Over the last few years Democrats have backed federal bills that would have banned partisan congressional gerrymandering and imposed fairer redistricting rules. Republicans opposed or filibustered them, so they never became law.
Then, last week things took a truly ugly turn when SCOTUS decided Louisiana v. Callais on 29 April 2026.
The Court said Louisiana’s attempt to create a second majority-Black congressional district — after earlier Voting Rights Act litigation said one was likely needed — was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The majority held that Louisiana had relied too heavily on race when drawing the map.
The effect is that states now have more room to claim “we’re just doing partisan gerrymandering, not racial gerrymandering.” That matters because the Supreme Court has already said federal courts generally won’t police purely partisan gerrymandering, while racial vote dilution used to be more challengeable under the Voting Rights Act.
The result – Republican-led states, especially in the South, are now rushing to redraw maps that may eliminate majority-Black or Democratic-leaning districts, while defending the new maps as “partisan” rather than “racial.” … and yes, what they are very obviously doing is deeply racist by design.
Earlier this past week on Wednesday (May 6) Marc shared his thoughts on what has happened as follows …
I have had a lot of long, hard weeks throughout my career. I have led urgent post-election litigation. I have prepared arguments for the Supreme Court. Like all of you, I have fought and survived the last 10 years of Trump-era attacks on democracy.
But this week has been one of the hardest. As I shared with members earlier this week, late at night, when I think about how to move forward, there have been moments when I am ready to give up.
I won’t because I can’t.
The fight for democracy is the fight of this generation, and none of us can give up.
Last week, the country was plunged into chaos as the Supreme Court gutted the crown jewel of American democracy and poured unprecedented fuel on the redistricting war. And now, Republicans are exploiting the opportunity with devastating results.
Republican legislatures are targeting seats held by Black representatives in an unprecedented effort to strip minority voters of their political voice. Governors are canceling elections as votes are being cast.
All of this is happening while the legacy media looks on. Their both-sides coverage and refusal to speak clearly in favor of voting rights and democracy is just the latest stain on the fourth estate.
Oh and least you wonder, yes indeed, because of course he did. newrepublic.com/post/210174/…
SENATOR LAMAR (D): “Racism does not become less racist because it’s called ‘PARTISAN’ — This is how democracy dies.”
Clay Bennett – Joining the Club
Hey TENNESSEE — If you want to see which district you live in now that @GovBillLee & the Republicans carved up Memphis to drown the Black vote out with white power (while pretending they didn’t) go here: sos.tn.gov/announcement…
I should also add this – All of these gerrymanders are based in part on the assumption that the 2024 voting patterns will hold true into 2026. So far, the Republican brand is tanking, even in the South, particularly among Independents.
Creating a lot of districts which aren’t so ruby red has created potential openings for Dems …
Some who have crunched the numbers confirm this …
If the GOP lose in a big way then they will do the usual “There has been some cheating going on“. They would be right in the sense that they did the cheating and it then backfired because voters rebelled and pushing back.
Robert Reich: “For years, Hungary’s Viktor Orban gerrymandered his opposition out of power. But in the end, all the dirty tricks in the world couldn’t save him from sinking approval ratings and massive voter turnout. There’s a lesson here for us.“
WarGames
Project Freedom kicks off …
Then was promptly cancelled. Here is why …
And so this tweet from the Speaker of Islamic Republic of Iran’s Parliament …
… oh and Iran is still playing with Lego …
Oh, and as for what Iran actually did, the Pentagon has been striving to cover that up …
- Justin Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
- Here is his Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/o…
- Quote: “War is hell. And hell comes with a hefty price tag.“
Meanwhile Mr Bone Spurs is once again posting stuff like this …
- You can actually consider the above to be rather accurate … when you realise that is it oh so symbolic of what he is doing to both the US and global economy.
DCCartoonist – We’ve been here before, Trump’s Iran War will be a failure
Nick Anderson – Hostage Situation
Economic Insights
We put a man who bankrupted multiple casinos …
- Trump Taj Mahal — filed for Chapter 11 in 1991, a little over a year after opening.
- Trump Plaza / Trump Castle-era casino debts — his Atlantic City casino operations were restructured again around 1992.
- Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts — filed for Chapter 11 in 2004, covering a casino company that included properties such as Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza and Trump Marina.
- Trump Entertainment Resorts — filed again in 2009 and 2014.
… his stupidity and incompetence is so great that he managed to make the house lose — repeatedly.
How?
Casinos are businesses where the odds are built in your favour. Trump looked at that model and said, ‘What if we added catastrophic debt?’
Now he is applying that same failed model to the entire economy.
This is not sustainable …
The issue is not “can the U.S. borrow today?” It can. The issue is how expensive that borrowing becomes.
When debt is high, higher interest rates matter much more. More tax revenue goes to paying bondholders instead of funding defence, healthcare, infrastructure, tax cuts, or anything else. It’s a feedback loop – more debt → more interest → bigger deficits → more debt.
There is no magic line at 100% where disaster begins. But if the ratio keeps rising, the choices get harder.
Markets will demand higher yields, and that in turn means … yep, you have it.
So what are the real risks here?
Basically …
- inflation, if money creation becomes part of the answer;
- higher taxes, if fiscal consolidation becomes unavoidable;
- spending squeeze, as interest consumes more of the budget;
- slower growth, if public borrowing crowds out private investment;
- political crises, especially around the debt ceiling;
- loss of fiscal flexibility, meaning less room to respond to recessions, wars or emergencies.
The danger is that, year by year, more of the national income gets pre-committed to servicing yesterday’s borrowing, until every future budget fight starts with: “What can we still afford after interest?”
The $1 Billion Ballroom
Dennis Goris – Get ready for the pitch #ballroom
Dennis Goris – Lots of storage #ballroom
Clay Jones – Reminder: Mexico still has not paid for Donald Trump’s border wall. #Trump #WhiteHouseBallroom #Ballroom
Daniel Boris – Security Is Extra
Corruption on a truly epic scale
Very blatant insider trading continues …
NYT: “The pool is the latest in a string of cases where Trump’s government invoked special powers to shut down required competition, and then handed contracts directly to his preferred vendors.” Endless grift at taxpayers’ expense. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/u…
Multiple layers of Lunacy and utter incompetence
We really do now have the stupidest people …
Storms with no warning …
Her husband wrote an entire book telling people not to go to college like him.
Is he really all there?
Nick Anderson – The Devil Wears…
ICE Gestapo updates
Lalo Alcaraz – May the Fourth Be With You! Today’s La Cucaracha, catch it daily in the LA Times
MAHA – Alternative “Science”
Clay Jones – We can all feel much better knowing that Donald Trump has experience with pandemics. #HantaVirus #Trump #Covid #Coronavirus #Pandemic #TrumpVirus #Bleach
MAGA Christian Cranks
The nuttier right-wing religious fanatics within the MAGA cult are as always doing their thing, and so here are this week’s samples. The truly scary part to all of this is that when Trump is gone, and that day will come, we will still have these lunatics pumping out total BS on a daily basis.
- “Enjoy your rights while you have them” is a hell of a slogan from people who claim they’re defending freedom. Apparently “America First” now means “Iran, but with pickup trucks and podcast mics.”
- This is not religious freedom, it is a protected-class voucher for one religion. The First Amendment does not say, “Congress shall make no law unless Jenna thinks the religion has the correct branding.” It says government may not establish religion and may not prohibit free exercise. The whole point is that the state does not get to pick the approved faith team.
- It her world ‘free exercise’ now means ‘Christians get the treadmill, everyone else waits outside.’
- It will of course be no surprise to understand that she can very very close to going to jail for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election, and narrowly avoided that by cutting a deal.
Floyd Brown says that “Muhammad was influenced by a demon and the Koran was written under satanic influence.“
- Apparently religious freedom means: my beliefs are sacred, your beliefs are demonic, and somehow I am the persecuted one.
- Floyd Brown claiming the Qur’an was “written under satanic influence” is not theology. It is just bigotry wearing a religious costume.
Tim Barton claims that there were so many miracles during the founding of the United States that you can only believe that “God was not directly involved and directing all along the way if you are ignorant of history or somebody who is really salty and angry at God.”
