Court strikes devastating blow to abortion rights
Sunday Dose of Democracy:
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Devastating ruling strikes major blow to abortion rights
Journalist Adam Klasfeld sits down with Brian Tyler Cohen to discuss the disturbing court ruling blocking the mailing of abortion medication and the next steps in the fight for reproductive rights.
Trump has no clue what his Supreme Court has just unleashed
Greg Sargent, The New Republic: "Now that the Supreme Court has gutted yet another piece of the Voting Rights Act, this one concerning redistricting, here’s one thing we know for sure: Democrats will have to enter into a new era of procedural total war. That might make many of them uncomfortable, but when it comes to the future of the liberal agenda, the stakes are enormous. With Donald Trump’s active encouragement, Republicans are already seizing on the ruling—which essentially dismantled protections against racial gerrymandering—to threaten to redraw maps in the South to eliminate numerous congressional seats with Black representatives. While it’s largely too late to do so this cycle, Republicans will likely launch mid-decade redistricting in many Southern states heading into 2028, eliminating as many as 19 more Democratic seats in hopes of locking in a near-permanent GOP majority.
In a purely political sense, is this Armageddon for Democrats?
Not necessarily. The reason? Democrats can move to redraw maps in time for the 2028 elections in states where they control the legislatures. According to a new analysis by Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, Democrats could redraw anywhere from 10 to 22 additional congressional seats for the party in time for the 2028 elections if they push hard with redistricting in seven blue and swing states.
'Democrats have a clear path to neutralize this GOP power grab if they want to take it,' Max Flugrath, senior communications director of Fair Fight Action, told me. 'This is the ‘break glass in case of emergency’ moment for American democracy.'"
Take Action: Stop Trump's plan to dump coal ash in our drinking water!
Trump gets nightmare news as his top impeachment witness launches run for Senate
Alexander Vindman for Senate: Alexander Vindman made history as one of the star witnesses in the first impeachment case against Trump — and now he’s running for Senate so he can hold the wannabe dictator accountable from the halls of Congress. Vindman has vowed to take on "a Republican Party that’s failing to deliver accountability and underwriting chaos and corruption," but to win in Florida, he’s going to need some help. Can you chip in to help kick-start his run?
We are bombarding America's forests with Roundup
Nate Halverson, Mother Jones: "In remote Northeast California, about 10 miles outside the lumber mill town of Chester and a half-hour’s drive from the old hunting cabin I bought and fixed up about a decade ago, I steer my old Toyota Tacoma down a bumpy dirt road to where the Lassen National Forest gives way to private timberland. Lilly rides shotgun. We’d come to this exact spot seven years ago. Lilly, my sharp-eyed border collie, had jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit through a meadow of knee-high grass, returning covered in mud and burrs. The landscape was straight out of an L.L.Bean catalog: a flower-dotted meadow buzzing with life. Douglas firs, incense cedars, and some of the tallest sugar pines on the planet sheltered protected species ranging from gray wolves to Pacific fishers and northern goshawks. The Sierra Nevada red fox, one of California’s rarest mammals, was known to live nearby, amid the vast patchwork of private and public lands.
The Lassen area is where I come to reset, forage for wild mushrooms, and let stress evaporate. But today, I’m looking out over a barren, sun-bleached expanse that stretches across the former meadow and up the sides of denuded mountains as far as the eye can see. No birds. No animals. No insects. No big trees. Just some waist-high piles of volcanic rock, a nod to the still-active Lassen Peak nearby. It is eerily quiet—desolate. Just a few minutes down the road, nature has crept back to life. There, I saw vibrant green mountain whitethorn bushes, rabbitbrush, and purple-tinged bull thistles, with energetic bees bopping from flower to flower. The towering trees were gone, but new saplings abounded—cedars, pines, firs, and more—scattered randomly amid the greenery, already a foot or two high. No such verdant revival is visible on the private timberland before me.
No bees, no flowers—it’s a virtual dead zone where the only life consists of row upon row of manually planted, tightly packed conifer saplings, all less than a foot tall. This is because, unbeknownst to most people, logging companies and the US Forest Service have been spraying massive amounts of herbicide in clear-cut and fire-ravaged forests of California—and throughout the nation. And not just any herbicide, but glyphosate, a potent and problematic weed killer best known by the brand name Roundup. Bayer, the multinational conglomerate that acquired Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to thousands of people who say Roundup gave them cancer or other ailments.
