I have written before about how Ohio congressional districts are so gerrymandered that election after election sees 12 Republicans and 4 Democrats being sent to Congress even though the popular vote is much closer to a 50-50 split. In the statehouse, Republicans won 62% of the seats while getting slightly fewer votes than Democrats

In a major victory today, a three-judge panel of federal judges unanimously ruled that the Ohio congressional map was unconstitutional because of blatant gerrymandering and had to be redrawn by June 14.
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Abigail Disney, the great niece of the famous animator Walt Disney, has added her voice to those who criticize the excessive salaries paid to the CEOs of companies, including Disney CEO Bob Iger. His salary is 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee. It is interesting that she too uses the term ‘neoliberal’ as a pejorative, something that I wholeheartedly endorse.
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Addictions are frighteningly easy to acquire and tremendously difficult to get rid of. While no single treatment method works for everyone, the punitive approaches of harsh penalties such as prison time for possession and use of drugs for what essentially has become an illness seems misguided. But in the US, the heavy hand of the private profit-seeking pharmaceutical sector that benefits from creating drug addicts and the private prison system that benefits from incarcerating large numbers of people prevent more enlightened and humane methods from being widely used.
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It is quite extraordinary how on the one hand the US political-media class in the US is outraged, absolutely outraged, by alleged Russian attempts to sway US elections while at the same time they are openly calling for a military coup in Venezuela to overthrow president Nicholas Maduro and install Juan Guaidó as president. This is not the first time that the US has done it. The US expressed great joy when Hugo Chavez seemed to have been ousted only to end up with egg on its face when he beat back the coup.
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The Indian general elections began on April 11 and will continue until May 19, with the results to be announced on May 23. It is an important election that will show how much support current prime minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP party have for their right-wing, Hindu nationalist agenda. But in this post, I want to focus on the impressive way that Indian elections are conducted. It is a mammoth undertaking since 900 million people are eligible to vote for 2,354 registered political parties and the law requires that every voter should not have to travel more that 2 km (1.24 miles) to cast their ballot. This means that election officials have to lug some of the 2.3 million electronic voting machines to the remotest parts of the country. They have to take one machine up to a height of 15,256 feet and travel 35 km with another just to get to a single resident, the temple priest in the Gir National Forest in Gujarat.
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I am not naïve. I know that politics is a dirty business and that people will do unsavory things to help their chosen candidate win. But there are some things that so sicken me that I feel the urge to say the hell with it and go and become a hermit just to avoid reading about it.

One such case is the attempt by two Republicans to recruit gay Republicans to allege that Democratic contender Pete Buttigieg had sexually assaulted them. Fortunately that plot was exposed by Hunter Kelly, the person who was being used for the purpose
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The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful lobbies in the US, successfully thwarting many attempts at serious gun control laws. It started out as an organization dedicated to the responsible use of guns but over time was taken over by zealots who opposed any and all attempts at controlling the spread of even the most lethal weapons, even if the net result was that seriously disturbed people could get their hands on them.
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