Steven Greenhut at the OCRegister.com, excerpts below:

After looking at the current redistricting process, and the new maps offered by a supposedly nonpartisan and fair-minded commission that is doing the bidding for left-wing and ethnic interest groups, I do have some happy news: The new maps – which almost certainly will ensure a two-thirds legislative voting majority for Democrats, who will be sure to raise taxes early and often – are likely to be challenged and, either way, won't go into effect until at least 2012.

Facetiousness aside, the redistricting debacle spotlights the far-reaching tentacles of the political Left, the impotence of the Republican Party and the outlandish double-standards at work in the high-stakes game of Sacramento politics.

As former California Republican Party Chairman Shawn Steel put it, "The Democrats knew what they were doing, and Republicans were asleep at the switch." He said the commission, comprised of Republicans and Democrats (and members of third parties), features ineffective and liberal Republican members and hyperpartisan Democrats, with the results strongly tilting the new seats in one direction."  Furthermore, Steel notes that the commission was designed, though the language of the initiative that created it, to devise new ethnic-oriented gerrymanders beyond what's required by the federal Voting Rights Act. The one commissioner who voted "no" on the new maps, Michael Ward of Fullerton, complained publicly. "In my opinion, the commission failed to fulfill its mandate to strictly apply constitutional criteria and consistently applied race and 'community of interest' criteria and sought to diminish dissenting viewpoints."