Electrikmonkrjs

I also recommend Donors Choose for finding a local school to support.

Open thread below...

The Department of Justice will stop contracting with private prisons, the department announced Thursday morning. The decision comes a week after the DOJ inspector general released a damning report on the safety, security, and oversight of private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.

The announcement comes on the heels of a Mother Jones investigation of a private prison in Louisiana that found serious deficiencies in staffing and security. It also documented a higher rate of violence than the prison reported. Last week's DOJ report found that private prisons are more violent than federal prisons.

As of December 2015, private prisons incarcerated about 22,600 federal inmates. The news of the DOJ's decision prompted a quick downturn in stock prices for the two largest private prison companies.

two biggest private prison corporations, $CXW and $GEO, are plummeting right now pic.twitter.com/j0zjh0RvEr

— Alexander C. Kaufman (@AlexCKaufman) August 18, 2016

The decision was announced in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, according to the Washington Post. The memo directs department officials not to renew existing contracts or to "substantially reduce" their scope, with the goal of "reducing—and ultimately ending—our use of privately operated prisons."

Read Mother Jones' editor-in-chief and CEO on what it took to pull off our investigation.

According to different sources at Tumblr and Reddit, the tote bag, photographed on Berlin public transit, reads, roughly:

"This text has no other purpose than to terrify those who are afraid of the Arabic language."

Open thread below...

Amid the horror of floods that have covered southern Louisiana in recent days, a grim note of irony: Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-queer Family Research Council, is among those whose homes are underwater. Perkins believes natural disasters are sent to punish gays. (more…)

In Chicago, the "Heat List" system is used to direct policing resources, based on data-mining of social media to identify potential gang-members; the model tells the cops where to go and who to arrest, and is supposed to reduce both violent crime and the likelihood that suspects themselves will be killed -- but peer-reviewed analysis (Scihub mirror) of the program shows that while being on the Heat List increases your chances of being harassed and arrested by Chicago PD, it does not improve crime rates. (more…)

UC Irvine economist Peter Navarro, a hand-picked Trump economic advisor: "Navarro has never met Trump in person. And as for speaking with him by phone, he acknowledges, 'I have never had the pleasure.'" (more…)

I just did an impromptu Facebook Live talk about a speech Hillary Clinton just gave, in which she talked about tackling the high price of prescription drugs. (You can watch the broadcast on Facebook, here.)

To Hillary’s credit, she made specific mention of the fact that we pay more in America — significantly more — for the same drugs that are sold in Europe at a much lower price.

I’d written extensively about how US drug companies fleece American consumers by charging us 5 time or more what they charge Europeans for the same drug. But Hillary noted another reason why this is unfair: American taxpayers are subsidizing these drugs companies. We subsidize through tax breaks, and we subsidize it through the FDA. As Hillary notes, our FDA, paid for by American tax dollars, makes sure these drugs are safe, and then the drug companies make money all over the world based on that seal of approval that US taxpayers paid for.

Now, let me walk you through just how badly Americans are fleeced by these drug companies. Let’s look at a few top asthma drugs, and what they go for in France vs. the US. These are prices from a few years back, when I did the comparison from Paris.

Advair — 5.3x more expensive in the US
US: $391
France: $73

Symbicort — 4.5x more expensive in the US
US: $272
France: $60

Asmanex — 7.9x more expensive in the US
US: $197
France: $25

Also obscene is the whopping increase in the price of these drugs in the US over the past 5 years, while at the same time these companies actually dropped the price in Europe.

Advair (GlaxSmithKline)
US: ↑43%
France: ↓13%

Symbicort (AstraZeneca)
US:↑40%
France:↓17%

So not only have these drug companies overcharged Americans by an obscene amount, and increased the prices of these drugs by an obscene amount, they actually dropped the price significantly in Europe over the past five years.

Watch my Facebook Live broadcast about Hillary’s proposal to reign in high US prescription drug prices.

