A primer on gerrymandering and race discrimination
Posted By: Big Bopper, 4/30/2026 1:26:58 PM
The 435 members of the House of Representatives represent the people of specific geographic areas. Those areas are drawn up to include equal populations. The population of a Congressional District is currently about 762,000 people. The intent is for each citizen and 762,000 of his close friends to have a voice in Congress. This necessarily means that Congressional Districts have vastly different geographic sizes and shapes reflecting different population concentrations. Alaska has only one Congressional District covering the entire sparsely populated state, while one of the 26 Congressional Districts in New York State is just a few square miles of densely populated Manhattan.
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The 435 members of the House of Representatives represent the people of specific geographic areas. Those areas are drawn up to include equal populations.
The population of a Congressional District is currently about 762,000 people. The intent is for each citizen and 762,000 of his close friends to have a voice in Congress.
This necessarily means that Congressional Districts have vastly different geographic sizes and shapes reflecting different population concentrations. Alaska has only one Congressional District covering the entire sparsely populated state, while one of the 26 Congressional Districts in New York State is just a few square miles of densely populated Manhattan.
It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.
Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.
Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”
When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar.
I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job.
Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit.
In Colorado, the highest posted speed limit is 75 mph. I can live with that, even though I think 85 mph might be better and perhaps just as safe.
This speed limit of 75 means that it’s against the law to go faster than that. Trust me on this, I used to be a lawyer.
But now, Colorado has announced that if you go the 75-mph speed limit in the left lane, or even if you violate the speed limit by going 85 mph, and people stack up behind you who want to go 95, then you’re violating the law by impeding traffic. And you’ll be ticketed for it.
Mothers and fathers die. For the population to remain constant, the two of them need to produce about 2.1 children on average in order to replace themselves. (The extra 0.1 is necessary to offset the deaths of children who never reach reproductive age.) This figure is called the “fertility rate.”
Recent data shows that the fertility rate in the United States is nowhere near that 2.1 figure. It has instead dropped to an all-time low of about 1.6. American woman on average give birth to only 1.6 children.
Everyone loves a party. Especially when the party makes you money. Forget that the money you’re making now is the same money you lost last month. It’s still fun.
And so, the stock market is having fun today.
And why not? America and Iran are not exactly kissin’ cousins now, but at least nobody’s civilization will end. Not today, anyway.
The stocks of the boomers are booming, oil is crashing, monster pickup sales to monster drivers will certainly become monstrous again, the Pope (who is “God’s representative on Earth,” a reader informs me) will take credit for a few days, and we’ll probably get a docu-fiction war movie
Take out one Iranian power plant per day
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Power plants are legitimate targets in war. They’re “dual purpose” infrastructure in that they serve a civilian purpose but also a military one. (The same was true of the large bridge in Tehran that we took out last week.)
That’s one reason that terrorists like Hamas position their military commands in hospitals, not power plants. It is recognized that hospitals are not legitimate targets (unless a military use is made of them) while power plants are.
America is therefore justified in disabling Iran’s power plants, as President Trump has threatened to do. It will be much tougher for Iran to launch drones and missiles without electric power.
Bill Maher’s Magical Mystery Tour
3 replies
I once saw an unidentified flying object, or “UFO.” I was a passenger on a commercial airliner on an overnight flight. I awoke in the middle of the night, looked out the window, and saw a lighted object flying near the airplane. I couldn’t identify it.
The object kept perfect pace with the airplane, as if it was shadowing us. Once in a while, it blinked, as if it was signaling us. Maybe the blinks were an extraterrestrial form of Morse Code?
In my half-awake stupor, it thrilled me to realize that we are not alone.
This war with Iran is one that had to be fought, and so we were right to fight it on our terms at a time before it became harder to win. The way Iran has lashed out at civilians everywhere, including with indiscriminate killing machines it denied having, has confirmed that.
But I recognize that there are arguments and counterarguments. Some of those are just the lame “Orange Man Bad!” or “Orange Man Good!” type, but others are more principled.
Half a century ago, American children were taught in elementary school that “representative democracy” was the highest form of government.
Part of me wondered even then, why should everyone get an equal say in things? That wasn’t how it worked in my elementary school, I observed, even as they taught that creed. The students and the janitor didn’t get the same say as the principal and the teachers.
Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.
One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.
Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world
Electric vehicles are probably the vehicle of the future, but they are not the vehicle of the present. Let’s look at the numbers.
An EV uses about six cents of electricity to go a mile. That’s if you charge it at home with inexpensive residential electricity rates. It’s more if you use a charging station, and it’s more if it’s a large vehicle like a Rivian. And by the way, be prepared to leave it plugged in for several hours to get it charged.
Gasoline-powered cars use about thirteen cents of gasoline to go a mile, assuming gas is something over $3/gallon and you get something like 25 mpg.
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California’s bullet train can’t catch a break.
The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority board punted a vote Wednesday on its long-awaited business plan — after it was revealed that the project’s cost had ballooned to a staggering $231 billion.
Lawmakers and budget hawks have ripped the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco train project as incomplete, opaque and possibly illegal, with the authority moving to delay a vote until next month. Two days earlier at a tense Senate Transportation Committee, government watchdogs in the Legislative Analyst’s Office warned that the plan doesn’t meet basic legal requirements after new station locations were proposed.
