May 8, 2026
What a Friday. I’m writing this with The West Wing on one monitor (my emotional support presidency — sometimes you just need to watch Jed Bartlet say the word “decency” out loud) and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie queued up on the other (it hit VOD this week and yes, I will be watching a cartoon plumber go to space to remember a simpler time). It is, frankly, a coping setup.
Anyway. Onto the news. But first some new music I’ve been liking. Beta Radio. Give it a listen.
The Cubs Bullied Texas Like It Was Personal
Final score: Cubs 7, Rangers 1. Down in Arlington, the Cubs decided the Rangers’ pitching staff was a piñata and started swinging.
Seiya Suzuki launched a homer. Michael Busch drove in three. Pete Crow-Armstrong sprayed two hits including a double, presumably while humming. Nine hits, zero errors, and a tidy bullpen night — Javier Assad got the win, and Ben Brown came in for four scoreless innings and three strikeouts out of the pen, basically running the speedrun version of pitching.
Texas managed two hits all game. Two. That’s not a lineup, that’s a lineup card with a typo. Kumar Rocker took the L for the Rangers, and his ERA in this one came in at a charming 7.36, a number that makes you want to issue a hug and a Gatorade.
Cubs have now won three in a row. Wrigley vibes are immaculate.
The Padres, Meanwhile, Forgot How Hitting Works
Final score: Cardinals 6, Padres 0. Yeah. Zero. As in nothing. As in zilch, nada, the loneliest number, the result you get if you ask a Magic 8-Ball how many runs San Diego scored.
The Padres came home to Petco and got shut out by St. Louis on a single hit. One. Hit. A solo Jackson Merrill knock — the rest of the lineup combined for the kind of stat line you write on a dry erase board and then quickly erase before anyone sees. Manny Machado, Xander Bogaerts, Fernando Tatis Jr., Freddy Fermin — every star in the order went hitless. They might as well have been waving pool noodles up there.
It was a 0-0 game heading into the fifth, and then St. Louis hung a six-spot in one inning, which is the baseball equivalent of slipping on a banana peel, falling off a cliff, and landing in a pit of more banana peels. Griffin Canning got tagged for all six runs in 4.1 innings. His ERA’s now sitting at a delightful 12.46. You don’t want a 12.46. You want anything else. A 12.46 is the ERA of a man being chased.
The Padres also coughed up two errors. Rookie Cardinals starter Michael McGreevy went six innings, gave up that one Merrill hit, and struck out nine. He looked like Bob Gibson out there. The Padres looked like they were waiting for the bus.
Trump’s Oil Chart: A Masterclass in How to Lie With a Graph
Okay. Buckle up. This one’s fun in a “wow, the audacity is impressive actually” kind of way.
On Friday, President Trump posted a chart on social media titled “Oil is Down 25% or $30 Per Barrel Since Sleepy Joe.” Big swooping line going from $120 down to $90, framed as proof that oil is way cheaper since Biden left. It looked very official. It had numbers and everything.
There’s just one tiny problem: it’s nonsense. The kind of nonsense where you stare at it for a second, tilt your head like a confused dog, and go “wait, what?”
Here’s why.
The “$120” figure on the chart? That’s a reference to the approximate peak in US crude closing prices under Biden — a peak that came in 2022, more than two years before Trump returned to office, in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Read that again. It’s a price from a one-day spike during a different presidential year, dressed up as if it were the going rate at Biden’s farewell party.
And here’s the part the chart really doesn’t want you to think about: Joe Biden didn’t make gas expensive in 2022. Vladimir Putin did. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the global oil market did what oil markets do during major wars in oil-producing regions — it freaked out. Presidents have famously little control over global crude. What they do have control over is whether they themselves start a new war that spikes prices. And that brings us to the second half of the punchline:
Oil prices early in Trump’s second term were actually pretty low — US crude was below $60 for much of January 2026. Then in late February, Trump launched a war against Iran, and crude promptly jumped, briefly exceeding $110 per barrel in early April before settling around $94. So Trump’s spike isn’t from inheriting anything. It’s from a war he chose to start. The “Sleepy Joe” line on the chart is doing an incredible amount of heavy lifting for a man who got in a fistfight with the gas pump and then blamed his predecessor for the bruise.
What were oil prices actually doing when Biden handed Trump the keys? Below $80 per barrel on January 20, 2025. So translated honestly, oil is up roughly $14 a barrel since Biden left, not down $30. The chart cherry-picks a 2022 wartime peak, slaps “Sleepy Joe” next to it, and lets the eye do the lying. It’s the chart equivalent of saying “I’m down 50 pounds since college!” while not mentioning college was forty years ago and you’ve been gaining weight steadily since.
This isn’t even a new move. Trump has repeatedly said gas topped $5 per gallon under Biden without mentioning that this peak occurred in June 2022 — also Putin’s doing. The national average had come down to about $3.12 per gallon on Trump’s inauguration day in January 2025; it had increased to $4.55 per gallon as of Friday. Same sleight of hand, different fuel.
Moral of the story: when somebody shows you a graph with no dates on the x-axis and a vibes-based title, look closer. Then look at the source. Then maybe go for a walk.
The Supreme Court Just Made Gerrymandering Easier (and the Map-Drawing Wars Are On)
Stepping back from yesterday for a moment, because this one is shaping the political year: on April 29, the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais in a 6-3 ruling, and the redistricting world is still picking itself up off the floor and patting around for its glasses.
The short version: the Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that included a second majority-Black district, ruling it amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. The Court didn’t formally repeal Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — but in her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.” Which is the polite, robed-and-marbled way of saying “y’all just killed it, you’re just being shy about admitting it.”
Section 2, for the uninitiated, is the part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states to draw electoral maps to give racial minority voters the opportunity to elect their chosen candidates. With that guardrail effectively yanked out of the wall, states are very much off to the races. An hour after the Court handed down its decision, the Republican-controlled Florida House approved an aggressively gerrymandered map that could net Republicans four more House seats after the 2026 election. ONE HOUR. They had it ready to go. Picture an aide standing by the printer, finger hovering over the button, just waiting.
And it isn’t only one party doing the cartography. The map-drawing arms race has been going on for months and is starting to feel like a really weird Olympic event. Democrats in Virginia recently won a statewide vote on a new gerrymandered House map that could net them four more seats. Earlier, Texas redrew its legislative maps to provide Republicans a chance of winning five more seats, while California’s voters approved new maps in a referendum that could help Democrats gain five seats. Everyone’s drawing on the map. Some of these districts now look less like districts and more like Rorschach tests.
The bigger picture: with racial-vote-dilution protections weakened, partisan gerrymandering — already legal at the federal level — becomes the default move for whoever holds the pen in any given statehouse. State officials can redraw maps explicitly to favor one party as long as they don’t put the racial intent in writing. That’s a very easy bar to clear if you remember to send the spicy emails on Signal.
Defenders of the ruling argue the Court was simply enforcing the Equal Protection Clause and getting race out of map-drawing. Critics argue it’s the most significant rollback of voting protections since Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. The 2026 midterms are about to be the test case, and democracy is sitting in the back seat asking if we’re there yet.
Closing Thoughts
So: the Cubs are rolling, the Padres need a hug and possibly a hitting coach intervention, the President’s chart needs a footnote and an apology, and the Supreme Court has redrawn the redistricting playbook. Pretty packed Friday.
I’m going to go pour something cold, watch Sam Seaborn give a speech about the inherent dignity of public service, and then let an Italian plumber save the universe. You should do the same. Or whatever your version of that is. Self-care in 2026 is a vibe.
See you next week. Bring snacks.