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CLOSE Wisconsin’s redistricting case isn’t just about Wisconsin. If the group of Democrats suing the Badger State are successful, every state will have to follow new rules when they draw congressional and legislative maps. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

 The U.S. Supreme Court building. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite)

 WASHINGTON - U.S. Supreme Court justices showed deep divisions Tuesday over a gerrymandering case from Wisconsin that could have far-reaching national implications.

 Liberal justices expressed openness to the idea that courts should intervene when lawmakers draw election maps that greatly favor their party. Conservatives were skeptical that judges could come up with a way to determine whether and when legislators had gone too far.

 In the middle of it all — as expected — was Justice Anthony Kennedy. Both sides see him as the one who will likely cast the deciding vote and they pitched their arguments to him.

 A three-judge panel last year ruled 2-1 that maps for the Wisconsin Assembly were so heavily Republican that they violated the constitutional rights of Democratic voters. Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether the lower court got the ruling right.

 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg questioned what would happen to the "precious right to vote" with maps like Wisconsin's that lock in a majority for one party.

 "If you can stack a legislature in this way, what incentive is there for a voter to exercise his vote?" she asked. "Whether it's a Democratic district or a Republican district, the result — using this map, the result is preordained in most of the districts."

 I never ask for God to choose sides but with the eroding of our democracy I pray God's will includes #fairMaps! This is for all the marbles! https://t.co/S21Y2rVnmt — Vice Chair,Rep Bowen (@DavidFBowen) October 2, 2017

 RELATED: Redistricting case could ripple beyond Wisconsin

 RELATED: Federal court strikes down GOP-drawn maps

 RELATED: Court to Wisconsin Republicans: Redraw election maps

 Chief Justice John Roberts countered that legislatures have long been the ones in most states to determine where political lines are drawn.

 “The whole point is you’re taking these issues away from democracy and you're throwing them into the courts," he told the attorney for the group of Wisconsin voters who brought the case.

 If they succeed, the nation's high court will have to decide in case after case whether to toss out maps favoring one party over the other, he said. And the public will suspect the court's rulings are based on partisanship, he warned.

 “That is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country," he said.

 The stakes are high for Wisconsin's Democrats, who have been out of power for seven years. The case represents one of their last shots — if not their very last shot — of gaining a foothold in the Legislature in the foreseeable future.

 But the case could also have a broad national impact. If Wisconsin's maps are thrown out, states will have to follow new rules when they draw congressional and legislative districts, limiting their abilities to give edges to either party.

 The packed gallery included Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican former governor of California who has championed redistricting reform, and Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), one of the top leaders to sign off on the GOP-friendly maps.

 The Supreme Court has long wrestled with the question of whether maps can be so one-sided as to violate the Constitution.

 Both sides focused their arguments on Kennedy, who has written that overly partisan maps can violate the Constitution but that courts have never had a way to measure when that happens.

 He asked Erin Murphy, an attorney for the Wisconsin Legislature, whether it would violate the Constitution for a state to pass a law that required lawmakers to draw maps that gave maximum advantage to one side (while still complying with traditional redistricting principles).

 “I’d like the answer to the question," Kennedy said.

 Murphy said such a law would violate the Constitution, but emphasized that no such law was in effect in this case.

 Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin — a former Kennedy clerk — argued Wisconsin's maps are constitutionally sound and contended a victory by the Democrats would prompt a slew of litigation across the country.

 He told the justices the plaintiffs hope to "launch a redistricting revolution" that would force maps around the country to be redrawn.

 "I would expect that almost every single map drawn by a legislature will be challenged immediately if plaintiffs prevail," he said by email before Tuesday's arguments.

 Those bringing the case disputed that, saying litigation could advance only in states with the most extreme maps.

 Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center argued the case on behalf of the Democratic voters from Wisconsin. He told the court it was the "only institution" in America that could prevent lawmakers from drawing maps that helped themselves at the expense of voters.

 “Politicians are never going to fix gerrymandering," he said. "They like gerrymandering.”

 The map for the Wisconsin Assembly, he said, "is so extreme that it effectively nullifies democracy."

 The center, based in Washington, D.C., hopes to curb partisan gerrymandering by both sides. Some Republicans — including Schwarzenegger, U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Ohio Gov. John Kasich — are siding with the Wisconsin Democrats.

 ”I say it is time to say hasta la vista to gerrymandering and it is time to terminate gerrymandering," Schwarzenegger said on the plaza outside the court.

 Every 10 years, states must draw new election maps to account for population shifts. In Wisconsin and most other states, politicians get to draw those lines.

 Republicans took full control of Wisconsin's government in the 2010 elections and used their power to draw maps that greatly favor them.

 Democratic voters sued in 2015, arguing their voting rights had been violated, and the panel of judges sided with them last year. (Unlike other types of cases, redistricting lawsuits are first heard by a panel of three judges and then go directly to the Supreme Court.)

 ARCHIVE: Democrats sue state election officials over 2011 redistricting

 The Supreme Court is expected to rule by summer.

 Wisconsin is often closely divided, but that doesn't reveal itself in legislative races.

 In 2012 — a year when Democratic President Barack Obama handily won Wisconsin — Democrats received nearly 52% of the vote in Assembly races, yet took just 39 of the chamber’s 99 seats.

 In last year's election, Republican Donald Trump topped Democrat Hillary Clinton by the slimmest of margins in the presidential race, but the Republicans laid claim to a 64-35 majority in the Assembly.

 The Democratic voters who brought the lawsuit contend both sides should have an equal chance to capture the same number of seats. If one side can get 60 seats with 52% of the vote, the other should be able to do the same thing, Smith argued.

 They proposed a new test to determine whether maps were unfairly one-sided. It counts “wasted votes” — that is, any votes beyond those needed to elect a candidate — to determine the “efficiency gap” of a map.

 Maps have large efficiency gaps when they spread one party’s voters into districts in a way that creates a significant number of wasted votes for them.

 Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether courts should adopt a relatively new social science theory rather than waiting for more scholarship. Justice Neil Gorsuch said he was worried new rules would be so vague that states wouldn't know what they were allowed to do.

 Roberts called the plaintiffs' test “sociological gobbledygook.”

 Justice Stephen Breyer said the social science measurements may be gobbledygook, but the idea of fairness is not and there are efficient ways for courts to determine what's fair.