- History and human life is full of unlikely escapes, lucky weather, bad enemy decisions, charismatic leaders, logistical mistakes and accidents of timing, attributing any of those to a god is wholly irrational.
- There is also a core problem with providential history beliefs. It cherry-picks the moments that flatter the story and quietly walks past the ones that make the theology uncomfortable. “God helped Washington cross the Delaware” gets the spotlight. “God apparently signed off on the Three-Fifths Compromise” is left in the gift shop bin.
- In other words, Tim Barton’s history works like a rigged slot machine. If America wins, God pulled the lever. If America sins, please stop asking follow-up questions.
Eric Metaxas has also gulped down the Barton cool aid. He asserts this past week that the establishment of the United States was “so overwhelmingly explicitly Christian” because “the Founders wanted to reestablish this nation like on the Sinai Covenant.”
- At Sinai, according to the biblical story, the people enter into a covenant with God, receive divine law, and become a religiously defined people under sacred obligation. The United States Constitution does almost the opposite. It creates a secular legal framework based on popular sovereignty, elected representation, divided powers, amendment procedures, and individual rights. Authority comes from “We the People,” not “Thus saith the Lord.”
- Apparently the founders were so committed to recreating the Sinai Covenant that they forgot to mention the covenant, forgot to mention Sinai, forgot to mention Christianity, banned religious tests, rejected a national church, and wrote a Constitution whose legal authority comes from the people rather than God.
Intercessors for America quotes George Washington as saying, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”
- One ever so tiny flaw there is that Washington never said that.
Jesse Leon Rogers declares that conservative Christians must get politically engaged because “everything that Christ died for and everything that Christians live for has become a target of evil.“
- If they wish to stop evil targeting us all, then a great place to start would be to stop supporting the felon and convicted sexual abuser.
Rick Green says that Democrats “have always used violence” as a political weapon: “This has always been the evil Marxist leftist playbook.“
- A cartoon argument by a cartoon character.
- No fingerprints, no trial evidence, no motive analysis, no psychiatric history, no police investigation — just: “He criticized Christian nationalism, therefore demons.” This is a man using a double homicide as a sermon illustration because his politics are too brittle to survive criticism.
- The truly grotesque part is that Wallnau is not just wrong; he is performing moral vandalism. A family was murdered. Instead of compassion, restraint, or facts, he offers a ghoulish little morality play where the victims’ politics explain their deaths.
- Give it 2 seconds of thought and his argument collapses instantly. If criticizing Trump invites demons, then Trump rallies should require exorcists, hazmat suits, and a priest stationed next to the merch table. If opposing Christian nationalism “opens your house” to darkness, then defending a movement that blames murder victims for their own deaths must be the spiritual equivalent of leaving every window open during a locust plague.
- Rob Reiner did not “open his house to demonization” by criticizing Trump or Christian nationalism. Lance Wallnau opened his mouth and demonstrated exactly why both deserve very vocal criticism.
Pastor Dale Partridge of King’s Way Church in Prescott, Arizona claims that Americans are having “increased gut issues” because of “third-world immigration“: “When you import millions from the parasite and diarrhea capital of the world, they bring their diseases with them.“
- Fact Check: His claim is total BS. Chronic gut diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, has complex risk factors, including industrialized lifestyles, ultra-processed food, NSAID use, smoking, antibiotic exposure, genetics and environmental factors — not immigrants because that’s not how it works. (See CDC), but hey, since when did guys like this ever do facts.
- Dale Partridge blaming immigrants for America’s “gut issues” is perfect, because nothing says “serious medical analysis” like a pastor diagnosing national diarrhea from his Twitter pulpit. The CDC studies pathogens, screening, diet and public health. Dale studies foreigners and gets the vapors. This is not epidemiology. It is xenophobia with indigestion.
- Blaming immigrants for disease is such an old nativist routine that it practically arrived at Ellis Island wearing a waistcoat. Every generation gets the same lazy panic: the Irish brought cholera, Jews brought tuberculosis, Italians brought polio, Chinese immigrants brought plague, Haitians brought AIDS, and now Dale wants to add “immigrants gave me tummy trouble” to the museum of racist diagnostics.