Why, you might ask are prices so much cheaper in Europe? Because over in Europe, the governments negotiate with Big Pharma to get a lower price. Our government doesn’t — and in fact, the federal government is banned by law from negotiating cheaper drugs prices for Medicare recipients. As the NYT notes, the drug companies get around all of this by simply charging more to Americans to make up the difference for the lesser profit in Europe:

Many other countries control drug prices in some manner, so drug companies have become dependent on increasing prices in the United States to grow.

Economist Steve Kyle did a nice write-up for us a while back, explaining how drug pricing works, and how the drug companies simply charge Americans more to make-up for lower prices in Europe.

One final point: Drugs aren’t cheaper in France because they’re subsidized. No one subsidizes anything. They’re cheaper because the French government simply negotiated a cheaper price. And mind you, that $25 or $73 you may pay in France for a high-end asthma drug isn’t what Frenchmen actually pay. That’s the price without insurance. If you have insurance, and everyone there does, the prices is significantly less.

So, by virtue of our American citizenship, we’re paying a massive drug tax in order to subsidize cheap drugs for Europeans. And most of our politicians are okay with this.

Hillary isn’t. November can’t come quickly enough.

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a good deal on Philips’ life-changing wake-up lights, so if you’re not among the 20,000+ Gawker media readers who have already pulled the trigger, the entry level model just dropped to $46, or within a few cents of the best price we’ve ever seen.

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Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore posted an essay on his blog titled, "Is Trump Purposely Sabotaging His Campaign?" He says he knows for a fact that Trump only ran for President as a way to get a higher paycheck for his NBC "Apprentice" shows. When he actually got the nomination, he started to have second thoughts.

And then… you can see the moment it finally dawned on him… that “Oh shit!” revelation: “I’m actually going to be the Republican nominee — and my rich beautiful life is f#*@ing over!” It was the night he won the New Jersey primary. The headline on TIME.com was, “Donald Trump’s Subdued Victory Speech After Winning New Jersey.” Instead of it being one of his loud, brash speeches, it was downright depressing. No energy, no happiness, just the realization that now he was going to have to go through with this stunt that he started. It was no longer going to be performance art. He was going to have to go to work.

Soon, though, his karma caught up with him. Calling Mexicans “rapists” should have disqualified him on Day One (or for saying Obama wasn’t born here, as he did in 2011). No, it took 13 months of racist, sexist, stupid comments before he finally undid himself with the trifecta of attacking the family of a slain soldier, ridiculing the Purple Heart and suggesting that the pro-gun crowd assassinate Hillary Clinton. By this past weekend, the look on his face said it all — “I hate this! I want my show back!” But it was too late. He was damaged goods, his brand beyond repair, a worldwide laughing stock — and worse, a soon-to-be loser.

The economic orthodoxy of austerity means that governments facing recession can't just spend their way out of it by creating New Deal-like stimulus that gets the economy moving again: instead, they handed trillions to banks and then watched in dismay as the banks failed to lend any of that out to small businesses and entrepreneurs. (more…)

Donald Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani claimed yesterday that “we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack” on US soil in the eight years before Obama became president.

Conveniently forgetting about 9/11, in which nearly 3,000 people died.

It wasn’t the first time that Giuliani had made the outrageously false claim that there were no terror attacks on US soil during the Bush presidency.

Giuliani made a similar, but even more outrageous claim, in January of 2010. Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Giuliani said: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush, we’ve had one under Obama.”

That Giuliani historical revisionism was particularly bad, as it not only erased 9/11 from the history books, but also the following terror attacks, per Politifact:

1. The Anthrax scare.
2. The shoe bomber.
3. The DC sniper.
4. The 2002 attack against the El Al ticket counter at LAX.
5. The campus attack at UNC.

Here’s Giuliani in 2010:

And here’s the same erroneous claim yesterday:

What’s actually going on is that Giuliani is trying to claim that, other than 9/11, George Bush had fewer terrorist attacks under his watch than Barack Obama, and thus Bush kept America safer. How exactly do you start a sentence about terrorism with “other than 9/11”?

Under Giuliani’s logic: More people died at Benghazi (4 dead) than died on September 11 (2,966 dead), so long as you don’t count 9/11.

