u/EighthFirstCitizen

So last year around this time a pregnant feral cat showed up in my barn. I started feeding her and fed the babies after they were birthed. When they were eventually big enough to separate I caught all the babies (kept two and found homes for all the others) and then trapped the mom and had her spayed. She's been living in in the barn ever since where I leave food out for her.
This morning I went out to deposit her usual food and she had three probably four or five week old kittens with her... So called the vet to ask if it was possible the spay failed and he was pretty confident it did not. Considering how long ago we got her spayed and how quickly cats can get pregnant, I'm inclined to agree because I figured she would have birthed a clutch already if it did fail. So I'm wondering if it's known behavior for a spayed cat to adopt or look after another cats babies.

I'm a regular reader of Andrew's Egger's Morning Shots and generally enjoy it. However, today's had one part about the Alito's decision in Callais that I felt deserves some push back:

"Still, there’s a reasonable argument to support Justice Samuel Alito’s conclusion that the way some courts had chosen to apply the VRA over the years had become preposterous—finding that if a state’s population could support a racial gerrymander creating a certain number of majority-minority districts, it was bound by law to do so."

While I'm sure if we were to dig through every court's application of the VRA we can find some examples that are "preposterous," the issue with Callais is Alito's remedy. Even if Alito didn't explicitly kill section 2 of the VRA, he might as well have. The Callais ruling establishes such a high bar for section 2 that it's now basically impossible to apply it at all. Clarence Thomas was actually more honest in his concurrence where he stated it should simply be done away with. Instead what Alito did is more sinister. He more or less turned section 2 into a legal quest for the Golden Fleece. Section 2 can only be applied after sowing a field with fire-breathing oxen and getting past a never-sleeping dragon. That's not reasonable solution to a minority of "preposterous" lower court rulings at all.

More that that, even if Alito was making a good faith effort to curtail problematic applications of section 2, does anyone think republican legislators are genuinely doing that? The glee with which several, like Marsha Blackburn, jumped onto twitter to talk about erasing democratic leaning districts seems to suggest otherwise. Any reasonability to Alito's arguments fly out the window when looking at the impact of millions of primarily African Americans having their voting power diluted. The GOP can claim they're drawing their maps on the grounds of partisan advantage instead of race, but in this case that's in effect a distinction without a difference.

We are supposed to be members of the pro-democracy coalition. Historically speaking, the United States didn't become a "full democracy" until the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. Those are bedrock pieces of our modern experiment with multi-racial democracy. Alito's decision is the culmination of a long effort to turn back the clock on that experiment. There isn't any reasonability behind that effort, just long standing racial animus that should be roundly denounced.