 Justice Elena Kagan said courts should be able to determine if maps are fair by using the same tools lawmakers use to draw maps. Computer programs allow lawmakers to put in place maps they can count on to keep them in power.

 “When legislatures think about drawing these maps, they’re not only thinking about the next election, they're thinking often — not always — but often about the election after that and the election after that and the election after that," she said.

 Read or Share this story: https://jsonl.in/2kj7VMp ||||| Today may have been only the second day of the Supreme Court’s new term, but it may also prove to be one of the biggest. The justices heard oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A federal court struck down the plan last year, agreeing with the plaintiffs that it violated the Constitution because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering – that is, the practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one party and put another at a disadvantage. After roughly an hour of oral argument this morning, the justices seemed to agree that partisan gerrymandering is, as Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged, “distasteful.” But there was no apparent agreement about whether courts could or should get involved in policing the practice.

 The case arose after Republicans won majorities in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature and captured the governor’s office, giving them control over the maps that were drawn after the 2010 census. In the 2012 elections, Republicans won slightly less than half of the statewide vote, which translated into 60 seats in the state’s 99-seat assembly; by contrast, Democrats won just over half of the statewide vote but garnered only 39 seats. Two years later, Republicans won 52% of the vote and 63 seats, while Democrats won approximately 48% of the vote and 36 seats.

 A group of challengers argued that the new redistricting plan amounted to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. They contended that the new plan sought to dilute Democratic votes across the state, using two methods: “cracking,” which divides up supporters of one party among different districts so that they do not form a majority in any of them; and “packing,” which puts large numbers of a party’s supporters in relatively few districts, where they win by large margins.

 The dispute went to a divided three-judge district court, which Congress has designated as the forum for redistricting challenges. That court regarded the case as an easy one. Although it may sometimes be difficult to tell when politics plays too influential a role in redistricting, the lower court conceded, this case is “far more straightforward”: The Republican-controlled legislature drafted a redistricting plan to lock in the party’s control of the state legislature, even though it could have created a different plan that would have accomplished redistricting goals without giving Republicans such a partisan advantage.

 The district court may have regarded the case as a “straightforward” one, but few justices seemed to share that sentiment today. That’s not particularly surprising, because the issue of partisan gerrymandering has deeply divided the Supreme Court in the past. Thirteen years ago, the justices rejected a challenge to Pennsylvania’s redistricting plan, with four justices agreeing that courts should decline to review partisan-gerrymandering claims, because it is too hard to come up with a manageable test to determine when politics plays too influential a role in redistricting. Four other justices would have allowed courts to review partisan-gerrymandering claims. That left Justice Anthony Kennedy, who agreed that the Supreme Court should stay out of the Pennsylvania case but suggested that courts could play a role in reviewing partisan-gerrymandering cases in the future if a workable standard could be found.

 Before the justices got to the merits of the case this morning, they tackled another question: whether the plaintiffs have a legal right – known as “standing” – to challenge the 2010 map at all, particularly because some of them live in heavily Democratic districts. Kennedy (whom many regard as the key vote in the case) acknowledged that the plaintiffs could not point to a specific Supreme Court case in their favor, but he asked Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin whether the plaintiffs might have standing if their claims were grounded in the First Amendment, rather than a right to equal protection of the laws. Kennedy seemed to suggest that they would, telling Tseytlin that such plaintiffs would have a First Amendment interest in having their preferred political party be strong, rather than weak.

 Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to disagree. He told attorney Paul Smith, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs challenging the map, that allowing plaintiffs in a partisan-gerrymandering case to challenge an entire map seemed inconsistent with the court’s rule that plaintiffs in racial-gerrymandering cases can only challenge their own districts, not the whole map.

 Smith countered that the two scenarios are different: In racial-gerrymandering cases, he argued, the claim does attack a specific district; by contrast, a plaintiff in a partisan-gerrymandering claim is challenging the dilution of one party’s votes statewide.

 If five justices were to agree that the plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the whole map, it would allow them to avoid ruling on the merits of the case. But it does not look as though there are five votes for that outcome – especially if, as Kennedy’s comment suggests, he would allow the lawsuit to go forward. And so most of the one-hour argument today was spent on the substance of the case, and in particular on two closely related questions: Should the courts get involved in reviewing partisan-gerrymandering cases at all; and, if so, what standard should they use to review such claims?

 Roberts made clear that, in his view, the Supreme Court should stay out – for the good of its institutional reputation. He told Smith that if the plaintiffs win, the courts would be flooded with partisan-gerrymandering claims, which would all wind up at the Supreme Court because, unlike in most cases, in which the court can choose which cases to review, the court is generally required to review redistricting challenges. For example, if the Supreme Court rules for the Democrats in a case, Roberts continued, most people will not understand that the decision rests on a complicated calculus. Instead, Roberts posited, the average person will say, “That’s a bunch of baloney,” and chalk the ruling up to a preference for the Democrats. And that, Roberts stressed, will cause very serious harm to the status and perceived integrity of the Supreme Court.

 Smith pushed back, predicting that any potential harm to the Supreme Court’s reputation would pale in comparison with the harm to democracy if the state prevails. Partisan gerrymandering is already bad, he cautioned, but we are on the “cusp of a more serious problem” because officials drawing redistricting maps now have access to vast amounts of data, and because the electorate is now so polarized that voting has become more predictable than ever. If you uphold the Wisconsin map, he told Roberts ominously, the court will be confronted with a “festival of copycat gerrymandering,” and people will lose faith in democracy altogether.

 Roberts was unconvinced, telling Smith that his rule would take democracy away from the legislatures based on social science “gobbledygook.” The court’s newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, was relatively quiet, but he appeared to show his cards when he asked Smith to name the source of the Supreme Court’s authority to revise state redistricting maps. The court should be cautious, Gorsuch emphasized, about stepping in here.

 The plaintiffs seemed to find a more receptive audience in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who told Erin Murphy – arguing on behalf of the Wisconsin legislature – that the “precious right to vote” is at the heart of this case. If legislators can “stack” a legislature, so that the result of the election is “preordained,” she queried, where is the incentive for voters to actually go to the polls? “Society should be concerned,” Ginsburg concluded.

 Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced similar concerns. She asked Murphy whether it was okay for one party to “stack the decks, so that for 10 years,” it could garner a minority of the vote but still win a majority of the seats in the legislature.

