News

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34185165

A shooter travels to Manhattan planning to target corporate executives he blames for his health issues. He leaves behind a note that law enforcement won’t release and the news media is happy to quote from selectively but won't publish.

Sound familiar?

The parallels between Shane Tamura, the 27-year-old Nevada man who killed four people in a Midtown Manhattan office one week ago today, and alleged assassin Luigi Mangione are uncanny. Unlike Mangione, however, Tamura’s victims had nothing to do with his reported health issues. As a result, his rampage was framed as a random act of “senseless violence,” as President Trump declared.

But former friends of Tamura’s that I talked to say there’s more to the story: that his suicide note’s reported claim that “football gave me CTE” is plausible, given his many years as a high school football star.

The classmates, while clearly horrified by Tamura’s actions, are also able to appreciate the likelihood that there’s a public health dimension to the shooting. Wouldn’t it be nice if our elected leaders were capable of that kind of nuance? That’s certainly how I feel about it, and why I hope that the media publishes the notes he left behind: not to glorify anything but to understand what happened and how it might be prevented from happening again.

What little we know about the writing Tamura left behind reportedly includes three separate references to

• “You can’t go against the NFL, they’ll squash

• “Study my brain please I’m sorry.”

• “Terry Long football gave me CTE and it caused my to drink a gallon of antifreeze.”

Terry Long, who played as an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 80s and 90s, committed suicide in 2005 by drinking antifreeze. An autopsy revealed that Long had been suffering from CTE.

The spotlight may have moved off the DOGE since the departure of Elon Musk, but the Trump administration's DOGE continues to post about cost cutting on its so-called "wall of receipts." And once again, some of its claims about savings appear to be significantly overstated, according to a CBS News review.

The review of three of the largest cuts claimed so far indicates the savings from those contracts are less than 3% of what DOGE said they were.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/43457696

One of the biggest mysteries that has emerged from the Trump-era Supreme Court is the 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan.

In Milligan, two of the Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — voted with the Court’s Democratic minority to strike down Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional maps, ordering the state to redraw those maps to include an additional district with a Black majority.

So why did two Republican justices break with their previous skepticism of gerrymandering suits in the Milligan case? A new order that the Supreme Court handed down Friday evening appears to answer that question.

The new order, in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, suggests that the Court’s decision in Milligan was merely a minor detour, and that Roberts and Kavanaugh’s votes in Milligan were largely driven by unwise legal decisions by Alabama’s lawyers. The legal issues in the Callais case are virtually identical to the ones presented in Milligan, but the Court’s new order indicates it is likely to use Callais to strike down the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against gerrymandering altogether.

The Callais order, in other words, doesn’t simply suggest that Milligan was a one-off decision that is unlikely to be repeated. It also suggests that the Court’s Republican majority will resume its laissez-faire approach to gerrymandering, just as the redistricting wars appear to be heating up.

On Friday, the Court issued a new order laying out what these parties should address in those briefs. Those briefs should examine whether the lower court order requiring Louisiana to draw an additional Black-majority district “violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” The justices, in other words, want briefing on whether Gingles — and the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering more broadly — are unconstitutional.

This suggestion that the Voting Rights Act may be unconstitutional — or, at least, that it violates the Republican justices’ vision of the Constitution — should not surprise anyone who has followed the Court’s voting rights cases.

“There is no denying,” Roberts wrote for the Court in Shelby County, “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”

Although Kavanaugh joined nearly all of the majority opinion in Milligan, he also wrote a qseparate opinion indicating that he wanted to extend Shelby County to gerrymandering cases in a future ruling. “Even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under [the Voting Rights Act] for some period of time,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

Gingles also suggests that Voting Rights Act suits challenging racial gerrymanders should eventually cease to exist. If the electorate ceases to be racially polarized — something that appears to be slowly happening — then Gingles plaintiffs will no longer be able to win cases, and the federal judiciary’s role in redistricting will diminish. But Kavanaugh seems to be impatient to end these suits while many states remain racially polarized.

Read in the context of Kavanaugh’s Milligan opinion, in other words, the new Callais order suggests that a majority of the justices have decided the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering have reached their expiration date, and they are looking for arguments to justify striking them down.

It now looks like Milligan was Gingles’s last gasp. The Republican justices remain hostile both to the Voting Rights Act and toward gerrymandering suits more broadly. And they appear very likely to use Callais to remove one of the few remaining safeguards against gerrymanders.

Texas Republicans have voted to track down and arrest dozens of Democratic legislators who have fled the state to block passage of a partisan redistricting plan.

The vote passed by 85 to 6, following Republican Governor Greg Abbott's threat of bribery charges against the absent Democrats.

After the vote, the governor ordered state troopers "to locate, arrest, and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans".

The nation’s two most populous states — California and Texas — grappled for political advantage in advance of 2026 elections that could reorder the balance of power in Washington and threaten President Donald Trump’s agenda at the midpoint of his second term.