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.

The Fraying Far Right in Europe, A Potential Shift Away from Fascism as Hungary Ousts Orban

If there's any good news for western liberal-democratic systems, it's that elections still matter. Hungary just held a parliamentary vote with huge turnout and even bigger global ramifications (via NPR):

Hungarian voters turned out in the greatest numbers since the fall of communism in the 1990s to turn away from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party, with exit polls indicating possible "super-majority" victory for Péter Magyar's Tisza movement. The movement rallied various opposition forces around the themes of fighting corruption and re-integrating the European mainstream. 

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán congratulated Magyar in a concession speech less than three hours after polls closed. Ballots continue to be counted but the trend suggests a possible two-thirds majority for Magyar and his Tisza movement. If that happens, he would be able to undo constitutional changes made by Orbán to weaken the independence of the judiciary and entrench the Fidesz party's control of political life.

I don't blog much about Orban, but he's been a major figure in the anti-democratic movement across most of the western world since the 2010s. As part of a "populist nationalist" ideology, Orban has really been a dictator in all but name: shutting down free speech and political opposition within Hungary, rewriting laws to keep himself and his party in power, pushing an anti-immigrant agenda that openly relied on racism, and basically providing a blueprint to every other Far Right autocrat seeking absolute rule (SEE trump, Bolsonaro, trump again, wannabe rules like Le Pen and Farage, and more trump).

Orban has been held as a model for success among the Far Right factions across most of what we'd call the western world. As Isaac Chotiner documented in 2021 at New Yorker:

Still, over the past decade, Orbán has become something of a hero to conservatives throughout Europe, and has piqued the interest of the American right wing as well. Last week, Tucker Carlson visited Hungary and, over dinner, lauded the Prime Minister as someone that the West could learn from. On Sunday, in the Times, the conservative columnist Ross Douthat explained some of Orbán’s appeal. “It’s not just his anti-immigration stance or his moral traditionalism,” Douthat wrote. “It’s that his interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers and the spending on conservative ideological projects, are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence...”

The likes of Seb Gorka has been pushing the US government under trump to pursue a partisan hunt against "left-wing terrorism" like Antifa (which is, by the by, Anti-Fascism something Gorka and other wingnuts don't want you to realize) based exactly on how Orban attacked center-left and far left parties in Hungary. Orban's efforts to stifle his nation's media - through intimidation and allies buying up outlets - mirror the same efforts happening here in the United States.

Tied up into all this is how tied up all of these nationalist movements are to each other: Not just moral support but also money and influence backing each other's attempts to win elections so that the Far Right can control more nations to fulfill a global agenda. Orban is - well, was - a keystone among the other Far Right factions; ironically trying to seize control by promoting isolationist pro-nativism hatreds within their own nations, using international support to do so.

For Orban to fall, and to fall so openly and decisively (losing by double-digits!) even after rigging the electoral system wtih gerrymandering - is a harsh rebuke to the Far Right ideologues convinced they were an unstoppable juggernaut across the globe. Making it harsher - well, funnier to the rest of us - is how trump and his administration panicked over how poorly Orban was doing in the polls leading up to the election, to where JD Vance visited multiple times in person to campaign for Orban and where trump openly tried to bribe Hungarians with promises of boosting their economy.

The hilarious thing is that Orban's polling sank lower after Vance's visit and after trump's promises, proving that Europeans even in conservative-leaning nations really HATE trump.

There's also the reality that a lot of Hungarians got tired of inept corrupt rule by an inept corrupt autocrat. Under Orban, their economy suffers to high inflation and worsening conditions. For all of Orban's railing against migrants, refugees, dread Others, and liberals; after 16 years the people understand the problem has been Orban and his cronies all along.

Orban's loss is a sign that for all their efforts to rig the game in their countries, the other Far Right parties and factions across Europe have no guarantee of winning and holding onto power. Whatever appeal the nationalist/populist/racist groups offer to the angrier sections of their populations, they cannot expect inevitability or winning over any moderates that modern-day fascists can be effective if they control high office.

Orban's loss is also a huge blow to Putin: the Hungarian prime minister had been the Russian dictator's most useful ally puppet in European affairs. Hungary's position within both the EU and NATO gave Orban the means to disrupt and sabotage those organizations to serve Putin's needs. In the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, Orban routinely denied stronger EU / NATO support for Ukraine and even withheld funds - literally stealing it in a heist - Ukraine was supposed to get for their war effort.

The incoming prime minister, Peter Magyar, hasn't openly committed to supporting Ukraine in full - I saw a social media post he was willing to return the stolen funds, but I can't verify it - but he does want closer relations to the rest of the EU (in order to fix Hungary's failing economy), which should mean getting on the rest of Europe's good side. Magyar shouldn't be fully obstructionist the way Orban was. 

