Virginia should just proceed with the map anyway tbqh 🤷🏾‍♀️ reinstate the map their damn selves

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra just took half a million dollars from the fossil fuel industry. This on top of the max contribution from Chevron. When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

what really gets me about the Virginia Supreme Court redistricting decision today is that 1.6 million Virginia voters approved this map! you're telling me legislatures can freely impose racist maps on the public, but the public can't choose fair maps for itself? ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

👀"Travelers booking summer flights are in for a sticker shock — and airlines are warning it could get worse. Summer domestic roundtrip airfare prices are up 27% compared to last year, and flights to Europe are even higher — up 45% to London ..." @semafor.com Trump ruining summer.

Well, Chevron has figured out their candidate. Always helpful to know who Big Oil is rooting for. As for me, I think Tom Steyer will take on the oil and utility industries, and save Californians a bundle. Which is why those industries hate him.

This is collective punishment, denying benefits to the most vulnerable when they have done nothing wrong.

The Roberts Court previously treated the “Purcell Principle” (can’t change electoral rules close to an election) as important. But that was in instances doing so advantaged Republicans. Faced with a situation where Republicans want to change rules while voting is already underway, the Court says OK.

War is peace

"Trump is now effectively blocking any new wind projects in the US, according to the main renewables trade group, using the federal government’s power over all things air and sky to grind a routine approval process to a screeching halt," reports @jael.bsky.social: heatmap.news/plus/the-fig... 🔌💡

Incoming Hungarian PM Peter Magyar is setting a good rhetorical example for what to do with former regime insiders who benefited from Fidesz corruption:

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Just got the following email from the NYC bar association: "Update: All attorneys from the United States Attorney's Offices have withdrawn from participating in this year's White Collar Crime Conference."

Tucker is obviously setting himself up to be the redeemer figure in the “the Jews puppeted/betrayed Trump” MAGA narrative that is emerging on the right.

This is an abortion ban

It cost me $177 to renew my driver license today. Requiring certain ID to vote without making that ID easy, accessible, and free is 100% a poll tax.

The Democrats still have an acute gerontocracy problem that urgently needs to be addressed

someone make an ad of grandma working in a coal mine

Now do stocks.

More than 20 years ago, I wrote it in trial about the Supreme Court for the Sacramento Bee. The headline of the editorial was"the Confederate court. The news has apparently not yet reached New York City.

Arguably, no law in American history was a product of more public deliberation and more attention from the political branches than the Voting Rights Act. We fought a Civil War to put authorization of it in the Constitution. It then took 100 years of protest/lobbying to get the legislation passed.

It's such a breath of fresh air to see @aoc.bsky.social stand against gutting our tax base.

My New One at Slate: “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century; This evisceration of the Voting Rights Act requires us to take SCOTUS reform more seriously.” @slate.com slate.com/news-and-pol...

Schumer & Jeffries should be on the steps of the Capitol or in front of the Court with voting rights activists and others and state plainly, "John Roberts does not think Black people should have the right to vote or deserve representation in Congress." State it plainly so normal people get it.

Lots of alternative approaches to districting. But none will work without Supreme Court reform, because the Supreme Court is highly likely to strike down proportional representation, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, or anything. The text of the Constitution does not matter to them, sadly.

Let’s see if I have this right. Trump is taxing me to pay companies not to produce the cheapest, cleanest form of energy so his fossil fuel buddies can make more money and jack up my prices whenever there is turmoil in the Middle East or Russia. Why does he hate Americans so much?

I'm writing an NSF grant proposal now. How do I justify spending my time writing proposals to an agency that is targeted for a greater than 50% budget cut, has made almost no new awards in 2026, and clearly is being destroyed from the inside out according to the Russ Vought playbook?

Good god. Trump fired the entire National Science Board without explanation on Friday afternoon.

DOJ official advised keeping states in dark about "what the admin was intending to do with unredacted state voter rolls, which contain private information about Americans. “I believe our reply should always be: ‘We will use the data in a manner consistent with Federal law’ and say nothing more.”

The Founders wrote a Constitution giving Congress the power to shape the judiciary. A corrupt & lawless Supreme Court has now abrogated to itself the power to sideline Congress. Restoring the republic requires putting the judiciary back in its proper place. www.liberalcurrents.com/break-up-the...

Another reason why China and Russia love Trump’s débâcle in Iran. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Many of those who complain California counts votes too slowly also want district elections to be more competitive. But under any counting regime, close competitive elections are going to take longer to know the outcome. You can’t have both with single-member districts. calmatters.org/politics/202...

Renewable energy is less expensive than fossil fuels. 🧪💡🔌☀️💨💧🔋

The low IQ guy here is the fellow who doesn’t seem to know that US taxes have consistently claimed 8-10 percentage points less of GDP than in the average advanced country for this entire century, no matter which party is in power.

Comically, baldly corrupt. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/b...

Zero. Sympathy. They did this to themselves. Oh, and also? There definitely is an easy answer.

I’m so old I remember when everybody said that boys could do arithmetic better than girls.

The grifting is reserved for the big guys. If the little guys get in on the play, it screws up the market and the bosses don’t get as bigger return on their crimes.

Age isn’t the issue here. A simple web search or AI search gives you the right picture. It’s typical journalistic laziness.

While testifying last week, RFK Jr. dismissed Medicaid programs that pay families to care for disabled loved ones as “rife with fraud” and claimed that they pay people to complete menial tasks they “used to do as family members for free.” Disability rights advocates & family caregivers are furious.

The war on birth control access is well underway, it's just less explicit Planned Parenthood says 50 of its clinics closed last year as a result of an anti-abortion budget provision—and nearly all of them were in contraceptive deserts (link in alt). Translation: it's now harder to get birth control

Fewer immigrants mean more jobs and higher wages for American workers, right? The data tell a different story. www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

He's a liar and a killer. I don't know what else to tell people, he's a rich eugenicist, he wants as many poor people as possible to die in the name of 'health.' He's a genuinely and uniquely malign figure in American life and his appointment was an act of violence

Tell that, bozo, to the folks in Iowa, who’ve seen their electricity prices fall relative to the national average as wind has taken over as the state’s dominant power source.

Reading the FT front page story about a Chinese company introducing a battery with a 1500 km range & six minute recharging time & about how two Chinese companies own more than half of the global EV battery market & I am struck by the different realities the US and China occupy. We’ve lost the plot.

So is it now Republican orthodoxy that Prop 13 and other voter initiatives amending the California constitution were added by an “absurd” and “ridiculous” process? Is it possible they read our book?

one of the ways the mid to late 20th century political world has distorted the historical memories of even sophisticated observers is in the idea that you can achieve major transformations of american political life through something like bipartisan consensus

So is it now Republican orthodoxy that Prop 13 and other voter initiatives amending the California constitution were added by an “absurd” and “ridiculous” process? Is it possible they read our book?

Trump's Iran war has cemented China's position as #1, it's very MAGA cepr.net/publications...