Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Massive SCOTUS Case Could Guarantee House Control For GOP

The Supreme Court took a second look at a case that could result in handing the Republican Party guaranteed control of the House of Representatives last week, and initial reports suggest a major ruling is on the horizon. If the highest court in the land strikes down Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, the GOP’s hold over the House could become insurmountable.

Reports say that if Section 2 is removed, which has been interpreted previously as requiring the creation of majority-minority districts, the Republican Party could toss out a dozen Democratic-held districts in the South.

It all started when a group of voters challenged a 2024 congressional map by claiming that it pushes unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. This means the map sorts voters based on their race, which is a violation of the 14th Amendment.

The court heard two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments, with conservative justices signaling they are most likely going to undermine a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, though they might not strike it down completely.

“Wednesday’s oral argument was the latest chapter in a dispute that dates back to 2022, when Louisiana adopted a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. Roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black, but the 2022 map had only one majority-Black district out of the six districts allotted to the state. That prompted a group of Black voters to go to federal court, where they argued that the 2022 map violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination in voting practices,” SCOTUS Blog reported.

U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2. She then forbade the state from using this particular map in future elections and ordered the state to create a new map featuring two majority-Black districts.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit supported that ruling. It then gave the state until January 15, 2024, to produce a new map; otherwise, the lower court would develop a plan for the 2024 elections.

Louisiana then created a new map that created a second majority-Black district. Complaints came forward from a group of voters who referred to themselves as “non-African American.” A three-judge federal district court ruled that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, as it sorted voters based on race. The court banned the state from using the map in future elections.

“In May 2024, the Supreme Court put the three-judge district court’s ruling on hold, which allowed the state to move forward with using the new map in the 2024 elections. Voters in the 6th District, the new majority-Black district, elected Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s, to represent them,” SCOTUS Blog writes.

Louisiana and the Black voters then appealed to the Supreme Court, which listened to oral arguments for the first time since spring. The state stated that once the lower courts determined the 2022 map likely violated the VRA, it directed the state to redraw a map with a second majority-Black district. State Republicans’ primary goal was to provide protection for the state’s GOP incumbents, such as Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who is an active member of the House Appropriations Committee.

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Ninth Circuit Hands President Trump Sweeping Win Over Gavin Newsom — Trump Can Federalize California National Guard to Enforce Federal Immigration Law

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has denied en banc rehearing in Newsom v. Trump, effectively upholding the earlier panel decision that sided with Trump and affirmed his authority to federalize the California National Guard to support federal immigration enforcement.

When California officials refused to cooperate with federal agents, Trump invoked § 12406(3), federalizing and deploying 4,000 members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles to secure ICE facilities and restore order.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the State of California sued over President Trump’s order, claiming it was unconstitutional and violated state sovereignty.

Newsom wrote at the time:

“We are suing Donald Trump. This is a manufactured crisis. He is creating fear and terror to take over a state militia and violate the U.S. constitution. The illegal order he signed could allow him to send the military into ANY STATE HE WISHES. Every governor — red or blue — should reject this outrageous overreach. There’s a lot of hyperbole out there. This isn’t that. This is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic. We cannot let it stand.”

US District Judge Charles Breyer (brother of retired SCOTUS Breyer), a Clinton appointee, granted Newsom a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and said Trump’s decision to federalize the National Guard was illegal.

But the appellate panel ruled that the statute clearly empowers the President to act whenever he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

In practical terms, this means the Commander-in-Chief may call Guard troops into federal service when local or federal law-enforcement personnel cannot safely or effectively enforce the law.

After Senior Judge Marsha S. Berzon, joined by several liberal colleagues, requested a full-court rehearing, a vote of active Ninth Circuit judges failed to secure a majority, and rehearing en banc was denied on Wednesday. That denial makes the earlier Trump victory final within the circuit and binding precedent across nine Western states.

Judge Marsha Berzon’s 38-page dissent argued that the ruling “invited presidents, now and in the future, to deploy military troops… in response to commonplace, short-lived, domestic disturbances.”

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Key State Passes New Congressional Map ‘Locking In’ Additional GOP Seat

Duke University math professor Jonathan Mattingly conducted an analysis to discover if a new Trump-supported congressional map in North Carolina would result in the Republican Party locking in additional seats. The answer, he uncovered, is a resounding yes.

Three days before publishing his results on Sunday, the GOP revealed another mid-decade congressional map proposal that would bolster the party’s grip in Congress. It does so by expanding the boundaries of the state’s 1st Congressional District, which is currently held by Democrat Don Davis, pulling in some of the 3rd Congressional District, which is represented by Republican Greg Murphy.

The 1st District is the only one in the state considered a swing district, meaning it’s not a guaranteed win for either Democrats or Republicans.

A report from The News Observer shared Mattingly’s findings after the state’s Senate passed the map, sending it down to the House for final approval.