This election ousting Orban is - simply put - a huge punch in the face to fascists and dictators across the globe.

This is why turnout matters, Americans.

Fun times, people.

Quick update: Europeans really have a knack for partying when authoritarian/totalitarian regimes fall:

went to check out the techno rave outside Parliament and I don't think I have the data allowance to share a video from it but let me tell you: there sure is a techno rave outside Parliament right now, celebrating Orban getting ousted

[image or embed]

— Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com) April 12, 2026 at 3:57 PM

It Was Never About Getting a Deal Or Making Peace

So if anyone thought that last week's "ceasefire" between trump and Iran was staged, that the entire peace process effort that trump proposed to stabilize the global markets was gaslighting, that the negotiations being held in Pakistan was pure theater... you were correct (via Dan Goldberg at Politico):

Marathon negotiations (personal edit: doubt it) with Iran in Pakistan this weekend failed to produce a breakthrough that would definitively (personal edit: uh, ahahaha no) end the war, which is entering its seventh week.

Vance, who spoke early Sunday morning local time, said the Iranians refused to give assurances that they would not try to obtain or develop a nuclear weapon.

“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Vance said. “The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.”

I'm not sure what Vance's trump's terms were exactly; but Iran knows the US are in no position to dictate such terms, and will deny any offer until the Ayatollah gets a deal - complete American humiliation in the Middle East and removal from the region as a global power - he can literally live with.

It's been noted that the US terms getting pushed were the same terms President Obama secured back in 2015, that trump infamously tore up in 2018 (all because trump cannot abide Obama achieving deals he can't).

In the meantime, you can tell trump took these negotiations seriously by... amusing himself with a UFC match in Miami and blowing off the no-deal situation:

Trump, who was watching a UFC fight in Miami while Vance briefed the media in Islamabad, has not said whether he would pick up where he left off last week — threatening to destroy Iranian civilization.

“We win regardless,” Trump said earlier Saturday. “We defeated them militarily.” (personal edit: /facepalm)

That trump kept his Secretary of State Marco Rubio with him in Miami to watch the fight instead of sending our most senior foreign diplomat to aid Vance in the talks underscored just how messed up and self-destructive this is: A farce pretending to be a mockery of a sham.

This was never about securing a new peace deal to pacify Iran as a Middle East threat. This was never about reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This was all about pleasing a worried and stressed out global financial market terrified of rising global oil prices triggering economic collapse.

And even then, trump and his lackeys screwed THAT up.

You can tell it wasn't about reopening the Strait because when it became clear how much of a disaster Vance's failure was, trump came out and ordered US naval forces in the region to stage their own blockade to keep ALL ships going in and out, doubling down on what Iran's already done (updates from NBC News):

TRUMP THREATENS BLOCKADE: President Donald Trump said that "effective immediately" the U.S. Navy will prevent ships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, accusing Iran of extorting them. He had previously criticized Iran for blocking the critical oil shipping chokepoint.

trump's trying to bully every other nation that wants the Strait opened to come in to fight Iran and do his dirty work for him. But that hasn't worked yet and likely won't work this time.

An absolute mess, all started and escalated by an idiot who thinks he's a genius deal-maker.

Again, the Men of Power Fail Us

There's a lot going on, so I'll be brief. Angry, but brief.

JFC, guys. AGAIN? (via Andrew Solender at Axios): 

It's a stunning reversal of political fortunes in just 24 hours. Swalwell was among the frontrunners in the race, but his campaign is in free fall due to allegations of rape, sexual assault and misconduct, which he denies.

His page on the Democratic fundraising website ActBlue and the endorsement tab on his website have been pulled down, his ad buys are being pulled back, at least one fundraiser has been scrapped, and he is reportedly hemorrhaging staff.

It doesn't end there: Swalwell is under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) plans to force a vote to expel him from Congress.

Swalwell said in a video posted to social media Friday: "These allegations of sexual assault are flat false. They are absolutely false. They did not happen, they never happened..."

It's hard to keep up that defense, Swalwell, when your victims are coming forward with witnesses, evidence, and receipts.

Considering how consistent a scandal this is - elected officials abusing women, especially the women working for them, and that they won't stop until confronted in public and a court of law - across both Republican and Democratic candidates, we are honestly at the point where we shouldn't allow men at all to run for any elected office or get appointed to administrative roles. I'm a guy, and I can't trust any of these guys for God's sake.