Giuliani’s claim is also at odds with Giuliani’s own candidate, Donald Trump, who spent the campaign excoriating George Bush over 9/11. As Trump told Jeb Bush this past February, “the World Trade Center came down under your brother’s reign, remember that. That’s not keeping us safe.”

So keep all of this in mind when considering Giuliani’s explanation today: “I didn’t forget 9/11.”

Giuliani is right. He didn’t forget 9/11. Forgetting isn’t willful. Erasing is.

Follow me on Twitter: @aravosis — win a pony! (not really)

This Indonesian guy went to college in London for 3 years and lost 45 lbs. His family didn't know and he played a funny trick on them by sitting next to them in a restaurant and waiting for them to recognize him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GigpnsJ84xc&feature=youtu.be

Zephyr Teachout (previously) is the anti-corruption candidate in New York's Hudson Valley who raised more than $500K from small-money, Bernie-Sanders-style donors (I was one of them); then vulture fund billionaire Paul Singer gave $500K to the PAC for John Faso, her Republican opponent, catapulting him into contendership. (more…)

As a denizen of the Internets given to spouting personal opinions I'm not easily offended. I can't afford to be. It's hard enough to write without having to do it curled up in a fetal position, tears in my eyes, sucking my thumb.

But I'm offended by my country.

I'm offended by the very idea of a Donald Trump in the role of public servant, and even more offended by the narcissistic, asocial blowhard billionaire himself.

I'm offended by the Republican party's relentless opening up of the deep, dark hole Donald Trump felt encouraged to slither out from.

I'm offended by the press, whose idea of good journalism is the elevation and celebration of a madman who believes he can be president of the United States.

I'm offended by voters who hate our government system so thoroughly they're working to punish the entire nation by electing officials whose qualifications are limited to a mutual need to make us pay for our supposed sins.

I'm offended by my own Democratic Party for allowing this to happen. We're supposed to be the party of the people and we've let the people down. Our leaders wimped out and didn't fight hard enough for the people whose age, race, gender, religion, income, or health kept them down and sometimes out.

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Federal prisons run by private prison companies aren't just less safe and less secure than than their publicly run counterparts. They're also inadequately supervised by the federal Bureau of Prisons, which has outsourced the incarceration of 12 percent of its inmates to three giant for-profit prison companies, while allowing gaps in oversight that endangered inmates and put their rights at risk.

That's the takeaway from a damning new report by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. The report, released Thursday, examined how the BOP monitored its contracts with three of the nation's largest private prison companies: Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group, and Management and Training Corporation. For $639 million, these corporations run the country's 14 private federal prisons, incarcerating around 22,660 people as of December—mainly low-security immigrants serving short sentences.

The inspector general's findings corroborate years of reports documenting violence in private prisons, including Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer's immersive investigation of a CCA prison in Louisiana.

Compared to federal prisons of similar sizes, locations, and security levels, the private facilities had a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and more than twice as many inmate-on-staff assaults per capita between 2011 and 2014. Prison officials also found nearly twice as many weapons and eight times as many cellphones in private prisons as compared to BOP prisons, per capita. The inspector general also found that private prisons went on "lockdown" much more frequently, confining inmates to their quarters "often in response to a disturbance or incident that threatens the secure and orderly running of the prison." The number of private prison lockdowns: 101; in BOP-run prisons: 11.

The inspector general found that least two private prisons dealt with overcrowding by automatically assigning new inmates to "special housing units"—isolation units, including solitary confinement, usually used to discipline inmates. There, they were subject to special restrictions, including "controlled movements; limited access to programs such as education or vocational programs, as well as work details; and limited telephone calls." (According to wardens at the facilities, they had no choice. Vacant beds in solitary created the appearance of extra space at their facilities, so the BOP assigned them more inmates—and the prisons were not allowed to refuse them.)

BOP monitors, who are charged with ensuring that the private prisons are following federal policy and fulfilling the terms of their contracts, did not verify whether inmates were receiving basic medical care, according to the report. One facility went without a full-time doctor for eight months, in violation of its contract—even though the monitor reported it as being in compliance. Monitors also are not instructed to verify that private companies are conducting regular searches of housing units and visiting areas, nor are they required to confirm that the prisons are employing enough staff.

