OK, so I’ve been away for a while, as will be obvious to all three of my loyal readers. I’ve been visiting a lot with my friend L. from Detroit, and also celebrating my 21st birthday, which was yesterday (no alcohol was consumed, but I did have some very inordinately tasty bread pudding).

On Friday, I got to see a very fun, if spotty, production of Hamlet at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The costuming was all over the place–doublets, late Victorian costumes, Norwegian commandos with AK-47s. And, I hate to be catty here, but the actor playing Laertes seemed like a terrible ham until I just realized that he has the misfortunate of this really weird, nasal voice that is really distracting. Max, who we saw at intermission, also pointed out that he disliked the direction of Polonius, who was being played completely buffo, without any of his underlying menace. All true. On the other hand, many of the actors were quite good — in particular, Hamlet (whiich is the important thing, of course), Horatio, Claudius, and Polonius (goofiness aside). And as always, the Shakespeare Festival is just a lovely place to go out for a night and see a play. Even if it were god-awful, I would have enjoyed the drive and sitting outside by the fountain. Yesterday we celebrated my birthday by going to see the fabulous film version of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Capri theatre and having dinner at the Warehouse Bistro in Opelika. And today, we are going to Cold Stone Creamery with Max to hang out and get some very tasty ice cream. All of this, I have to say, has been a lot more entertaining than, say, schlepping down to Bodega’s and giving myself alcohol poisoning with 21 shots.

Anyway, to come to the point of all of this reportage, another nice feature of my birthday weekend was that my mother returned home from Dallas bearing several cheaply-acquired computer goods (Office XP Professional for $60 — having relatives who work for M$ is very nice). So, for the next few days I’ll be working on hot-rodding my computer a bit. New wireless mouse and keyboard are already installed; I’ll be upgrading to Winders XP soon, and I’m going to go out shopping with some of my birthday money to pick up new gadgets to slap on to the system. It should be a pretty geektacular couple of days, so if I’m not around posting for a little while, that’s where I’ll be.

OK, as promised, here’s the report from the past few days of cross-state rabble-rousing. The big event was a protest at the DEA offices in Montgomery, as part of a national day of direct action at about 60 DEA offices across the country, fighting back against the federal government’s nation-wide crackdown against medical marijuana dispensaries.

We drove up to Birmingham on Monday night to petition at the primary election polling places to get Dr. Jimmy Blake on the ballot as an independent candidate for Jefferson County Commission in the November general election. The sun was beating down on us all day, and the breeze couldn’t bother itself to blow for more than about five minutes. Nevertheless, the pay was good, and Vestavia Hills was a hopping place for getting signatures. One poll worker said she’d sign the petition because she supported Jimmy Blake, but she didn’t think we should be outside a primary polling place to petition. Well, OK, I thought, and I don’t think you all should be using state funds to subsidize the internal party business of the two major parties. I’d be glad to stop petitioning out front of primary polling places if Demopublicans actually had to go through the same shit to get on the ballot that independents do. But I held my tongue. A signature is a signature.

On Wednesday morning we drove down to Tuscaloosa and began to plan the big event for Thursday 6/6.

Thursday we met Floyd Shackleford in Wetumpka The Montgomery TV press had arrived thanks to the efforts of the media collective assisting ASA, and we got a chance for some great film of Floyd delivering our Cease & Desist order from 73% of the American people to the DEA. We held a banner (DEA: Stop Arresting Patients) and distributed the fake WANTED posters I put together for the event, while Floyd and I talked to the interviewers.

We had prepared Burma-Shave signs which we hoped to hold by the side of the road for passing motorists to see, but we arrived a bit late and all we had time to do was deliver the Cease & Desist order and talk to the press. We had also run off lots of copies of flyers to hand out to passing pedestrians, but the DEA building was off in a office building ghetto a bit off the main streets, so there was no foot traffic for handing out our flyers. I was a bit disappointed that it turned out to be more of a press conference than an actual demonstration. Nevertheless, the newsmedia coverage was a lot more sympathetic than I thought it would be, and it came together pretty well for something we had thrown together in less than a week of active planning. The day was beautiful, the drive home peaceful, and the remainder of the day restful.

Take action! Thanks to the publicity from participating in the national event, we are quickly gaining contacts around the state for future actions toward taking the high ground in the drug war. If you are in Alabama and would like to join the network we are developing of activists who are fighting to end the federal government’s assaults on states’ rights and compassionate care, get in touch and ask me to add you to the contact list.

I have returned from three days trekking around the state–petitioning for an independent candidate in Birmingham, helping the UA Libertarians with a Operation: Politically Homeless in Tuscaloosa, and putting on a protest / press event at the DEA office in Montgomery. More on these events coming up soon.

In the meantime, however, check this out: the folks at The Weblog Review have been kind enough to review Geekery Today, and I received a 4 out of 5. According to my all-too-kind reviewer,

I learned a lot at Geekery Today, and with the amount of information available at this weblog, I could certainly see it turning into a magazine and hitting newstands everywhere.

Add some brain food to your daily dose of surfing and check this site out

Geeze, I think I’m going to blush.

Poor Lee county is a mixture of a prosperous college town and a run-down old mill town; rural areas facing extreme poverty; and sitting not far north of the Alabama black belt counties. As a result, if you look at the House districting map of Lee county, you’ll see that we’re carved up into six different fiefdoms for the state House of Representatives, you see that we have six different districts of the state House of Representatives, with lines running straight through the middle of towns to carve out safe districts. And Lee isn’t unique: we’re just part of a larger problem (look at the Birmingham district in Jefferson County and the surrounding area). This carved-up districting process establishes fiefdoms for dynastic state legislators; if you get elected enough to be in the legislature at the time of a census, you get to redraw the map for your own re-election. And gee whillikers, the people writing the rule book keep winning from census to census.

In the aptly-named How to Rig an Election, the [Economist][] examines America’s peculiar system of legislative redistricting, in which the lines are drawn and redrawn state-by-state according to partisan power politics. District gerrymandering gives state legislators the tools for egregious incumbent-protection schemes, which decimate the possibility of competitive races and completely invert democratic control of governance. The corrupt gerrymandering of safe districts means that legislators pick their voters, instead of voters picking their legislators.

So how can we fight back and reclaim the power from the careerist political hacks?

The Economist suggests a more European style of redistricting, Putting it into cleaner hands such as bipartisan commissions or neutral civil servants. But this isn’t going to help matters any. The problem is the power that rests in the hands of experts who know how to tweak and twist and manipulate the demographic data to shore up power. Ameliorating the direct interest of personal power by taking it out of the hands of the legislators themselves helps a little, but it doesn’t remove the process from partisan or bureaucratic power politics. Strategic interests don’t disappear when you switch over to an army of bureaucratic civil servant tweakers.

Our reluctance to challenge the arrogance of careerist bureaucratic "experts" has limited our ability to see other answers. But it is precisely expertise that is the problem. This doesn’t mean that the people drawing the lines should be stupid; it means that they shouldn’t be professionals who have invested their efforts in the art of twisting, tweaking, and manipulating districting lines.

So here’s how we reform redistricting

• First, completely overhaul how districting is done in the first place. State legislature districting should only be done within a county: each county gets one state senator, and a number of state representatives proportional to its population. Because they’re elected at the county level, district lines can only be drawn within the county, and you have no more gerrymandering across county lines. Also, since this scheme will generally increase the number of senators and representatives, it will also make legislators more responsive and representative towards individual constituents.

• Set strict guidelines for the shapes of districts which prevent egregious gerrymandering.

• Now ditch the legislators, ditch the bureaucrats. Instead, bring the people into the process. Create a process for selecting committees of randomly-chosen ordinary citizens who will be charged with redrawing the districts in a rational manner. For the state House of Representatives, districting can be done with citizens from the county represented. For the US House of Representatives, districting can be done with a larger committee of citizens cluster-sampled from across the state.

• Make the entire process open to the public, with media coverage and input from citizens not on the committee.

While this will help a great deal, fixing districting is hardly the be-all and end-all of democratic reform. To challenge the dynastic power of entrenched legislators, more will have to be done.

• Ensure that no candidate ever runs unopposed: give voters the option to vote None of the Above in any given race. If NOTA prevents a candidate from getting a majority of the vote, then the election is scuttled and new candidates run for the position.

• Implement legislative term limits, to break up the power of dynastic candidates. If they can’t stay in office from one redistricting to another, there’s no point in trying to mainpulate it in your favor.

• Obliterate ballot access restrictions which prevent non-Demopublican parties and independent candidates from getting on the ballot. Every citizen needs to feel empowered to run for office and alternative viewpoints need to be included in the discourse: giving an up-down decision on the pre-selected favorite of the Party elite is democracy as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. It’s not a real choice.

• Similarly, institute ballot reforms such as Instant Runoff Voting, which will empower independents and third parties by destroying the wasting your vote and lesser of two evils arguments. IRV allows for preferential voting, where if no-one gets a clear majority of the vote, the second (and if necessary, third, fourth, etc.) choices of the voters still count towards choosing the winner.

• Empower citizens to go over the heads of the state legislature to the people themselves. Institute a voter initiative process so that action doesn’t have to be filtered through the whims of legislative power.

• Empowering citizens also involves the creation of participatory, local spaces for citizen organization and power. This means forming neighborhood assemblies and interest-based caucuses of citizens, which can pass resolutions, organize cooperative mutual aid in the use of money and goods, and open up a space for people to work at running their own lives.

Roy Moore, Chief Justice, Alabama Supreme Court

Well, the polls have closed at Vote.com, and the results are mixed.

Two months ago, I reported on Vote.com’s recent online referendum on whether Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore should be removed from office. Our beloved Chief Justice was under fire for his virulently homophobic tirade, in which he used a concurring opinion as a platform to announce that the State would be acting within its moral and legal prerogatives to imprison and slaughter queer people. Despite the nature of his statements, when I first found the poll, 66% of the voters supported him and only 34% voted for removal.

However, supporters of gay liberation stepped up to the plate and fought to make their voices heard.

The bad news is that when the poll was closed, it was still 55% in support of Moore (3,116 votes) to 45% opposed (2,522 votes).

But here’s far better news. Those of us in Alabama, who have to live with the nutbar, came out against Roy Moore by pretty much the same margin (54% voted he should be removed, 46% voted he should not).

Now, online referenda are not scientific. Not even remotely. But, for one, these messages are going to Alabama lawmakers, and lawmakers care about the volume of letters coming from their own constituents. What’s even more important is that were enough of us in Alabama to turn the vote around like that. It’s heartening to see that a lot of people in Alabama are sick to death of Roy Moore, and it’s heartening to see that the Internet can put us in touch to make our organized voices heard.

Roy Moore comes up for re-election in 2006. The next task is to build on what we have accomplished, so that this online poll can be translated into victory at the ballot box.