The View Was Grand Indeed

I apologize for the long absence: I had a long vacation last week going to Las Vegas, with the intent of visiting the Grand Canyon. I had never been to Vegas, although it's a spot my dad enjoyed visiting as a Navy pilot making delivery runs from East to West Coast. I don't travel as much as I'd like, either. Living on a librarian's salary doesn't allow for a lot of trips I'd like to take. Even saving up for this trip has crimped my current budget.

It did not help that on the day after my trip to the Grand Canyon, I tried to travel around Vegas to do some birthday shopping for my twin brother... and in the process injured my left leg bad enough that I'm walking on crutches and seeing my local clinic about possible ligament tears at my knee. Ow ow ow.

While there's a ton of political madness to keep up with, at least I got to see the majestic views of the west side of the Grand Canyon. Using a Canon Rebel T6 camera, I was able to get some pics:

I wonder if you can see the shape...

Yup, there's a sleeping dog on the left.

The west side is on tribal land: the Hualapai people oversee and manage the tour sites, including a Skywalk viewpoint that is pretty scary for anyone - like me - afraid of heights.

You have to pay extra to go on the Skywalk. 
I was not about to pay extra to scare myself.

Just remember this is the WEST side of the canyon.
There's a North (currently closed) and a South. Spread over 
HUNDREDS of miles.

Even the staff parking lot has an epic view.

I tried to get an interior picture, but it was too dark.

This is stop two at this park: Guano Point. That
rocky formation is actually called Ant Hill.
The top of it is supposed to give you the best
360 degree view of the canyon possible.
And it's impossible to get up there.
I tried, twice.

I'm told that's the Colorado River down there.

There's a bat cave down there. (No, not THAT one)
Guano was harvested for fertilizer. That's part of the old
lift system they used to get to the cave.

I dunno if you can see it but I tried to get a picture
of the tour helicopters that fly through the canyon.

The Guano Point facilities, where bathrooms are available
and lunch can be had. I really needed that bottle of water
after all the hiking and walking, especially because
that dry heat of the desert made more dehydrated than I'd ever
been in Florida!

I have a number of videos that I recorded to my smartphone - and a lot more photos of Las Vegas on there as well - that I will need to upload through YouTube to share properly on the blog.

In the meantime, I hope you all have good vacations planned for the summer, and for the LOVE OF GOD DO NOT INJURE YOURSELVES. Hurts like hell still, ow ow ow...

This Is Not Victory, This Is Iran Punching Back

I'd like to blog about May The Fourth Be With You, but trump is making things worse as always.

After spending the weekend running around claiming "the war with Iran was over" and that the Strait was opened (aka lying as usual), today Iran made it clear who was in charge of this war and who was winning (via Luena Rodriguez-Feo Vileira and Bernard McGhee at AP News):

The United Arab Emirates on Monday said it came under attack by Iran for the first time since a fragile ceasefire took hold in early April. Authorities in the eastern emirate of Fujairah said an Iranian drone sparked a fire at a key oil facility, and the British military reported two cargo vessels ablaze off the UAE.

The attacks appeared to be in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces on Monday began offering to guide commercial ships through the critical waterway and reported that two American-flagged merchant ships had successfully transited. Hundreds of ships have been stuck in the strait since the war began.

Trump on Saturday said he was reviewing a new Iranian proposal to end the war but expressed skepticism that it would lead to a deal. Two semiofficial Iranian news outlets believed to be close to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said Iran sent a 14-point proposal via Pakistan in response to a nine-point U.S. proposal.

Trump, meanwhile, also claimed that the war has been “terminated” because of the ceasefire — an interpretation that would allow him to skirt the War Powers Resolution, which requires Congress to authorize military action that extends beyond 60 days. Trump called this law “unconstitutional,” and its May 1 deadline passed without action after lawmakers left town.

This war isn't going to end until one of three things happen: Congress forces trump to abide by the War Powers laws and shuts down military operations; trump is out of power and saner heads can prevail; or Iran obliterates enough oil production capabilities by our Middle East allies to where they scream loud enough for trump to withdraw outright.

