TV News LIES

Thousands of people from across the country descended on Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, on Saturday. They arrived by bus, by car and by plane to gather for the All Roads Lead to the South rally, following the supreme court’s Louisiana v Callais decision last month, which essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act and severely limited protections against voting discrimination.

Organized by a coalition of national and local civic engagement groups, the rally took place outside the Alabama state capitol building, in the same plaza where the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches – three nonviolent demonstrations in support of Black voting rights – are enshrined.

“We’re here, Montgomery, not at a stopping point, but at a starting point,” Steven L Reed, mayor of Montgomery and the first Black person to hold the position, told the crowd. “We’re here in this city because of the spirit, because of the courage and because of the commitment of our forefathers and foremothers who got us to this point.”

Following the supreme court decision, Republican-led states rushed to redraw their voting maps in ways that weaken Black political power. Tennessee and Florida have already passed new maps, while Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia seem poised to follow. Mississippi temporarily paused redistricting efforts, with the state’s governor promising to revisit the issue soon.

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After several months of heated arguments over whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) should release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the dispute has neared a boiling point. With one recent media appearance after another, the DNC chair, Ken Martin, has set off fierce criticism and even derision, while offering notably illogical explanations for keeping the autopsy secret.

As the controversy simmers, no one has more at stake than the party’s latest standard-bearer. Kamala Harris, apparently preparing for another run, leads in polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. One of the last things she needs is a widely publicized narrative from the DNC about failures of her 2024 campaign. A maxim from George Orwell applies: “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past”.

At present, Martin is holding firm to his announcement last December that he would not fulfill his promise to make the autopsy public. That was a boon to Harris, but this spring’s escalating uproar over the decision has given her reason to distance herself from it.

Last week, NBC News reported that Harris was “signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time – telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations”.

But Harris hasn’t made any public statement that she believes the autopsy should be released. Her “signaling” is evidently an effort to disassociate herself from the taint of Martin’s unpopular decision without openly opposing it.

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The Texas Supreme Court on Friday shut down Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) effort to penalize the dozens of Democratic legislators who fled the state last summer in an attempt to block a rare mid-decade redistricting effort.

Abbott asked the all-Republican court in an emergency petition last August to find that the Texas House’s Democratic leader, Houston Rep. Gene Wu, had vacated his office when he and more than 50 other Democrats refused to return to Texas to pass a new GOP-drawn congressional map.

In a Friday opinion, authored by Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock, the Lone Star State‘s high court rejected the request.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” wrote Blacklock, who was first appointed to the bench by Abbott in 2018.

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Tina Peters, a former elections clerk who was the first local official convicted over efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, will go free from prison after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted her sentence Friday.

Polis told Colorado Public Radio earlier in the day from the governor’s office that he would cut her almost nine-year prison sentence to 4 1/2 years. By June 1, she will have been in prison for more than 600 days.

The governor added that Peters “did not interfere with any election, did not have to do with ballot counting, but it was illegal access to the computer room.”

“She thought she was trying to back up the software before it was updated,” Polis said. “She did it illegally. There’s no question about it. And she deserves to go to prison. And I think this is a more appropriate, even harsh, frankly, sentence for that crime.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid by Virginia Democrats to revive a voting map designed to help their party wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives from President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in November’s midterm elections.

The justices declined to halt a ruling by Virginia’s top court that blocked a voter-approved pro-Democratic map for the midterms, denying a request by Democrats in the state. The court’s action came in a brief and unsigned order that provided no rationale. No justice publicly dissented.

Democrats pursued the revised electoral map - crafted to flip four Republican-held U.S. House of Representatives seats to Democrats - as part of a nationwide political battle initiated last year by Trump to redraw the boundaries of U.S. electoral districts for partisan benefit.

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Democratic state representatives in Minnesota began a sit-in in their house chamber on Thursday night after the Republican speaker failed to put a gun violence prevention bill up for a vote.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reported the sit-in began at about 9pm local time.

Samantha Sencer-Mura, a Democratic representative from Minneapolis, first announced the plan on Wednesday from the floor of the state’s house of representatives, giving speaker Lisa Demuth, a candidate for governor, 24 hours to give the bill a vote before the sit-in would start.

The Minnesota senate, controlled by Democrats, narrowly passed the gun violence prevention omnibus earlier this month. The house, where there is a 67-67 vote tie and a Republican speaker in charge, has so far not taken up the bill.

The push for new gun laws came after a school shooting at Annunciation Catholic church last August, where two students were killed and others injured during a school-wide mass. Minnesota also saw the killings of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shootings of state lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, last summer.

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