“Lawmakers returned to Raleigh on Monday and are expected to pass the proposed map, after failing to pass a full state budget before the end of the fiscal year in June or approve during its session last month additional funding to avoid Medicaid cuts,” the report said.

Mattingly claims the new map is all but certain to shift a House seat to the GOP for the foreseeable future if passed by the state’s full legislature.

“The previous map was not very responsive to changing public sentiment. But there was one district that was in doubt, and this one (new map) has largely removed that district,” he explained. “It’s very effectively shifted one district from the Democrats to the Republicans,” and “seems to lock in, 11-3, no matter what happens.”

North Carolina’s congressional map was redrawn in 2023 by the Republican-led legislature in order to provide the GOP with a boost, leading to the election of 10 Republicans and four Democrats during the 2024 elections. The article goes on to say that the map replaced a previous one drawn up by court-appointed “experts” for the 2022 midterm elections as a replacement for one drawn following the 2020 Census. It was ruled unconstitutional by federal courts in Harper v. Hall.

The map that was drawn after the intervention of the court led to a 7-7 split in the 2022 elections. The North Carolina Supreme Court gained a GOP majority that year, and the new court ruled it didn’t have jurisdiction over claims of partisan gerrymandering.

Mattingly’s latest analysis reveals the latest map would preserve a total of three seats for the Democratic Party under a variety of scenarios taking into consideration how residents might vote. Even if the statewide vote should shift significantly along party lines, the same number of Republicans, 11, would pull in victories.

“That pattern appears in a graphic from the new analysis, which looks at several statewide elections from 2016 and 2020, including races for governor, auditor and others, where the Democratic vote share ranged from just over 46% to more than 52%. The graphic shows how many seats Democrats and Republicans would likely win under different simulated map scenarios. It indicates that under the newly proposed map, Democrats would win only three seats across more than 10 elections tested, except in one case — the 2020 auditor’s race,” The News Observer wrote.

“When the electorate changes its mind dramatically — when it switches from 46% statewide to a 52% … you’d like to have a map with a number of districts that would change who controls them,” Mattingly stated in his analysis.

Researchers used the results from past elections to show how the new map packs voters into a district or splits them across district lines, which they claim will dilute their influence.

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Disabled Canadians increasingly under pressure to opt for euthanasia during routine doctor visits

Inclusion Canada CEO Krista Carr revealed that many disabled Canadians are being pressured to end their lives with euthanasia during routine medical appointments.

During an October 8 session of the Parliamentary Finance Committee, Carr, an advocate against Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), explained that Canada’s expansion of MAiD to the non-terminally ill has led to people with disabilities being pressured to end their lives during unrelated medical visits.

“Since the bill was brought in around Track 2 MAID … that has certainly changed people’s interactions with the healthcare system,” she explained, referring to the 2021 expansion that allowed those who are chronically ill but not terminally ill to be euthanized.

“People with disabilities are now very much afraid in many circumstances to show up in the health care system with regular health concerns, because often MAID is suggested as a solution to what is considered to be intolerable suffering,” she revealed.

Overall, 116 of Ontario’s 4,528 euthanasia deaths in 2023 involved non-terminal patients, with many of those killed from impoverished communities.

Data from Ontario’s chief coroner for 2023 revealed that over three-quarters of those euthanized when death wasn’t imminent required disability support before their death.

Similarly, nearly 29% of those killed when they were not terminally ill lived in the poorest parts of Ontario, and only 20% of the province’s general population lives in those areas.

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Congress Should Miss Their Paychecks Too

This week marks the third week of the government shutdown – and there continues to be no end in sight. This week, millions of federal workers officially missed their first paycheck. These workers are staring down the barrel of piling bills; many are unable to put gas in the car or food on the table for their families.

The consequences of a prolonged shutdown are stacking up fast. Federal services are grinding to a halt. Veterans’ career counseling and regional offices have gone dark. Flight delays and travel disruptions are wreaking havoc across the country. And for every week this drags on, the U.S. economy takes a $15 billion hit. A month-long shutdown means 43,000 more Americans are thrown out of work.

And yet, there’s one group that hasn’t missed a single paycheck: members of Congress. While working-class families are about to miss paychecks their livelihoods depend on, fat-cat politicians in Washington continue to get paid. It’s time for Congress to feel the pain they’re inflicting on millions of Americans.

Congress should miss their paychecks.

Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego displayed the hypocrisy out loud as the shutdown began. In an interview with NBC News, he defended his refusal to forgo his salary during the shutdown, saying, “I’m not wealthy, and I have three kids. I would basically be missing, you know, mortgage payments, rent payments, child support.”

Exactly, Senator. That’s precisely what millions of everyday Americans are facing right now.