 But although the justices spent some time at the 50,000-feet level, contemplating the broader implications of their ruling, much of their time was spent in the weeds, on what Justice Stephen Breyer described as another “hard issue” in the case: If courts are going to get involved with partisan-gerrymandering cases, what are manageable standards that they can apply to evaluate the claims? Breyer offered Tseytlin a five-part test that looked at, among other things, whether one party controls the legislature and the redistricting process; whether the redistricting maps create “partisan asymmetry” – that is, they do not treat the different political parties equally; and whether that asymmetry is “persistent” and extreme. “I suspect,” Breyer told Tseytlin, that the test is manageable.

 Justice Elena Kagan seemed to agree. She observed that, if the technology now available to legislators is so good that legislators can draw the maps easily, the same techniques can be used on the back end to evaluate what the legislature was considering when it was drawing the maps. This is not “airy fairy,” she stressed, but instead “pretty scientific.”

 Not surprisingly, Tseytlin disagreed. He maintained that the Supreme Court had already rejected some of these kinds of inquiries in its earlier cases. And he repeated a theme that would resurface throughout the hour: Any “standards” that the court might articulate to evaluate partisan-gerrymandering claims would rely heavily on statistics and battles between each side’s experts.

 Murphy picked up this theme, reminding the justices that the kinds of standards that the plaintiffs have proposed have identified “false positives” – districts that appear to be the result of gerrymandering but are not – 50% of the time. What, she asked rhetorically, are legislatures supposed to do when confronted with problems like these?

 Justice Samuel Alito was also skeptical. He told Smith that, although everyone has been looking for a manageable standard, one of the theories on which the plaintiffs relied – known as the “efficiency gap,” which looks at the number of votes “wasted” in each election, either because they are cast for the losing candidate or because the victorious candidate did not need them to win – was not developed until very recently. “Is this the time for us to jump into this,” Alito asked, when there are still so many questions about the theory?

 Although it was obvious that, for Alito, the answer was “no,” for Smith the answer was “yes.” In the 2004 redistricting case, the court provided a blueprint for future partisan-gerrymandering challengers: They would need to give the court manageable standards to evaluate their claims. And that is exactly what social scientists have done, Smith argued. In this case, the district court used three different social-science standards and concluded that the 2010 Wisconsin map was, for purposes of partisan gerrymandering, one of the worst maps ever.

 Kagan seemed to be on board with Breyer’s standard, but looked for reassurance that the courts would not be inundated with challenges to other redistricting maps in the future. Smith suggested a variety of measures that seemed to placate Kagan, but not Roberts, who complained that the kind of statistics-based predictions that Smith’s measures would call for had “been a very hazardous exercise” for the court in the past. Alito also complained about the “dozens of uncertainties” in the process that Smith was proposing.

 Perhaps notably, Kennedy did not ask Smith any questions at all during Smith’s 30 minutes at the lectern – which, although there’s no way to know, would seem to bode well for the challengers. Smith seemed to direct his closing remarks straight at Kennedy, as he told the justices that if they do not act now, it could be too late. We’ll know by the end of June whether and how the court will act.

 This post was originally published at Howe on the Court.

 Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Argument analysis: Cautious optimism for challengers in Wisconsin redistricting case?, SCOTUSblog (Oct. 3, 2017, 2:13 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/10/argument-analysis-cautious-optimism-challengers-wisconsin-redistricting-case/ ||||| Kennedy’s Vote Is in Play on Voting Maps Warped by Politics Image People including Bill Millhouser protesting gerrymandering outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The court was hearing a case based on voting district maps in Wisconsin. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

 WASHINGTON — Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has long been troubled by extreme partisan gerrymandering, where the party in power draws voting districts to give itself a lopsided advantage in elections. But he has never found a satisfactory way to determine when voting maps are so warped by politics that they cross a constitutional line.

 After spirited Supreme Court arguments on Tuesday, there was reason to think Justice Kennedy may be ready to join the court’s more liberal members in a groundbreaking decision that could reshape American democracy by letting courts determine when lawmakers have gone too far.

 Justice Kennedy asked skeptical questions of lawyers defending a Wisconsin legislative map that gave Republicans many more seats in the State Assembly than their statewide vote tallies would have predicted. He asked no questions of the lawyer representing the Democratic voters challenging the map.

 There was something like consensus among the justices that voting maps drawn by politicians to give advantage to their parties are an unattractive feature of American democracy. But the justices appeared split about whether the court could find a standard for determining when the practice was unconstitutional.

 “Gerrymandering is distasteful,” said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “but if we are going to impose a standard on the courts, it has to be something that’s manageable.”

 Some of the court’s more liberal members said the problem represented a crisis for democracy and that the Supreme Court should step in.

 “What’s really behind all of this?” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked. She answered her own question: “The precious right to vote.”

 In extended remarks, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. expressed worry that the court’s authority and legitimacy would be hurt were it to start striking down voting districts in favor of one political party or another.

 “That is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country,” he said.

 Paul M. Smith, a lawyer for the Democratic voters, urged the court to act. “You are the only institution in the United States that can solve this problem just as democracy is about to get worse because of the way gerrymandering is getting so much worse,” he told the justices.

 Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, Mr. Smith said, other states will follow Wisconsin’s lead. The round of redistricting that will follow the 2020 census, he said, “will produce a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen.”

 The Supreme Court has never struck down an election map on the ground that it was drawn to make sure one political party wins an outsize number of seats. The court has, however, left open the possibility that some kinds of political gamesmanship in redistricting may be too extreme.

 The problem, Justice Kennedy wrote in a 2004 concurrence, is that no one has devised “a workable standard” to decide when the political gerrymandering has crossed a constitutional line.

 On Tuesday, he pressed Erin E. Murphy, a lawyer for Wisconsin lawmakers, about whether a state law could require drawing districts to have the maximum number of votes for a given political party. Other justices followed up on the point, and Ms. Murphy gave equivocal answers.

 Justice Kennedy grew frustrated. “I have to say that I don’t think you ever answered the question,” he said.

 Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Ms. Murphy more fundamental questions.

 “Could you tell me what the value is to democracy from political gerrymandering?” Justice Sotomayor asked. “How does that help our system of government?”

 Ms. Murphy said that gerrymandering “produces values in terms of accountability that are valuable so that the people understand who isn’t and who is in power.”