Ché Ahn asserts that “God calling me to run for governor is another sign that we’re entering into revival and reformation.“
- Funny how “God’s grand plan” always manifests as “personal ambition”
- At this point he is running as a write-in because he forgot to file the proper paperwork and is not actually on the ballot. Apparently God forgot to tell him to do that. Apparently divine mandates can be defeated by basic admin.
- It really will be a divine miracle if the type of voter who would seriously vote for this fraudster can actually manage to correctly spell his name in a blank box.
- Telling the people who voted for him that they can fuck off now because he has no interest in representing their best interests is a very Republican thing to do.
- Will his supporters wise up to what people like this are really doing? Probably not.
- Humans as a species have been like this since forever. When faced with stuff we don’t understand we often use religious beliefs to fill the gap. Number of times that strategy has turned out to be the right answer is … (oh come now you already know) … exactly zero.
- I should perhaps also add that what has been released does not meaningfully advance the alien hypothesis. “Unidentified” still mostly means “not enough data,” not “visitors from Zeta Reticuli forgot to turn off their headlights.”
Cognitive Incompetence
No doubt in my mind Trump got the answers ahead of time for that dementia exam where he had to identify a squirrel.
No president has ever reached this level of stupidity before.
… and so here we are …
Clay Jones – Surely Donald Trump should not be allowed around children. #Trump #EpsteinFiles #TrumpEpsteinFiles
Met Gala
8647
Clay Bennett – Presidential Approval
Daniel Boris – Under the Sea
Dennis Goris – One of these things is not like the other #8647
Even More Political Cartoons from the past week
As always, there are many excellent cartoons.
Clay Jones – Quick! Renew your passport before they start putting Trump’s photo on them! #Trump #TrumpPassport #Passport #WarCriminal #TrumpIsAWarCriminal #MAGA
Clay Jones – Is Donald Trump the Spirit of presidencies, or is Spirit the Trump of airlines? #Trump #Spirit #KarolineLeavitt
Daniel Medina – It’s impossible not to see parallels with Banksy’s new piece, Blind Patriotism, and those in power who have taken millions in bribes from Israel-aligned PACs. They willingly cover their eyes to the atrocities Israel commits. #freepalesti̇ne #genocide #IsraeliWarCrimes #politicalart #politicalartwork
Daniel Boris – 25th Amendment for Orange Sauron
KA$H
Very normal behavior by KA$H here (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/politics/202…
Daniel Boris – Spirits of Incompetence
Elon’s antics
It would appear that Elon has been posting on Twitter as both his mum and also as his dad. The reveal is that he got those roles mixed up this past week …
Epic Trolling by Ukraine
Zelensky issued an official presidential decree authorizing Russia to hold its Victory Day parade in Moscow tomorrow. He included the exact coordinates of Red Square. That’s it.
A+ trolling.
Finally
What Powers Should The President Not Have? Former President Obama Weighs In
1,979,336 views May 6, 2026 #PresidentObama#Obama#StephenColbert
Stephen Colbert travels to Chicago to interview former President Barack Obama at the newly-completed Obama Presidential Center. Watch as they discuss the president’s love for Chicago, his long-term hopes for his legacy, and which presidential powers are ripe for abuse.
Trump Ignores 60-Day Iran Deadline & King Charles Urges Congress to Do Its Job | The Daily Show
4,372,112 views May 5, 2026 #KingCharles#DailyShow#IranWar
As America’s situationship with Iran hits the 60-day War Powers Act deadline, Trump brazenly ignores Congress’s authority while spouting nonsense about America’s depleted weapons inventory, and Jon Stewart marvels at our “genius” president’s faulty math and cognitive skills. Plus, a visit from a real monarch, King Charles, shines a light on the lack of checks and balances from America’s absent Congress. #DailyShow#WarPowersAct#KingCharles#IranWar
- 0:00 – Jon Stewart’s TDS Welcome
- 1:00 – The War in Iran Hits Its 60-Day War Powers Act Deadline
- 4:39 – Trump Explains How He Aced His Cognitive Test
- 9:45 – King Charles Calls Out Issues in America
- 12:00 – Jon Stewart Takes a Look at Elected Officials’ Lack of Constitutional Knowledge