But the company, which has hired lobbyists with deep ties to the Trump administration, may have notched a win in February, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order deeming glyphosate critical to national security. He even invoked the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic production of the herbicide and extend some immunity from lawsuits to its manufacturers. The Forest Service and private loggers say they use glyphosate because it helps commercially attractive conifers like pine and Douglas fir rebound faster after fires and timber harvests. It does so by killing deciduous trees, native shrubs, flowering plants, and anything else that might compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. In short, a key rationale for spraying a disputed chemical in natural settings boils down to executives and regulators treating forests, including our national forests, as tree farms."
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Staring at the pointing hand: navigating modern media in a time of constant crisis
Adam McKay, Current Affairs: "When I point to where I just threw a ball or dropped a treat for our seven-year-old Shepherd/Chow mix, Timothy, he simply stares at my hand. Not to where I’m pointing. But who’s really the confused party here—me, or black-nosed, curl-tailed Timothy? How could he know what pointing means? So why do I keep pointing, when it’s not working, and will never work? As Timothy stares at my hand, while I impotently repeat a cryptic gesture known only to my species, I’m reminded of the way our society has been politically frozen during the last decade, with none of the biggest problems getting solved. Why is it so difficult to direct popular attention and action towards what matters?
The crises could not be more urgent. Mass detention centers are currently being set up across the U.S., with billions being spent on a terrifying 'nationwide ‘ghost network’ of concentration camps.' Cartoonish levels of corruption are exploding, with the U.S. falling to its worst-ever rank in a global corruption index and the White House brazenly embracing a 'pay to play' philosophy of politics. Fossil fuel companies are escalating their destruction of the planet, obliterating our species’ hopes for a livable future, with scientists warning that global warming is accelerating faster than predicted and feedback loops may well trigger “a new and hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ climate.” And since 2023, we have watched the livestreamed, nonstop slaughter of tens of thousands of people in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, with the full support of the U.S. government under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
In the face of these overwhelming catastrophes, legacy news, talking heads, and elected officials repeat the same kinds of tired, spurious talking points designed to waylay consensus and divert us from taking meaningful action. "It’s complicated." "You have to choose between the lesser of two evils." "Any change must be driven by market incentives." Or we hear that activists are the problem, not the companies wrecking the planet. But the most powerful weapon of all is silence: simply not mentioning that any of this is happening. Or burying it in the back of the newspaper, as the New York Times infamously did with the Holocaust and now does with climate news. Or reporting it, but doing so only once it’s too late and the window for action has closed. Helplessness, confusion, and anger have become the one common reality we all share precisely because we’ve been robbed of any unifying mass media depiction of anything remotely resembling reality.
Americans are bombarded with dozens of micro-targeted narratives every day, tailored to their comfortable consumer profile but not their need to know in order to act. And nobody can be expected to navigate this moment without having even one functioning, widely-available, news outlet, a trusted source of information to replace the dozens of “legacy” outlets that have collapsed like a 100-foot-tall ice sculpture of Edward R. Murrow on a 92-degree January day. The oligarchs aren’t even pretending they want to keep us informed anymore. They view functioning news as a threat—which it is, because if people understood how their futures are being wrecked to keep the rich rich, they’d be furious. The pitchforks might come out.
There is some good news though. All of the high-end graphics, high-priced talent, reach, and brand loyalty in the world can't change one thing: stone cold reality. The facts are real, whether they’re reported, distorted, or ignored. There is a hunger for something different and better. People know there’s something wrong. There’s an active change happening in the production of news—the way we relate to it, how we get it, and the way we question, challenge, and support it.
And yes, after idiotically pointing dozens and dozens of times I finally stopped and tried another way to help Timothy find the ball. I just pretended to do another throw in the same direction, and his eyes instantly went in the right direction. Tim doesn’t screw around. He only understands action."
Take Action: Stop Wall Street from gambling on crypto with our retirement savings!
Untitled musings on our tech reality
Katherine Argent, Twitter: "Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads.
AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back!
We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon.
Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends.
Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details.
Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too.
Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???"
Food for thought
The Sunday wrap-up
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