Private facilities did have fewer positive drug tests and sexual-misconduct incidents than BOP prisons, though the inspector general noted that limited or faulty data existed in both of those categories. In its response to a preliminary copy of the report, GEO Group's executive vice president wrote that the higher incident numbers in private prisons could be explained by more diligent incident reporting than in public prisons.

The companies also claimed that elevated violence in private prisons could be attributed to their "homogenous foreign national population"—largely Mexican—resulting in a "high number of gang affiliations," according to GEO and CCA. "Any casual reader would come to the conclusion that contract prisons are not as safe as BOP prisons," wrote Scott Marquardt, president of MTC. "The conclusion is wrong."

The New Yorker

Private prison titan Corrections Corporation of America has extensively diversified its holdings into the entire carceral-industrial sector: halfway houses, electronic monitoring, mental health -- and family immigration detention, a growth industry where the human rights standards are rock-bottom and the payouts are guaranteed to jackpot. (more…)

Ever since the Supreme Court ordered the nation's voting authorities to get their act together in 2002 in the wake of Bush v Gore, tech companies have been flogging touchscreen voting machines to willing buyers across the country, while a cadre computer scientists trained in Ed Felten's labs at Princeton have shown again and again and again and again that these machines are absolutely unfit for purpose, are trivial to hack, and endanger the US election system. (more…)

Editor's Note: The International Documentary Association has released a petition that asks the Department of Justice to investigate the arrests of citizen journalists who videotape police killings of citizens in marginalized communities. Boing Boing asked documentary filmmakers Laura Poitras and David Felix Sutcliffe to share with our readers why the fight to protect the rights of these amateur documentarians matters so much for all of us.—Xeni Jardin

Citizen journalists are reporting from the frontline of police violence in the United States. Using camera phones, they recorded the final moments of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner. In each case, the police retaliated by arresting those citizens - either in the immediate aftermath of the killings, or within 24 hours of the deaths being ruled homicides by medical examiners.

(more…)

A USA Today investigation has discovered a network of paid informants working for Amtrak and nearly every US airline who illegally delve into passengers' travel records to find people who might be traveling with a lot of cash: these tip-offs are used by the DEA to effect civil forfeiture -- seizing money without laying any charges against its owner, under the rubric that the cash may be proceeds from drug sales. One Amtrak secretary was secretly paid $854,460 to raid her employer's databases for the DEA. (more…)

On August 6, artist Todd Vaziri observed that all of Trump's angry tweets come from the Twitter client for Android, while the more presidential, less batshit ones come from an Iphone; Vaziri speculated that the latter were sent by a staffer. (more…)

Donald Trump levied a pretty thinly veiled threat today against Hillary Clinton. At a rally Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump told the baying crowd:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is.”

I had to watch the clip a few times to make sure I heard him correctly. The first time, I looked at the computer, said "no way he just said that" and rewound the clip. Then at a second glance I said to myself "oh my god, he is suggesting someone assassinate Hillary Clinton if she wins." Then I got on twitter and saw that I didn't hear it wrong.

Reaction has been fast and furious. Trump's supporters are calling it either a joke or saying that what he *really* meant was that people vote. Except his statement was about actions that should happen after she is elected. But you know, facts.

Jake Tapper had on former CIA Chief Michael Hayden to discuss the comments. His reaction?

"HAYDEN: It suggests either very bad taste reference to political assassination or an attempt at humor or an incredible insensitivity to the prevalence of political assassination inside of American history and how that is a topic that we don't even come close to, even when we are trying to be lighthearted.

TAPPER: There was an attempt on Donald Trump's life just a few weeks ago and the Secret Service got involved.

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Fox News' The Five was unusually funny Tuesday afternoon because conservative co-host Greg Gutfeld repeatedly made fun of Eric Bolling's attempts at trying to defend Donald Trump's insane second amendment threat aimed at Hillary Clinton earlier in the day.

"And by the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks, although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know."

After hearing Trump's remarks, Geraldo Rivera opened up by saying, "What the hell?"