 That did not seem a sufficient reason, Justice Sotomayor said, “to stack the decks.”

 Much of the argument concerned various statistical tests for identifying extreme gerrymandering. Misha Tseytlin, Wisconsin’s solicitor general, said the challengers were relying on flimsy and hypothetical social science evidence.

 Image Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican and the former governor of California, says districts should be drawn by independent commissions rather than politicians. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

 “Plaintiffs are asking this court to launch a redistricting revolution based upon their social science metrics,” he said.

 Chief Justice Roberts told Mr. Smith that courts are poorly equipped to evaluate social science data. “It may be simply my educational background,” the chief justice said of the studies before the court, “but I can only describe it as sociological gobbledygook.”

 Other justices seemed more comfortable with the studies.

 “This is not kind of hypothetical, airy-fairy, we guess, and then we guess again,” Justice Elena Kagan said. “I mean, this is pretty scientific by this point.”

 Justice Sotomayor said that “every single social science metric points in the same direction.”

 There may be close cases, Justice Kagan said, but this was not one of them. “This map goes pretty much over every line,” she said.

 Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in remarks that may have been aimed at Justice Kennedy, sketched out a series of criteria that he said amounted to a workable standard. He said courts should act only when there is one-party control of the state government and a map that creates a persistent and unjustified partisan advantage that is “an extreme outlier” when compared to other maps.

 “I suspect that that’s manageable,” Justice Breyer said.

 The case, Gill v. Whitford, No. 16-1161, started when Republicans gained complete control of Wisconsin’s government in 2010 for the first time at the beginning of a redistricting cycle in more than 40 years. Lawmakers promptly drew a map for the State Assembly that helped Republicans convert very close statewide vote totals into lopsided legislative majorities.

 In 2012, after the redistricting, Republicans won 48.6 percent of the statewide vote for Assembly candidates but captured 60 of the Assembly’s 99 seats.

 Democratic voters sued, saying the maps violated the Constitution. “This is one of the most extreme gerrymanders ever drawn in living memory of the United States,” Mr. Smith said on Tuesday.

 The case is part of a larger debate over politics in redistricting, one that has taken on new urgency with the advent of sophisticated software. Both parties have engaged in partisan gerrymandering, but these days, Republicans have an advantage following a wave of victories in state legislatures that allowed lawmakers to draw election maps favoring their party.

 Some critics, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican and the former governor of California, say districts should be drawn by independent commissions rather than politicians. Prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and his first attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., are pushing to undo the redistricting gains Republicans made after the 2010 census when the next census is taken three years from now.

 Outside the court during the arguments, several dozen activists rallied with signs that read “Equal Districts Under Law” and “Hands off our Districts!”

 Mr. Schwarzenegger, who attended the argument, said afterward that he is hopeful that the justices will put a stop to partisan gerrymandering.

 “We are here today to ask the Supreme Court to fix something that the politicians will never do,” he said. “As Einstein said, those who created the problem will not be able to solve it.”

 Last year, a divided three-judge Federal District Court panel ruled that Republicans in Wisconsin had gone too far. The map, Judge Kenneth F. Ripple wrote for the majority, “was designed to make it more difficult for Democrats, compared to Republicans, to translate their votes into seats.”

 The decision was the first from a federal court in more than 30 years to reject a voting map as partisan gerrymandering.

 Wisconsin officials say that the lopsided representation of Republicans in the State Legislature is a product of geography rather than gerrymandering. Democrats have packed themselves into cities, effectively diluting their voting power, while Republicans are more evenly distributed across most states, the brief said.

 Judge Ripple acknowledged that the distribution of the population explains at least some part of the gap.

 “Wisconsin’s political geography, particularly the high concentration of Democratic voters in urban centers like Milwaukee and Madison, affords the Republican Party a natural, but modest, advantage in the districting process,” he wrote.

 But he added that partisan gerrymandering amplified that advantage.

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What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Justice Anthony Kennedy may end up casting the deciding vote in one of the Supreme Court's biggest cases this term—and he appears to be leaning toward joining the court's more liberal justices when it comes to reining in gerrymandering. The court heard arguments Tuesday in a redistricting case from Wisconsin, where Democrats say Republicans created districts so lopsided that they violated voters' constitutional rights. Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, seemed skeptical of the arguments made by lawyers defending the Wisconsin voting map and didn't ask any questions at all of the lawyer representing the Democratic voters, which "would seem to bode well for the challengers," SCOTUSBlog notes. Justices including Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was time for the Supreme Court to step in and stop partisan gerrymandering, though Chief Justice John Roberts said he worried that the court itself would be seen as partisan if it started striking down voting districts, the New York Times reports. That would "cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country," he said. Republicans including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sen. John McCain are siding with Democrats on the issue. "It is time to say hasta la vista to gerrymandering and it is time to terminate gerrymandering," Schwarzenegger said outside the court, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.


Article:

Pacific Coast News

 Call Neal McDonough the anti-Tiger: the TV actor recently gave up his part on the new ABC show Scoundrels just three days into filming, because the script called for him to be in a sex scene -- something the married Catholic father-of-three has made clear he won't do, RadarOnline.com has learned.

 McDonough -- a talented 44-year-old actor who has appeared in projects like Band of Brothers, Desperate Housewives, Boomtown and Medical Investigation -- has steadfastly refused to do sex scenes of any kind throughout his career.

 PHOTOS: Celebrity Cheaters

 The Scoundrels script called for him to be in a sex scene with sultry actress Virginia Madsen, and leaving the show might have cost himself up to a cool $1 million.

 ABC has called the split a “casting change.”

 Said an insider: "It has cost him jobs, but the man is sticking to his principles.” ||||| According to Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, the authors of the new book "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality," the state of the American marriage is awfully grim. We have a stratospheric divorce rate and a surge of single parents. Couples who stay together are often trapped in sexless, passionless unions. An entire industry — from couples therapy to sex supplements — has emerged to help people "rekindle the spark" without straying from the confines of monogamy.

 But Ryan and Jethá also have a theory for what's causing this misery: From a biological perspective, men and women simply aren't meant to be in lifelong monogamous unions. In "Sex at Dawn," which uses evidence gathered from human physiology, archaeology, primate biology and anthropological studies of pre-agricultural tribes from around the world, they argue that monogamy and the nuclear family are more recent inventions than most of us would expect — and far less natural than we've come to believe.

