Friday Aggrepost: "Weekend Reading List" Edition

You know it's a busy week when you print stuff off on Wednesday, lug it to work and back every day since ... and still haven't read word one of the article yet. So here's a short list of the weekend reading plan, whereby I intend to make up for a little bit of lost time:

» NYT Mag: The Big Fix (David Leonhardt)
The Wednesday culprit I allude to above. It's always a day-maker when I see Leonhardt turned loose on the Magazine's long-form format. His previous Wednesday column is also worth a read.

» TNR: Conservatism Is Dead (Sam Tanenhaus)
[TNR's links are always buggy on print dates. It'll be up soon, or you can always read the PDF or dead tree version if you must]
Honestly, I do try and avoid much of the "Dem Dissection of Conservatism's Demise" genre as I possibly can. But consider this something of a NASCAR attraction ... it's just too darn hard to ignore all of them when you know the crashes will be entertaining. Case in point, Nate Silver's own interesting take ... plus his predictable graphical analysis of same.

Personally, I find it much more entertaining to watch Republican bloggers comment on the need to fix the party they themselves played such a role in reducing to a pile of rubble. Parroting talking points has a price, ya know.

» McKinsey Quarterly: Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers
A nice combination for my inner wonk and inner tech geek.

» HBO: The Trials of Ted Haggard
Well, not really "reading" ... but I do need to make a point to catch this over the weekend for some reason or another. Perhaps the one element of Haggard's personality that I don't think has gotten enough attention is his seeming need for media attention. Granted, it's hard to compete with homosexual behavior, drug use, and male escorts. Crud ... this'll really jack with my search term hits now.

» NYT: Blagojevich Makes a Day of It on Way Out
Blago. Out. And not a minute too soon. I did catch some snippets of the Blago Media Tour as he sought to defend himself. It had just as much eeriness as Ted Haggard's tour (particularly the Larry King interviews of each). Maybe they should make the rounds together. They look like they'd be a cute couple.

The Times' story is just an interesting take on the subject of Blago's departure. The ChiTrib has better for the local scene. The new Gov is already on the job and it looks like a Primary election is set for September to settle on a Senator. I haven't studied enough on the potential candidates, but I am inclined to think that state Attorney General Lisa Madigan might be a good potential candidate.

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And one that I have actually found some time to read through this morning ...

» Chron: Houston has an obligation to increase council seats (Vidal Martinez)
I've often wondered how on earth anyone would draw lines in a potential 2009 redistricting round. Vidal Martinez is at least brave enough to offer a suggestion:

The information from the last census is used for legislative funding and apportionment purposes in a multitude of circumstances. There is sufficient credible updated information, based on that census, along with energy, water and other utility information, postal data and consumer data, that describes where the population growth has occurred.

Brilliant ... let's let CenterPoint provide the data for slicing new district lines!

Needless to say, I think it's a bad idea to draw lines in 2009. It's politically messy (ie - will taint the normal work that really needs to get done by council), it's temporary (ie - we'll find out in 2011 how wrong the old lines were anyway), it eradicates community stability in people knowing who their council member is (to the extent that they know that now), and it will not play out the way many people are thinking it will in terms of boundary definitions.

A few cases in point for that last item ... Clear Lake and Kingwood will either have to delink from the odd-shaped District E, or you'd have to take out some of the working-class/minority areas west of I45 (and possibly more). I think the emphasis will be on the latter more than the former in order to prevent dilution of minority districts that reside next to CL and Kingwood.

The "new" districts that you'll likely get will be a Montrose-based district (something that community has been arguing for since at least the 90s). This will reduce the River Oaks/Shephard/Montrose area bordered by Highways 45, 59, and 610 from having parts of five different districts to being predominantly represented by one. How such a district votes in the aggregate will likely come down to how much of River Oaks is in there. It's entirely possible that this is more of a District G-"lite" than it would be a District D-"white".

As Districts C/D/G/F shuffle to accommodate that, I think it's a possibility that you get something new out of the SW side of town in order to placate the more entrenched interest in keeping C and G as whole as possible. This could make something like Dist. F more Alief-based and move Sharpstown into the new C, for instance. The remainder of an Alief District might snake through parts of the Westheimer/Westpark corridor to make it more of a transitional/new community. Politically, it should be more favorably Dem than the current F. But if there's a ton of apartments in the district, those folks are less likely to vote. It might go either way, with could be of interest for (just to throw out a name) someone like Alief ISD board member Nghi Ho, a Republican minority.

Another possibility I see for a new district is to take the armpit of 610 and 290 and create something there, making H more of an Hispanic district and A more anglo. As for the new turf, I think it's likelier to be a Republican-leaning district.

It's not clear to me yet how you draw two new district with all of the VRA restrictions and grow any minority district. Nor is it even clear how you manage that while drawing a Montrose district that votes in a candidate who is well received by the gay community. But that's just the political side of the argument. There's still the issue of what data you use to draw lines with and what precedent it sets to use census estimates as the basis for honoring what Martinez describes as a contractual matter.

SIDENOTE: Also in the works, I'm hoping to finish off a great book by Pastor Greg Boyd and start in on a big thick book on macroeconomics.