A 2001 proposed Senate District that took 8 hours to travel the convoluted 199-mile trek from one end to the other - Payback time

A ghost of 2001: Senate District 51, occupied by Republican Bill Stephens, required an eight-hour trek by car

Senate District 24, as drawn in 2001 for Republican Sen. Joey Brush

In an 8-16-11 post post entitled "What! Only 9 minutes Bobby! - What! lost your mittens, you naughty kittens! Then you shall have no say. Mee-ow . . mee-ow. No, you shall have no say," I wrote:

When I first read a few minutes ago in the AJC's Political Insider that Senate Reapportionment Chairman Mitch Seabaugh had given Senate Democrats a whole 9 minutes to offer up changes to the GOP redrawn redistricting map for the Georgia Senate, I thought, damn, that sounds so Draconian, I mean Drakhanian, as in Bobby Khan in 2001, when the shoe was on the other foot.

Today Jim Galloway writes in the AJC's Political Insider (and includes the above photographs of proposed Senate Districts 51 and 24):

In 2001, Democrats still ruled Georgia, but Republicans — for the first time — were threatening. Led by Gov. Roy Barnes, Democrats produced a series of maps that stretched the bounds of credulity, as federal courts would later rule.

Ten years later, Senate Reapportionment Chairman Mitch Seabaugh, R-Sharpsburg, flashed some of the Democratic handiwork on a pair of wide screens in the Senate chamber. District after district snaked across the state in narrow, twisted paths.

A giggle broke out when Seabaugh unveiled Senate District 51, housing a GOP incumbent, which Democrats had draped across the roof of Georgia like a giant pair of elephant ears — several counties on each lobe. The land bridge that connected the east side with the west was at one point only two football fields wide. (It took a reporter eight hours to make the convoluted 199-mile trek from one end to the other.)

I recall talking at the time with my close friend and now deceased and former City of Douglas Mayor and industrial recruitment guru Max Lockwood about what our good friends Gov. Roy Barnes and Bobby Kahn were doing and how they would not listen to us or anyone else.
At the time, this item was not on voters' the radar screen. It later would be, and we are still paying the price for their failure to abide by the adage that the pigs get fat, and the hogs get slaughtered.