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The June 3 episode of Gaslit Nation hosted by Andrea Chalupa is titled Putin is Dead Man Walking and came shortly after Ukraine pulled off that amazing drone attack that damaged key airplanes in Russia’s fleet and did it in bases far from Ukraine.
The guest in this episode is Lionel De Lange of South Africa. He is a conservationist, saving animals from neglect from private zoos. He believes nature is a healing force in the world. He now visits the front lines of Russia’s position in Ukraine to save humans.
They discuss the claim of white genocide in South Africa, something the nasty guy made a big deal when the South African president visited the White House. Yeah, white people have been murdered, but far more black people have been murdered. Also, there are about 60 million people in South Africa and 1.5 of them are white. If the blacks wanted to wipe out the whites that would have been done already and done very quickly.
That drone attack in Russia happened in part because Ukraine is afraid of falling support from the US and the West. Yes, the planning of the attack happened while Biden was still in office, but even he wasn’t giving Ukraine all the help they wanted, as generous as he was. So Ukraine said we’ll do it ourselves.
Ukraine paid for the successful attack through ongoing nights of Russian missiles firing on Ukraine cities.
In the 11 years that De Lange has been in Ukraine he has noticed a lot of difference. The people now respect each other, no longer shoving each other in supermarkets. Now they’re more polite, greeting others on the street and ready to help when needed. But one must still be careful of propaganda.
In addition to rescuing animals, and he has stories about that, De Lange also rescued humans. That meant he was exposed to Russian drone attacks.
After accident at Chernobyl the humans evacuated. The animals and plants thrived, not affected (perhaps made stronger) by the radiation. De Lange wanted to turn the region into a nature park. Alas, with the war it didn’t happen.
When Russia invaded many of its soldiers dug trenches in the Chernobyl region. Most of them have now been hospitalized and a few died of radiation poisoning.
Russia attempted to cause an explosion at the Chernobyl plant in hopes of breaching the radioactive container. They wanted to send the radiation across Ukraine and Europe (and some across Russia too). They did not succeed. And Ukrainians were quick to repair the damage. Ukraine is protecting us as well as themselves. They’re holding back Russia that would invade Europe after it took Ukraine. We need to pay closer attention and provide more help to Ukraine.
Poland narrowly elected a deeply corrupt figure similar to the nasty guy, one who is staunchly against LGBTQ rights. He capitalized on all the Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Other minorities, including Jews, feel they have a target on their heads. This will not be helpful to Ukraine.
De Lange said Putin has been meddling around the world. He’ll soon try to meddle in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Putin’s downfall will be like Hitler’s, fighting on too many fronts. That will be the only way he gets wiped out. Alas, millions of people will die before he is stopped.
De Lange said Putin can’t walk away even if everyone promised there would be no charges against him. Between the Ukraine war (and that successful attack by Ukraine), his international meddling, and the horrible Russian economy Putin is dead man walking. In Russia changing the guy at the top is frequently violent.
I don’t know how accurate De Lange is in his predictions.
Two week’s later the June 17 episode was titled Putin’s Sledgehammer. That’s part of the title of a book by Candace Rondeaux. She’s a reporter and an expert on global security and the future of warfare. The full title of the book is Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos.
June 23, a couple days after this episode was posted, marked the two year anniversary of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner group getting within 125 miles (200 km) of Moscow. The book is about Wagner and that crack in Putin’s power. Exactly two months later Prigozhin’s plane exploded.
The Wagner group was created because Russia’s conventional warfare capacity has always been challenging. The Wagner group could be more agile in situations like Syria while giving the Russian state plausible deniability. The Wagner group had a brand identity of violence and aggression.
The Wagner group, and other groups dealing in mayhem, would record their excessive violence and post it on social media. In a sense it was displaying their trophies. These groups got such a reputation of terror that their targets would empty out to avoid the violence and sadism. The title of the book comes from the group beating a guy with a sledgehammer while others filmed it. Guys beating the devil with a sledgehammer became the group’s logo.
I’m so not interested in the brutal details of the Wagner group that I stopped reading less than halfway through.
