CleanMO, SilencedTurkey

This episode of Radio Active Magazine discusse two superficially unrelated issues:

1. The Clean Missouri campaign is looking for volunteers to “Join the Coalition” in the fight for fair maps in Missouri: In early 2018 Republican Representative Hannah Kelly said, “The Clean Missouri initiative, if passed, will be devastating to Missouri Republicans.” Republicans now hold 70% of the seats in the Missouri House and Senate and 80% of the Missouri delegation in the US House of Representatives. Meanwhile, a 2018 Gallup poll found that 47% of Missouri respondents were Republicans or were leaning Republican. Representative Kelly could be correct: If the current Republican supermajorities are based on gerrymandering, they could be devastated by fair maps. For background on this, see the Wikiversity article on, “Electoral integrity in the United States“.

However, the Clean Missouri campaign is not giving up. They are inviting people to work with them to use a new tool called “districtR.org” that “is a free, public web tool for districting and community identification, brought to you by the MGGG Redistricting Lab” at Tufts University. CleanMissouri.org is recruiting people to use this tool to make it harder for the Republican supermajority in charge of the Missouri government to seriously gerrymander the districts in Missouri. If you want to support that effort, go to “CleanMissouri.org” and click “Join the Coalition” or send an email to “[email protected]”.

DistrictR.org” is a tool that can be used to help common citizens involve themselves in the redistributing process in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. I don’t currently know of any effort in Kansas similar to CleanMissouri.org, but I would naively expect that many local chapters of the League of Women Voters from sea to shining sea would be doing something similar.

2. Advocates of Silenced Turkey is organizing a protest at the Horse Fountain, for Saturday, March 6, 3 PM, to express their opposition to human rights abuses in Turkey. Arrests have included thousands of members of the military; about a third of the judges in the country; Kurdish activists, mayors, governors, and members of parliament; and journalists. More than 50,000 people have been arrested and over 160,000 fired from their jobs. Various television stations, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses were shut down, and tens of thousands of passports were revoked.  For more please go to silencedturkey.org or go to the Horse Fountain, Saturday, March 6, 3 pm.


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