Democrat Announces Resignation After State GOP Destroys His District

A Tennessee lawmaker is retiring because his district will no longer exist after this year.

Democratic Representative Steve Cohen announced Friday that he will not be representing Tennessee’s 9th congressional district after his term expires due to the state legislature’s recent decision to carve up the predominantly Black and Democratic voting base.

In future, the area will consist of several rural voting areas that are expected to lean Republican.

“This is by far the most difficult moment I’ve had as an elected official,” Cohen said during a press conference at his office.

Currently, Tennessee’s 9th district covers most of Memphis and its inner suburbs. The new map creates three alternative districts in the area, none of which include Memphis proper.

The progressive lawmaker told reporters that he has considered running in one of the other districts.

Cohen was first elected to the House in 2006 and has consistently won re-election ever since. He is the first Jewish person to represent Tennessee, a detail that has sparked criticism from some of his electoral challengers, who have argued that the majority-Black district should be represented by a person of color.

Tennessee state Representative Justin Pearson was aiming to challenge Cohen for his seat before the state passed its new map.

“I have an opponent who’s verbally facile, and can jump around and dance, and things like that, and if somebody thinks that’s who they wanted, that’s who they can have, because I can’t,” Cohen said Friday of Pearson. “I don’t dance anymore, jump around, but I think I was gonna win that race.”

Tennessee passed its maps last week, offering Republicans all nine seats in the House while eliminating the state’s lone Democratic district. Pearson will continue to run in the newly redrawn 9th district.

Donald Trump’s blatant corruption just got even more outrageous.

A recent financial disclosure revealed that the president bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stocks in tech companies and government contractors, including Palantir and Nvidia, NOTUS reported Friday.

On February 10, Donald Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Nvidia, a massive AI chip maker. A week later, Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with Meta. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, has spent more than a year cozying up to Trump.

Trump previously purchased between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, after clearing the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, the company’s second-most powerful AI chip, to China. A week later, the Commerce Department officially approved the sale. This week, after Huang traveled with Trump to China, the Commerce Department cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s chips—making way for Trump to make millions more.

Also on January 6, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another AI semiconductor company, which was authorized to sell their chips to Chinese customers a week later. Trump purchased at least $740,000 in AMD stock last quarter, according to NOTUS.

In the first quarter of 2026, Trump also purchased at least $260,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a private weapons manufacturer with hefty government contracts and ties to the president.

In January, Trump bought between $65,000 to $150,000 of Palantir stock, and sold between $1.1 million and roughly $5.3 million of it in February. That same month, Palantir won a billion-dollar purchasing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to use the company’s software to aid Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts.

In March, Trump purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 in Palantir stock. Last month, Trump made a public call for people to buy stock in Palantir—including the stock’s ticker symbol in his social media post—in an obvious effort at market manipulation. A few weeks later, Palantir landed yet another major federal contract.

Trump’s May 14 financial disclosure showed that the president has shifted away from his prior strategy of investing mostly in corporate and municipal bonds, and had made more than 3,600 individual stock and other financial trades during the first three months of 2026.

In a statement to NOTUS, the White House said that Trump and his family were not responsible for their investments, or notified of their trades.

For Trump to get rich off of companies he regulates is insanely corrupt, but not necessarily surprising from the president who runs several schemes to get rich from the Oval Office. That said, Americans should not stand for it, nor for any lawmakers who sit idly by and watch it happen.

Before Dr. Brian Christine was tapped to lead America’s public hantavirus response, he was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants, CNN reported Friday.

Christine currently serves as the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and as such is one of the top public health officials running the country’s infectious disease policy. Earlier this week, he told reporters in Nebraska that the agency’s response to the dangerous outbreak would be “grounded in science” and “grounded in transparency.”

Yet Christine’s resume seems far and away from that of a typical U.S. health official. While he has some public health experience under his belt, having served as a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he has also espoused dangerous far-right beliefs and spread wellness conspiracy theories.

He rebuked coronavirus mandates and spread conspiracy theories about treatment plans that sowed doubt and division over the government’s public health response at the time. He has claimed that the pandemic was a part of a wider government plot to control people, and he skirted questions from the U.S. Senate as to whether or not he would recommend the Covid vaccine to his patients.

The 62-year-old admiral also hosted a YouTube series titled “Erection Connection,” a professional show for other urologists discussing erectile dysfunction.

More than 40 people in the U.S. are currently being monitored in connection to a hantavirus outbreak aboard a Rotterdam-bound cruise ship last month. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday that there are currently no cases in the U.S. and that risk to the general public remains low. Nine cases have been confirmed in connection with the ship.

A Dutch couple were identified by the WHO as the first passengers infected with the virus. It is believed that they were exposed to the virus while birdwatching at an Argentinian landfill. Both the husband and wife died as a result.

Trump is dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS regarding the 2019 leaking of his tax returns, and is instead having them create a $1.7 billion “weaponization” fund to dole out taxpayer money to his supporters who feel they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration—like the January 6th insurrectionists.

“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” an attorney for the president wrote. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

This lawsuit is at best a brazen last-gasp money grab that even Trump himself has even acknowledged, stating candidly that it “sort of looks bad.”

“It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision, right, and, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” Trump said late last year. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

While dropping the lawsuit does prevent Trump from using the IRS to pay himself, it still leaves plenty of wiggle room for the president to personally enrich himself, as his super PAC could apply for the weaponization fund just as J6ers or any other far-right wing group can. Trump can also pick, choose, and fire the members of this weaponization committee without cause, forming it in his own image with little to no oversight.

“An insane level of corruption—even for Trump,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote Thursday on X. “A $1.7 BILLION slush fund for Trump’s hand-picked stooges to hand money to January 6th insurrectionists and his political allies. Here’s the President’s priority as Americans sell their plasma to afford gas and groceries.”

From the visibly declining president that brought you incredibly stupid terms such as “Tpublicans” and “Panicans” comes a new nickname for Donald Trump’s critics:

“Dumocrats. Because they’re dumb, I—they’re dumb. It’s D-U-M. I got rid of the B. So you’re only changing one letter, right? E goes, the U comes,” Trump told Fox New’s Sean Hannity Thursday.

Just a reminder: this imbecile is who represents us on the world stage.

Is it any wonder he’s walked away from a two-day summit with China without securing any significant breakthroughs? Or in negotiations with Iran for that matter, in which Trump revealed Thursday he discards deals from the other side if he doesn’t like the first sentence?

Based on how Trump’s talking, it would be a wonder if he could read much further than that.

No worries though, we’ll just add it to the slush pile of unintelligible things Trump said this year—and pray for peace some other day.