 Before the advent of agriculture, they argue, prehistoric humans lived in a much less sexually possessive culture, without the kind of lifelong coupling that currently exists in most countries. They also point to the bonobos, our closest relatives, who live in egalitarian and peaceful groups and have astronomical rates of sexual interaction, as evidence of our natural inclinations. While Ryan and Jethá's book (Ryan is a psychologist, and Jethá a practicing psychiatrist, in Spain) is often a bit scattered and hard to follow, its provocative argument is also impossible to dismiss.

 Salon spoke to Ryan over the phone from Barcelona about the problem with American marriages, why gay men understand relationships better than straight men, and the hidden meaning of human testicle size.

 You paint a bleak picture of the state of marriage in the West, particularly in the United States. What makes it so bad?

 Marriage in the West isn’t doing very well because it’s in direct confrontation with the evolved reality of our species. What we argue in the book is that the best way to increase marital stability, which in the modern world is an important part of social stability, is to develop a more tolerant and realistic understanding of human sexuality and how human sexuality is being distorted by our modern conception of marriage. Certainly growing up in the '70s and '80s there were very few kids I knew whose parents weren’t divorced at least once. The economic, emotional, psychological cost of fractured relationships is a major problem in American society — with single mothers and single-parent families.

 You argue that much of this misery stems from changes that occurred when humans developed agriculture, around 8000 B.C. What happened?

 The advent of agriculture changed everything about human society, from sexuality to politics to economics to health to diet to exercise patterns to work-versus-rest patterns. It introduced the notion of property into sexuality. Property wasn’t a very important consideration when people were living in small, foraging groups where most things were shared, including food, childcare, shelter and defense. It makes perfect sense that sexuality would also be shared — why wouldn’t it be when paternity wasn’t an issue?

 When you have agriculture, men started to worry about whether or not certain children were theirs biologically, because they wanted to leave their accumulated property to their own child. At that point, people also made a very clear connection between sexual behavior and birth. Lots of people didn't have a very clear understanding of the cause and effect of sex and birth, but when you have domesticated animals living side by side with people, they start to notice that the characteristics of a certain male that has mated with a certain female show up in the offspring.

 One of the central ideas of much biological and genetic theory is that animals will expend more energy protecting those they’re genetically related to — siblings, parents, offspring — as opposed to those they're not related to. Why wouldn't that apply to humans?

 There are many, many exceptions to that rule in nature. One of the exceptions we talk about in the book are the vampire bats that share blood with each other. They go out and they suck the blood at night and then they come back to the cave and the bats that didn’t get any blood will receive blood from other bats. They share, and that has nothing to do with genetic connection. And in terms of animals that are much more closely related to humans, when you look at bonobos and their promiscuous interaction, it’s virtually impossible for a male to know which of his offspring are related to him biologically. So to say that there’s this inherent concern with paternity within our species, I just don’t see evidence for that.

 Does this mean that humans didn't form couples before the advent of agriculture?

 Because human groups at the time knew each other so well and spent their lives together and were all interrelated and depended upon each other for everything, they really knew each other much better than most of us know our sexual partners today. We don’t argue that people didn’t form very special relationships — you can see this even in chimps and bonobos and other primates, but that bond doesn’t necessarily extend to sexual exclusivity. People have said that we’re arguing against love — but we're just saying that this insistence that love and sex always go together is erroneous.

 Given that these people have been dead for thousands of years, and we don't have a fossil record of sexual activity, isn't this hard to prove?

 The evidence comes from several different areas. We look at pre-agricultural people who have been studied today and horticultural people who have been studied by anthropologists. There’s a fair amount of information about the sexuality of people who haven’t been deeply exposed to Western influence. There are accounts from travelers and colonialists, first-contact accounts from historical records, that we rely on. But you can also extract a great deal of information from the human body itself — from the design of the penis to the volume of the testicles to the sperm-producing potential of the testicular tissue and the way we have sex.

 What does our testicle size tell us about the way we have sex?

 Our testicles aren’t as big as those of chimps and bonobos, but our ejaculation is about four times as big in terms of volume. The theory is that when males compete on the level of the sperm cell, they develop much larger testicles, because in promiscuous animals, the sperm of the different males is competing with the sperm of other males to get to be the first to the egg. And the fact that our testicles are not as small relative to our body as the monogamous gibbon or gorillas reinforces the idea that we have been non-monogamous for a long time.

 Plus the design of our penis strongly suggests that it evolved to create a vacuum in the female reproductive system, thereby pulling out the semen of anyone who was there previously. There are all kinds of indications of sperm competition in the human male. And one of the things that we suggest in the book that no one else has suggested is that because the testicles are genetically the part of the body that adapts fastest to environmental pressure, it’s quite possible that our testicles are much smaller than they were as recently as fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, to reflect the historical cultural imposition of monogamy. And of course we all know that sperm count is dropping precipitously even as we speak.

 But that drop in sperm count has been reported over the last few decades, and I don't think American culture has becoming less sexualized since the 1950s — I think the opposite is true.

 Well, it’s hard to say because it’s only been measured for about the last 100 years. So it’s very difficult to know what was happening before that. But yeah, it does seem to be plummeting faster and faster, and there are indications that it has a lot to do with industrial contaminants in the environment, and antibiotics and growth hormones in the food supply and so on.

 But I think there’s this bifurcation of American culture where you’ve got the liberalization on one side with states passing gay marriage, but then you have other states veering off in the other direction. I think the Bill Clinton and Lewinsky situation could have been such a great opportunity for the culture to grow up instead of wasting so much time and money and political capital in this investigation of a victimless crime. If the Clintons had gone on their "60 Minutes" interview and just said, "You know what, our sex life is nobody’s business but ours," I think the country would have been so much better off.

 I think from a cultural standpoint the idea of strict monogamy has far less currency within the gay male world than it does within the straight world. I’m a gay man, and I think probably about half the gay male couples I know are in open relationships. Why do you think that is?

 First of all, they’re both men, so they both know what it’s like to be a man. They both know from experience that love and sex are two very different things, and it seems that for women the experience of sexuality is much more embedded in narrative, in emotion, in emotional intimacy. But also it’s really hard to judge what women would be like if they hadn’t been persecuted for the last five or six thousand or ten thousand years for any hint of infidelity.