My Sunday movie was the documentary Casting By. I watched it through Kanopy. It is about the role of the casting director in making movies. More accurately, most of the film is about the first great casting director Marion Dougherty.
In the Hollywood Studio system the person in charge of casting essentially looked over the list of contract actors and assign them to parts based mostly on looks and assumed character type. When TV came along the early directors were more interested in acting ability and personality than looks.
Dougherty got a casting job because a friend invited her to be the assistant. Soon she was the person in charge. She would attend New York theater productions, Broadway and not, looking for great actors. She had quite an eye for talent. Her earliest big successes were Naked City and Route 66 that needed new actors for every episode. Some of the talent she discovered and promoted were James Dean, Gene Hackman, Glenn Close, Al Pacino, Diane Lane, Dustin Hoffman, Bette Midler, and Robert Redford. Many of those actors and their directors are in this documentary to describe what their relationship with Daugherty did for their careers.
There were times when Dougherty had a particular actor in mind for a particular role and she did a lot of convincing to win over the director. Some of her wins are now iconic performances rewarded with Oscar nominations and wins.
Daugherty’s roster of known talent was so vast that when she was asked to cast The Sting, which came out in 1973, she went down the list of characters and assigned the actors. She actually auditioned for only one character.
The movie spends some time with the casting of Lethal Weapon, released in 1987. In one of the two major roles Daugherty recommended Danny Glover. The director said, hold on, he’s black. Her response was, so? The director later admitted she had opened his eyes to his internal racism.
There were some regrets in her long career. In the 1990s many studios were bought by conglomerates, some of them foreign. Again, casting decisions were made according to the actor’s looks and whether the studio wanted to promote an actor from this TV series for that movie. That pretty much ended Daugherty’s career, though several of her protégés are still going strong.
Another regret was while Oscars are given out for scenery, costumes, and editing, there isn’t one for casting. And casting can make a big difference in how a movie comes out. The Oscar snub is more annoying because there is an Emmy for casting.
Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote a good summary of all five cases for which the Supreme Court issued decisions last Friday, the last day of their term. Only one of the five is good for democracy. I’m glad Needham wrote the summary because most other news outlets reported on only one or two.
The nasty guy’s executive order banning birthright citizenship went before the Court, but not to get a decision on that question. The case, Trump v. CASA asked the Court to rule instead on whether lower courts can issue injunctions against the government that apply nationwide. The Court ruled they can’t.
That means when a person, group, or state wins a case in a federal court the ruling affects only the people who brought the suit. This means overturning an executive order that contradicts the Constitution is much harder. Every state has to pursue a case (and some stated won’t) or an organization has to go through the extra effort to certify they represent a class of affected people.
That could mean until the Supremes rule on birthright citizenship some states will follow it and some won’t. And that raises a big legal mess, such as whether a baby born in Minnesota is a citizen if the family moves to Texas.
This means the nasty guy can issue an executive order undoing part of the Constitution and the legal system has a much harder time stopping him. In the meantime he gets to continue doing his unconstitutional thing until the case gets to the Supremes and they get around to acting on it.
I heard today that the ACLU is assembling a class action suit over the birthright citizenship issue.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor the Court decided schools need to allow students to opt out of a classroom lesson if their parents object. The case went all the way to the Supremes because a school district tried it and found it unworkable. The particular case involved books with LGBTQ content, but could be expanded to cover evolution or science in general. Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the decision “threatens the very essence of public education.” The conservative justices probably think that’s a good thing.
The case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is a case brought against the Attorney General of Texas. The decision means internet porn sites are required to see a government issued ID to verify the person is an adult. All this is about “sexual material harmful to minors.”
Yes, the Court added an exception to the First Amendment. And conservatives could expand the definition of “harmful” to include discussions of transgender issues and many other things.
The case is Kennedy v. Braidwood is nominally about conservative Christian business owners objecting to pay for health insurance that covers such preventive care things as PrEP, the medication that prevents the transmission of HIV.
Behind that is an attack on the US Preventive Services Task Force, which recommends what things should be covered by insurance.