Invading Iran with ground troops is out of the question: Our military is falling apart under Hegseth's misrule as I type this. trump getting a peace deal out of Iran is out of the question because Netanyahu and the Far Right wingnuts in Israel do not want peace with Iran under any terms.

I seriously wonder what will happen first: trump's willingness to lie and deceive himself into a nursing home; or our overseas military quitting in a mass mutiny over lack of food and coherent leadership.

Eighty Sixing Forty Seven

There are several constants in the known universe. One of them is that donald trump will not stop his bullying ways to avenge even the slightest injury to his raging fear/hate.

I noted last November how trump's "Revenge Tour" - attacking everyone who exposed his ties to Russia, investigated that nation's likely involvement in the 2016 election fiasco, or refused to do his bidding to go after his perceived enemies that first go-around - was falling apart because the facts of the universe did not fit trump's fantasies of being the victim/hero. Those legal failures by his puppeteer-ed Justice Department ended up costing lackey Pam Bondi her job as Attorney General, setting up a replacement AG to do trump's dirty work pursuing vengeance on even flimsier evidence.

Which led to this past week's act of injustice when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filed charges against former FBI Director James Comey (again) on the pretext that Comey threatened trump's life by sharing a photo of seashells on the seashore (more details from Ryan J. Reilly, Monica Alba, Gary Grumbach and Michael Kosnar at NBC News):

The two-count indictment, posted Tuesday afternoon, alleges that a reasonable person would interpret the image of the shells, arranged to spell out “86 47,” as “a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

Justice Department attorneys sought the indictment in the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Comey has a beach house and where he posted the beach scene photo. The Department of Homeland Security previously investigated Comey, who has long been a Trump target, over the May Instagram post, even subjecting him to questioning by the Secret Service.

Comey had deleted the post, saying it never occurred to him that it would be interpreted as being violent. "Eighty-six" is a term commonly used in restaurants when an item is sold out, and it's also informally used to mean "cancel" or "get rid of."

In a subsequent Instagram post in May, Comey said that he assumed the shells he saw on a beach walk were "a political message" and that he "didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence," adding that he opposed violence "of any kind."

Comey said in a video posted after his indictment that he was innocent, that he was not afraid and that he still believed in the independent judiciary.

"They're back," he said of the Trump administration. "This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won't be the end of it."

By the by, should we count the number of times donald trump threatened violence or wished harm on other sitting presidents like Obama or Biden? In those instances, he openly directly called for violence. trump never got charged by the Justice Department for that. All Comey did was flash a photo of "86 47", and trump's lackeys are having fainting spells across the Sunday talk shows.

The hypocrisy of this reeks.

It's also pulling what's called The Streisand Effect: By drawing attention to a minor, almost ridiculous matter, trump has instead exploded interest and willingness by a lot of other Americans and protestors to use "86 47" as a vocal protest against him.

Sales of "86 47" merch are expanding.

The actual legality of what Blanche and the rest of trump's enforcers are attempting is up for debate. It's just that a good number of experts are pointing out how stupid it all is (via Matthew Chapman at Raw Story):

Former FBI Director James Comey's indictment for supposedly threatening violence against President Donald Trump is completely ridiculous, said former FBI official and counterintelligence specialist Michael Feinberg on MS NOW's "Deadline: White House" Tuesday.

"I mean, again, [former Congressman] Matt Gaetz posted, 'We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy McDaniel McConnell; Better days are ahead...'" said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "Is there any reasonable interpretation that Matt Gaetz meant we'd killed them? I mean, is this — is this in law enforcement, an accepted phrase that is associated with threats of death?"

"No," said Feinberg. "I actually first learned the phrase when I was working the door at a bar in Chicago shortly after I graduated college, where we would use it to refer to ejecting unruly customers. So when I saw Jim Comey's post on Instagram from last year, I simply assumed it was a reference to removing the president from office."

"It is a very large leap to claim that that is a threat of violence," said Feinberg. "And because of that, I don't want the phrasing I'm about to use to make light of how malevolent and destructive of constitutional norms this Justice Department is being with this indictment. But this is the single dumbest charging decision I have ever seen in my entire law enforcement career, or in my even longer career as an attorney. This is the definition of bad faith."

