#congressional maps

[whenweallvote]

For the first time in decades, Louisiana has a second majority Black congressional district! After a two-year fight for fairness and equal representation, the new congressional map was signed into law Monday when a federal appeals court ruled the state’s congressional map to be withdrawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

As Ashley Shelton, President of Power Coalition of Equity and Justice, said, “This is a win for Black voters and a powerful moment in Louisiana’s history.”

[tomorrowusa]

North Carolina may have just gerrymandered 3 US House seats out of Democratic control. But the New York Court of Appeals (what the state supreme court is called in NY) just indirectly gave the Democratic legislature the power to draw a new Congressional map. It will probably result in Dems flipping 3 or 4 seats and possibly as many as 6. In effect, the North Carolina gerrymander has been neutralized – or even more than neutralized.

Under a new map, Democrats could flip as many as six seats currently held by Republicans, enough to seize control of the closely divided House. The New York Republicans who rode a state-level red wave to Congress in 2022 are about to watch their districts shift dramatically to the left. The big question is whether New York Democrats will squander this opportunity with the kind of mismanagement and infighting that led them to disaster last year. Tuesday’s decision was the latest episode in the years-long saga over redistricting in New York. It began when residents voted for a constitutional amendment in 2014 that gave primary responsibility over the process to an Independent Redistricting Commission, or IRC. The 2014 amendment, however, divided the IRC equally between Democrats and Republicans, and the commission deadlocked on a plan after the 2020 census. So the legislature stepped in with its own congressional map—which the New York Court of Appeals struck down as an unlawful partisan gerrymander by a 4–3 vote in 2022. (The Court of Appeals is the state’s top court.) The conservative-leaning majority, appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and led by Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, directed an outside mapmaker to redraw the plans. The mapmaker’s submission was heavily influenced by analyses from experts who specialized in GOP-friendly redistricting. It gave Republicans an edge while pushing two top Democrats into the same district, forcing them to compete against each other. As a result, Republicans seized five or six additional seats (though one was vacated when the House expelled indicted Rep. George Santos).

So we probably have that 2022 NY map to thank for George Santos's brief House career. His district, NY-03, is currently a tossup. But with a redraw of the map, much of that area would probably find itself in bluer territory.

In the peculiar world of NY politics, nothing is simple.

First crack at a new map will go to the IRC (Independent Redistricting Commission). But it will deadlock because it is evenly split along party lines. Then the task goes to the legislature with Dem majorities in both chambers. Dems will get out their mapping software and have a go at it. Republicans will inevitably appeal the new Democratic map and the case will end up back at the New York Court of Appeals which just handed down this decision on Tuesday.

All this has to be done before filing deadlines for the 2024 US House primaries. However, no date has been set for those primaries in NY. The primaries can be held as late as early September. Stay tuned!

[archaalen]

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-congress-redistricting-house-elections-4b8768b63e0ab7a05d184a52f8979968

New York Democrats reject bipartisan congressional map, will draw their own

[mapsontheweb]

The congressional districts of Houston, Texas

[gayarograce]

Man fuck SCOTUS. "Checks and balances" my ass! They barely have shit keeping them in check

[headlinehorizon]

New Mexico Supreme Court Upholds Democratic-Drawn Congressional Map, Shaping Political Landscape

The New Mexico Supreme Court's groundbreaking decision to uphold the Democratic-drawn congressional map has significant implications for the state's political power. This article discusses the court's verdict and its impact on future elections.

[damnyousubdermalirritants]

UPDATE: NOVAVAX NOW AVAILABLE!!!

Hi everyone, it's been about a year since I posted about updated COVID vaccines and it's time for another update if you are in the US:

THE BRIDGE ACCESS PROGRAM IS ENDING!!!!

If you are uninsured or your insurance does not cover covid boosters, please schedule a new booster appointment before the end of August because the Bridge Access Program (the way the government will still pay for your booster) ends in September. The updated mRNA boosters from Moderna and Pfizer are available now. Go Go GO!!!

Shitty, I know! If you can call your congressional reps, the FDA, the CDC, whomever to tell them you want this program to continue/be reinstated, that would be great. Also, while you're at it, call the FDA to tell them to expedite the approval for the updated Novavax booster (3017962640).

The new Novavax vaccine is designed for the JN.1 strain which is one of the most recent mutations of the virus going around. If you have insurance and can afford to wait, I highly recommend getting the Novavax booster when it becomes available.

