As the Supreme Court makes ready to rule on the blatant gerrymandering in Wisconsin, the AP has conducted a study using "a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage" to analyze "the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year" and report "four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones." Read the rest
Randy Bryce wants to challenge Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan for the First District of Wisconsin, where Ryan beat his most recent Democratic challenger by 35 points. Read the rest
Senator Joe Manchin [D-WV, @Sen_JoeManchin, +1 304-342-5855] is a right-wing Democrat Senator whose inglorious career includes breaking with his party to endorse President Trump's deal to sell record quantities of weapons to the Saudis. Read the rest
After video of Trump admitting to a string of sexual assaults appeared last October, his approval rating bottomed out; a month later, it had recovered -- and he was the President. Read the rest
Greg Gianforte is a short-tempered, hyper-conservative Montana political hopeful who is standing for the GOP in a special election for a Congressional seat; he is also invested in Russian firms that are under US sanction. Read the rest
The best way to fight gerrymandering is to prove to courts that electoral districts have been unfairly formed, a tactic that's been used successfully in places like North Carolina; but for this to work, you need good demographic data to show that the district is unfair, and for that, you need an accurate census. Read the rest
David Lesperance is a Canadian-born lawyer who specializes in helping the super-rich secretly buy foreign citizenship so they can escape taxation at home. Read the rest
On inauguration day, 214 protesters were arrested in DC on felony riot charges, and now they face up to $25,000 in fines and up to 10 years in prison, though no one -- not the cops, not the prosecutors -- believes that more than a handful were involved in property damage or disorderly conduct. Read the rest
The Republican Congressjerks who passed legislation allowing your ISP to spy on your online activity and sell the data from it without your permission will be firmly reminded of their calumny in the 2018 election cycle, as the Center for Media Justice and its privacy allies plan "street-level tactics" to hold them accountable for their sellout. Read the rest
Yesterday, Congress voted to bar the FCC from ever making a rule that limits how your ISP can spy on you and sell your data, without your permission. Read the rest
The humiliating inability of Republicans to legislate even when they control the Presidency, House and Senate has emboldened the left wing of the Democratic party, led by Bernie Sanders, to push to replace Obamacare (designed by the Heritage Foundation and first trialled by Mitt Romney) with "Medicare-For-All," a state run, universal healthcare system that will end the out-of-control transfer of tax funds to insurance companies and the bonanza for Big Pharma. Read the rest
As the approval ratings for Trump, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and Congress circle the drain, one politician remains trusted by a shockingly large number of politicians: Bernie Sanders, who is polling +41% with independents, +28% with Democrats, and whose approval rating has steadily climbed since he hit the national stage in 2015. Read the rest
As the Republican Congress and Donald Trump's FCC move to dismantle the most basic protections for American internet users, no target is juicier than Net Neutrality, the simple idea that your ISP should send you the bits you ask for, rather than accepting bribes from big companies to slow down your net connection when you try to connect to their competitors. Read the rest
Two of the NSA's mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden are Prism (which give the NSA "bulk data" access to the servers of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others) and Upstream (through which the NSA taps the internet's fiber optic backbones). Both are possible because of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires this year. Read the rest
NYU poli sci/econ professor Maria Guadalupe and educational theater prof Joe Salvatore collaborated to stage a recreation of the Trump/Clinton debates with the gender roles reversed, starring actors who played Brenda King, "a female version of Trump" and Jonathan Gordon, "a male version of Hillary Clinton." Read the rest
Masha Gessen has impeccable credentials as a Putin critic -- you may remember her from her instant classic Autocracy: Rules for Survival, but you may not know that the Jewish lesbian mother of three fled Russia in 2013 to escape the country's Putin-fueled, ultra-violent anti-LGBT movement -- and so when she tells us that the conspiracy theories about Trump and Putin are problematic, it's worth listening. Read the rest
A team of esteemed scholars including Yochai "Wealth of Networks" Benkler and Ethan Zuckerman (co-founder of Global Voices) analyzed 1.25 million media stories published between April 1, 2015 and election day, finding "a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world." Read the rest