The good part is the PSTF care recommendations remain. The bad part is its members were declared to not need Senate confirmation, which means Heath Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. can replace them with people who agree with his conspiracies.
The last case is FCC v. Consumers’ Research. The Federal Communications Commission requires internet and phone carriers pay into a fund to subsidize access in rural and poor area. Consumers’ Research argued a technicality to say the fund is illegal. Six justices – the liberals plus Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett – kept the agency’s authority to institute the fund.
Since the justices have gutted other federal agency authorities, this seems like a vulnerable win.
Kos of Kos reported last Thursday evening that the Department of Justice is coming after Daily Kos. The DoJ went after ActBlue and Media Matters, so attacking Kos to silence the nasty guy’s enemies isn’t a surprise. The details of the case can’t be disclosed (yet?). Even so Kos asked readers to donate to the site’s legal defense fund.
By Friday at 1:00 Kos reported readers had donated over $50,000. He is humbled by the support of the Kos community.
Because this has never just been about me. Or even Daily Kos. It’s about what we’ve built together over the past 23 years: a space to fight for democracy, for decency, for a government that serves people—not authoritarians. And just as importantly, it’s become a community—a place where people who care about those things can find each other, lift each other up, and know they’re not alone in this fight.
What you gave on Thursday wasn’t just financial support—it was a reminder of how deeply connected we are. That when one of us is under threat, the rest of us show up. That we have each other’s backs. I’m getting emotional just typing that. (Who am I kidding? I’ve been an emotional wreck writing this entire piece.)
[Deep breaths, composing myself …]
It’s proof that this community is strong. That it’s kind. And that it’s ready to stand together, no matter what.
Now for some beautiful stories.
TheCriticalMind of the Kos community reported that in April Hungarian dictator Victor Orban’s Fidesz party passed an amendment to the Constitution requiring recognition of only two genders and restricting LGBTQ events, citing “child protection.” Yeah, we know that’s a fake reason. However, it means Pride parades are banned in Hungary. And the one in Budapest was one of the best.
Pride organizers in Budapest renamed it “Budapest Pride Freedom” in honor of Hungary’s return to freedom when Soviet troops left in June 1991. Not that anyone was fooled. Organizers anticipated 35,000 to 40,000.
TheCriticalMind quoted a report from The Guardian:
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Budapest in defiance of the Hungarian government's ban on Pride, heeding a call by the city's mayor to "come calmly and boldly to stand together for freedom, dignity and equal rights", writes Lili Rutai in Budapest and Ashifa Kassam.
Jubilant crowds packed into the city's streets on Saturday, waving Pride flags and signs that mocked the country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as their peaceful procession inched forward at a snail's pace.
Organisers estimated that a record number of people turned up, far outstripping the expected turnout of 35,000-40,000 people.
"We believe there are 180,000 to 200,000 people attending," the president of Pride, Viktória Radványi told AFP. "It is hard to estimate because there have never been so many people at Budapest Pride."
See the photo at the top of the post. Also see the photos in a Bluesky tweet by valentine. He says the attendance topped a half million. From the photos I believe a half million is possible (not that I know what a half million people looks like). Budapest Pride is still one of the best.
I scrolled down the replies to that tweet and saw an image of the Sydney Opera House lit up in Pride colors.
Bridgette Redman for Between the Lines reported the Presbyterian Church of Okemos, Michigan held a baptism rededication service for 16-year old Zach Nawyn-Hellinga, transgender, so that he would be baptized with his new name, leaving his deadname behind.
Before the service there were discussions with Rebecca Mattern, who led youth ministry, pastor Rev. Lisa Schrott, and the church’s governing body. “Everyone expressed enthusiasm.”
On Jan. 12, Nawyn-Hellinga was joined by his family at the front of the congregation where Mattern, Schrott and the Clerk of Session asked him the questions of his reaffirmation and led the congregation in a responsive liturgy.
