Things are not right or normal - call it out!

 Just to get tradition out of the way, here's a quick "fuck off" to the international bad actors of the age - Russia, Israel, Hamas, and anybody else looking to set aside or ignore the established conventions of the world that keep things civilized.

That done, here's a quick update on some of the shit in play in the USA.  Whether it's yet another attempt to distract from Trump's Epstein problems, trying to solidify their power for the mid-term elections, or some mix of those, we've got a combined assault on fair elections currently underway.  Most recently, we've got Trump issuing executive orders (which, as always, aren't laws) trying to push through an out-of-cycle census that would exclude some people, in an effort to mess with how many representatives each state can send to Congress.  Meanwhile, we've also got the Republican contingent of the Texas state representatives trying to push through an out-of-cycle redistricting to try and send more Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives next election.

Now that we're firmly in the realm of "taking jobs and power that matter", Democrats are, unsurprisingly, reacting.  Naturally, that includes various other, Democrat-heavy states making threats about doing the same thing Texas is trying to do, but the immediately important thing that's happening is that the Democratic Texas state representatives have made themselves scarce, so that they're not just letting things happen as if that's just how things are supposed to work.  They've done so well enough that the state house can't get enough representatives together to legally do any business, which is a bonus - and you know it's effective from all the shit Texas Republicans are throwing at the wall, hoping something will stick (trying to get the FBI involved in a civil matter?  Really?).

In an unrelated matter, nationwide net neutrality is off the table again, after a lawsuit loss on appeal against a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court.  In normal times, this wouldn't be the end of the story, because they could go through one or two more rounds of appeals, ending at the Supreme Court, albeit a process that would take a fair amount of time and money.  Instead, they're dropping the case, but making sure everybody knows that one big reason that they're doing so is because they know that they wouldn't get a fair hearing at the Supreme Court.  To illustrate, the spokes-lawyer in the story I linked said the conservative majority of the court "have shown hostility to sound legal reasoning" and "cares very little about the rule of law", which is about as damning a thing you can say about any court, never mind the Supreme Court.

So yeah, seriously, no more "both sides are bad", no more go-along-to-get-along.  We need more of this level of response to the sort of bullshit Republicans are trying to pass off as business as usual.  Mind you, I am explicitly not saying "don't take part in elections" or anything like that - especially since elections are about the only way things are going to improve.  Well, short of everybody going out and punching a Nazi, but elections are definitely the cleaner way to fix things, if they're allowed to work.