Re the Voting Rights Act: I've used this graph a lot to illustrate how the VRA largely ended the historic pattern of blocking and burdening Black voters in the south. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

🚨BREAKING: According to exclusive research by Democracy Docket, the Supreme Court’s ruling will likely derail at least 28 pro-voting lawsuits that aim to stop state legislatures from drawing electoral maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

No unilateral disarmament on gerrymanders. Dems need to fight fire with fire.

Buffalo plays the Canadian anthem even when Canadian teams aren't present. And when the microphone cut out the people did the job admirably. That's what neighbours do. Buffalo proud. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFv...

This is such an important point about speed cameras. We have overwhelming data that the vast majority of drivers quickly learn where they are and adjust their driving habits to avoid getting ticketed. This makes them a bad way to generate ticket revenue but a super effective way to reduce speeding

Reminder that any political party trying to make it harder to vote is sending a clear message: they can't win on their ideas alone.

As far as I can tell, a map-drawer can now say, "I am going to split this community of black voters into separate districts, not because I intend to dilute the votes of black Americans, but rather because black Americans vote Dem and I want to dilute the power of Dem voters," and it's just fine

Alito also notes that Black turnout reached near parity with White turnout in 2 of the past 5 presidential elections. But which two, Justice Alito?? Oh, the LAST TWO before Shelby County? You don't say!

dude i cringe when i have to watch myself give a talk how's this supposed to be relaxing at the end of a rough day

Justice Thomas just asked a jaw-dropping question in the TPS cases. He seemed to question how the Haitians could raise equal protection claims when the 14th Am applies to states. Atty explained the 5th Amendment embraces those claims (as has been understood since at least Bolling v Sharpe in 1954).

Impossible to understand the Suprme Court's Voting Rights Act case without the context that John Roberts has spent his entire career working to gut the VRA. As a Reagan DOJ staffer, he made the *same arguments* the Court just embraced. He lost then; he won today. ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/john-...

This is correct. There is no future of democratic self government in the US with an unreformed Supreme Court. The Court is riddled with corruption and abuses of power and rooting out that corruption is a sine qua non of civic democracy in the United States.

The way to promote unqualified men is just to get rid of qualified women. Simple.

Gutting the VRA puts enormous pressure on Dems to redraw House maps wherever they can. Dems may be able to redraw maps by 2028 in 9 states targeting 19 seats currently held by the GOP. I'll share example maps below. Longer-term, a future Dem Congress & president MUST ban gerrymandering nationwide

If you want to understand why the Voting Rights Act is so important, a good place to start is the history of the Wilmington (NC) massacre, where white supremacists executed a coup against the legitimately elected biracial municipal government: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AORz...

It is worth, I think, emphasizing that in trampling congressional attempts to protect the rights of Black people, the Court is basically doing what it has always done, with the exception of a couple decades in the mid-20th century when it often worked with Congress to protect the rights of Black ppl

Redistricting

A full 25% of American healthcare spending goes to things like billing, claims processing, and customer service. www.ft.com/content/6b1b...

Again, today of all days is an important time to recognize that the Democratic Party's 2026/2028 platform must be institutional reform. <Every policy> everyone wants <follows> from that, not the other way around. There will be <one> chance to fix things. We can't waste it again.

Like the weak SPLC and Comey cases, the best way to think about this is an attempt to sync up law enforcement with the right-wing media narrative machine.

'People Have the Right to Be Buried': In Gaza, Thousands of Palestinians Remain Trapped Under Rubble www.haaretz.com/gaza/2026-04...

I'm still surprised some people seem to think that we just need to feed seaweed to cows, and their methane emissions just goes away… It's not that simple. drawdown.org/insights/are...

Why worry whether a case has merit when you can screw your enemies just with an indictment?

This is one of those things that is shocking but not surprising.

Stanford University researchers find SARS-CoV-2 makes a circular RNA called circ7b8N that does not boost viral growth but reshapes human immune gene activity and may serve as a lasting infection marker. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“I don’t want to be one of those people that sat,” said Libby Blyth, an accountant who drives people to work who are afraid of being spotted by ICE and delivers food to families in hiding. “I don’t want to be somebody’s history lesson.”

Pollution levels in Paris after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.

Lying about starving people. This 4.3 million is mostly children they have pushed off of the program.

I have to renew my passport but now I'm going to have to wait until those 25k copies are gone bc I'm not looking at this asshole's face for 10 years worth of trips

one time the biden administration politely asked social media platforms to take down covid misinformation to save lives and the rightwing ecosystem spent years screeching about the perils of censorship

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear 2 cases that will decide the fate of more than a million migrants in the United States. @rparloff.bsky.social explains the challenges to the Temporary Protected status cancellations, including the equal protection claims, and how they may fare.

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

It is fine for the parties themselves to choose their candidates and even if primary elections weren’t perversions of democracy in several ways (which they are) they’d be a piss poor way of choosing candidates, and they separate parties from accountability.

Carbon removal joins the "let's just say we never gave a fuck about climate" club in the US Also: "Carbon removal could provide offsets for liquefied natural gas companies exporting to Europe or hyperscalers facing community pushback when building data centers" FFS www.axios.com/2026/04/27/c...

This week, I read two books that are essential to understanding what the Trump Administration is doing to the small-r republican project of self governance. One is Slobodian & Tarnoff's book, discussed here. The other is "Into the Wood Chipper" by Nicholas Enrich, about what Musk did to USAID.

The merged Paramount/Warner Bros company will be 49.5% owned by foreign interests (including the Chinese), and 38.5% owned by Middle Eastern countries Brendan Carr, who was positively apoplectic about foreign ownership of companies like TikTok, won't make a peep about it because he's a hack

This researcher created a fictional illness, and fake studies funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and University of the Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad. LLMs warned people the illness was real. go.nature.com/4cQabS5

I know we get inured to stuff, but it is hard to fathom the cruelty here. At a time of tax cuts for the most powerful, they are trying to remove basic supports for the most vulnerable. The Trump administration's war on people with disabilities continues.

The story here is that Congress rejected Trump’s proposal to slash funding for the National Science Foundation, but Trump is gutting the agency anyway. The by-now classic Russ Vought play of treating Congress as an irrelevancy. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of EPA head Lee Zeldin. “In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters.” [newyorker.com]

There are a few things we should keep, but a new Constitution with a parliament would be preferable in almost every way to what we have now.

"in resolving the merits of Texas’s appeal of the preliminary injunction, the majority deemed it appropriate to simply incorporate December’s order by reference—even though that order included exactly two paragraphs of analysis, one of which was only about why Texas met the factors for a stay"

The Israeli government, like the Trump admin, is determined to turn every long-time ally into an adversary - something that will haunt both counties for decades.

Scientists are learning to spot pandemic threats without touching dangerous pathogens.

Some pretty crazy stuff that somehow didn’t make it on the air.

Toronto man poised to become the first Canadian cured of HIV-AIDS. 62-year-old has been in remission since 2021. He joins a group of 10 others across the globe who achieved the milestone after a stem cell transplant, by Jennifer Yang www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic... via @theglobeandmail.com

Hold on. We the taxpayers are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?

Login.gov is the primary way many retired feds get into their thrift savings program and access information on their annuities and other important documentation. So, yeah, no worries whatsoever.

Let me get this straight: Bari Weiss has radically edited the new Trump interview on 60 Minutes? Let's not forget that Weiss lost her mind over standard editing of a Kamala Harris interview in 2024. But as Juliet shows, this Trump editing goes way beyond standard broadcast practices. Good grief.