The indictment isn't even likely to result in a conviction - the case is that weak - but it demonstrates trump's willingness to harass and harm his "enemies" in spite of reality (via Steve Benen at Maddow Blog):

When Comey, a lifelong Republican, went public with his concerns and criticisms about Trump, the president came to see the ousted FBI chief as one of his most important enemies, and in April 2018 he started demanding that Comey be prosecuted for crimes that Trump struggled to identify.

It took several years, but the president is seeing the results he’s long sought.

Months after Trump’s Justice Department brought absurd criminal charges against the former FBI director, in a case that ultimately collapsed, prosecutors secured a second indictment against Comey this week, claiming that he used Instagram to call for violence against Trump by way of a seashell-related code.

Though the case is rooted in an indictment of Comey, it’s actually more of an indictment of a weaponized DOJ. Legal experts are reportedly “shell-shocked” over how preposterous the case is, and for good reason: No fair-minded observer could defend or take seriously such spurious charges.

This isn't about justice, or securing the safety of a sitting president occupant of the Oval Office. This is about trump using the executive branch of government to humiliate and harass anyone who ever crossed him.

A case like this should never have gotten through a grand jury. It shouldn't stand before any judge who should see this as a legitimate witch hunt - pushed and prodded by a guy who screamed about all his criminal and civil cases being 'witch hunts' - for political (and stupid) reasons.

Every DOJ lawyer from Blanche on down involved in this farce deserve to get sanctioned and disbarred for this, along with a hundred other illegal acts trump's gotten them to commit against our nation. This is "sandwich guy getting charged with assault" levels of stupid that Justice lawyers are committing here, and it's going to end with the same (acquitted) results.

In a sane world, trump's campaign of legal terror would lead to impeachment and criminal charges.

Goddamn the Far Right partisan bastards in the Supreme Court and a broken Congress who are protecting trump from the justice he's deserved for decades.

We need to get rid of trump. Get him out of power he's clearly abusing for his own greed and rage. Flush him down the toilet like the shitgibbon he is, the way you're supposed to when you 86 something (that's how my fellow middle schoolers used the phrase back in the day).

Am I going to get criminally charged for blogging that he needs to get flushed down a toilet? Try me, motherfuckers. There's at least 60 percent of fellow Americans you're going to have to prosecute alongside me.

The Grinding Down of Russia as Ukraine Keeps Fighting Back, May 2026 Edition

It's been some time since I posted anything about Ukraine's war of survival against Putin's Russia.

By most accounts, it's still going terrible for Putin and his meat grinder. I once mentioned that Russia's only true advantage over Ukraine was sheer numbers: that Russia had 134 million to throw at Ukraine's 34 million, an obscene "We Have Reserves" tactic that could still well work. Problem even with that: there's really only so many bodies you can throw into a war zone before you use up the ones that are able to fight; and are left with untrainable, unhappy, unwilling soldiers. There's also a limit to how many men - young, old, mere babies - you can conscript before crippling your nation's workforce in vital fields. Meanwhile, Ukraine is playing defense and can draw on everyone willing to protect themselves and loved ones from invading Russian hordes.

If you want more data: A link to the most recent analysis from the Institute for the Study of War.

With trump's war on Iran creating a global crisis with oil supply, Ukraine's been taking advantage by striking Russia's refineries to prevent them from capitalizing on the increasing demand for oil. Granted, it's not great for the rest of the world, but it's putting more pressure on Putin who can't generate any wealth or maintain his own war machines without it. 

In this, Ukraine's skill fighting with drones has made them one of the most invaluable military forces on the planet. As Sinead Baker notes over at Business Insider:

Now, partners want access to Ukrainian weaponry, to learn from its production techniques, and to integrate Ukrainian tactics into their own militaries.

Ukraine's armed forces are now "undoubtedly the most combat-hardened and the best at the moment in Europe," Michael Clarke, a former UK security advisor and now a defense analyst, told BI. And allies are paying attention.