We need to flush out this corruption, this twisted mindset among men of wealth and power that they can hurt and control anybody they like. /rage

The Delay... Again

So at the last minute trump pulls off another TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) with his Iran War, by staging a "third party" offer from Pakistan to hold a "cease-fire for two weeks" in order to let the markets calm down and give trump a chance to pretend none of this really happened. 

But Tom Sullivan over at Digby's Hullabaloo has it right: What the hell happens next?

You can stop ducking and covering for now. Politico’s landing page this morning announces “World exhales — a little — as US, Iran agree to ceasefire.” It’s a two-week ceasefire in the illegal war Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to turn into civilizational genocide. Two weeks? That’s enough time to roll out the “terrific,” “phenomenal” and “fantastic” new health care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act he’s been promising in two weeks since taking office in January 2017.

It’s also enough time for Trump’s accelerating mental decline to worsen. Or for him to attack Cuba.

It's that madness, that chaotic uncertainty underlining every act trump and his lackeys have staged up to this moment. We have no idea what will trigger trump's ire within the next week, next day, hell within the next hour. For all we know, all those planes and troops gathering for Iran are going to flip around and invade Greenland.

Secretary of WAR! Pete Hegseth just completed a press conference focused heavily on how many bombs the U.S. dropped and on a partial list of targets hit with no clearer definition of U.S. strategic aims...

Why are we bombing Iran exactly? We still don’t know. But “Hegseth just called President Trump ‘a president of peace.’”

The question remains: What will Trump do when in the interim demands renew for a full release of the Epstein files? He’ll need another flashy distraction.

Given how trump's latest Acting Attorney General Todd "Good Name For a White Boy" Blanche is acting like the whole Epstein case is closed (when it's clearly not), we can expect blowback on that scandal to drive trump to lower depths of insanity.

We are still damned, America, thanks to every asshole who voted for this (and YES, you DID vote for this).

I want one day without a CNN alert that scared the hell out of me! - Cecily Strong in an SNL Skit back in 2017 (yes, it STILL hasn't stopped)

'A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight'

It doesn't look like trump will chicken out of this threat. The bully wants to prove he's serious.

Seriously, what the fuck is this. This is completely deranged, and anyone who can’t say so is a coward.

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— Angry (@angrystaffer.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 8:30 AM

In case the Bluesky skeet goes away, here's a screen capture from Angry Staffer

Dear fellow Americans: We knew. We knew what kind of a monster trump was the first time around, and 77 million of you still voted to bring that thug back. 

There's 284 million of us able to vote, yet not all of us did, and not enough of us voted the SANE choices - neither Hillary or Kamala - when we had the chance. Goddamn us all. "Ooh, Hillary wasn't good enough!" FUCK YOU, SHE WAS GOING TO BE BETTER THAN trump! "Ooh, I don't trust Kamala!" FUCK YOU, SHE WAS GOING TO BE CLEARLY BETTER THAN A CRIMINALLY-CONVICTED SEX-OFENDING trump! 

A number of you who openly voted for trump even with the knowledge of his graft and his sins... you KNEW he was a monster and you brought him back anyway! Cowards.

And now, we as a nation are openly committing war crimes against not just Iran and not just Venezuela and not just most of South America as we bomb their fishing boats, but essentially the whole world as this escalates into Middle East chaos - there's Israel happily bombing Lebanon (again) into submission! - and economic collapse.

And there's a palpable fear out there that trump now might actually go nuclear - even just one warhead dropped on a major city - on Iran.

Dear fellow Americans: We ARE the baddies this time. Some of y'all are fucking reveling in that today.

Goddamn us.

To those of us still willing to stand against fascism and stupidity and godless wars: keep fighting against trump and his lackeys, and keep fighting against the cowards among the GOP ranks who know how bad this is but won't do anything to stop it.

Stop the stupidity. Stop the hate. Stop the wars.

Heading Into Bomb Everything Day

Welp, there goes Easter this year.

I had to check but yes this is real

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— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) April 5, 2026 at 8:27 AM

Just in case the Bluesky skeet disappears, here's a saved photo

It's been said that when people drop curse words, they tend to be more honest about what they're saying. In that moment, their frustration and rage make it harder to be civil - there's no filter for polite conversation - and they speak blunt about their intentions.

With trump - a person notorious for lying nearly every time he opens his mouth - this exposes his frustration and rage all right. Also his bullying and viciousness. Also his willingness to commit war crimes to win a fight he shouldn't have started and arguably can't finish.

I'm seeing the usual calls from the sane side of the political spectrum that now would be a good time for the people in a position to do something - 25th Amendment time! - about removing trump from the big chair even if it's only temporary. That his madness and his dementia are getting too obvious to ignore.