 Gay men in the United States have also by definition gone through a process of self-examination. The whole process of coming out is a process of integrating sexuality into your life in a way that takes courage, and it’s not something that happens naturally. I think gay people have an advantage because they’ve already gone through a process of saying: "Look, my sexuality is what it is. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m going to live openly and in accord with it." That puts them on a different level than most heterosexual people who are able to pass along and pretend that they fit into the normal parameters.

 It seems like many Americans, in particular, have a very strong notion that a marriage must remain monogamous at all costs — and that any infidelity is grounds for divorce. In other countries, like France, for example, that doesn't seem to be the case.

 I’ve been living off and on for almost 20 years here in Barcelona, and from outside, the United States looks very adolescent, in a positive and negative sense. There's its adolescent energy — its idealism — but there’s also an immaturity and intolerance toward the ambiguity of life and the complexity of relationships. The American sense of relationships and sexuality tends to be very informed by Hollywood: It’s all about the love story. But the love story ends at the wedding and doesn't go into the 40 years that comes after that.

 So if monogamous marriage isn't the right arrangement for us, what is?

 We’re not really arguing for any particular arrangement. We don’t even really know what to do with this information ourselves. What we’re trying to do in the book is give people a more accurate sense of where we came from, why we are the way we are, and why certain aspects of life feel like a bad fit. I think a lot of people make a commitment when they’re in love, which is a sort of a delusional state that lasts a couple of years at most. I think it was Goethe who said that love is an unreal thing, and marriage is a real thing, and any confusion of the real with the unreal always leads to disaster.

 All we’re really hoping for is to encourage more tolerance and more open discussion between men and women about sexuality and about marriage, and to come to see that marriage isn’t about sex. It's about things that are much deeper and more lasting than sex, especially if you have children. And the American insistence on mixing love and sex and expecting passion to last forever is leading to great suffering that we think is tragic and unnecessary. |||||
What is a summary?

– Neal McDonough is no longer part of the ABC cast of the new Scoundrels because the script called for him to do a sex scene. The devout Catholic and father of three balked, and he got replaced three days into filming for his trouble, reports Radar. McDonough, 44, is best known for his roles on Desperate Housewives, Band of Brothers, and Boomtown. Plenty of big-name female actresses refuse to do love scenes, notes Margaret Eby at Salon, but it's rare to find a guy who draws the line. "It’s easy to dismiss McDonough as out of touch with the industry or perhaps even a religious nut, but the more I thought about it, the more I admired the guy. Given the constant turmoil in most stars’ love lives and how difficult it seems to be to stay married in Hollywood, maybe McDonough’s move isn’t so much self-defeating as it is smart."


This morning, erstwhile American hero Tila Tequila posted a badly photoshopped picture to Facebook. In it, she holds a pistol in her right hand, with her left on her hip, as the apparent light of God pours out of the cloudy sky behind her. She’s wearing a red swastika armband and the unmistakable cap of the SS uniform. She’s standing in front of Auschwitz.

 While no one was looking, two years after her apparent conversion to Judaism, Tila Tequila has reached perhaps what was the only possible conclusion to her trajectory: as an incoherent, Hitler-sympathizing, Illuminati-evangelizing, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

 UPDATE: The image Tila Tequila posted to Facebook included the signature of Ben Garrison, a libertarian cartoonist who, for whatever reason, is the frequent target of 4chan’s /pol/ board. Garrison maintains that he “had nothing to do with the damn thing,” and at his request, we’ve removed the signature.

 “Tilisis is the GODDESS of LOVE & WAR! Learn your facts!” reads the caption on this morning’s photo, apparently referring to a goddess alter ego she’s created for herself. She’s responded to a few of the inevitable negative commenters, mostly to call them “racists” and link to a post on her blog entitled “Why I Sympathize With Hitler Part 1: True History Unveiled.”

 In this excerpt from the post, she wink-wink, nudge-nudges that current governments might have something to learn from Der Führer.

 Here is a man who was not a coward, stood up for his country in a DESPERATE TIME OF NEED (unlike all of our cowardly leaders), and yet not only did he try his best to help his country and people get out of what was a time of depression, economic collapse, high unemployment, amongst many other things… he lost the war AND was painted out to be a monster after his death. This is what breaks my heart.

 On Friday, Tequila posted a Daily Mail article about James Marcus Howe, a director who’d worked on her show and who was murdered in his Los Angeles home last month. Her lengthy caption seemed to revel in Howe’s death, and included the text, “GOD SEE’S [sic] YOU DIRTY FUCKING KIKES WORKING FOR THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN AND I HAVE RETURNED AS HIS MESSENGER!”

 She’s been recording music, too. Her newest track, “It’s Going Down!” (touted as MUST HEAR on her site), sounds like it was recorded inside of a cardboard box with a Yak Bak for a mic.

 Sample lyrics:

 Jewluminati motherfuckers hate me

 Oh no they don’t wanna date me

 Nor you nor you nor you too

 Worldwide Genocide blame it on the jews

 Tequila also refers to herself as “Hitila” –an apparent portmanteau of, yes, “Hitler” and “Tila,” –and raps “So now they call me a Nazi/No, bitch, I’m just good at Yahtzee.”

 As reprehensible as it is, I’d still rather listen to “It’s Going Down!” than her previous recording, which finds Tila “speaking in tongues” over a martial horn loop, or the one before that, which consists of the phrases “I’m gonna do a little soundcheck” and “Turn up the bass” repeated ad nauseam in a grating Ying Yang Twins whisper.

 There’s plenty of garden variety anti-Semitism on Tequila’s blog Facebook, and YouTube channel–we must stop the evil Jews who run the world’s banks and media, that sort of thing–but the theorizing gets several orders of magnitude more batshit than that. I’ll leave you with this sad, insane excerpt from a post entitled “Dear Diary: The True Story of My Epic Life Battle in 3 Minutes!” about Tequila’s battles with reptilian agents of the Illuminati:

 It was so strange because at that time I had no idea what was happening to me. All I knew was that it was all real. I looked up into the sky and a portal of light opened up! It was a circle and there were a bunch of Angels looking down on me, watching my battle. Then I flew up there to be with them and then it continues…. ’til this very day. Oh, except for the reptilians. After I slained 3 of them last year they have stopped bothering me. They DID however, ask me to join their team before the battle began. Of course I politely apologized before I turned down the deal and then BAM MOTHERFUCKER! The battle began!