Partner countries have long trained Ukrainian troops to fight Russia, but increasingly the roles are being reversed, with Ukrainians sharing their expertise with NATO militaries and joining their training programs, particularly on drone warfare...

Ukrainian troops have at times pushed back on Western training, explaining why some tactics are unlikely to work against Russia while also feeding front-line experiences back to their instructors. That know-how is reshaping how partner militaries train their own forces, trainers in a UK-led program told Business Insider.

On the opening of a new training camp for Ukrainian soldiers in Poland last year, Poland's defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, said, "This is not a one-way process," sharing that "we will be drawing on Ukrainian experiences."

If Putin thought conquering Ukraine would make the rest of Europe tremble, he's made things worse for himself and Russia by giving them opportunities to learn from Ukraine how to fight back. Putin's never really going to win this one.

Ukraine's drone capabilities were apparently scary enough that Putin put out offers of a temporary ceasefire on his nation's upcoming Victory Day to avoid any embarrassing drone strikes on his glorious parades. Peter Dickinson at The Atlantic Council explains how this exposes Putin's weaknesses:

For Putin, the annual Victory Day parade is no mere formality; it is the main event on the Kremlin calendar. This prominence reflects Putin’s efforts to revive Russian patriotism following the fall of the USSR and place the Soviet World War II experience at the heart of the country’s modern national identity.

During the Soviet era, Victory Day had not been the leading public holiday, with only four parades held between 1945 and 1991. Since the start of Putin’s reign, however, Victory Day has been elevated in status to the level of pseudo-religion, complete with its own saints, symbols, dogmas, and heretics. Indeed, it is no coincidence that enemies of the Kremlin are routinely branded as “Nazis...”

Since 2022, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has cast a long shadow over this spectacle. With Russia needing all available armor to replace heavy combat losses in Ukraine, finding enough vehicles for the parade has become increasingly challenging. In 2023, the Kremlin could only muster a single tank, sparking widespread mockery. “There are farmers in Ukraine with more Russian tanks than that,” quipped one internet wag.

This year’s parade is shaping up to be even more awkward. The Kremlin has already announced that due to the threat of Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, the event will proceed in a scaled back format without any tanks or military equipment whatsoever. Instead, the pageantry will be limited to columns of troops marching across Moscow’s central square. This dramatic downgrade represents a tacit admission by Putin that he can no longer ensure security in his own capital...

Five years ago, the entire notion of Putin seeking American assistance to protect Moscow from Ukrainian attack would have seemed absurd. This humiliating turn of events will not have passed unnoticed inside Russia, where rumblings of dissent are already becoming more audible amid a grinding war, deteriorating economic outlook, and escalating government restrictions on internet access. Putin’s obvious inability to protect his own showpiece parade will now underscore perceptions that the regime is rapidly losing control of the narrative and has become trapped in a war it cannot win but dare not end.

Starting an unpopular, unwinnable war just isn't the best way for dictators to show off, ya know?

As always, I suggest keeping up with Adam L Silverman at Balloon-Juice for insight and updates on Ukraine.

Slava Ukraini!

The Arc of Justice, Pretzeled by the Far Right Undoing the VRA

Goddammit. Just as I was writing a long spiel about gerrymandering, this extremist Roberts Court decides to come out with a ruling against redistricting for minority representation that basically made things worse for democracy (via Lawrence Hurley at NBC News):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday further weakened the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.

The justices, split 6-3 with the court's (note: Republican) conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when drawing maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations where the use of race can be justified to draw a map, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," he added.

This ruling ignores the long, horrifying history of segregation when post-Civil War southern states slid back to control under ex-Confederate racists who rigged elections, took away voting rights for Blacks, and drew maps in such a way that pretty much guaranteed racist one-party rule well up into the Second World War. But that's the point: Alito and his fellow Far Right conservatives wanted to return to that segregationist era ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s ended their racist regimes. Labeling the Louisiana district as a "racial gerrymander" is irony of the sickest kind.