But I saw this coming the last time around. Nobody in trump's Cabinet or Joint Chiefs or in a Republican-controlled Congress is going to invoke the 25th to stop this shit. None of them have the nation's best interests at heart, only their own.

There's a possibility by Tuesday some people in trump's orbit may talk him out of a massive war-crime bombing campaign. But trump has been escalating his threats even after he backs off (aka TACO or Trump Always Chickens Out), and it's been clear for weeks now that if he can't get the Strait opened sooner rather than later the global economy will collapse... and he'll get the blame no matter how much gaslighting he and his wingnut media allies try to use.

The odds of trump making this a long drawn-out war just got worse.

We're screwed. 

Our Military Implosion

Update: Thank you Batocchio for providing another link at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. As the attacks on Iran seem to be intensifying this morning (April 7th) into full-scale genocide, please everyone stay safe but please also keep standing against this stupid, globally destructive war. 

Also Update: Just posted my thoughts this morning (April 7th) about our slide into genocide. Goddamn trump and every idiot who supported him.

The damage being done to our nation's military - not by our enemies but by our own leaders - in the middle of a goddamn war is a straight-up nightmare (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic): 

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Firing the Army chaplain in particular is a hell of a move, something that's never happened before, and allegedly by someone in Hegseth who claims to be of Christian faith. A little more on that later.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

This is where firing the Army Chaplain becomes an issue, because Green - guess what - is Black. Hegseth didn't see the man's qualifications as a preacher or an officer: all he saw was a "Woke" hire and let his racist world-view push Green out the door.

Making this all worse is how Hegseth - fulfilling trump's own dark hatreds - is clearly attempting to redesign our prestigious armed forces to reflect his own recklessness, viciousness, and disdain for others.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.)

...Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

Instead of maintaining a military that spent decades developing a genuine system of merit based on qualifications and understanding of how things work, Hegseth is switching that out for a system openly based on toadying, ego-stroking, and posturing. Granted, some of that does happen in any organization, but at least the Defense Dept. tried to keep that on the down-low to avoid incompetency blowing everything up. Hegseth wants that as Standard Operating Procedure.

And while the U.S. military has a rather scary history of religious fervor among the ranks, they've tried to keep it moderated and leveled out between the various faiths (and among different Christian beliefs). Hegseth doesn't care about that: He's openly pushing the Christianist evangelical platform of Holy War in a way we've never seen from our political leadership in previous wars (not even during the GWOT versus the Taliban and Iraqi Sunnis). Today, a major scandal erupted when he staged a Good Friday prayer service... that failed to invite the Catholics - a world church currently criticizing the unjust war against Iran - to one of their major holy days (from Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost):

The Pentagon has invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.

“Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” reads a Friday email sent by Air Force leadership, a copy of which was shared by an employee.

“I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome,” said this employee, who requested anonymity to speak about internal communications. “It’s so ridiculous.”

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed it is not hosting another, separate religious service for Catholic employees.

I'm Unitarian, and even I know - well, I have my ex-Catholic dad as a source - that Good Friday is one of the Big Ones, especially where they perform the Stations of the Cross. Even the Pope does it (well, when he's young enough to handle carrying the heavy crucifix). To exclude the Catholics from a Good Friday service - even one meant for Protestant service - is a huge insult to that church. Considering how many Catholics are in the U.S. armed forces (roughly 1.8 million Americans in uniform or families or base employment) this could well have serious effects on morale.

And as Nichols noted earlier, Hegseth is clearly waging a war on women in the military, allowing sexism to affect the chain of command. He's risking our armed forces at the worst possible time for the dumbest (and selfish) reasons (from Edith Olmstead at the New Republic):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rampant racism and sexism extend further than we previously knew.

Hegseth has made efforts to block or delay the promotion of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process who spoke with NBC News.

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials told NBC News...

The apparent reasons to block these promotions varied but seemed to have nothing to do with conduct—more with the identities of the officers and what they represented to Hegseth.

These are qualified officers: People who have served in the military for decades, who know how things work and how to get the best out of the personnel under their commands. Hegseth is kicking out people who know their jobs, all because Hegseth doesn't know his own job.

This ongoing war - not just the war in Iran, and South America; but the Culture War against America's move towards social justice - is going to get worse, and it's not going to end until these goddamn wingnuts from the Far Right are out of power forever. Pray for that.

