In part 21 in this series we saw Democrats succeed in taking back both the Howard County Council and the county executive position from Republicans. In this post we see how that success translated into control over the council redistricting process, as the new redistricting commission scheme faced its first test. December 2000. Facing a tight deadline for county council redistricting (with the 2002 council elections less than two years away), the Democratic and Republican parties prepare to name members to the seven-person redistricting commission. The Democrats publicly advertise for any party activists willing to serve, an action that surprises county GOP chair Louis Pope: “You want people who understand the numbers, the issues and who can work toward a compromise.” Both parties praise the new system as a better way to do redistricting than that followed in the previous cycle, in which conflict between the Democratic council majority and Republican county executive Charles Ecker degenerated into a lawsuit. Notes Maryland state delegate Robert Flanagan, “At the very least members of the commission won’t be worried about their own [political] hides.” ...

Here are more recent links from hecker.tumblr.com. This week (actually, more like two weeks) was somewhat random, to say the least. Race Against the Machine. This is a must-read. The basic argument is that exponential advances in software technology threaten to automate all jobs involving low-to-mid-level relatively routine intellectual work, and even threaten what we would consider relatively high-end work (e.g., medical diagnosis). You should read this instead of reading yet another superficial pro- or anti-OWS article. (Plus it’s a smashing bargain as a $3.99 ebook.) ...

Dear Ken, Thanks for inviting me to your reception last Thursday, an invitation that (after a reminder from Jessie Newburn) I was happy to accept, because I think on balance you’ve done a good job as county executive and also because I thought it would be fun to spend some time among the movers and shakers of Howard County. I’m not very forward in social settings so I didn’t stop by to say hello, but now that I’m back in my element I thought I’d bend your ear for a few minutes. ...

Back in October 2010 pollsters were dueling over their predictions in the Howard County race for county executive, with pollster Patrick Gonzales of Gonzales Research seeing the race between Ken Ulman and Trent Kittleman tightening to only a 49-41% advantage for Ulman, a conclusion pooh-poohed by Ulman’s campaign staff. One major bone of contention was choosing a pool of likely voters in doing the polls, and in particular determining how many Democrats should be in the pool vs. Republicans and independents. ...

In this post I continue the story of the 1998 elections for Howard County Council that I began in part 20 of this series. August 1998. As Guy Guzzone faces no opposition in the District 3 Democratic primary his would-be Republican opponent, ex-Democrat Wanda Hurt, has her party credentials questioned by her primary opponent, “lifelong Republican” Kirk Halpin. (Hurt protests: “I was miserable as an active Democrat in this county. I suffered a heck of a lot.”) Though Hurt is backed by incumbent Dennis Schrader, the endorsement of the Baltimore Sun goes to Halpin for his “vigor” and “fresh perspective.”1 ...

In part 19 of this series we saw that in 1996 the voters by referendum adopted a change to the Howard County charter to have a redistricting commission create proposals for council district lines, as opposed to having this be the function solely of the council. However the council still had the power to influence the commission through its appointment of a seventh “tie-breaker” member. In this post and the next we review the council elections of 1998, which would determine the balance of power in drawing district lines after the 2000 census. ...

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it. ...

For some time now I’ve been posting links I find interesting at hecker.tumblr.com. This is mainly for personal reference, but I thought it might be useful to collect those every week or two in case anyone else is interested. Some of these inspire blog posts, others I use as reference for various projects. This week was a political philosophy week. “Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality” This is an interesting riff on John Rawls and the “veil of ignorance,” starting with the following assumption that “[absent] a policy of income redistribution, capitalism plus stability leads to income disparities.” I wrote a blog post based on this. ...

How can Maryland promote job growth and the well-being of its citizens as the economy languishes and Federal spending shows every sign of declining, never to rise again? Should Maryland seek to model itself on its next-door rival, Virginia, or even on Texas and other states in the south touting themselves as “business-friendly” destinations? Or is there another way to grow Maryland and make it a better place to live and work, one that takes into account Maryland’s own characteristics and doesn’t try to make it into something it’s not and never could be? ...

Is the US too stable for its own good? You’d think that stability would be a welcome thing, especially for a country in the midst of an economic downturn making life unstable for millions of Americans. But in a recent post, “Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality” (which I found via the Twitter feed of venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky), SEC official (and former financial industry insider) Rick Bookstaber makes the case that stability isn’t an unalloyed blessing when it comes to a capitalist society. I was interested in posting on this general topic, and commenting on Bookstaber’s post is as good a way to begin doing that as any. ...