The implications could be immediate: as much as we're weeks away from midterm primaries kicking off, a number of Republican-controlled states were already in the process of last-minute gerrymandering efforts that can get a boost from this ruling to erase every Black majority district off their maps. Not only the congressional districts, but the state legislative districts are at risk of seeing every Black/Latino representative getting mapped out of office.

If there's any ray of hope, it's the one David A. Graham shared in that dummymander article I quoted in my previous blog entry:

The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

The state-level Republicans may be eager to redraw Black majority districts out of existence, but they run into the risk that those voting blocs with blend in with the surrounding districts that the conservatives made sure were racist White enough to lean conservative/Republican. A lot of those "racial gerrymandered" Black districts were intentionally over-packed with Democratic voters to where that district could be +20 Dem while the surrounding four or five districts leaned +2 or +5 GOP. Without that overpack, that +20 Blue can flow into those GOP Red districts and shift them enough to where the Republicans lose their advantages in spite of their map rigging.

This is why the Republicans are also working overtime to take away voting rights from everyone they fear/hate. Don't be surprised if there's a lot of last-minute legislation under the guise of fighting "voter fraud" to take away the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Blacks, women, and college students to solidify whatever "win" the Far Right inflicted on this nation today.

Keep fighting. This was how things were in the 1960s and here we are again, but these rights are worth fighting for, there is an America still out there worth fighting for. Don't let these bastards win: Vote every fucking conservative Republican out of office while we still can.

Update: Adam Serwer at the Atlantic explains it better than I can.

As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, (segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick) had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.”

In fact, Kilpatrick’s conversion was no conversion at all. To understand it is to understand the Roberts Court’s decision today in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people.

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

The best way to stop racists is to stop fucking voting for them. Get every Republican out of office now.

The Gerrymander Wars Escalate

Any regular follower here knows I am not a fan of the gerrymander.

I've railed about it often: how it distorts true representation, suppresses voter interest and turnout, and drives the major political parties to pander more to the monied powers than to genuinely represent their districts and states.

For some time there in the late 2010s, I had some hope that legal fighting over the gerrymandering efforts by Republicans in key battleground states like Florida would end the issue: That the skewing of representation and denial of voters rights would irk even conservative-leaning courts to level the electoral field and letting sanity prevail.

Alas, the Roberts Court in 2019 nuked those hopes from orbit. All I had left were my observations that even by 2022 the GOP efforts to rig the congressional elections in their favor had turned farcical and clinging to a diminishing returns cliff - all those distorted districts and they still only have a 4-5 seat lead in the House - of their own making.

With the 2026 midterms looming - and with growing evidence that the slim Republican holdings in both the US House and Senate are slipping away - you can taste the desperation of the Far Right to impose their minority rule with escalating efforts across GOP-controlled states to skew their gerrymandered districts even more. Especially as trump himself - openly noting that losing Congress this 2026 would end his reign of madness and sadism - has been running around since 2025 - when his polling numbers slipped as ICE thuggery and tariffs increased - demanding states like Texas and Indiana redraw their districts to keep Democrats from gaining control of a divided House.

The big difference this election cycle - and a big reason why the Republicans are panicking in public - is that the Democratic Party finally decided to take the gloves off and do their own extreme gerrymandering to counter the decades of GOP mapmaking that drove us to this cliff.

I've noted before that yes, Democrats were guilty of gerrymandering in states their legislatures controlled, especially in Maryland, Illinois, and California. It's just that the Dems never pulled it to the extremes the way Republicans did in Texas, Ohio, and Florida. 

Until now: California passed a voter referendum in 2025 allowing them - the most populous state - to skew their congressional districts to where Republicans may not have any seats left; and Virginia passed a voter referendum this month allowing them to redraw districts to where mathematically speaking the Democrats can win the US House by 1-2 seats.

The Virginia results are under legal scrutiny at the moment, so it may not be settled for this midterms. In the meantime, the GOP panic that they could lose the House - and lose it for a long time, because they don't have as many nationwide voters as they'd like to keep skewing the results - has resulted in map madness in the large-population states they still control.