We are currently in the largest Covid summer surge since 2021

If you haven't had a booster in the past six months you are essentially unvaccinated. New strains with different spike proteins keep evolving faster than vaccine development and distribution can keep up. All that said, getting Covid is not a moral failing. If you do feel sick, take a rapid test! If it's negative, test again a day or two later. It is better to know than not to know. Here's a refresh on how to take a rapid test correctly:

If you do get Covid, it is worth getting on antiretrovirals within the first week of symptoms to reduce the overall viral load your body has to fight. If your insurance doesn't cover Paxlovid or Remdesivir, here are other low/no-cost ways to access it:

If you get sick, rest radically even after you stop testing positive on rapid tests. Avoid exercising for at least eight weeks after the fact to reduce the risk of developing long covid.

Regardless of your vaccination status, masking with a KN95 or N95 respirator (or equivalent standards in your country i.e. FFP2/3 in the EU) is the most reliable way to protect yourself and others. If Covid protections are a financial burden, there is likely an active Mask Bloc near you doing free distribution of respirators and tests that would be happy to help you. Here's a global map of them from covidactionmap.org

Some quick tips: if you're wearing a bi-fold mask, flatten the nose-bridge wire completely, then mold it to your nose on your face for a better fit. The best mask is the one that you will actually wear regularly to protect yourself. I really like the selection of styles, sizes and colors from WellBefore:

As school is starting, getting you and your family boosted is one of the best things you can do to protect yourselves. Masking is perhaps even more important. If you can advocate for updating and regularly changing the HVAC filters at your local schools to MERV-13 or higher to keep the indoor air cleaner, that can also make a big difference. Better indoor air quality in schools helps protect kids from illness, allergies, wildfire smoke, and more per the EPA's website.

These are steps you can take to improve air quality at home as well. Corsi-Rosenthal boxes are low-cost and highly effective for cleaning the air indoors.

Here's a map of clean air lending libraries for getting access to air purifiers for events from cleanairclub.org

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trumpism’s healthcare fracture-lines

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle

There was never any question as to whether Trump would implement Project 2025, the 900-page brick of terrifying and unhinged policy prescriptions edited by the Heritage Foundation. He would not implement it, because he could not implement it. No one could. It's impossible.

This isn't a statement about constitutional limits on executive authority or the realpolitik of getting bizarre and stupid policies past judges or through a hair-thin Congressional majority. This is a statement about the incoherence of Project 2025 itself. You probably haven't read it. Few have. Realistically, few people are going to read a 900-page group work of neofeudalist fanfic shit out by the most esoteric Fedsoc weirdos the world has ever seen.

But one person who did read Project 2025 was the leftist historian Rick Perlstein, who was the first person to really dig into what a fucking mess that thing is:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein's excellent analysis doesn't claim that Project 2025's authors aren't sincere in their intentions to wreak great harm upon the nation and its people; rather, his point is that Project 2025 is filled with contradictory, mutually exclusive proposals written by people who fundamentally disagree with one another, and who each have enough power within the Trump coalition that all of thier proposals have to be included in a document like this:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

Project 2025 isn't just a guide to the masturbatory fantasies of the worst people in American politics – far more importantly, it is a detailed map of the fracture lines in the GOP coalition, the places where it is liable to split and shatter. This is an important point if you want to do more about Trumpism than run around feeling miserable and scared. If you want to fight, Project 2025 is a guide to the weak spots where an attack will do the most damage.

Perlstein's insight continues to be borne out as the Trump regime makes ready to take power. In a new story for KFF News, Stephanie Armour and Julie Rovner describe the irreconcilable differences among Trump's picks for the country's top public health authorities:

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/trump-rfk-kennedy-health-hhs-fda-cdc-vaccines-covid-weldon/

The brain-worm-infected-elephant in the room is, of course, RFK Jr, who has been announced as Trump's head of Health and Human Services. RFK Jr is a notorious antivaxer, chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a notorious anti-vaccine group. Kennedy's view is shared by Trump's chosen CDC boss, Dave Weldon, a physician who has repeated the dangerous lie that vaccinations cause autism. Mehmet "Dr Oz" Oz, the TV "physician" Trump wants to put in charge of Medicare/Medicaid, calls vaccines "oversold" and advocates for treating covid with hydroxychloroquine, another thoroughly debunked hoax:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/12/17/hydroxychloroquine-study-covid-19-retracted-trump/77051671007/

However, other top Trump public health picks emphatically support vaccines. Marty Makary is Trump's choice for FDA commissioner; he's a Johns Hopkins trained surgeon who says vaccines "save lives" (but he peddles the lethal, unscientific hoax that childhood vaccines should be "spread out"). Jay Bhattacharya, the economist/MD whom Trump wants to put in charge of the NIH, supports vaccines (he is also one of the country's leading proponents of the eugenicist idea of accepting the mass death of elderly, sick and disabled people rather than imposing quarantines during epidemics). Then there's Janette Nesheiwat, whom Trump has asked to serve as the nation's surgeon general; she calls vaccines "a gift from God."