“The congregation just resoundingly said, ‘We see you,’” Mattern noted. “They said it loud and with confidence, and several of the members of the congregation had tears in their eyes. If I hadn’t processed it and cried before I got there, I would have been crying, because we are in a time where there is a concerted effort to erase trans people. They’re being told that they don’t exist, that they’re predators. Their parents are being told they’re grooming. It is the job of the church, and the calling of the church, to say to those who are in the margins, 'We see you and we love you.' No matter what the world says, you are a beloved child of God.”
Schrott said they added their Clerk of Session because they wanted it to be clear that it was an action of the church, not a rogue pastoral choice.
And one just for fun.
Sarah Bricker Hunt of Between the Lines reported the Motor City Bears did their 17th annual car wash. They raised almost $1,700 for Affirmations and Ruth Ellis Center.
In gay jargon a “bear” is a large hairy gay man. And many do the car wash wearing only a speedo (and I hope a great deal of sunscreen). They liked to joke, “your car is so dirty, so dirty.”
An Associated Press article posted Monday on Daily Kos reports on the Iran strikes on US military bases in the Middle East. It also reports on Iran strikes on Israel and Israel strikes on Iran. I’m definitely not keeping up with this story. I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t try.
Alex Samuels of Kos wrote Democrats are trolling the nasty guy by staging a Pride concert at The Kennedy Center, which the nasty guy controls. He may control it but members of Congress have a privilege of renting space there.
So even though the nasty guy has ignored pride, has attacked LGBTQ people – especially trans people, and many of the staff of The Kennedy Center quit when he took over, the venue will have a bunch of gay people on its stage, a bit of “guerrilla theatre.”
Samuels’ article does not give a date for the program, who will be performing (the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington is mentioned), and who will be attending.
June 26 was the tenth anniversary of the Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the country. I’ve heard a couple tributes on NPR, including one on Michigan Public’s Stateside program. A Michigan couple brought one of the three suits that were combined when the case went before the Supreme Court.
That suit, DeBoer v. Snyder, started as a case trying to overturn the ban on LGBTQ people adopting children. April DeBoer and Jane Rowse both wanted the other to adopt their children, to give all the children two parents. The judge in the case said a few time he thought they should refile the case not to overturn the ban on adoption but to overturn the ban on marriage. That message took a while to sink in.
Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a chart showing the percent of Americans who think same-sex marriage should be valid. Back in 1996 less than 35% of Democrats and about 17% of Republicans supported same-sex marriage. The peak support by Republicans was about 2021 when it was 55%. Support has now dropped to 41%.
Peak support by Democrats is now, with 88% in support. For America as a whole peak support was in 2023 at 71% and is now at 68%.
We’ve made a lot of progress in acceptance in the last 30 years. But this right could be pulled way too easily.
For a bit of fun scroll up from the marriage acceptance chart for a Brief Sanity Break showing an unusual game of chess.
Also to mark the tenth anniversary an Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed how views on same-sex marriage have changed over the decades. Back in 1988, less than 40 years ago, only about ten percent of US adults agreed that gay couples should have the right to marry and about 70% disagreed. At the time the that was the same for both Democrats and Republicans.
In 1996 – the year of the Defense of Marriage Act – 27% of US adults said same-sex marriages should be recognized in law. At that time Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to agree.
In 2004 Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage and Bush II campaigned on a constitutional amendment to ban it. About 40% of US adults supported same-sex marriage, including about half of Democrats and 22% of Republicans.
In 2015, when the Supremes legalized same-sex marriage, about 75% of Democrats were in favor while only about 33% of Republicans were.
The chart mentioned above shows over the last three years Republican support has fallen from 55% to 41%, the steepest multi-year fall. Democratic support has continued to rise.
An important point is that Republicans under 50 are about 60% in favor of same-sex marriage while just 36% of those over 50 are in favor. The Republican numbers will improve.
I had mentioned that Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Mamdani was born in Uganda and is now a US citizen. Alix Breeden of Kos wrote about a particular reaction to his win.
That reaction is from Republicans who are saying he is supported by terrorists and will work to destabilize or civilization. Electing him will be cultural suicide. That is coupled with the message that he can’t win, so he doesn’t deserve a place on the ballot. And don’t waste your vote on him. Yeah, the usual false accusations.
What Mamdani might do is try to nudge the city a bit out of being controlled by the rich. That is the only part of civilization he might destabilize.
In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitow Kev quoted Robert McCoy of The New Republic:
MAGA Republican groups are calling for the deportation of New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.
On Wednesday, the day after the 33-year-old democratic socialist handily secured his party’s nomination, the New York Young Republican Club, or NYYRC, took to X, begging Trump immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to revoke Mamdani’s U.S. citizenship and deport him.
In the comments is a tweet from Captain Fanta. It shows a storefront in southern California displaying piñatas that look like ICE agents.
A tweet from Bea shows two images, one labeled domestic terrorist, the other labeled ICE agent. The image labels every component of their outfits. The only difference is the gun. The easy conclusion is that the ICE agent is a terrorist. But that’s not Bea’s only conclusion:
w/the exception of the firearm, one can buy EVERY SINGLE item on this list from amazon. yes, even the zip tie cuffs.
no gov't id and/or signed judicial warrant after 2 asks? call 911.
-masked man = kidnapper/human trafficker
-no plates = stolen vehicle
-approaching ppl w/a gun = mass shooter
A cartoon posted by Toonerman shows the nasty guy and the dog that serves as Toonerman’s voice of truth.
Nasty guy: Israel and Iran are trying to make a liar out of me.
Voice of truth: Like he needs any help being a liar.
There is one more quote of interest, though interesting enough I went for the full article. It is by Colin of The One Percent Rule on Substack. He wrote about Germans during the Nazi years and how that relates to today. His academic specialty was psychology of business ethics.
Somewhere along the way he started researching cognitive warfare. He read many books about ordinary people in WWII. The books had in common the intention to take away people’s ability to think for themselves. Today we have declining literacy and the ability to think critically.
Many of the atrocities were enabled by ordinary people who failed to think critically about the consequences of what they did. This isn’t an excuse. It’s a way of saying evil can come from thoughtlessness, indifference, and not exercising moral judgment.
One book Colin read was Defying Hitler a memoir by Sebastian Haffner. To know when democracy dies watch your neighbor. Or yourself for when you stop asking questions and just nod along. Wrote Colin of the book:
His memoir, despite its title, begins not with Hitler, not with a rousing speech or a climactic battle, but with a duel: one private individual, face-to-face with a state demanding his thoughts, his gestures, his time, his soul. It is not a battle of equals. The outcome seems inevitable. Yet Haffner offers us a disturbing truth: the erosion of freedom does not come by force alone. It comes by consent, by inertia, by a quiet willingness to go along.
Another book is They Thought They were Free by Milton Mayer. That book describes the author’s Nazi friends. They had ordinary jobs – bakers, clerks – and helped neighbors. They were the little people. Their seduction was practical “The trains ran. The meals came. The compromises began.”
Haffner noted that to the German boys that grew up during WWI war was thrilling. It was also national grooming. By the time they found war appalling they could no longer dissent.
Mayer noted none of his Nazi friends felt responsible. They hadn’t chosen evil. But they hadn’t chosen. Each step was so small none saw the overall pattern.
The first warning: Propaganda isn’t just the lies of the powerful. It’s also in children’s games and songs and the silence of the adults.
The second warning: Authoritarianism isn’t just hate. It is also habit and custom. People join because it is easier, because resistance is exhausting, especially when one is alone.
The third warning: Keep thinking, even when others have stopped.
People also join because of the comradeship. That relieves the individual from responsibility for their actions. The crowd hugs while it corrodes. The ordinary man will rationalize, adapt, and submit.
Mayer found institutions, such as churches, schools, and police, weren’t taken by force. They offered themselves up. The individual didn’t had institutional protection.
We don’t want to disagree with the crowd and risk exile. The internet has only made the crowd larger and more inescapable. Fascism arrives with a slight compromise, a fear of speaking out.
Are you willing to continue to question things? How much discomfort are you wiling to endure? The crowd is always waiting.