Ian Choudri, CEO of the High-Speed Rail Authority, promised to provide
First Lady Melania Trump’s supporters are organizing a grassroots boycott of advertisers for ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! amid a report saying that Disney is “ready to pull” the plug following the left-wing TV host’s comments fantasizing about President Donald Trump’s death just days before the third documented assassination attempt on his life. Kimmel is facing intense backlash from scores of fed-up Melania Trump fans after he called the First Lady an “expectant widow” before a gunman attempted to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday evening.
That the Japanese will not allow pro-jihad, pro-Sharia elements to take over their country in the name of diversity and political correctness is clearly evident from a wave of viral videos showing large crowds in Fujisawa taking to the streets to oppose a proposed mosque project which is expected to be one of the largest mosques in the area.
At the heart of the strong resistance that thousands of Japanese participating in these demonstrations have shown are multiple practical and socio-cultural implications, including traffic congestion during prayer times and potential noise disturbances. These are all valid concerns, as Muslims across the globe are
Woke Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., lashed out at a LindellTV reporter when pressed about massive discrepancies in her congressional financial disclosure forms, which once listed her net worth as high as $30 million before an amended filing reduced it to under $95,000.
In a hallway exchange captured on video, the reporter reminded Omar that she had previously called her “stupid” for asking about the filing and asked how she could make “such a big mistake,” prompting Omar to reply, “I still think you’re stupid for asking me anything.”
When the journalist pressed for an explanation for LindellTV’s audience and “the American people,” Omar snapped, “I don’t want to tell you jack s—t.
We’re in the eighth week of the Iran waropens in a new tab, and things are starting to heat up even though there’s not kinetic action. What do I mean by heating up? The Iranian government has ceased to exist. We don’t know, and the Iranians don’t know who holds power.
There is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. There is the theocracy, there is the elected people in Parliament, and there is a regular military. And those four groups operate in schizophrenic fashion. By the same token, sometimes they give off signals that they would like to negotiate because that is predicated on popular resistance.
In a skit last Thursday, ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel pretended to be the host of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and remarked of Melania Trump, “You have a glow like an expectant widow.” Given that President Trump had already survived two assassination attempts, it was tasteless even at the time. But the remark aged even more poorly when a third aspiring assassin crashed the actual event days later.In a rare statement, the understandably shaken first lady condemned Kimmel, saying, “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana's congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais, finding that the state's second majority-Black district violated the Equal Protection Clause.In the 6-3 decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority district. Without that requirement, the state had no compelling reason to use race in drawing its lines. SB8, enacted in 2024, created a District 6 stretching roughly 250 miles from Shreveport through Alexandria and Lafayette to Baton Rouge.
In lighter news, the internet was abuzz during the recent White House visit from King Charles III and Queen Camilla of the United Kingdom. Why? Cameras caught the U.S. president getting a little handsy with his wife, Melania. [Tweet]
Of course, it’s not standard protocol for any president to pat his wife’s behind in the middle of an official state visit, in full view of the media and the world, but remember: This is President Donald Trump. He breaks rules like this, and people often love him or hate him for it, and he seems to relish every minute of it.
The Federal Reserve is reported to be historically apolitical, meaning all considerations are absent of politics. However, no individual Federal Reserve Chairman has been more overtly political than Jerome Powell.
Today, after announcing yet again the Fed will not lower interest rates, Chairman Jerome Powell announced he will not leave the board of the federal reserve even after his term has expired and he is replaced by recently advanced Kevin Warsh. Powell said he plans to maintain a “low profile” as a governor, but it will be the first time since 1948 that a Federal Reserve Chairman has stayed on the board at the end of their chairmanship.
Former Democrat Rep. Barney Frank in Hospice
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Former Democrat Rep. Barney Frank has entered hospice care.
Barney Frank, 86, is in hospice care at his home in Maine, where he resides with his husband. Frank is suffering from congestive heart failure.
Barney Frank was one of the Democrat Reps who authored the Dodd-Frank bill, which was put in place after the 2008 bank crash.
The government arguably caused the failure and then turned around and put in a massive amount of regulations in response to the failure. The Dodd-Frank bill put enormous strain on smaller banks, and eventually, some of the regulations were rolled back.
Ironically, Barney Frank sat on the board of Signature Bank,
Liberal Supreme Court justices say majority
has ‘completed demolition’ of Voting
Rights Act 13 replies
has ‘completed demolition’ of Voting
Rights Act 13 replies
The Supreme Court’s liberal justices called their colleagues’ decision clawing back race-based redistricting on Wednesday a “now-completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act.
In a 48-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan held up the landmark 1965 law as helpful to the nation’s progress on racial discrimination.
“At this last stage, the Court’s gutting of Section 2 puts that achievement in peril,” Kagan wrote.
“I dissent because Congress elected otherwise,” she continued. “I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”
The indictment of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens Tuesday revived calls for the Justice Department to prosecute Fauci himself for allegedly lying to Congress about funding risky research in China before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Just two weeks remain before the five-year legal deadline on May 11 to indict Fauci for denying under oath that he funded “gain of function” experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started.
Morens, 78, was charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal,