

Twenty-nine people were killed in southern Mexico when their bus plunged into a ravine Wednesday. And I was all over it.

My regular reader(s) know that I’ve made a couple of posts about the minimum wage. Every time I hear the phrase “Minimum Wage”, though, I am reminded of an old They Might Be Giants song. As it turns out, the first and most amusing part of said song is available as a short .ogg clip from Wikipedia.

I just read this hilarious, if gruesome, article about dozens upon dozens of people hurtling to their deaths as their buses plunged off of cliffs.

But now, you too can be kept informed every time a bus plunges off a cliff, thanks to Google News and the beauty of RSS. Just point your RSS feed reader to fetch the feeds from this page and add the “Bus Plunge” feed to your list.

Blue Man Group is coming back to Northeast Ohio. They’ll be playing in Youngstown on 8 March. I saw them a couple months ago at the Gund, and it was a super ultra mega fantastic show. I won’t be going to this due to cash considerations, but I thought I’d let my Cleveland-area readers know about it.

Tickets go on sale 20 January. Other tour dates of possible interest to my readers are 2 February in Seattle, Washington; 3 February in Portland, Oregon; and 11 March in Raleigh, North Carolina. See also this link for more tour dates.

(Bonus points to anyone who gets the reference.)

Since the Dems are getting control of Congress for the first time in over a decade, interest has been renewed in attempting to secure full Congressional representation for Washington, D.C. Due to a rather convoluted history where the District wasn’t originally envisioned as being a permanent home for half a million people, residents elect one non-voting delegate to the House and none to the Senate. They gained an electoral representation for the Presidency in 1961, and in 1978, a Constitutional amendment granting them state equivalence for Congressional and Presidential elections was passed by Congress but expired in 1985 without ever coming into force, having only 16 of the necessary 38 state ratifications.

But what continues to be left out of the debate about giving the people of Washington the representation they fairly deserve is the correct answer: retrocession of all but the definitively government-related areas of the District back to the state of Maryland, whence it came when the District was formed in 1790 from a ten-mile-square block of Virginia and Maryland. (Virginia regained its portion of D.C. in 1847 in an effort to stave off the abolitionist movement in that state, but thanks to the 13th Amendment, that’s neither here nor there.)

Returning the bulk of the District to Maryland would be a better solution than the proposal expected to be addressed in the next Congress, where D.C. gets a full representative rather than a delegate, while Utah gets a bonus representative to mollify them concerning their claim that a failure to account for Mormon missionaries during the 2000 census resulted in them getting shortchanged in the House. It’s better for numerous reasons, actually:

1. Incorporating the population of D.C. into Maryland would not only result in those people being in a legitimate Congressional district (probably encompassing the city as well as some outlying areas already in Maryland), but would also grant them access to Maryland’s senators.
2. It would free D.C. from direct Congressional control, as it would become a normal city governed by Maryland.
3. It would gain access to Maryland’s state resources, including street and highway funding, the state police and penal system, and the state’s tax base.
4. It would absolve Congress of the task of managing D.C. directly, a task better suited for the agencies and officials of Maryland who already govern many cities on a daily basis.
5. It permanently obviates the political hotbutton issue of representation for D.C. by forever securing the city’s place as part of a state, rather than putting the District at the whim of whatever party happens to be in power.

Additionally, it is important to note that the prior Constitutional amendment was just as bad as the proposal Congress will be considering. Both represent the biggest instance of gerrymandering in recent history (yes, all you Texas haters can flame me, but you’ll realize I’m right once you read on). The current proposal essentially grants the Democrats a free House member in perpetuity, while giving the Republicans the temporary concession of a representative in Utah until the completion of the 2010 census, when all bets would be off. The earlier Constitutional amendment would also grant two perpetually Democrat seats in the Senate to an individual city with a little more population and a little less land than the city of Cleveland, not to mention that D.C. is smack in the midst of over five million people in outlying cities and communities who wouldn’t get such an immense benefit. At least the least populous state, Wyoming, has an excuse for getting two Senate seats, being the tenth largest state in land area.

Retroceding Washington, D.C., solves this representational problem, benefits the underprivileged and poorly-governed population of much of the District, and does so permanently and fairly to everyone. Well, everyone except those people trying to manipulate the system for partisan political gain.