Florida, for example, called an emergency legislative session: Not about data centers, or AI, or education needs, or funding for the upcoming hurricane season; but about redrawing a map they already skewed 20-to-8 in their favor back in 2022. It's bad enough that they're planning to divide the Tampa metro - as huge a Democratic Party stronghold in the state you can find - so that none of the seats representing that metro will favor Dems: A clear partisan attempt to negate the rights and powers of a large number of American citizens.

The funny thing about all this? All of these Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves into permanent victory could actually help them lose it all (via David A. Graham at The Atlantic):

But partisan gerrymandering does have one ultimate weakness—a foe that doesn’t always win, but whose victories are especially satisfying. That foe is gerrymandering itself. If you have never heard of a dummymander, this is probably a good time to learn the word. Dummymander is the term that the political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas L. Brunell coined for what happens when a gerrymander backfires, hurting the party that it was designed to help. Dummymanders are nothing new, but the bunch of new districts drawn in recent months mean that they could play an important role in the outcome of the midterms...

Now the action is mostly reaching its end as the deadline for finalizing 2026 maps nears, although some questions remain. (Among them: Will the Supreme Court issue a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act in time for Republicans to draw new maps for this cycle? (editor's note: goddamn this foreshadowing...) The consensus among election analysts is that the redistricting will end up giving Republicans only three or four new seats, if any. But Democratic prowess in recent special elections raises the possibility that rather than a cold-blooded political hit, the GOP’s efforts could end up as a Pyrrhic victory.

In late January, a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat in Tarrant County—in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. Most House districts won’t see a shift that big, but victories like these have raised the possibility of Democrats catching enough of a blue wave that maps drawn to help Republicans might actually hurt them. The math is simple: In order to draw more districts favoring Republicans, GOP legislators had to spread their own voters a little thinner. But if they spread them too thin and Democrats have a good year, Republican candidates will become vulnerable.

One thing that keeps getting overlooked in these gerrymander wars is the role no-party-affiliate (NPA) or independent voters play in how districts get won. When they're drawing these maps, the Republicans (and Democrats) look at how much they can spread out their registered voters they expect to show up, and then pray that the third-party indy voters either side with them or fail to show... which is a huge gamble to take if you're trump's party when polling shows a lot of independent voters are pissed at trump right now. You can survive independent voter outrage if your district is +5 or +8 in favor of your party, but you can't if you've got the percentages at +1 or +2.

Many of Grofman and Brunell’s examples of dummymanders come from late in the 20th century, when Democrats still held lots of southern seats because of historic party support, but were on the verge of losing them to Republicans. For example, they write that the map Georgia Democrats drew after the 1990 census looks more like a Republican gerrymander than one drawn to help Democrats, which the authors blame on “the belief that it is good to be as thin as possible as long as you still remain breathing.” Entering the 1992 election, Georgia had nine Democratic House members. Three won, but three lost, and three more retired.

In the wake of those 1990 redistricting, the Republicans rose on the demographic - and racist - shifts from social conservative Democrats fleeing a party more inclined to defend civil (Black) rights. Those shifts were accelerated in the 2000s by the War on Terror of 9/11 and the growing evangelical Christianist voting base, which led to the Tea Party/anti-Obama fervor that drives the modern Republican base to this day.

Thing is, that partisan shift is pretty much played out. For all the ongoing outrage and demonizing the Far Right produces and consumes within their own circles, they can't increase their voting base any further. At best, they can bamboozle or enrage certain voting blocs - Latino men for example in 2024 - to side with them for one or two election cycles before their hypocritical true selves emerge and drive those blocs off.

This is one of the reasons the Republicans are not only struggling to gerrymander every state they can to favor themselves, they're also desperate to take away voting rights from everyone - Blacks, women, college-age, LGBTQA+ - they don't want voting. The conservative mindset on full display that only THEIR side should have power and rights, and everyone else needs to sit there in our cages being grateful for the crumbs thrown our way.

I'm terrified of the damage these gerrymanders are going to inflict: the lack of honest representation that will ignore the needs of our communities just as we need help from government the most.