Like "Bidenism," Trumpism is a fragile coalition of people who thoroughly and irreconcilably disagree with one another. During the Biden administration, this resulted in self-inflicted injuries like appointing the brilliant trustbuster Lina Khan to run the FTC, but also appointing the pro-monopoly corporate lawyer Jacqueline Scott Corley to a lifetime seat as a federal judge, from which perch she ruled against Khan's no-brainer suit to block the Microsoft-Activision merger:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

The Trump coalition is even broader than the Biden coalition. That's how he won the 2024 election. But that also means that Trumpism is more fractious and off-balance, and hence will be easier to disrupt, because it is riven by people in senior positions who hate one another and are actively working for each others' political demise.

The Trump coalition is a coalition of *cranks*. I'm using "crank" here in a technical, non-pejorative sense. I am a crank, after all. A crank is someone who is overwhelmingly passionate about a single issue, whose uncrossable bright lines are not broadly shared. Cranks can be right or they can be wrong, but we're hard to be in coalition with, because we are uncompromisingly passionate about things that other people largely don't even notice, let alone care about. You can be a crank whose single issue is eliminating water fluoridation, even though this is very, very stupid and dangerous:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-fluoride-debate

Or you can be a crank about digital rights, a subject that, for decades, was viewed as by turns either unserious or as a sneaky way of shilling for Big Tech (thankfully, that's changing):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

Cranks make hard coalition partners. Trump's cranks are cranked up about different things - vaccines, culture war trans panics, eugenics - and are total normies about other things. The eugenicist MD/economist who wants to "let 'er rip" rather than engage in nonpharmaceutical pandemic interventions is gonna be horrified by total abortion bans and antivax. These cranks are on a collision course with one another.

This is on prominent display in these public health appointments, and we're very likely about to get a test of the cohesiveness and capability of the second Trump administration, thanks to bird flu. Now that bird flu has infected humans in multiple US states, there is every chance that we will have to confront a public health emergency in the coming weeks. If that happens, the Trump public health divisions over masking, quarantine and (especially) vaccines (Kennedy called the covid vaccine the "deadliest" ever made, without any evidence) will become the most important issue in the country, under constant and pitiless scrutiny, and criticism.

Trump's public health shambles is by no means unique. The lesson of Project 2025 is that the entire Trump project is one factional squabble away from collapse at all times.

[socialistexan]

So I went through some of the list of "posts flagged for explicit content" on my blog, here are some of the things I found (I have screenshots, but I won't post them because I don't want to be nuked)

A video of my dog playing in the snow for the first time

A jar of hot sauce with just words on it

Multiple screenshots of ads that have run on tumblr

A comic about taking a nap with you're dog

The cover art for the Sonic and Garfield video game double pack

A list of the line of succession in 2017 when we thought maybe Trump might be removed from office

A Congressional district map of Texas

A dog sitting in a seat on a train

A photo of two women dressed similarly sitting at a dog in a restaurant (I think Panera?)

There's more but I got exhausted.

[whenweallvote]

GOOD NEWS: Alabama’s new congressional map now includes two Black-opportunity districts.

Previously, Alabama’s congressional map was struck down for violating the Voting Rights Act diluting the voting power of Black Alabamians. Despite Black Alabamians making up 27% of the state's population, only one of the state's seven congressional seats regularly went to a candidate preferred by Black voters.

[thatnamewill-probably-change]

I ranted for a good chunk of time to SEVERAL, distinct friend groups about that map. As a field staffer, I also have SEVERAL qualms about the outfitting/setdressing of the Texas campaign office.