Bolling cut in and said, "He clarified saying the second amendment will group around him to make sure she's not elected."

As he was talking, the entire panel was laughing at Bolling. And if you look at Eric's face, you can see he's trying hard not to laugh either because you can't defend the indefensible.

Gutfeld said, "You can't do it with a straight face!"

Then they played a clip of two Trump supporters sitting behind Donald at the rally basically stunned from his threats at Hillary.

Rivera then cut in and got serious, "You have to understand, this is a federal crime if he means what he says.”

Bolling was flabbergasted, but Dana Perino came in and said,"Imagine if she had said or somebody had said that about Donald Trump? Like carelessly say ‘Oh, maybe someone will assassinate him,’ I mean we would all be going crazy and say how inappropriate it was and making the point Geraldo did which is that's actually a crime."

And that is a fact.

Until the election, we're bringing you "The Trump Files," a daily dose of telling episodes, strange-but-true stories, or curious scenes from the life of GOP nominee Donald Trump.

In its short-lived existence, Spy magazine had a lot of fun with Donald Trump. The New York-based monthly is best known for making fun of the size of Trump's fingers, but its deepest cut may have come as part of a 1990 prank.

Spy correspondent Julius Lowenthal wanted to know just how cheap some of the city's richest figures were. So he set up a company, called the National Refund Clearinghouse, and sent letters with checks for $1.11 enclosed, "for services that you were overcharged for." The letters went out to 58 "well-known, well-heeled Americans," 26 of whom promptly cashed them. Curious as to how low they might go, Lowenthal sent those 26 "nabobs" a second refund check, for $0.64. This time, 13 people cashed them.

Finally, he sent those 13 respondents a check for $0.13. This time, only two people cashed the check. One was an arms dealer. The other was Donald Trump, whom the magazine identified as a "demibillionaire casino operator and adulturer."

In 1990, Spy sent 13-cent checks to the world's richest people. Only two cashed them: an arms dealer & Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/f6Kjt1hMYp

— Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) August 4, 2016

• Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
• Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen's Marriage to Brooke Mueller
• Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the "Trump Chateau for the Indigent"
• Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
• Trump Files #5: Donald's Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
• Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
• Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
• Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
• Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
• Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
• Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man
• Trump Files #12: Donald Can't Multiply 16 and 7
• Trump Files #13: Watch Donald Sing the "Green Acres" Theme Song in Overalls
• Trump Files #14: The Time Donald Trump Pulled Over His Limo to Stop a Beating
• Trump Files #15: When Donald Wanted to Help the Clintons Buy Their House
• Trump Files #16: He Once Forced a Small Business to Pay Him Royalties for Using the Word "Trump"
• Trump Files #17: He Dumped Wine on an "Unattractive Reporter"
• Trump Files #18: Behold the Hideous Statue He Wanted to Erect In Manhattan
• Trump Files #19: When Donald Was "Principal for a Day" and Confronted by a Fifth-Grader
• Trump Files #20: In 2012, Trump Begged GOP Presidential Candidates to Be Civil
• Trump Files #21: When Donald Couldn't Tell the Difference Between Gorbachev and an Impersonator
• Trump Files #22: His Football Team Treated Its Cheerleaders "Like Hookers"
• Trump Files #23: The Trump Files: Donald Tried to Shut Down a Bike Race Named "Rump"
• Trump Files #24: When Donald Called Out Pat Buchanan for Bigotry
• Trump Files #25: Donald's Most Ridiculous Appearance on Howard Stern's Show
• Trump Files #26: How Donald Tricked New York Into Giving Him His First Huge Deal
• Trump Files #27: Donald Told Congress the Reagan Tax Cuts Were Terrible
• Trump Files #28: When Donald Destroyed Historic Art to Build Trump Tower
• Trump Files #29: Donald Wanted to Build an Insane Castle on Madison Avenue
• Trump Files #30: Donald's Near-Death Experience (That He Invented)
• Trump Files #31: When Donald Struck Oil on the Upper West Side
• Trump Files #32: When Donald Demanded Other People Pay for His Overpriced Quarterback
• Trump Files #33: The Time Donald Sued Someone Who Made Fun of Him for $500 Million
• Trump Files #34: Donald Tried to Make His Ghostwriter Pay for His Book Party
• Trump Files #35: Watch Donald Shave a Man's Head on Television
• Trump Files #36: How Donald Helped Make It Harder to Get Football Tickets
• Trump Files #37: Donald Was Curious About His Baby Daughter's Breasts
• Trump Files #38: When Democrats Courted Donald
• Trump Files #39: Watch the Trump Vodka Ad Designed for a Russian Audience
• Trump Files #40: Donald's Cologne Smelled of Jamba Juice and Strip Clubs
• Trump Files #41: Donald Sued Other People Named Trump for Using Their Own Name
• Trump Files #42: Donald Thinks Asbestos Would Have Saved the Twin Towers
• Trump Files #43: Why Donald Threw a Fit Over His "Trump Tree" in Central Park
• Trump Files #44: Watch Trump Endorse Slim Shady for President

