nutritious collapsible house


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NullspacePittsburghers know that the times are out of joint. Somehow they're expecting the prosperity to blow up in their faces.
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This shape is often used by the League of Women Voters when they describe Pennsylvania legislative districts as 'deformed'. But last year there was a race between Tim Murphy and Chad Kluko for this district. Those results look like this:
Redistricting is not going to affect this coming election (or even the next), but we are getting closer to 2010 and a challenger in this race may just be laying the groundwork for a future run when the odds are a little better. One of the biggest impacts on future Pennsylvania politics could be the difference in who controls state government in a few years compared to the situation in 2001-2002 when redistricting last took place. Even the switch in the PA supreme court could be significant because there are provisions for redistricting to default to the Supreme Court if all else fails. Could the advantage of a Republican in this district be undrawn? One way or there other, SW PA congressional districts are going to look different after 2010 because other parts of the state have been growing faster and Pennsylvania is projected to lose a congressional seat. Taken together, most local districts could look awfully different in just a few years.
Tick tock.
Maybe over Christmas we will see a new wave of tourists. From the Kansas City Star is yet another travel piece on visiting Pittsburgh.
The folks at Marginal Revolution point out a study from a couple years ago that ranked the most liberal and conservative cities in the US. See the full report by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. Pittsburgh is ranked 34th out of 236 cities they rank in terms of 'most liberal'. Also on that site you can see that their center is listed on EBAY, so you too can own a piece of a think tank... sort of a Think Tank IPO. Who buys think tanks? Maybe Null Space could be sold virtually on Second Life for some virtual money?
and amid all the Thanksgiving cheer, little notice was paid to the anniversary of JFK's assassination the same day. A moment that impacted the nation and the world, but had a particular impact on local politics. The next 4 decades of our politics would be impacted by two of the players in the post-assassination investigation: Arlen Specter who came up with the silver bullet theory is now the longest serving Pennsylvania Senator ever. Over that time he has beaten a lot of other candidates. and Cyril Wecht of course, who has both a web site and occasional journal/blog, the recent entry is scintillating: A Note to Funeral Home Directors. His profile would forever be elevated and would dominate local politics for years. People forget, CW was an Allegheny County commissioner at one point long before he lost to Jim Roddey for the new post of County Chief Executive.
and everyone is talking about Pittsburgh's history these day, but even the articles I see today do not mention that it was literally today, November 25th, that in 1758 the British captured Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War. My own cent and a half, but I just don't get why all the history compilations leading up to the 250 celebrations rarely mention Pittsburgh's history in World War II.That is mostly an excuse to point out one of the more important, if really esoteric, things going on in the world of municipal bonds (bonds? we've got bonds). The US Supreme Court is expected to rule in the next few months in a case that could disallow some state tax exemptions of interest paid on certain municipal bonds. The issue is that bond interest could be bumped up a small bit. For Pennsylvania it may be a smaller impact than most other states because for high income taxpayers (bond buyers presumably) our tax rates are relatively low. So it may be a very small impact, but when you are a billion or so in the hole... every mil counts. Related trivia: Pennsylvania is one of only a few states that has a flat personal income tax, i.e. no progressivity at all.
The answer seems to be the mass reassessment of property values across the county and how that was handled. I have commented on that in the past (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_14515.html) about some of the problems managing the initial reassessment. While all sorts of people were mad at how the assessment was conducted, the city had this compounded problem of having a two-tiered tax that essentially exaggerated the impact of the assessment on certain communities. That anger was concentrated in specific East End neighborhoods. So Shadyside and Squirrel Hill property owners were the ones angriest about the assessment and split tax and having a fair amount of sway, the city's split tax was promptly eliminated. The reassessment and new property values would stay, and the overall anger over the whole process translated directly into a big flip in votes away from Roddey. He would lose and move out of the city rather promptly after leaving office after a single term.
So, if that stream of conscience has not lost you, it may have lost me... I am still pondering what the election results last week really mean. All this talk of polarization in the city is troubling and I really wonder if it is true. It's clear that there are groups in the city that voted for LR and others who didn't. The group that didn't correlates directly with the group of voters that first put Roddey into office and then kicked him out after one term. So it's clearly a mass of very independent minded voters that have some similar interests to produce such cohesive voting. I am just struck by the fact that the reasons for that cohesiveness are far more dynamic than all the pontificating today would lead you to believe. Republican or Democrat, reform minded or not, liberal, conservative or progressive, pork rinds or pierogies? Is that really the debate going on? That same block that voted against LR last week was just as motivated by very different reasons to vote cohesively in 1999 and 2003. Maybe something else altogether is going on? I really don't know what it means.....
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and there is the article today in the PG on the lack of support being set up for problem gamblers in the state. That made me want to go see if there is a new issue out of the Journal of Gambling Issues. There isn't, but the last issue does have a relevant article: Mapping the prevalence of problem gambling and its association with treatment accessibility and proximity to gambling venues. Some interesting maps in that, I wonder if there will be someone making maps like that for us someday.
I think others have compiled the election returns by ward, but what about by city council district. That looks like this:
I think the last chart is pretty important. Its hard to explain how many people told me over the last couple months that the Black community was going to come out for MD. Lots and lots of people said this to me and it was supposed to be one of the defining strengths of the campaign. Yet all the people saying that to me were white. Every single Black person I know or talked to in recent months may not have been huge LR fans but they were generally pretty supportive of LR at least to the degree that they really thought he was doing a pretty good job considering the circumstances. Whether you agree or not with that judgement is not the point (or at least not my point at the moment), but why did one group of people so badly mispercieve the actual voting intentions of the other. It really was just so odd watching the news, reading blog comments or talking with friends who all painted a different picture from what I heard myself and what the voting results showed on Tuesday. It's a rhetorical question unfortunately, but do we communicate that badly. If there is a story in this election, it's tied up in how badly two groups understood each other. There were similar incongruities in what I heard about other groups, but it was just so extreme in the case of African Americans. I could work to put a slightly more precise number on it, but Black voting for LR was clearly over 90%, possibly near 95% on average across the city.
update 2: for those googling in, I have a follow up: the thousand words.
more to follow. over.
update. Man, people like maps. Just fyi, I put this up before but historical data by voting district in the City is merged in this file:
http://www.briem.com/data/Pittsburgh_Election_Data.xls
and I have other historical maps here:
http://www.briem.com/mapindex.html
Surprises eh? According to this web article they poured over records to find 9 thousand or so voters already deceased. Is that a lot? Comes out to about 1% of all registered voters and less than the number of deaths in the county each year. They found "16" of them who actually voted. 16 out of just shy of 900K registered voters in the county. Thats an amazingly good record if WPXI claims their research was thorough. The surprise in the headline is how few dead voters there are, not how many. Yet I bet many who don't read past the headline think this is some huge problem now proven by the story title. 16 voters spread throughout the city can affect virtually no election out there even if they are fraudulent. and even the WPXI story suggests the possible explanation of similar names and sheer clerical error. Not that votes were created, but just misreported.
Here is the deal... if people really are not removed from the voter rolls soon after they are deceased, it would be a fairly hard thing to hide. I am sure there are some limited examples of people who are missed. Remember, people die all the time. If even a small fraction of deceased voters were routinely left on the rolls, it would be a very short time before the voter rolls showed a severe imbalance in the number of older registered voters and what you would expect by looking at the population.
I have pointed out this simple graph to people in the past and they still swear every person deceased in the last decade are still on the rolls. Here is a graph of the age distribution of all registered voters in Allegheny County compared to the age distribution of the population. Both are for 2006.
2006 Senate
The only comment I have on the 1999 race is that those results were clearly impacted by the Wecht-Caliguiri feuding within the local Democratic party in the past. Caliguiri was once an independent mayoral candidate, but he really had his strongest support from within the party as well having received the ACDC endorsement over incumbent Mayor Pete Flaherty once. Also 8 years of migration have affected who lives in the city and I would bet migration is pretty selective by party. Take for example Jim Roddey himself who moved out of the city almost immediately after his political career likely came to an end with his defeat in 2003. An anecdotal point of course, but does anyone doubt Republicans are more likely to move out of the city than Democrats.
(1) has a boundary that touches, even at a single point, a county of the second class; (2) is a county of the fourth, fifth or sixth class and shares common boundaries at more than a single point with two counties described in paragraph (1); or (3) is a county of the sixth class and is located to the south and west of a county described in paragraph (2).Go try and figure that out with a map. If you can't don't feel bad, the statute writers couldn't either. Actually it was that "single point" that got them in trouble. The problem is that when this edict was interpreted by the PA secretary of state, it was deemed to apply not to 10 counties, but 11. So Clarion County, which had not been a part of the discussion at all, was deemed to have a sufficient boundary with Butler county to be included and was told at the last minute to have a referendum for a proposal it new little about and cared about even less. It failed there too.