The Red, White, and Royal Blue movie is a fun little romp that I will cherish always and the chemistry alone makes it a 10/10. But there is one sin I can not overlook: THE FACT THAT THEY MADE MINNESOTA RED. Pennsylvania: Fine. Michigan: Okay. BUT MINNESOTA?! WHY WOULD YOU SLANDER THE DEMOCRATIC NAME OF MINNESOTA? Minnesota literally has the longest unbroken streak of voting dem for pres of all 50 states, two dem senators, a dem governor, and dem majorities in the state house and senate. ANYWAYS, go watch Red, White, and Royal Blue

[contemplatingoutlander]

“The hour is late for America. Beyond political success, her fate relies on exorcising the leftist specter dominating education, religion, and culture – a 360-degree holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom.”

--Pete Hegseth (2020) in American Crusade: Our fight to stay free.

In this detailed accounting of Hegseth's beliefs, Jason Wilson writing for The Guardian, implies that Hegseth seems to be primarily interested in "freedom" for far-right "Christians," since he seems to consider many others, especially those on the left to be "America’s internal enemies." Wilson also implies (based on comments by John Whitehouse from Media Matters) that Hegseth would be fine with using the military against anyone who protests Trump's neofascist policies--as long as that is okay with the "rightwing audience" that both Trump and Hegseth want to please.

Relying largely on Hegseth's 2020 book, American Crusade: Our fight to stay free, Wilson claimed the following:

MILITANT "NATIONAL DIVORCE":" Back in 2020, Hegseth indicated that he would be okay with a "national divorce" and/or "civil war" if the Democrats won the 2020 election, because he believed there were “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process.”

A "PRO-FREEDOM, PRO-CHRISTIAN, PRO-ISRAEL ARMY": However, Hegseth also believes that “If America is split, freedom will no longer have an army.” He believes that the American military is “the only powerful, pro-freedom, pro-Christian, pro-Israel army in the world.” If that happens, Hegseth believes “Communist China will rise – and rule the globe. Europe will formally surrender. Islamists will get nuclear weapons and seek to wipe America and Israel off the map.”

THE ENEMY: On the other hand, if America isn't split, and the American military remains intact, Hegseth believes it will mean the defeat of “globalism”, “socialism”, "secularism”, “environmentalism”, “Islamism”, “genderism” and “leftism.”

INTIMIDATION TACTICS: Hegseth urges his readers to “mock, humiliate, intimidate, and crush our leftist opponents,” whom he feels are engaged in “sedition.” Here's an example of the intimidation he recommends: “When local businesses declare ‘gun free zones,’ remember the Second Amendment, carry your legally owned firearm, and dare them to tell you it’s not allowed.”

WORTHY OF "DISDAIN": Regarding "the media and 'almost all' politicians and credentialed experts" Hegseth tells his audience to “Disdain, despise, detest, distrust – pick your d-words. But all of this must lead to action.”

AGAINST DEMOCRACY: Hegseth does not believe in democracy, although he continues to claim to believe in the Constitution. Hegseth wrote: “For leftists, calls for ‘democracy’ represent a complete rejection of our system. Watch how often they use the word.” He goes on to say, “They hate America, so they hate the Constitution and want to quickly amass 51 percent of the votes to change it.”

GERRYMANDERING IS FINE: Hegseth is fine with gerrymandering. He writes: “Republican legislatures should draw congressional lines that advantage pro-freedom candidates – and screw Democrats.”

PRO-NATIONALISM: Hegseth is a nationalist, who wrote: “Our weapon is American nationalism.” He went on to say, “The Left has tried … to intimidate us into thinking that nationalism is a relic of a bygone era.”

BANNING WOMEN FROM COMBAT: Furthermore, Hegseth is opposed to women serving in combat.

PRO-PARDONING WAR CRIMINALS: In 2019, Hegseth successfully lobbied Trump, who "pardoned three service members who had been charged or convicted with alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan." [all color/emphasis added]

Finally, Wilson notes that

"John Whitehouse, news director at Media Matters for America (MMFA)... said that Hegseth has 'always given off a proto-fascist vibe'”, and that 'the thing that appealed to him was going into Iraq as a crusader, and when that went wrong he started looking at America through the same lens.'” [emphasis added]

Clearly Hegseth is a militant right-wing "Christian" nationalist, who was rightly tagged by the Army National Guard as being a potential threat to our nation. Hegseth certainly doesn't belong anywhere near the Department of Defense, much less in charge of it.

Wilson ends his article by using Hegseth's own words to show his affiliation with militant far-right "Christian" nationalists:

“See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”

--Pete Hegseth (2020) in American Crusade: Our fight to stay free.

[mapsontheweb]

Current US congressional districts colored to uphold the four color theorem