This summer, DoJ Cybercrime Lab director Ovie Carroll presented at a Federal Judicial Seminar in San Diego, attended by over 100 US federal judges, where he recommended that the judges should use Tor -- The Onion Router, subject of much handwringing and serious technological assaults from the US government, but which is also primarily funded by the USG -- to protect their personal information while using their home and work computers. (more…)

The Chicago Independent Police Review Authority has released a video showing the aftermath of the July 28 police shooting of an unarmed black man, in which the officers checked to ensure that their body-cameras were switched off and then gave each other high fives. (more…)

Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen -- Chinese nationals who live in Singapore -- own a global property speculation and development empire whose US branch is called American Pacific International Capital Inc. They followed a recipe set out in a memo by Charlie Spies, a top Republican lawyer, in order to funnel $1.3M to Jeb Bush's PAC, then Tang offered a reporter for the Intercept $200,000 not to mention that he had been investigated for smuggling, tax evasion and bribery by the Chinese government. (more…)

A group of Democrats, voters, and activists joined with Common Cause, a public advocacy group, and filed a lawsuit Friday alleging that the way North Carolina Republicans drew up the state's congressional districts constituted a blatant partisan gerrymander and violates the US Constitution. If the case is successful, it could go a long way in helping courts define when redistricting with partisan intent violates voters' rights to elect officials of their choosing.

"What is at stake is whether politicians have the power to manipulate voting maps to unjustly insulate themselves from accountability, or whether voters have the fundamental right as Americans to choose their representatives in fair and open elections," Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, said in a statement. "We believe this is a vital case that could strike at the very foundation of gerrymandering."

In 2011, after Republicans took control of both legislative houses in North Carolina, they created a new redistricting plan for the state's 13 congressional districts that sought to entrench a Republican majority in the state's congressional delegation. On February 5, 2016, a state district court ruled that the plan constituted illegal racial gerrymandering by populating two districts disproportionately with African American voters, thereby white-washing the other districts and ensuring Republican victories. It ordered the state Legislature to redraw the districts. North Carolina has appealed that ruling to the US Supreme Court in Harris v. McCrory, but the case has not yet been decided.

Meanwhile, the Republicans redrew the districts again after the district court ruling. During that process, state Republicans made it clear that they planned to redraw the districts to preserve the state's 10-3 Republican congressional delegation majority. Friday's lawsuit argues that the Republicans clearly drew the districts to disenfranchise Democratic voters by essentially letting the candidates choose their voters, and not the other way around.

The coalition's lawsuit points out that state Republicans' effort to lock in their party's 10-3 advantage for the state's congressional delegation flies in the face of representative democracy because voter registration data shows that Republicans make up just 30 percent of all registered voters, compared with 40 percent for Democrats. The remaining 30 percent register as unaffiliated.

Two of the Republicans involved in redrawing the maps said in a statement Friday that the districts are fair and legal, and that the lawsuit is "just the latest in a long line of attempts by far-left groups to use the federal court system to take away the rights of North Carolina voters."

The lawsuit filed Friday notes that Common Cause is nonpartisan, and that the organization is currently opposing the efforts of the state Democratic party to gerrymander in Maryland.

See the full lawsuit below: