Seems appropriate

This picture is from New York City, said to be in response the arrival of a convoy of ICE occupiers. 

Trump is threatening to send his goons to San Francisco. We won't make their mission of civic destruction easy. If the Supreme Court continues to fail, liberty is up to us.

Denouncing the war on those who have served

 

Every Wednesday at noon, veterans and friends gather at the entrance to the San Francisco VA Medical Center to protest Trump administration cuts and privatization plans.

Protesters are a lively bunch, spreading out to all four corners of the vehicle entrance and chanting loudly.

 

A vet explains the protest to a Med Center visitor exiting the campus. This crew makes a point of talkng with their people.

 

Choosing to alienate veterans seems a foolish move by Trump and MAGA.

Standing up for law and the Constitution against two-bit fascists

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, reamed Donald Trump's preening cabinet secretary Kristi Neom in a budget hearing last week. Apparently there is no part of her job she's actually doing -- except play acting tough girl for the cameras and Donald.

Murphy is unremarkable to look at, but he's prepared and knows his stuff. This is longer than clips I usually post, but absolutely worth watching as a lesson in how government is supposed to work. 

Not only that, Murphy is morally outraged by Noem's complicity in the Trump regime's disappearing unlucky migrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to foreign torture prisons. Worth your time!

Resistance is NOT futile

A new NYTimes poll [gift link] confirms what my spidey sense has been feeling: Trump is sinking in the esteem of the people as he blunders to the 100 day mark of his term. Even FoxNews has noticed he's stuck below recent presidents. That doesn't mean he's no longer dangerous, but there is a shift.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles project can come across as a little hokey. He's an FDR Democrat, forever believing that Democrats will someday push a social welfare state over the finish line. But in the present political situation, he deserves credit for building one community of resistance activists whose intensity is second to none, folks who diligently and strategically push Dems to act as their best selves instead of cowering in confusion. 

He sums up the present moment this way: 

... magical thinking in Trump’s diseased brain about how his “strength” will force the American people and the world to bend the knee is crashing hard against reality. He sees himself as a hero. The nation and the world increasingly sees him as a villain - a foolish, weak, failed, and ridiculous man with his painted face, orange hair and a girdle working overtime. A big blubbery baby man as we like to say here. ...

Like Putin’s delusional miscalculation in underestimating Ukraine’s fight and resolve, Trump has grossly underestimated the resistance he would face here and abroad. It doesn’t mean he won’t keep arresting judges on Trumped-up charges; or deporting an American citizen child with cancer; or keep trying to send people to his Salvadoran Gulag; or unraveling our public health system; or waging war against science, research and learning. All of that may continue and we have to keep fighting it all as hard as he can [fight us]. But this early version of Trump 2.0 has failed.

They are constantly in retreat. They’ve lost the country. Folks are not bending the knee. A majority of the country has come to understand the Emperor has no clothes, and has pulled the curtain back from the Wizard. Without his “strength” what many are seeing now is a desperate, pathetic old man, far more a fool, a fuck up and a lame duck than the strongman he sees in the mirror when he applies his spray tan in the morning.

... So, finally, friends, let us on this Saturday remind ourselves of where are now:
    •    We are stronger, he is weaker
    •    We have to continue to act with great urgency as he is breaking things that will be hard if not impossible to repair
    •    In seeing public opinion break against Trump we are getting confirmation that our work matters, that minds can change, things can be different and even - shall we say it - better?

Let's keep the pressure on from all our very different communities ...

See no evil: the toll of the Trump team's Signal chat lapse(s?)

Wouldn't they have loved to get the intel on D-Day?

The people whose lives might be at risk as a result of the Trump team's frat boy approach to national security are not amused.

Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
Men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States expressed bewilderment after the leak of attack plans. “You’re going to kill somebody,” one pilot said.

Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and use of her right arm when the combat helicopter she piloted in the Iraq war was shot down, had a very direct response

Duckworth: ‘Pete Hegseth is a ‘f‑‑‑ing liar’ “...This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” Duckworth said in a statement. 

The Washington Post's judicious columnist Philip Bump unpacks what accountability for the security breach might look like and why we won't get it from the Trump clown show.

The point of accountability is to reinforce that bad things are bad. ...

... Trump — and by extension his party — have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. (“Deny, deny, deny,” Trump once reportedly advised an ally.) In any previous administration, Hegseth wouldn’t be the secretary of defense in the first place. Deeply unqualified (beyond his closeness to Trump) and mired in multiple scandals, he was nonetheless confirmed by a Republican-led Senate unwilling to face the ire of Trump. Since the Signal scandal broke, Hill Republicans — a group ostensibly empowered to enforce accountability from the executive branch — have not indicated any newfound appetite for challenging the White House. No one thinks the Justice Department, helmed by some of the more energetic Trump sycophants in America, will launch any serious investigation.

Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don’t know or don’t care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad. No signal to others in government. No signal to Trump’s base of support. No signal to America’s overseas allies that this government holds such mistakes to account.

This is precisely what (the deeply insecure) Trump wants to avoid, of course. He will happily malign people who used to serve under his direction — but always as he introduces some imaginary distance from them. It would be very hard for him to do so with Hegseth in particular: He picked and advocated Hegseth despite concerns about his readiness; if the criticisms of Hegseth were accurate, then so were the criticisms of Trump.

What results is a weird (and for the right, ironic) moral relativism, one centered on the whims and actions of Donald Trump. We know that religious conservatives revamped their moral boundaries once Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. What we’ve seen since is an entire party willing to shift black-and-white moral and ethical issues into a muddy, gray area in which Trump alone remains untainted.

Republican politicians have replaced both common sense and elementary ethical calculation with "Anything for Mr Trump." They've become servile as well as ignorant.

Time to get up and fight

Last fall I cancelled the Los Angeles Times when its owner refused to publish the editors' endorsement of Kamala Harris. Endorsements don't mean much, but how could I support the paper when its overlord puts a thumb on the scale? 

But today I still find the LAT's politics newsletter in my inbox; for how long I don't know. But for the moment, I still see some of Anita Chabria's opinion writing and it's so good and strong I'll post an excerpt, even though I can't link to it. She's got the spirit we all need in these times.

Hello and happy Thursday. President Trump addressed Congress — and America — Tuesday night in a speech that was both painfully long and studded with all the threats and grievance we have come to expect from our perpetually peeved commander in chief.

The World Health Organization? “Corrupt!” he cried.

The United Nations Human Rights Council? “Un-American!”

Federal employees? “They will either show up for work in person or be removed from their job.

All this while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared to be chewing gum and Vice President JD Vance’s jaw hung open in glee. I couldn’t help but think he looked like a vintage Howdy Doody marionette, eternally trapped in smug if mindless satisfaction.

“Our country will be woke no longer,” Trump exclaimed to the roaring cheers of MAGA Republicans. And I fear he is right — if by woke, he means empathetic, inclusive and interested in civil rights.

Meanwhile the Democrats shot back with ... nothing.

... Texas Democrat Al Green takes the honor for at least trying to cause some good trouble, by shaking his cane at the president before being kicked out at the order of Speaker Mike Johnson.

“I’ll accept the punishment,” he told CSPAN afterward. “It’s worth it to let people know that there’s some of us who are going to stand up to against this president’s desire to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

And indeed, for those who are vulnerable and in MAGA’s sights, there was plenty of terror in Trump’s windy rants, even beyond those critical social safety nets. Migrants, legal or not, should know that the “great liberation of America” remains underway, a promise to continue to ramp up deportations.

Transgender people should know that Trump is “forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body,” and “we feel so much better for it, don’t we?”

Panama and Greenland? Coming for you.

Even farmers aren’t safe, with Trump proclaiming that they will “probably have to bear with me,” while his tariffs and halting of agricultural exports for foreign aid demolish their businesses.

But the sad spectacle of the Democrats just sitting there during the whole tirade reinforced that they simply don’t know how to handle Trump 2.0 — and Trump knows it.

... So the takeaway from Trump’s speech should be that MAGA has long known exactly what it wants, and now knows how to get it.

But Democrats have forgotten the most basic lesson [of politics] ... : When the attack knocks you down, get up and fight.

That's the spirit we need.

The war over our history

Did you know that one of Donald Trump's golf courses included a Civil War battlefield? Neither did I, but the Orange Toddler wants you to believe it did. 

 

He's not picking sides ... he's not yet saying he'd be all for the Confederate cause of preserving slavery. But we can guess. 

 

Much more from Kevin M. Kruse on the Trump/Hegseth zeal to rename military bases which lost their Confederate names during the necessary historical reassessment triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement.

It's Trump's job now

For all the afterthoughts and recriminations, Joe Biden/Kamala Harris are not in office because a tiny majority of us believed they were not doing a good job. (Yes, different people had different notions of what the job was they weren't doing; it's a big country.)

So it's Trump's job now. How's he doing? 

• Egg prices going up because of the avian flu? That’s on Trump. 
• People not getting needed aid because of the federal funding freeze? Trump’s fault. 
• Criminals set free to wander around the country? Trump. 
• Chaos abroad? Trump. 
• A collapse in the Gaza ceasefire? Also Trump.

That's Obama comms guy Dan Pfeiffer's list (lightly edited). 

Let's see how many I can add off the top of my head:

• MLK holiday, Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance cancelled by order of Trump's DOD guy? Trump.
  
