Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“These strange divisions underscore the complex political dynamics of the president’s latest power play. It’s become a loyalty test that could boost Republicans’ chances of keeping their trifecta in Washington, but one that also carries significant electoral risk for several of their own members in Congress and potential for broader voter backlash.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/14/gop-redistricting-00508626
“Meanwhile, in another corner of the internet, a bunch of conservative women started doing what appears to be actual Nazi salutes on Instagram (though some deny it). In many ways, it highlighted how ridiculous the “good genes” controversy was; as we saw during Medhi Hasan’s Jubilee episode, when right-wing influencers want to say they’re Nazi sympathizers, they don’t exactly use invisible ink. But it also served as a reminder: Here were people doing an actually egregious thing, and Democrats didn’t have the tools to make it stick. Indeed, Democrats have tried for years to tie the genuinely extreme, not-just-irritating views of the far right to the rest of the Republican Party, and most of the time, it fails.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/08/sydney-sweeney-republicans-win-media-ecosystem-00497761
“Missouri Republicans are considering redrawing their state’s congressional lines to add another red House seat, the latest volley in a national battle over control of the lower chamber in 2026.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/05/missouri-redistricting-2026-midterms-00494356
“Trump’s team is putting “maximum pressure on everywhere where redistricting is an option and it could provide a good return on investment,” according to a person familiar with the team’s thinking and granted anonymity to describe it.
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a handful of Democratic-leaning states — including California — handed mapmaking power to independent commissions instead of leaving it in the hands of the state legislatures. States where Democrats retain the power to gerrymander, like Illinois and Maryland, have very little room to draw more advantageous maps than their current ones.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/07/republicans-are-full-steam-ahead-on-redistricting-and-not-just-in-texas-00496450
Trump is destroying the Department of Education and making it so they cannot fulfill their law-mandated duties. The Constitution states that Congress makes the laws, and the executive faithfully executes them. This is not faithfully executing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=and1R4YBDfc
Supporters of textualism act like it is a simple way of reading the law, but judges who practice textualism often claim a clear text is ambiguous or an ambiguous text is clear based on what fits their political or ideological bias.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTSPi9CYjAQ
People falsely claim some elections are rigged, but, gerrymandered districts really are rigging elections and who holds power in Congress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MV9hu4FHOs
“Forcing states to cover some of the cost of food stamps would be a big change for how the program operates, and one that is long overdue. “The federal government pays for 100 percent of the benefits, so state administrators have little incentive to crack down on theft,” Chris Edwards, chair of fiscal policy for the Cato Institute, and a longtime advocate of food stamp reform, tells Reason. While most states are not swindling federal taxpayers as often as Alaska does, more than $1 in every $10 spent through the food stamp program last year was paid out in error.
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to get Murkowski and Sullivan on board with the bill, the Senate added a sweetener: Any state with a food stamp error rate of more than 13.3 percent will be exempt from the federal-state cost-sharing measure for two years.
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Imagine that you’re administering the food stamp program in a state like Delaware, which last year had an error rate of 12.37 percent. If the Senate version of the tax bill becomes law, you’d have a pretty strong incentive to simply let that error rate rise a bit for the rest of this year, thus buying you two more years of a fully federally funded SNAP program with no mandatory state spending.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/02/the-tax-bill-rewards-states-for-higher-rates-of-food-stamp-fraud/
“Our findings indicate that individuals from
both political affiliations are prone to believing and disseminating politically aligned fake news via social media. Despite
employing a stronger reflection manipulation in contrast to past research, we failed to replicate the mitigating effect of
the reflection on the acceptance of fake news. We observed that reflection reduced Democrats’ willingness to spread fake
news, yet it did not affect Republicans.”
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12144-025-07578-5.pdf
A common Republican response to a school shooting is mental health is the problem. A few years ago, members of both parties passed a mental health bill and school therapists were paid for. The Trump administration cut that funding because of a line about diversity hiring; Republicans who voted for this funding are silent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyW2WuuK0G4