 (Top image: Nate Cepis/ANIMALNewYork) ||||| Reality star Tila Tequila converts to Nazism, calls herself ‘Hitila’ in anti-Semitic new song

 By Arturo Garcia

 Monday, December 9, 2013 19:29 EDT

 NEW: How Tila Tequila’s new embrace of Adolf Hitler is going down with white supremacists

 Reality television star Tila Tequila emerged from a year of relative obscurity by apparently celebrating a former associate’s death and expressing sympathy for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler both online and in a new song.

 Tablet magazine reported on Monday that Tequila, who came into national prominence through the dating show A Shot At Love in 2007 and 2008, posted a photo illustration of herself on Facebook bearing an armband adorned with a swastika and an SS hat while standing in front of the entrance to the Auschwitz prison camp.

 The caption for the picture states, “Tilisis is the GODDESS of LOVE & WAR! [sic] Learn your facts!” In another post Monday evening, Tequila — born Tila Nguyen in Singapore in 1981 — wrote, “I am She, the Queen who hath come to save you from this dark world filled with NWO parasite invaders,” an apparent reference to the “New World Order,” a popular boogeyman figure among conspiracy theorists.

 She also responded to criticism of the image by linking to a Dec. 7 blog post in which she defends Hitler, saying his history was rewritten after the defeat of the Axis in World War II.

 “I am not going to sit here and say that I hate Jewish people because that is not the case nor is this about Jews,” Tequila wrote. “It is about Hitler and his side of the story that was never told since he was not the victor. However, those of you with a closed mind can think I am being anti-semite all you want because I already told you that I am not, nor will I repeat myself again.”

 The barrage of pro-Nazi imagery came less than two years after a public statement on Tequila’s part declaring she had converted to Judaism, saying “I just feel like the Jewish people have such a beautiful way about them, and I can’t wait to officially be Jewish. Shabbat Shalom.”

 Animal New York reported that Tequila also used anti-Semitic language in a Dec. 6 post making light of the death of 42-year-old James Howe, who was shot and killed in their home on Nov. 27.

 “I TOLD YOU MY TRUTH SHALL COME OUT ONE DAY!!!! A TRUE WARRIOR OF GOD IS ALWAYS VICTORIOUS!! POW! NO PUN INTENDED! [sic]” she wrote.

 According to Animal, Tequila also refers to herself as “Hitila” in a new song she posted online on Sunday, which features the lyrics, “Jewluminati motherf*ckers hate me,” and, “Worldwide genocide, blame it on the Jews.”

 In April 2012, Tequila entered rehab after suffering a brain aneurysm caused by an accidental drug overdose.

 NEW: How Tila Tequila’s new embrace of Adolf Hitler is going down with white supremacists

 [Image via Tila Tequila Facebook page] ||||| Welcome to anonymoustruthblog.com

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What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Perhaps because no one has been paying attention to her lately, Tila Tequila recently decided to convert to Nazism. The reality star has posted a number of questionable pictures on her Facebook page, including one (apparently since removed) of herself wearing an SS cap and swastika armband while standing in front of Auschwitz, Animal New York reports. She also refers to herself as "Hitila" in a new song she posted online, according to the Raw Story, and has been posting entries on her blog like, 'Why I Sympathize With Hitler Part 1: True History Unveiled." (Making this even weirder: She publicly converted to Judaism less than two years ago.) Why does she sympathize with Hitler? We'll let her explain it to you: "Here is a man who was not a coward, stood up for his country in a DESPERATE TIME OF NEED (unlike all of our cowardly leaders), and yet not only did he try his best to help his country and people get out of what was a time of depression, economic collapse, high unemployment, amongst many other things… he lost the war AND was painted out to be a monster after his death." As if all of the above was not insane enough, she's also created a goddess alter ego for herself called "Tilisis," is into the Illuminati, and thinks Paul Walker was murdered.


Here is a news article: The wounded officer is Crystal Almeida, 26. The third victim was identified as Scott Painter, a Home Depot loss-prevention officer.

 Almeida and Painter were still in critical condition on Wednesday, but they were making "remarkable recoveries," Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall said at a news conference Wednesday morning.

 Hall thanked the community for its support and asked for continued prayers.

 The suspect, 29-year-old Armando Luis Juarez, was arrested Tuesday night after a police chase that ended in a neighborhood near Love Field. He was initially arrested on one charge of aggravated assault against a public servant and another against the civilian.

 A capital murder charge was added Wednesday morning after Santander's death.

 The district attorney's office has assigned a team of attorneys to prosecute Juarez in "pursuit of justice," District Attorney Faith Johnson said in a written statement. ||||| DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – A Dallas police officer has died less than 24 hours after being shot at a North Dallas Home Depot store. Another officer and a store employee, who were also both shot, remain hospitalized.

 Officer Rogelio Santander died at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas hospital at 8:11 a.m. Wednesday.

 Dallas police Chief U. Renee Hall held a press conference outside the hospital this morning. When CBS 11 News reporter Robbie Owens offered sympathies the Chief said, “We appreciate it” and then made the announcement.

 “We come before you this morning with broken hearts and we regret to inform you that Officer Rogelio Santander, Badge 10934, has succumbed to his injuries,” she said. “We’re asking you to continue to pray for the [Santander] family and the DPD family.”

 Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings also announced Officer Santander’s death during a regularly scheduled city council meeting. Interrupting the meeting, which was already in progress, he said, “It is with great sadness that we must inform you that Officer Rogelio Santander, Badge #934, passed away at 8:11 this morning.”

 Along with Officer Santander, Officer Crystal Almeida and the Home Depot security guard, now identified as Scott Painter, all underwent surgery after the shooting. Officer Almeida and Mr. Painter both remain hospitalized.

 During the press conference Chief Hall said, “We are happy to report that Officer Crystal Almeida and our loss-prevention officer Scott Painter is making remarkable recovery. They are still in critical condition but we are optimistic about what we’re seeing with them right now.”

 The man who police say shot the officers and the security guard – Armando Luis Juarez – woke up behind bars today. After the shooting, a manhunt, and late night police chase, Juarez was taken into custody and ultimately transferred to the Dallas County Jail very early Wednesday morning.

 Officers Santander and Almeida both joined the Dallas Police Department there years ago, assigned to the Northeast Division.