Colin recommended reading through the Wikipedia article on “Strength through Joy.” I didn’t read it, but did scan it. This was a Nazi program to offer leisure activities to the masses that were previously only available to the privileged. It included sports, adult education, and cultural events. Though my scan and keeping Colin’s article in mind I could see one of its goals was to embed the ordinary person into the crowd, where dissent was much harder.
I sometimes listen to the program Today Explained put out by Vox. I hear it on the NPR affiliate Michigan Public. Thursday’s episode was about the Israel/Hamas war and war crimes. I haven’t written about this war in a long time. In the first half of the program, about 12 minutes, host Noel King talked to Suzy Hansen, who has written about International Humanitarian Law after WWII. I am working from the transcript.
The IHL says that when a country wages war there are things they can’t do. Those things are labeled war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. We also built courts to prosecute crimes of war.
People generally agree that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was a war crime. There is less agreement whether it was an act of genocide.
On the Israeli side, withholding food and water, cutting of electricity and fuel, bombing to damage hospitals and cultural sites, and the high civilian death toll are all war crimes.
Experts ask whether the attacks are proportional to the military aims. The civilian death toll and the tolerance for it is much higher than the norms of international law.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants to three Hamas leaders and two Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu. But warrants are different from arrests, which haven’t happened.
The war continues because when resolutions come up in the United Nations Security Council the US vetoes them. Also, even though the US State Department knew Israel was depriving Gaza of food, the US continued sending weapons to Israel.
In the second half of the program, about the same length, King spoke with Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University. He is also Israeli and Jewish.
Bartov said there are two parts to the UN’s definition of genocide. One, is there an intent to destroy a group as a group. Two, is that intent being implemented. Bartov said that he saw evidence as undeniable in early May 2024. That’s when he realized a pattern to what the Israeli Defense Force was doing. They would tell the Gazans they had to leave a particular area. In May 2024 this was Rafah and about a million Gazans were there. Once they moved the area where they had been was bombed and flattened. Israeli leaders say they have to wipe out Gaza. The actions show a systematic destruction, including schools, museums, and hospitals. These are the things that allow a group to reconstitute itself. Bartov recognized the goal was to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live as a group in Gaza.
Bartov also noted the children in Gaza have the largest percent of child amputees in the world. They haven’t received enough food and live in atrocious conditions. They are traumatized and will never be normal and healthy.
The “G” word is not mentioned in Israel. The country was created as a refuge for the victims of the largest genocide, the Holocaust. The idea that the country created because of genocide is committing genocide cannot be grasped and accepted. But Israel is also saying there is no other way to destroy Hamas without major damage to the population because they use the people as human shields. Hamas cannot release the hostages because that is the only thing keeping the IDF from finishing off Gaza.
The plan Israel is now putting out there is to squeeze the population of Gaza into 25% of its territory and destroy and empty the rest of the strip. Gaza isn’t all that big and a quarter of that is tiny. There is now no infrastructure in that small space and the population is two million. That will not work and shows the intention of genocide.
I went looking for size comparison and found one by Newsweek that overlaid Gaza on a few American cities. Gaza is 141 square miles. I think Detroit (without suburbs) is 134 and Gaza holds more people that Detroit ever did.
Israel has said since its founding that because the world stood by during the Holocaust the world cannot tell the Israelis what to do. That claim has now run out.
The world has international bodies that are supposed to prevent genocide. Those bodies were created at a time when strong states could do what they wanted with weaker neighbors. Those bodies aren’t working anymore. But the world still has a responsibility to stop these actions or we will return to that former era.
On Monday Oliver Willis of Daily Kos offered possible reasons why the nasty guy authorized bombs to be dropped on three Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend. Perhaps it’s because Republican leaders pushed it, as they have doing for many conflicts over the years.
Or perhaps Fox News kept pushing for the attacks. The network seems to be the nasty guy’s most influential advisor. Willis listed the praise the network gave Israel’s military operations. Then he listed several network hosts who pushed US involvement.
We should also remember the number of Fox News personalities who are in his cabinet and administration – Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffey, Pam Bondi and 20 others.
