With the help of the courts, Republicans have won the redistricting wars. The pro-Democratic Virginia redistricting has been thrown out, and the Supreme Court has given southern states the go-ahead to get rid of all their non-White congresspeople — which they are racing to take advantage of.
It probably won’t save Mike Johnson’s Republican majority in the fall, but it will turn a big Democratic popular-vote victory into a small Democratic House majority.
Other than that, everything that was happening last week is still happening: Trump still isn’t admitting his strategic blunder in Iran, so the price of gasoline keeps rising. The climate change catastrophe keeps creeping closer. Trump’s popularity keeps falling, but the stock market keeps rising for some reason I can’t fathom. Ukraine continues to seize the initiative from Russia, but Putin also can never admit that he made a mistake, so the killing will continue. The hantavirus scare continues.
So this seemed like a good week to do a book review: War and Power by Phillips O’Brien. It focuses on two questions: Why do analysts keep making horribly wrong predictions about how wars will turn out? (Kyiv was supposed to fall in a few days, remember.) And what does a proper understanding of war say about any possible conflict between China and the US, maybe over Taiwan?
The review should be out maybe around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary around noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Why is the stock market doing so well? Because many of the huge and widely-held tech-oriented enterprises are doing — or seem to be doing — very well. And the money available to invest, of which there is a lot!, gravitates toward corporate winners.
Should the U.S. stock market be reflective of broad scale economic conditions? Why? Oil-related revenues are galloping up as drivers necessarily pay higher prices. The market in general is not lamenting the loss of SNAP benefits. As for ACA dropoffs, Medicare Advantage is corporatizing Medicare, good news from an investment perspective.
A bigger worry for Democrats who must regain the Senate and its power over executive appointments because the House is not enough? Within just y-8 weeks before the November elections, Donald Trump can address “affordability” in some immediately apparent ways and thereby reduce the potential for big D turnout and political conversions at the ballot box. That plus tinkering with voter registration, mail balloting and election-eve processes and the market will not feel the pain the man so richly deserves.