Ask yourself – would this shutdown even happen in the first place if members of Congress couldn’t make their own mortgage payments or pay their own rent? If they were scrambling to fill up their gas tanks or stay on their feet? Not a chance.

My heart breaks for the families who are beginning to feel this impact while their members of Congress treat this like a political game. I’ve lived this struggle myself. In 2005, my husband Scotty was blinded by an IED suicide bomb while serving our country in Iraq. While he lay in a coma at Walter Reed, I was forced to navigate a system that offered no real support – not for him, and certainly not for me. I had resigned from my job to be by his side, while facing student loan debt and mounting care expenses. There were no safety nets, no clear guidance – just bureaucracy and silence.

That was 20 years ago. Shamefully, not much has changed. While I’m thrilled and thankful to see President Trump ensure that members of our military get paid, law enforcement, air traffic controllers, and millions of moms and dads are still missing paychecks.

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Lindsey Halligan Brings Russiagate’s Last Case To A Close After Seven Years Of Injustice

It may surprise some people, but until this week the Russia collusion hoax was still alive. Two prosecutions from the Robert Mueller era were still ongoing. On paper, the first, against a dozen Russians no one has ever seen or heard of, who were accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) without a shred of verifiable evidence, remains open. But for all practical purposes, the hoax is now over, because the other, far more consequential case finally came to an end on Monday thanks to the courage and persistence of the new U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan.

Many of us remember the abusive prosecutions Mueller’s team inflicted on figures such as Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and George Papadopoulos. Far fewer know about the collateral damage that extended beyond President Donald Trump’s circle. One of the most egregious cases targeted a Dutch-Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.

Alptekin had no connection to Trump, no connection to Russia, and no reason whatsoever to be caught in the Mueller dragnet. His only “crime” was hiring Gen. Michael Flynn’s consulting firm, the Flynn Intelligence Group, for a project unrelated to the 2016 election. The project involved raising awareness about an alleged radical Islamist cleric living in the United States, a matter of concern to Alptekin but irrelevant to anything Mueller was supposed to be investigating.

So why was Alptekin targeted? Because Mueller’s team combed through Flynn’s client list, searching for anyone they could pressure into making false claims. They zeroed in on Alptekin, attempting to coerce him into asserting that Flynn had secretly lobbied on behalf of Turkey without registering under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), intending to use that fabricated claim as leverage against Flynn and, ultimately, Trump. When Alptekin refused to lie, Mueller’s prosecutors proceeded to file bogus FARA charges against him.

Flynn’s business partner, Bijan Rafiekian, was hit with parallel charges. Unlike Alptekin, Rafiekian lived in the U.S., so his case went to trial. Predictably, he was convicted by a heavily partisan Northern Virginia jury, only for Judge Anthony Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, to throw out the verdict almost immediately, finding that the government had failed to prove its case. This alone is remarkable and highlights how in Alexandria, right across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., the jury pool is deeply tainted and partisan. After a long and messy appeals process, Rafiekian’s case was dismissed entirely.

Yet the related case against Alptekin somehow stayed alive. For seven years he lived in legal purgatory, unable to see his wife and children for fear of extradition, his business destroyed, projects abandoned, accounts frozen, millions in legal fees piling up, and his professional reputation shattered.

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DUBLIN RISES: Irish Citizens Explode in Wrath After Algerian Migrant Rapes 10-Year-Old Girl – Police Attack Protesters

Irish citizens have had enough, and the police protect the illegals. 

It’s a sad, but repetitive story: in the midst of the invasion of Europe by military-aged males posing as ‘asylum seekers’, a ten-year-old girl in Dublin, Ireland, was raped by an Algerian man who is housed, fed, and clothed by the Irish taxpayer’s money.

While in many EU countries the population has been drawn to apathy, in Ireland a fury has spread like fire among the citizenry, and for two nights the protests have centered around the migrant hotel.

The Guarda (Irish police), always ready to protect the invaders, charged on the protesting citizens, and in turn, officers were attacked with bricks, glass bottles and fireworks as the protest turned violent.

The Telegraph reported:

“Thousands gathered at the Citywest Hotel in Saggart after reports that a 10-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker.

Witnesses saw a police van set on fire as protesters waved Irish flags and chanted: ‘Get them out’.

The crowd attempted to breach a police cordon outside the hotel, with some carrying garden forks and other tools.”

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The New York Times Wants An America Without Americans

n Tuesday, Leighton Woodhouse wrote for The New York Times that conservatives are “spinning” a “mythology” that is “historically delusional.”

The delusional mythology Woodhouse is referring to? The belief that Americans are a “group of people with a shared history.”

According to Woodhouse, “The founding fathers were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely.” These “different” histories, however, were all rooted in Christianity. But Woodhouse wants readers to believe that this type of variety in Christianity proves America was born out of a multicultural diversity experiment.