The only true way in my opinion to end these gerrymander wars is for the rest of us - all of us - to show the fuck up at the polling stations during the midterms and vote the Republicans - the ones most responsible for propping up that child-raping, grifting, sadistic trump - out of office. As much as the Democrats are playing these mapmaking games, they're not the ones responsible for this monstrous tyrannical regime arresting families, crashing economies, and bombing schools.

We are long past due holding the Far Right accountable for all the sins they've inflicted on the rest of us. To hell with their games: VOTE THE REPUBLICANS OUT.

Then we'll see an end to these fucking partisan maps.

Hegseth: Starving Our Troops While Feasting on Steak And Lobster

Update: thank you again Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! 

The USA Today headline doesn't spell it out, but the lede does and the story gets even worse from there (via Cybele Mayes-Osterman):

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks. But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.

Dan asked to go by his first name only to protect his daughter from retaliation.

It's less about the lack of shipping personal items to their loved ones abroad, and more about the U.S. military under Secretary of Steaks and Lobsters Pete Hegseth absolutely unable to run the army in any competent fashion.

I noted this last month when word got out our military strikes against Iran were running out of missiles, ammo, and other equipment:

So the money is there - you would think - for a lot of weapons production and resources getting shipped out to our armed forces. And yet, we're getting warning signs from our own Pentagon officials that things are amiss, that they're not getting all these weapons and material to fight the wars they're being asked to fight.

This is a serious question: Just where the hell is all our defense spending going to these corporations that are supposed to be manufacturing all this shit? What happened to all the resources that are supposed to be pouring into our munitions factories to pump out the missiles and bullets and body armor and helmets and battlefield supplies?

Now we're witnessing the other failures at simple logistics - logistics, one of the most vital elements of any great army - affecting our own armed forces, unable to feed our troops and sailors at the very battlefronts trump and Hegseth want to wage their wars. The U.S. military used to be great at logistics, putting us at levels of preparedness and effectiveness that no other military on the planet could achieve.

Within two years of trump getting back into power, and within two years of Hegseth purging our armed forces over "woke" and "diversity" in ways that have clearly disrupted our chains of command and ruined morale at the worst possible time; we can't even feed our frontline people. 

There's an old saying - attributed to Napoleon, but it's probably been out there since the days of Roman military might (the guys who perfected logistics to a science) - that "an army travels on its stomach."

From the USA Today article
The only recognizable food on that half-empty tray are the carrots

You feed any army that and you are going to bring that army to its knees.

WHERE THE HELL DID THE BILLIONS IN THE MILITARY BUDGET FOR FOOD GO, HEGSETH??? YOU are starving our people, this is YOUR accountability, YOUR responsibility running the armed forces, YOU better have a GODDAMN solution for this ASAP.

Boys You Gotta Learn Not to Talk to Popes That Way

I wrote a while back that trump and his fellow Republican incompetents were starting fights they can't finish.

Well, trump went and started a fight against Pope Leo XIV and pretty much the whole Catholic Church (via Angela Giuffrida at the Guardian): 

Pope Leo said he did not fear the Trump administration and would continue to speak out against war after Donald Trump delivered an extraordinary broadside against him in which he said he did not think the Chicago-born pontiff was “doing a very good job”, while also suggesting he should “stop catering to the radical left”.

In remarks that have been widely criticized, the US president used a lengthy social media post to sharply criticize Leo while he flew from Florida to Washington on Sunday night, then continued in comments on the tarmac to reporters. “I’m not a fan of Pope Leo,” he said.

Trump made the comments after Leo suggested over the weekend that a “delusion of omnipotence” was fueling the US-Israeli war in Iran. While it is not unusual for popes and presidents to be at cross purposes, it is exceedingly rare for the pope to criticize a US leader – and for the president to respond in such a stinging manner.

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote in his post, adding: “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” He repeated that sentiment in comments to reporters, saying: “We don’t like a pope who says it’s OK to have a nuclear weapon.”

This actually isn't the start of the fight, but an escalation. It turned out months earlier people in trump's administration threatened Leo and the Church to play along to trump's war agenda (via Christopher Hale at his blog Letters From Leo):

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

America, Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.