• Commercial plane over DC hits errant military helicopter. No FAA leader? Trump's fault.
• Crooked NYC Mayor's prosecution to be ended? Trump.
• Reopen Guantanamo prison in Cuba? That's on Trump too.
• AIDS drugs to be denied to African countries? Trump.
• Too few workers to harvest crops in California? Trump.
• Women under 30 seek sterilization. Trump.
  

As Pfeiffer concludes: 

... Trump won the presidency despite his flaws because he promised to make everything better. We need to hold him accountable when he fails. Just start fighting back and we’ll figure out the rest later.

Brave words for this Trump moment

Frederick Douglass -- born enslaved in Maryland, assertive interrogator of and prod to President Abraham Lincoln, later Republican ambassador to Haiti -- saw much over a long life. In a speech in 1894 he proclaimed:

I have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair.

I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. l have seen many dark hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. By way of Kevin M Levin

So Douglass responded to the racial and anti-democratic backlash of America's last Gilded Age. He'd seen cruelty and disappointment, but also found courage and determination. 

Our turn is now.

We will not be stunned into silence

For a minute amidst the inaugural Trump carnival of greed, cruelty, and stupidity, the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde grabbed the nation's attention by issuing a clear if gentle rebuke to the man and his enablers. 

Her words (and his scowls) grabbed the attention of anyone who wanted to listen. And that is a broad swath of us; it's worth remembering that even today at what is almost certainly the Trump show's high water mark of approval, he's never broken 50 percent. 

This all reminded me that such breakthroughs in what seems an irresistible tidal wave of societal ugliness do happen. Over and over.

I remember well the first occasion on which one of these breakthroughs grabbed me -- way back in the spring of 1969. The American war on Vietnam was at its height; the young men of my generation were being drafted to die in a fight that was at best meaningless and, in actuality, a crime. The US confronted the Soviet Union with our respective nuclear arsenals of mass death. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was dead and the movement for racial and economic justice stalled. It was a terrifying year.

And then, in print and on cassette tapes, a speech by someone I'd never heard of spread like wildfire among many young people. George Wald was a scientist, a professor, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1967. Speaking at an anti-war teach-in at MIT in March 1969, he somehow touched and lighted up a moral nerve for many worn down by the horror around us. His speech was called: A Generation in Search of a Future.

The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life. Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.  ... I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me. But there are those students of mine, who are in my mind always, and there are my children, the youngest of them now seven and nine, whose future is infinitely more precious to me than my own. So it isn’t just their generation; it’s mine, too. We’re all in it together.

Are we to have a chance to live? We don’t ask for prosperity, or security. Only for a reasonable chance to live, to work out our destiny in peace and decency. Not to go down in history as the apocalyptic generation.

Our business is with life, not death. Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner of the universe that is our home; and, most of all, what becomes of men [humankind]—all men, of all nations, colors, and creeds. This has become one world, a world for all ... It is only such a world that can now offer us life, and the chance to go on.

In that moment, Wald broke through. In the next month, the speech was broadcast in several cities, and reprinted in the New Yorker, the Progressive, the New York Post, Washington Post, Philadelphia Bulletin, Chicago Daily News, Buffalo Evening News, San Francisco Chronicle...

Many of us in a disheartened generation trudged on, making Richard Nixon's perfidious presidency impossible and inventing the environmental, women's, and gay movements.

I don't think Wald had all that in mind. But somehow his moral insight provided a jolt of humanizing energy in a bad moment.

These eruptions of some powerful truth spoken to powers, to rulers, are what make humans the tantalizingly hopeful species that we are. 

And they happen for different people at different times in different contexts. Does anyone remember Acting Attorney General Sally Yates' refusal to violate her oath to the Constitution at the beginning of the first Trump administration? 

Does anyone remember the masses of us who marched for justice and against police murders of Black and Brown people in the midst of a pandemic in 2020? 

Eruptions of truth and justice recur. Some are vast and some are small. And they are never just past and gone. Thanks Bishop Budde for reminding us!

What such breakthroughs in the enveloping shroud of injustice and violence do readers remember from their time on the planet?

"May I ask you to have mercy Mr. President..."

Before dozens of attendees at a national prayer service in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington directly addressed President Donald Trump in her sermon, urging him to reconsider his attacks on marginalized communities.

“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde told Trump as he sat in the front row at the Washington National Cathedral. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children, and Democratic and Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

Budde made her plea on behalf of undocumented immigrants who work jobs, pay taxes and live among others, as well as refugees who come to the United States in search of safety and a better life.

“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities — these children fear that their parents will be taken away,” she said. “And that you help those that are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands find compassion and welcome here.” ... MSNBC

In 2017, along with many Epicopalians, I was critical of the National Cathedral for hosting the incoming monster. There was no sermon that year. Bishop Budde spoke bravely this year.