Cartoon

The World Cup

Written by SK Ashby

(Cartoonist - Lalo Alcaraz)

In other news, the market went into a free-fall today because, I don't know, I guess someone finally realized Trump is trying to destroy a century of economic progress. I'm sure they'll go back to pretending everything is normal by the end of the week if not tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Blackwater founder Erik Prince says he has turned over his phone and computers to special prosecutor Robert Mueller. I think he's just trying to avoid a more invasive subpoena that will find the things he's still hiding.

Finally, Ian Millhiser over at ThinkProgress took an appropriately-large shit on today's SCOTUS ruling on racial gerrymandering.

The thrust of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Abbott v. Perez is that the “good faith” of a “state legislature must be presumed,” even when there are very serious allegations of racial gerrymandering. The facts of Perez are unusual and unlikely to repeat in the future, but Alito’s presumption of white racial innocence could have a significant impact on future cases. [...]

“The primary question” in Perez, according to Alito, “is whether the Texas court erred when it required the State to show that the 2013 Legislature somehow purged the ‘taint’ that the court attributed to the defunct and never-used plans enacted by a prior legislature in 2011.” That is, if the 2011 maps were illegal racial gerrymanders, and the 2013 maps preserve many of these illegal districts, could a court presume that the 2013 legislature ratified the court-drawn maps because it wanted to leave as many racially gerrymandered districts in place as possible?

Alito’s answer to this question is, no, a court cannot make such a presumption. Indeed, it must do the opposite — presuming that the lawmakers who voted for the 2013 legislation are racially innocent. “Whenever a challenger claims that a state law was enacted with discriminatory intent,” Alito says, “the burden of proof lies with the challenger, not the State.”

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Now, here's John Oliver on Mexico's big election:

NSFW