As tempers rose, an unidentified U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

As a student who took AP European History in high school I can confirm two things: If your mom teaches AP Euro you should NEVER fall asleep in her class; and the Avignon Papacy was a serious political mess.

Any decent scholar of history should tell you that trump's admin invoking an Avignon situation is a political threat (here's Professor Thomas Lecaque at Religion Dispatches):

But what’s getting a ton of attention is both the worst sourced, and most intriguing, piece: that an American official in that meeting invoked the Avignon Papacy. As much as I hate giving in to the speculation, that’s a particularly weird thing to invoke, unless you’re trying to—in the most Gretchen Weiners “fetch” way I can say this—make Catholic Integralism happen in America. (Holy Cross professor Mathew Schmalz defines Catholic Integralism as the belief that “religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.”)

So what is the Avignon papacy and why does it matter? So kind of you to ask. The important thing to understand for today, is that it refers to a highly politicized 14th century stretch where a series of Popes, all of whom were French, resided in Avignon, rather than Rome. These popes were in many ways an extension of France’s monarchs...

But it matters, at this moment, because it’s easy to see how an invocation of Avignon is a (very) thinly-veiled threat of violence. Clement V didn’t move to Avignon out of nowhere. The King of France put his thumb on the scales to get him elected, after having sent his minister, Guillaume de Nogaret, to beat Pope Boniface VIII and hold him captive in retaliation for excommunicating him. 

The death of Pope Boniface VIII led to the short reign of Benedict XI, who also died very suddenly, just eight months into his reign. Clement V was, at the time, the Archbishop of Bordeaux and a friend of King Philip. To put the story in plain terms: his election was due to the intervention of France, after it had murdered a recalcitrant pope, who happened to be the king’s enemy. The move to Avignon put the Papacy where France could get to them more easily. This isn’t a random piece of medieval trivia; within the most brain-rotted neomedievalism imaginable, it’s a threat against Pope Leo XIV—but also the Vatican itself.

It hasn't just been trump and his lackeys - even "converted Catholic" VP Vance - threatening Leo and the Catholic church over trump's illegal and inept warring. Far Right pundits and elected officials have attacked the Church - which is pro-immigrant/pro-migrant - to defend trump's sadistic anti-immigrant raids across American communities. Know-nothing Sean Hannity is out there arguing that Pope Leo doesn't even know the Bible (you know, the ONE THING they teach a lot at seminary school and something most Popes can quote from memory).

A lot of this hostility is coming from the American conservative mindset that only their ideology and dogma matters. The modern conservative (Republican) movement formed around a Culture War focused on racism, sexism, and control, a reaction against the civil rights and women's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s that threatened white male patriarchy. When the Republicans merged with the conservative - mostly Pentecostal, evangelical - Christian groups to form a coalition under Reagan in the 1980s, they worked alongside a Catholic church willing to fight against abortion rights. The religious wingnuts got used to the idea of having a large international church on their side.

Thing is, other than agreeing on "pro-life," "anti-gay," and "traditional gender roles for women", the Protestant conservatives - who are pro-business greedheads and racist towards non-whites - have little in common with Catholics who tend to oppose greedheads in defense of the poor and are more liberal (kinda) on racial equality. Now, as the American conservative ideology shifts further rightward into racism and sadism, they're finding the Catholics are no longer on their side.

Angered that the Catholics aren't backing trump, the wingnuts are lashing out; falling back on the anti-Catholicism that informed conservative views well back into the 1840s - hi, Know-Nothings! - and into the 1960s - hi, Klansmen! The Far Right still railed against the Church over the decades since, especially when the Popes and stateside bishops refused to excommunicate Democratic elected officials like Joe Biden who were still Catholic (and liberal).

Thing is, bashing Pope Leo - who is not only popular with the American Catholic population but also with Americans of other faiths on the same page when it comes to supporting immigrants, families, and the White Sox - is going to alienate a significant faction of Republican voters who aren't happy with trump's war on migrants and are more willing to stand with the priests protesting outside ICE prison camps than with the haters.

Seriously, going after a Pope from Chicago is not going to end well for trump or the other religious wingnuts in the GOP.