In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bernd Ulrich of the German weekly Die Zeit (translated by Irene Caselli):
It is not the fault of some mythical traits — real or imagined — of the “Orient.” No, there is another reason that things in the Middle East tend to turn out differently than expected, that actions produce unintended and often overwhelmingly negative consequences.
It’s not a mirage, nor the shimmering heat, nor the buzzing bazaar that’s to blame — it’s the West itself, repeatedly falling into the same traps. It has interests in the region, but no real interest in the region.
The image at the top of Kev’s post shows a satellite image of line of vehicles outside a building with the caption, “Satellite imagery showing that Iran may have moved significant amounts of enriched uranium prior to Saturday's American strike on Fordo.”
In today’s roundup, Greg Dworkin quoted two sets of tweets by Phillips O’Brien:
So the US air campaign against Iran seems to have gone like this.
1) Trump does not want to get involved
2) he is told that Israel is having lots of success
3) he becomes desperate to join so he can be seen to “kick ass”
4) He bombs Iran one night
5) The results of the bombing
[6 is not mentioned]
Now we have moment 7
7) Trump slaps down Israel because the campaign was really about his personal glory.
Ps. Trump does not care a win for Iran or Israel, it’s all what it means for him
And...
There is a chance that Trump's bombing of Iran might turn out to be the most ludicrous use of military force in US history. Not the worst or the most destructive--just the most absurd. A failed attempt by a weak man desperate for glory.
Maybe the only good thing to come out of this was that the American people, by a large majority, saw these strikes for the self glorifying gestures that they were, and disapprove. What’s the opposite of rallying around the flag?
Yesterday was the primary election for mayor in New York City. Much to the surprise of many Andrew Cuomo lost to Zohran Mamdani, who has described himself as a Democratic Socialist. He ran on making NYC affordable. Dworkin quoted Mike Madrid on Threadreader:
One of the interesting things to look for is how working class Black and Brown residents voted. If these voters break left after moving towards Trump there’s a lot of water thrown on the ‘racial realignment’ narrative.
These voters are becoming more populist NOT more conservative.
Voters are absolutely sick and tired of establishment politics. It’s not ideological and that’s what the parties, pollsters and politicians are missing.
A tweet by David Dayen:
It will be tempting to analogize from one idiosyncratic municipal election that the old guard of the Democratic establishment has been wholly discredited and should be dismantled to make way for new leadership. Tempting, and also correct.
In the comments is a cartoon posted by paulpro and created by M. Wuerker to mark the three year anniversary of when Roe v. Wade was overturned. It shows a man in a MAGA hat with a sign saying, “No Masks” and a t-shirt saying, “My body my choice.” Looking at him is a woman with a sign saying, “Pro choice” and also with a t-shirt saying, “My body my choice.”
Alexandra Bowman posted a cartoon with characters from Star Wars, Sound of Music, and Indiana Jones. They ask, “Did all those anti-fascist movies teach you nothing?”
Alex Samuels of Kos, in a weekly column looking at polls, wrote:
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll reveals significant frustration among Democratic voters who believe their party is too focused on social issues—like transgender rights—and not nearly focused enough on the economy. That disconnect between what voters want and what they think party leaders care about could spell trouble, especially with a critical midterm election map approaching.
Sixty-two percent of self-identified Democrats indicated the party’s leadership should be replaced. Just 24% disagreed.
Samuels lists a few issues – taxing the rich, focusing on everyday needs, reducing corporate influence in politics – get high support from Democrats with noticeably fewer saying they think the party leadership feels the same way. On the flip side, only 17% of Democrats feel transgender women competing in women’s sports is a priority while 28% feel the leadership think of it as a priority.
I’m with the voters on this one. As much as I believe transgender women need to be allowed to play in women’s sports I agree it is a low priority. The other issues listed above, plus all the things needed to be done to secure our democracy are a much higher priority.
Overall, voter mood says Democrats should stop playing nice with the nasty guy and Republicans.
Samuels discussed views on how concerned people are of far-right and far-left extremism. 55% are very or somewhat concerned about the far-right and 49% are very or somewhat concerned about the far-left. Not a great deal of difference.
