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Two Southern States Reject Racist Gerrymandering – The Wednesday AM Quickie 5/27/26

By Whitney Curry Wimbish —

Very happy to report that my beloved Park Slope Food Co-op, the oldest grocery co-op in the country, voted last night to boycott Israeli goods after years of member organizing and a lot of institutional obstacles. But we won last night, 67 percent to 31 percent. That’s it from me, Corey’s back tomorrow. See you next week! -Whitney

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THE BIG NEWS

Two Southern States Reject Racist Gerrymandering

Alabama can’t use a new racist voting map for the November midterms, a panel of federal judges said yesterday, because it discriminates against Black people and was created too close to an election, the NYT and Mother Jones reported. The decision restores the earlier map with two majority-Black districts and is akin to flipping the bird to conservative Supreme Court justices, who gutted the Voting Rights Act in April because they are bigots who want to keep MAGA Republicans in power. 

The Supreme Court may take up the case and force their will on the people. But the lower court’s three-judge panel, which included two Trump appointees, said they reviewed arguments with the high court’s recent decision in mind. “We cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the judges wrote. 

Also on Tuesday, South Carolina’s Republican-majority Senate rejected Trump’s demand that they redistrict to eliminate the state’s single majority-Black district, with a vote against a new congressional map, NBC News reported. South Carolina’s House approved the map last week in the racist hope that they could disenfranchise Black voters ahead of early voting that began yesterday. But enough Republican senators decided it was ridiculous to change district lines given that thousands of votes have already been cast during early voting, which started yesterday. One prominent Republican state senator, Tom Davis, said that a previous redistricting took nine months. “We have completely outsourced our constitutional obligation to prepare a congressional redistricting map to a consultant in Washington, D.C. We have no idea, no idea how that map was created,” Davis said. 

White House advisors reacted to the South Carolina news with their customary melodrama, calling it a “betrayal” and saying they were caught off-guard. Too bad, so sad.   

Iran Deal Circles Drain

The United States is repeatedly violating a ceasefire with Iran by attacking Iranian commercial vessels and committing “numerous maritime robberies,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said yesterday, CNN reported. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened retaliation, saying it “will not leave any act of aggression unanswered and will show no hesitation in defending Iran’s interests.” It shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone and ran off an RQ-4 drone and an F-35 fighter jet that entered its airspace, according to Al Jazeera and the AP. The US attacks signaled America’s “bad faith and unreliability,” making it hard to strike a peace deal. The US attacks could very well screw up peace negotiations, Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at CSIS, told Al Jazeera. “While both sides may ultimately prefer an end to hostilities, the near-term logic of conflict — driven by strikes and retaliation — could easily overwhelm efforts to end the conflict,” she said. 

Regime Wants Federal Workers to Sign NDAs Beyond Typical Classified and Unclassified Info

Under the terms of a draft notice posted to the Federal Register yesterday, federal workers “would be blocked from sharing ‘non-public, confidential, or proprietary information’ or ‘any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law,’” the Washington Post reported. It’s an attempt to silence workers from alerting the media to illegal and idiotic decisions, such as the US raid in Venezuela. Signing the NDA is “voluntary,” but there’s a massive catch: “Failure to sign may result in removal from federal service and potential debarment for refusal to certify compliance with applicable non-disclosure obligations.”

QUICKEST QUICKIES

  • Child Rape Supporter Paxton Wins Texas Primary Runoff Against Sen. John Cornyn Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated the sitting senator after he got Trump’s endorsement; as I noted yesterday, Paxton is offered Waco attorney Adam Hoffman a plea deal of just one day in jail and no sex offender status after repeatedly raping a little boy for years. Paxton will face state Rep. James Talarico in the general election. via the Texas Tribune and the Washington Post. 
  • Supreme Court Rejects Michigan Cop’s Attempt to Dodge Excessive Force Claim From George Floyd Protest Grand Rapids cop Phillip Reinink shot a canister of tear gas into a crowd protesting days after Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin murdered Floyd; Reinink hit and injured Sean Hart and then tried for years to get out of it, saying he had qualified immunity. No he doesn’t, the high court ruled, so the case against him can proceed. Good. via NBC News. 
  • At Least 1 Dead, 9 Missing After Chemical Tank Implodes in Washington State Multiple others suffered chemical burns when a vat of chemicals at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. in Longview, Washington imploded; in Southern California, about 16,000 people remained under evacuation orders as of Tuesday night because a chemical tank at GKN Aerospace Transparency Systems is at risk of exploding. via the AP and the Seattle Times. 
  • Iceland Considers Joining EU to Protect Against US Imperialism Icelanders will vote on a referendum as soon as this summer on whether to begin exploratory talks to join the bloc because they’ve seen what Trump is doing to Greenland, their closest neighbor. via the NYT.

SOME NUMBER

2

That’s how many black racer snakes pestilential health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decided to pick up and mess with for a while, adding to his long list of incidents of doing that to animals and animal carcasses. One of the snakes bit him on the hand. Unfortunately for us, black racers are not venomous.

ON THE SHOW TODAY

5/27: Sam and Emma will be in the studio tomorrow. Their guest is Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative and former special assistant to President Obama for economic development and industrial strategy. Alex will discuss an analysis from Groundwork that exposes how major oil companies are exploiting the Strait of Hormuz closure to rake in $23B in excess profits.

DON'T MISS MR CLIPS‌

The Jillian Michaels Humiliation Tour Continues

Weird scene.

Republicans CANCEL Vote To Stop Trump’s Iran War

Americans are struggling to pay for gas because of Trump’s illegal war and turning on Republicans. Yet Republicans are focused only on whether they have Trump’s favor. Bizarre. But I guess that’s cult membership for you.

PARTING WORDS

“It’s a sick system. And when we talk about Ben-Gvir as if it’s an isolated incident, it’s not. This is – the Palestinians have been slaughtered and killed for over 80 years. And each administration comes and increases. They brag about killing Palestinians. This says we are – our blood is becoming an election material for them: Who kills more Palestinians gets elected.”

-- Haitham Arafat, a Palestinian American on the recent Gaza Freedom Flotilla, whom Israeli soldiers kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured, speaking with Democracy Now! Arafat has lost more than 100 members of his family in Israel’s genocide.

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