Crime has crept up in parts of California since realignment began in 2011 (although the causal link isn't clear).
Brown, through what he calls "realignment," began shifting control of low-level felons to the counties.
Work on the realignment began in January 2009, but was halted just one month later over environmental and easement issues.
This policy of "realignment", which began in October 2011, has cut the state's prison population by around 25,000.
Iran's growing confidence is based on a gradual realignment that began with the aftershocks of the Sept. 11 attacks.
To oversimplify things a bit — but only a bit — the historic political realignment that began sixty years ago, with the rise of the civil-rights movement, is now complete.
Republicans asserted that the unseating of a Democratic governor in an overwhelmingly Democratic state was the latest phase in a realignment that began with last year's Congressional elections and would continue in 2004.
More sobering for Democrats, the realignment that began in the 1960's -- when the battles over civil rights and Vietnam began to drive white men and rural voters away from the party -- has finally begun to erode the party at its very foundation: the state and local level, where it was dominant for decades.
And because of the political realignment that began in 1980 (when the term "Reagan Democrats" -- meaning ethnic whites -- entered the lexicon) and reached its apex in 1994, when the South tipped into the Republican column, the voters who are most susceptible to such appeals reside, at this juncture in our politics, primarily in the Republican base.
Not long after this realignment had begun, McNamara became increasingly embroiled in the war in Vietnam, stemming from Kennedy's belief that America's reputation with Nato and the non-aligned world would be undermined if it seemed unwilling to protect a small Asian nation from communist subversion.