Lesson Here, Pam: When You Fail trump, You Fall

Anyone who's paid attention to how trump handles his minions uh underlings oh what the hell let's call them flunkies would have told Pam Bondi this day was coming (via Jonathan Chait now documenting atrocities for the Atlantic): 

Pam Bondi’s 421 days as attorney general of the United States came to an end in the only way they could have: with her being fired ignominiously via a social-media post. Donald Trump announced that Bondi, though a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend,” will be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job” that, despite its great importance, remains a secret. Also, her new job will be in the private sector, which makes it a strange thing for a president to be determining—or at least this would be strange if the administration still observed traditional boundaries between public and private, which it does not.

In trumpland, loyalty does not flow both ways: trump will insist on you being loyal to him while he reserves the privilege of tossing you under every bus that passes by. It's both sad and funny so many Republicans and Culture War wingnuts - remember Chris Christie? - keep volunteering for jobs that will humiliate them publicly and end with them getting tire tracks all across their backs.

When his second term began, Trump sought out an attorney general whose loyalty would not waver under even the most trying circumstances. Bondi did not bother pretending to uphold the Justice Department’s independence. She announced to the staff upon taking office, “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”

Bondi faithfully echoed Trump’s messaging, calling him “the greatest president in the history of our country” and scolding Democrats in Congress two months ago for investigating his administration when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had topped 50,000. (It is currently at 46,000.)

Most important, Bondi investigated and brought charges against seemingly anybody Trump wanted her to. At minimum, Bondi tried to investigate a long list of Trump targets, and if she refused any of his demands, no evidence of doing so has made its way to the public. Her problem turned out to be that it remains very difficult to convict Americans of a crime they did not commit, even more so when those targets have competent lawyers. And so, as Bondi kept bringing the cases Trump ordered up, she kept losing them, which made Trump angrier and more determined to compel Bondi to bring flimsy charges against his enemies.

Noticed this earlier: trump's gaslighting is meant to make him always winning, always the victim of others, and so he wants that false narrative pushed to the limits to punish all who ruin that self-image of dominance and success. Problem with that is how lies can't overwhelm the facts when presented in courts of law, where Bondi and her underlings struggled to even convince grand juries to play along. What I said just last year:

The only good news about all of this is that trump - and his lackeys like Bondi and Halligan, and other wingnuts in the Justice Dept. - is obsessing over the twisted reflections in his own addled mind. The courts - in spite of what the Far Right thinks of the law - require proof and relevancy to work, not rumor hearsay or fake accusation.

The bad news is that trump - and his lackeys Bondi, Halligan, and dozens of other wingnuts - will never admit he is in the wrong, and will double-down on these attacks and fake allegations until all he has left is to burn the entire judiciary to the ground for failing to uphold his lies.

And Bondi did indeed double-down. It still didn't work, even as the Justice Department collapsed into ineptitude trying to cover up trump scandals like the Epstein Files. Bondi tried early in 2025 to placate the conspiracy wingnuts who were convinced the Epstein Affair was a massive Democratic (Clinton) scandal, but she did so by rehashing pre-existing evidence. It made Bondi and her staff look like fools, and drove enough Republican congresscritters to force a vote mandating more Epstein disclosures... which Bondi kept trying to stop, and did so poorly enough that more damning evidence against trump kept getting out. Especially the recent revelations that trump may have raped a 13-year-old girl, and that Ghislaine Maxwell - so far the only one in that power circle sitting in jail for the exploitation of teen girls - had copies of that report while Bondi's Justice Department tried to hide it.

That failure to stop the Epstein scandal from escalating is why a good number of pundits think trump soured on Bondi so quickly, but take note that this firing happened just after a vital Supreme Court hearing about birthright citizenship turned into a disaster for trump - and his fellow anti-immigrant lackeys - that arguably became the final nail in Bondi's coffin. Too many times playing to trump's vanity and bullying ways, and zero results to show for it.

It never mattered how close Bondi tied herself to trump's ascendancy. All the way back to 2013 - when she wrangled campaign money out of trump to cancel a state-level investigation into trump's fake university - she had proved herself the most consistent boot-licker among the Republican ranks. Bondi did everything asked of her - which involved violating a lot of ethics and constitutional laws - and still could not stay on trump's friends list.

Whoever becomes the next whipping boy Attorney General should be forewarned: trump is not your buddy, he will send you out to do the dirtiest work and violate every norm and law and cover yourself in shit, and when you don't get results - and you won't, because trump is asking for the impossible - you will get tire tracks all across your back when the bus comes back round.

Then again wingnut Republicans don't care, do they. They will line up for the shit job thinking they alone can do it right, and they'll never learn. That's how desperate and broken the Far Right is right now.

Sad thing is, a lot of innocent people are going to get body-slammed even harder by the next AG trying to kiss trump's ass even harder than before. 

Gods help us.