“Though there are a number of factors involved in this price creep (including high fees, which a 2018 Government Accountability Office report says make up an average of 27 percent of the ticket’s total cost), the heart of the matter is simple: demand. People all over the world are clamoring to go to just a handful of the most popular artists’ concerts. Live Nation reported that 145 million people attended one of its shows in 2023, compared to 98 million in 2019. The momentum doesn’t appear to be slowing, with ticket sales in the first quarter of 2024 higher than they were this time last year. ”
“The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision along party lines.., which represented its fullest endorsement of partisan gerrymandering to date.
In the past, legal restrictions on racial gerrymandering — maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party — had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from “repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.”
Along the way, Alito’s opinion gives the Court’s explicit blessing to maps that are drawn for the very purpose of maximizing one political party’s power. In the very first paragraph of his Alexander opinion, Alito states that “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”
This is a significant statement, as it endorses a practice — partisan gerrymandering — that the Court has previously treated as unseemly. The Court’s most significant previous opinion on partisan gerrymandering, Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), held that federal courts lack jurisdiction to hear cases challenging partisan maps, but it stopped short of saying that such maps are actually permissible under the Constitution. ”
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“On top of all of this, Alexander achieves another one of Alito’s longtime goals. Alito frequently disdains any allegation that a white lawmaker might have been motivated by racism, and he’s long sought to write a presumption of white racial innocence into the law. His dismissive attitude toward any allegation that racism might exist in American government is on full display in his opinion. “When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning conduct,’” Alito writes, before proclaiming that “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.”
So Alexander is a very significant decision, and a very significant loss for proponents of fair legislative maps. The case is likely to cause partisan gerrymandering to proliferate in the United States even more than it already has.”
“On the one hand, Trump frequently claims credit for the Supreme Court’s decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion — and well he should, since the three Republicans he appointed to the Supreme Court all joined the Court’s 2022 decision permitting abortion bans. As Trump told Fox News last summer, “I did something that no one thought was possible. I got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
At the same time, Trump at least claims that he has no interest in signing new federal legislation banning abortion. When a reporter asked Trump if he would sign such a ban last month, Trump’s answer was an explicit “no.”
Behind the scenes, however, many of Trump’s closest allies tout a plan to ban abortion in all 50 states that doesn’t require any new federal legislation whatsoever.”
“China held its stance on three disputed islands in the Gulf on Monday despite Tehran’s anger at Beijing for describing the Iran-controlled islands as a matter to be resolved with the United Arab Emirates.
In a statement last week, China expressed support for the efforts of the UAE to reach a “peaceful solution” to the issue of the islands – the Greater Tunb, the Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa.
The islands, claimed by the UAE and Iran, have been held by Tehran since 1971 after the withdrawal of British forces from the Gulf.
In a rare show of anger toward its biggest trading partner, the Iranian foreign ministry on Sunday summoned the Chinese ambassador to Iran to protest China’s “repeated support” for the UAE’s “baseless claims”.
“Considering the strategic cooperation between Tehran and Beijing, it is expected that the Chinese government will revise its stance on this matter,” the Iranian foreign ministry said.
China’s foreign ministry on Monday repeated its call for Iran and the UAE to resolve their differences through dialogue and consultation, describing China’s stance on the matter as “consistent”.”
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked at a press conference in Italy last week about whether China was selling Russia arms for use in the war. Biden, who was standing beside him, waited for Zelensky to say President Xi Jinping told him he would not do so, before delivering a parting shot and ending the event. “By the way, China is not supplying weapons but the ability to produce those weapons and the technology available to do it. So, it is, in fact, helping Russia.”
The comment appeared to signal a hardening tone toward Beijing following months of US warnings that it shouldn’t help its friends in Moscow over the war. NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg reinforced the tough new line during a visit to Washington Monday that included Oval Office talks with Biden.
“Publicly, President Xi has tried to create the impression that he’s taking a back seat in this conflict to avoid sanctions and keep trade flowing. But the reality is that China’s fueling the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II,” Stoltenberg said at The Wilson Center. “At the same time, it wants to maintain good relations with the West. Well, Beijing cannot have it both ways. At some point, and unless China changes course, allies need to impose a cost.””
“Forget election season; election denial season has officially kicked off.
Over the last few weeks, Republican legislators have held committee hearings as well as introduced and passed legislation preventing noncitizens from voting — something that is already illegal in state and federal elections, and very rare. Former President Donald Trump has ramped up his claims that the 2024 election will be stolen — even above and beyond his typical portending. The cast of the 2024 veepstakes have all been toeing the line on election denialism. And let’s not forget the hundreds of election-denying candidates running for election or reelection up and down the ballot.
“This effort has the effect, and perhaps has the intent, of planting the seeds of doubt about an election that some Trump supporters must think he might lose,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
There was a moment in the weeks following the 2022 midterm elections where it felt like maybe, just maybe, the election denial trend was starting to fade. Voters had roundly rejected election-denying candidates, including in some of the most high-profile races on the ballot, and the vast majority of candidates who lost their election conceded, including even some of the most dedicated election deniers. But it’s become clear over the past few weeks that Republicans are not yet ready to abandon the election denial narrative and are instead angling to make it a central issue come November.”
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“Roughly the same percentage of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen today as did in 2021. Polling from YouGov and The Economist in April showed 36 percent of Americans said Biden did not legitimately win, similar to the 38 percent who said so in April 2021 — making it clear what kind of lasting impact this rhetoric can have on voters’ perception of an election’s legitimacy. It also raises the specter of a repeat of the violence we saw on Jan. 6; meanwhile, threats against election workers have continued in the four years since the last presidential election.”
“two other polls found that the verdict has made a small but significant share of potential Trump supporters less likely to vote for him. According to Ipsos/Reuters, 10 percent of Republican registered voters said they were less likely to support Trump after the conviction; HarrisX/Forbes put that number at 11 percent. Similarly, 25 percent of independents said they were less likely to vote for Trump in the Ipsos/Reuters poll, and 28 percent of independents said so in the HarrisX/Forbes poll.”
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“you should take more-or-less-likely polls with a grain of salt; some of those people who say they are less likely to vote for Trump may not have been very likely to vote for him in the first place, and even among supporters, “less likely to vote for” does not mean “definitely will not vote for.””
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“On average, the most recent national polls from the four pollsters who’ve polled since the verdict show a tied race.* That represents a 1-point average swing toward Biden from those pollsters’ pre-conviction surveys.”
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“Interestingly, at least according to these surveys, the shift toward Biden isn’t because Trump is losing support; it’s because Biden is gaining it. On average, Biden’s support went from 42 percent in these four pollsters’ pre-conviction polls to 43 percent after it. By contrast, Trump’s support stayed flat at 43 percent.”
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“Although the fact that three out of the four pollsters showed a shift toward Biden makes us more confident that this is, in fact, real movement, the shifts in both the Ipsos/Reuters and Morning Consult polls were within the margin of error — meaning they could have just been due to random chance. That said, Echelon Insights did something useful: It surveyed the same voters both before and after the conviction, removing the possibility that its 2-point shift toward Biden was due to getting a slightly more Democratic sample the second time around.
It’s also possible that these shifts are an illusion caused by something called (deep breath) differential partisan nonresponse bias. Basically, in the wake of bad news for Republicans and/or good news for Democrats, Republicans may be less excited about responding to surveys and Democrats may be more excited to — which can lead to polling numbers that are a bit better for Democrats than the true state of public opinion.”
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“Even if Biden’s improvement is real, though, another thing to bear in mind is that these are just four polls.”