Of course it wasn’t. The colonists shared a common language, moral framework, and writ large, a lineage. Yet Woodhouse insists otherwise.

The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.

In other words, Woodhouse is arguing that America is not the product of Americans at all. Rather, it’s just a cosmopolitan conglomerate held together by particular processes but not people. It’s why Woodhouse invokes “Mexican, Korean, Somalian” “anestries” as similar examples of American heritage just like English, Irish, and Scottish settlers. The implication of course is that America would be just as American even without “heritage Americans.”

But that’s not how nations work. As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson wrote in these pages, the very premise of the entire American legal and civic culture emerged from the specifically Christian claim that “All men are created equal,” and such conviction “arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.”

“The only people who ever took that self-evident truth [that all men are created equal] and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America,” Davidson pointed out. Not Mexicans, not Koreans, not Somalians, but English colonists who created America and thus became the first Americans.

And despite Woodhouse’s best efforts, there is in fact such a thing as a heritage American. They are the descendants of those who settled this land, fought for its independence, and built our institutions. The great statesmen of our nation understood this. They spoke not of a diverse collection of foreigners as tying the nation together, but of a people bound by blood, memory, and the sacrifices of the generations that came before them.

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Leftists Downplay Dem’s Nazi Tattoo After Calling Hegseth’s Christian Ink ‘White Nationalist’

he propaganda press was sick less than a year ago over a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross on Pete Hegseth’s chest. They called his Christian markings “white supremacist and extremist,” as they tried to derail his confirmation for secretary of defense. Some mistakenly thought the cross was a Nazi swastika. It isn’t.

Now the press is making excuses for the actual Nazi symbol that was tattooed on Maine’s Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner’s chest. Platner would challenge Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, if he can make it through the primary against Maine Gov. Janet Mills.

Platner got a large skull and crossbones in the style of the Nazi’s SS Totenkopf (death head) on his chest in 2007 while he was a Marine in Croatia. It was worn by Nazi guards at concentration camps and is considered a hate symbol, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

MSNBC found Platner’s tattoo, and some heinous things he said on Reddit (like, cops are “bastards”; white rural Americans are “racist” and “stupid”; black people “don’t tip”) merely “a political stress test.” None of it disqualifies him for office in their eyes.

Platner shared a video of himself topless on Pod Save America, saying opposition research had found the video. He tried to get ahead of it on Monday by explaining the tattoo on a friendly podcast. Pod Save America Host Tommy Vietor is the former national security spokesman for President Barack Obama.

After the terrible tat was exposed this week, Platner claimed he did not know it was a Nazi symbol and rushed to have it covered up. Is it conceivable that in the 18 years he has had that tattoo, he never looked up the image? That no one ever mentioned it to him?

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Trump Suggests US Strikes on Alleged Drug Shipments on ‘Land’ Are Coming Soon

President Trump on Wednesday suggested that US strikes on alleged drug shipments “on land” could be coming soon amid the US bombing campaign targeting boats in Latin America.

Trump has made similar comments before, and according to multiple media reports, the US is preparing to bomb Venezuela with the goal of ousting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and is using cracking down on drug trafficking as a pretext.

The president claimed to reporters at the White House that he had “legal authority” to launch the strikes, but Congress hasn’t authorized the bombing campaign, which the Constitution requires for launching a war. Trump said he may notify Congress of the plans to launch strikes on land targets, but didn’t say he would seek authorization.

“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land. And they haven’t experienced that yet, but now we’re totally prepared to do that. We’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when [they] come to the land,” the president said.

The president previously told Congress that he believes the US is now in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. Trump has framed the airstrikes as self-defense, pointing to the large numbers of drug overdoses in the US, but they are primarily caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which don’t come from Venezuela, something Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who has been very critical of the campaign, has pointed out.

“There is no fentanyl made in Venezuela. Not just a little bit, there’s none being made. These are outboard boats that, in order for them to get to Miami, would have to stop and refuel 20 times,” Paul told British journalist Piers Morgan this week.

“It’s all likely going to Trinidad and Tobago. There are a lot of reasons to be worried about this. Number one is the broader principle of when can you kill people indiscriminately when there’s war. That’s why when we declare war is supposed to be done by Congress. It’s not supposed to be done willy nilly. When there’s war you just kill people in the war zone, there are rules of engagement,” Paul added.

Since September 2, the US has bombed at least seven boats in the Caribbean and one in the eastern Pacific near Colombia, extrajudicially executing 34 people at sea, according to numbers released by the Trump administration, without providing evidence to back up its claims about the targets. Sources told The Washington Post on Wednesday that any US airstrikes in Venezuela would likely first target alleged trafficker encampments or clandestine airstrips, but regime change remains the ultimate goal.

“There really is no turning back unless Maduro is essentially not in power,” a person familiar with the administration’s deliberations told the Post.

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