Recap of this week in the revolution: Judge orders closure of Florida concentration camp. Texas passes redistricting bill. Trump regime to maximize charges for anyone not carrying firearms in D.C. and openly trying to rig the 2026 elections. Join the resistance by getting involved in your community.
The good...
Trump and Noem approving use of human cages in Florida concentration camp.
Southern District of Florida Federal Judge Kathleen Williams has blocked the Trump regime from bringing any new detainees to the Florida concentration camp known as "Alligator Alcatraz." The ruling also orders the relocation of all existing detainees and the dismantling of fencing, lighting, gas, sewage, power generators, etc. used by the facility within 60 days. Florida Governor and Trump Bootlicker Ron DeSantis intends to appeal the ruling.
The ruling was based on the fact that the facility in the Everglades was built without the required environmental reviews being conducted. The Trump regime has argued that they didn't need to conduct environmental reviews required by the federal government because the facility was run by the state government. The judge dismissed this argument on the grounds that the site was built at the request of the federal government, promised federal funding, and used by and staffed by ICE officers. She pointed out, "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it's a duck."
In 1947, President Harry Truman described the Everglades as an "irreplaceable primitive area."
“Since that time, every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises,”—Judge Williams
The bad...
Current Texas congressional district map. Image by Twotwofourtysix from Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Texas Republicans are set to redraw their congressional district map to deliver five new Republican representatives to the Trump regime. Donny 2-Dolls asked, and Texas Republicans bent over backwards to serve their master's will.
For two weeks, Texas Democrats have stayed out of the state to delay the vote and bring attention to this shameful action. While there was never a real chance for them to block the passage of the bill by the Republican majority, the delay was effective in bringing national attention to the redistricting attempt, and has kicked off a war between several other states to update their own district maps to offset the changes made in Texas.
U.S. House Democratic Caucus Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “Public servants should earn the votes of the people that they hope to represent. What Republicans are trying to do in Texas, is to have politicians choose their voters."
The ugly...
Image by Dean Lewis from Pixabay.
Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro is acting as the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., and has instructed prosecutors to maximize charges against anyone arrested during the Trump regime's takeover of Washington, D.C.
The one exception: Anyone caught carrying rifles or shotguns (illegal in D.C.) should not be charged.
The move is obviously intended to make it appear like D.C. is a crime-ridden hellhole that can only be saved by armed military patrols on the streets of our nation's capital, despite actual data indicating just the opposite. While every city has crime that needs to be addressed, there are well-established methods for controlling crime as well as allowing crime to flourish. This move by the Trump regime is one of the latter.
Using the military to patrol the streets and over-inflating charges for non-violent crime while turning a blind eye on actual violence is a tactic meant to ensure that tensions continue to grow in D.C. and will almost certainly incite a violent response, which the administration will then use as an excuse to crack down even harder and to expand the tactic to other cities around the country.
Donny 2-Dolls is not hiding his attempts to rig the 2026 elections. Rachel Maddow points out three ways he is trying to upset the democratic process:
- He has asked Texas Republicans to give him five more congressional representatives in their state. And he's not stopping with Texas.
- He is demanding a new census in an attempt to claim that the current congressional districts are invalid so he can discount the results of their votes if they don't support him.
- He is following Russian President Putin's advice to try to eliminate mail-in voting.
What can you do this week?
Robert Reich offers five practical steps you can take to fight the Trump regime:
- Call your congressional representative...every day if you can
- Attend local town halls
- Join local resistance groups...or organize one yourself
- Boycott organizations that are caving to the Trump regime
- Protect the most vulnerable in your community
"Remember: We are the leaders we've been waiting for."
Keeping you informed...
At first, it might seem like this is an easy question to answer. A fair vote would mean that each person is given one vote. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly reinforced the idea that the weight and worth of each voters vote should, as nearly as practicable, be equal. In an election between two candidates, this is simple...the candidate receiving the most votes wins the election.
But things get complicated quickly. What happens when a third-party candidate enters the race, particularly if that third party "splits" the votes that would otherwise have gone to a certain party? In a simple case, let's say that 60% of a given district's voters favor Party A over Party B. If an election is held and there is one candidate from each party, the candidate representing Party A will win. But what if there are two candidates representing Party A running? If they are equally represented by voters, then each candidate would get 30% of the vote, and the candidate representing the less-popular Party B would be the winner of the election with only 40% of the vote.
In order to ensure that we have a truly representative democracy in this country, we have to do something to address this issue. There are several popular options for voting:
Choose One: In this system, voters can select one and only one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes overall wins.
Ranked Choice Voting: Voters can vote for multiple candidates in order of preference. When votes are counted, ballots favoring less-popular candidates will have their votes counted for the second-choice candidate instead. This continues until a winning candidate is selected.
STAR Voting: Voters can assign a number of stars (0-5) to each candidate, and each star is counted as if it were a single vote, and the two candidates with the most stars overall are finalists. The winner is elected based on how many of the ballots ranked each candidate above the other candidate, regardless of how many stars each one received.
Each of these methods can be used in our current winner-take-all elections or adapted to be used with proportional multi-representative elections. But the Choose One system currently used tends to promote two-party domination, over-polarization of our political system, and voters forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. It is imperative that we move towards a system that encourages more candidates to run in our elections, but we won't get there until we are able to change the way we count our ballots.
On the lighter side...
