When he was running against Martin Frost, one of Frost's staffers booked a singer, Peter Yarrow, for a campaign event. Yarrow had been a member of the group Peter, Paul & Marrow, which apparently is all the campaign stagger knew.

Turns out, Yarrow had been convicted in the 70s of molesting a 14-year-old groupie -- and, as soon as the Frost campaign learned of the incident, they cancelled the appearance and broke of their contract with Yarrow.

A month or so after this happened, Pete Sessions put out a Spanish-language mailer that told the story about the originally scheduled Yarrow appearance -- but put in very large, bold type, only the following: Martin Frost and, below, in bigger, bolder type, "molestador de ninos."

If you didn't read the mailer, as many didn't, it was designed to leave you with the clear impression that Frost was a child molester.

Even against the backdrop of our notoriously dirty Texas politics, it was the vilest, most egregious thing I've EVER seen in the name of politics -- and it worked like a charm, eroding Frost's support among the Latinos that Delay and Rove had already worked overtime to disenfranchise with gerrymandering.

I feel gross even writing about it.

was to concentrate (D) voters into a few blocks that the (R)'s had no hope for anyway.  Then create as many just barely (R)-safe districts as they could.

In a normal year, all their (R) districts go as planned, and they rack up their Congressional representation.  In a year like this (oh man, I hope!), they're looking at (D)'s making very dramatic gains.

Even the voters in North TX are disgusted by the latest redistricting.

and some federal agency was used to track them down?

The Republicans have gerrymandered Ohio so that despite the fact that in 2006, more Democratic votes were cast for Congress and for general assembly than Republican votes, our congressional delegation is 11-7 favouring Republicans and they currently hold both houses of our legislature (although their lead in the  lower house was slashed by 7 seats and we need only 4 this fall to take control, well within our reach).

Yet the despite this (look at Oh-06, Gov. Ted Strickland's old district on a map; he once joked it took him longer to drive from one end of his district to the other than to DC), we stand an excellent chance of picking up 2-3 seats in November which would tie us in the delegation or put us in the lead. In fact, five districts are considered to be competitive but it would be far-fetched to think we will win them all. Still, we will likely accomplish parity even before we get redistricting, which we should be able to address if both Strickland and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner get reelcted in 2010.

During Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War, and in the reaction that followed (later 1870s and the rise of the Klan and Jim Crow segregation through the 1950s and somewhat into the 1960s) it was the Democratic Party that made up the uber reactionary "solid south" and that was the party that pushed racist divisions.

After the last (pre-2000) majorly disputed election, that is, in 1876, when the election of Rutherford Hayes was fixed against Tidwell, the Republican Party stopped doing the progressive thing, and the United States was without a major political party that opposed racism until the awakening of the mid-1960s. (Tidwell, the democrat, won the popular vote but in a deal made in congress, the presidency was given to the NY Republican Hayes with the understanding that the federal government would no longer enforce the Civil Rights laws that were passed after the Civil War, and that there would be no more federal protection for the people who were newly freed during the Civil War.

With the fixing of that election, the long, horrible period of reaction set in, and the Klan rose to defeat people who fought back. The Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party during the years of reaction.

That the Democrats became a multi-ethnic party beginning in the 1960s was an outcome that arose solely because of grassroots organizing in the streets and in the neighborhoods and at the lunch counters and in the schools and factories and in places of work. People fought hard to turn the Democratic Party around and far away from its racist roots.