 A source close to the investigation told CBS 11 News reporter J.D. Miles that Officer Santander was shot in the back of the head and Officer Almeida was shot in the face.

 Wednesday morning Dallas police Sergeant Michael Mata, who is also president of the Dallas Police Association, said, “When an officer is shot or killed or injured in one city, it affects every officer across the country. We are one huge family.”

 The shooting happened just after 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Home Depot store in the 11600 block of Forest Central Drive, near U.S. Highway 75 and Forest Lane, after the two police officers were called to help an off-duty officer.

 According to an arrest warrant affidavit, Dallas police Officer Seward was working off-duty at the store when Mr. Painter alerted him that a male customer was acting suspiciously in the store. Officer Seward detained the person, identified him as Armando Juarez, and discovered a felony warrant had been issued for him.

 Officer Seward had called on-duty police officers to the scene and Officers Santander and Almeida responded. All of the police officers met in the store’s loss-prevention office and then Officer Seward then went to Officer Santander and Almeida’s squad car to look up the felony warrant for Juarez and confirm that was the person being detained inside.

 The affidavit details how Officer Seward was returning to the building when he heard a “shots fired” broadcast over his police radio, proceeded inside and found Officers Santander and Almeida and Mr. Painter all on the floor of the loss-prevention office “with apparent gunshot wounds.”

 Police say there was a witness inside the office who said he saw Juarez shoot all three people.

 Immediately after the shooting armed officers were seen in back of the Home Depot as employees and customers rushed out of the store and away from the area.

 A massive search for the suspect — including police helicopters and officers on the ground — followed after witnesses reported the shooter had fled on foot and may be hiding in a nearby creek. But when police reviewed security camera video they discovered Juarez fled from the scene in a white-colored work truck. It was then police put out a description of the truck — that had “GX4” on the back fender, a ladder rack, and large exhaust pipes rising from the front — and issued a be on the lookout (BOLO) alert.

 Police later spotted the truck, with Juarez and a female passenger inside, in Southeast Dallas and gave chase. Officers were ultimately able to corner Juarez in a residential neighborhood near Dallas Love Field Airport and took the 29-year-old man into custody. The unidentified woman was also detained. It isn’t know if she is facing any charges.

 “We got our man,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said at a late-night news conference.

 Moments after Juarez was taken into custody, Chief Hall thanked the officers on a radio call.

 “Base to all units: Excellent work, excellent work. Thank everybody for their diligence in this matter. Appreciate you so very much and we’re still praying for our brother and sister,” she said.

 A number of officers continue to hold vigil at Presbyterian Dallas hospital. “Most of the family that is coming is already here,” Mata said. “Obviously, they’re holding on the best they can. This [being shot] is something I think all [police] families realize they could be facing. But when it happens, you never want it to be you.”

 At the time of his arrest Juarez had an outstanding warrant for Felony Theft. With the death of Officer Santander, Juarez has now been charged with Capital Murder in addition to the charge of Aggravated Assault on a Public Servant for the shooting of Officer Almeida. He remains in jail on a $1.1 million bond. ||||| Law enforcement officers stand guard at the driveway entrance to the emergency room at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Two Dallas policemen were reportedly shot at a nearby Home Depot and reportedly... (Associated Press)

 Law enforcement officers stand guard at the driveway entrance to the emergency room at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Two Dallas policemen were reportedly shot at a nearby Home Depot and reportedly were transported to the Dallas hospital on Tuesday, April 24, 2018. (Louis DeLuca/The Dallas Morning... (Associated Press)

 DALLAS (AP) — A Dallas police officer died Wednesday after a shooting that wounded another officer and an employee at a home improvement store, the city's mayor said.

 Mayor Mike Rawlings was presiding over a city council meeting when he announced the death of Rogelio Santander, a member of the police force for three years. Santander, officer Crystal Almeida and a loss-prevention officer for Home Depot were shot Tuesday by a man identified by police as 29-year-old Armando Luis Juarez.

 The two officers and the store loss-prevention officer underwent surgery for their injuries after the shooting in the north of the city, Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall said late Tuesday.

 Almeida and the loss-prevention officer, who hasn't been identified, were in critical condition Wednesday.

 Police arrested Juarez following a high-speed car chase. He's being held at the Dallas County jail on charges of aggravated assault on a public servant and felony theft. He was taken into custody shortly before 10 p.m.

 "We got our man," Rawlings said at a late-night news conference at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.

 But relatives of Juarez said they couldn't believe he would be involved in such a violent episode.

 "There's no way my son could've done this," Ruben Juarez told The Dallas Morning News, adding that he didn't think his son owned any guns.

 Armando Juarez's grandmother, Janie Longoria, told reporters Tuesday that her grandson is a "sweet, lovable person," but that his friends are a bad influence.

 "And I told him to stay away from those people," she said.

 Police were called to the store to help an off-duty police officer to remove Juarez from the store. Police have not said if he was suspected of shoplifting or why he was being ejected from store. Juarez opened fire as he was being escorted from the store and made his escape. Several law enforcement agencies were involved in the pursuit that led to his eventual arrest.

 Rawlings said late Tuesday that he remains "upset at the lack of respect for our police in this city and in our country."

 In 2016, four Dallas police officers and a transit officer were shot dead by a sniper in an ambush that came toward the end of a peaceful protest over the police killings of black men in other cities.

 Juarez was arrested in January on a charge of unlawful use of a motor vehicle after authorities say he was found in a stolen vehicle. He also pleaded guilty to a drug-possession charge. |||||
A summary of this is?

– A 27-year-old Dallas police officer died Wednesday after being shot the day prior at a Home Depot in Lake Highlands. The Morning News identifies the officer as Rogelio Santander. He'd been called to the store around 4pm by a cop who was working an off-duty job there and noticed Armando Luis Juarez was behaving oddly. The off-duty cop detained Juarez and learned he had an outstanding felony warrant. Santander and Crystal Almeida, 26, responded to the scene; authorities say they and a loss prevention officer employed by Home Depot were shot by Juarez as he was being escorted from the store. A source tells CBS Dallas Santander was shot in the back of the head and Almeida was shot in the face. She remains in critical condition, as does the Home Depot employee. Police say Juarez fled and a high-speed car chase ensued, per the AP. He was apprehended Tuesday night and is being held on charges of aggravated assault on a public servant and felony theft. "We got our man," said Mayor Mike Rawlings.