And you thought Karl Rove was spending more time with his family

Ok, by now, they probably don't really need Karl Rove. I mean, what he did and sometimes still does was not exactly rocket science, and by now you'd think that everyone who is willing to become a low-down dirty rotten crook and liar would have learned how to do this stuff.

And so they have. If I'm reading this report from Johann Hari of the Independent (via the Seattle Post Intelligencer) properly, this was probably hatched in a brainstorming session at the Giuliani campaign and has gone all feral and viral since then.

Hari is very good at explaining to non-Merkins how sensitive the U.S. Electoral College system could be to phony attempts to democratize the system in one state alone -- one strategic state, California -- while maintaining the system elsewhere:

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the Electoral College among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favor. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its Electoral College votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 percent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 percent of California's electoral votes; if 51 percent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 percent of Texas' electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this -- but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California's Electoral College votes and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a statewide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California's electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big statewide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state's 54 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this were being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California's forgotten Republicans would be represented in the Electoral College, and so would Texas' forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

Fiendish, yes? And read on for the profiles of the particular fiends involved.

We are facing some seriously unpleasant people in North America these days, are we not? It is still hard for me to accept that the bastards really are such bastards and do have such power. But it seems that they are, and they do.

There are some nice North Americans, though. H/t on this story to my friend strategerie at The Little Pink Clubhouse, aka The Heartbreak Blog, who is always there with the chocolate and the kleenex.