Then Samuels noted since 9/11 far-right extremists have killed at least 130 people in the US. Samuels doesn’t list a body count from far-left extremists – perhaps it is zero? – though notes far-left violence does exist.
Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guys judicial picks are now more terrible – nominees are now asked whether Biden won the 2000 election. They quickly learn the correct answer, used by other types of nominees, is: “Joe Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election and served four years as president.”
There’s no question that Trump’s first-term nominees were bad in some spectacular ways, eager to help the wannabe autocrat eradicate rights and regulations. But when it came to the wide variety of election conspiracy cases Trump filed in his failed bid to overturn the election, even his own appointees did not sign on, ruling against him. Trump isn’t going to make that mistake again. He doesn’t just need conservative ideologues in the federal courts: He needs judges who won’t stop him no matter what he does, and agreeing to the farce that Biden didn’t win in 2020 is a pretty big tell that these nominees see their primary job as ensuring Trump gets his way, no matter what the law says.
...
None of these nominees will act as a check or balance on Trump. It’s pretty obvious they would not have gotten the nod if they believed the judiciary had any authority over the president. So, instead of normal judicial candidates, we’re going to get a motley mix of true believers crawling over one another to prove that they are the most committed to the Big Lie and the most eager to let Trump do whatever he wants.
That is going to be terrific for Trump, but terrible for democracy.
Kiley Price of Inside Climate News, in an article posted on Kos wrote that climate change is making protests against climate change harder. The example is the recent No Kings demonstrations where in El Paso, Texas temperatures passed 100F (38C). Protests in such high heat carries public health risks. It can also galvanize climate protesters. Many protests are also in urban areas, which tend to have higher heat and poor air quality.
So how can people stay safe during an outdoor protest? Many tips are fairly simple, such as using sunscreen, wearing sunglasses or a hat and drinking copious amounts of water.
As Wired points out in their guide to safe protesting, these supplies can also be used to guard yourself from other threats; sunglasses can shield your face from surveillance while water can be used to clean wounds and flush your eyes if you are pepper-sprayed or hit with chemical gas.
Public health experts say it is also crucial to recognize the signs of heat stress, which include heavy sweating, dizziness, cramping and headaches.
A health professional at the Denver protest put it this way:
“Best case? We just hand out water, treat a few heat injuries and eat pizza at the med tent,” Jake Paul, the group’s medical coordinator, told CBS prior to the demonstrations. “If we’re bored, that means everyone’s safe.”
Two weeks ago Nineteenletterslong of the Kos community reported:
Southern Baptists have endorsed a ban to end same-sex marriage in America marking the first time the group has officially opposed the ruling in Obergefell v Hodges, the case which legalized it in 2015. The vote on the motion came during the annual Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas, attended by over 10,000 church representatives this past Tuesday.
The Southern Baptists' resolution does not use the word "ban" directly. Instead, it calls for the "overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God's design for marriage and family" (something something something, separation of church and state though...).
The motion additionally calls "for laws that affirm marriage between one man and one woman".
The denomination’s values are shifting to align with the far-right.
A reversal would not automatically lead to a nationwide ban of same-sex marriage (as was the case with abortion rights). Same-sex marriage had already been legalized in 36 stated when the Supremes ruled in 2015 and nearly 70% of Americans support it.
Alas, Michigan is not one of those 36. It passed a state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in 2004, when several other states did (part of a bid to bring Bush II voters to the polls). The federal decision overrules it for now, but if that is overturned Michiganders would lose rights. There is the start of movement to overturn that amendment.
There is still a lot of news about the nasty guy ordering “bunker buster” bombs to be dropped on nuclear facilities (especially since I’m a couple days behind in reading the news). In what I’ve read and heard so far there isn’t much I want to emphasize, beyond the strangeness of dropping bombs, then seeming to declare a cease-fire before the enemy can retaliate. I’ll admit I probably haven’t heard the full story.
If you’re still curious there is an Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos about the bombing and another AP article about the spin the nasty guy’s goons are trying to give the story.
Of more interest to me is an article by Mark Jacobs on Stop the Presses pleading with media to not turn the war into entertainment. He lists eight things journalists should keep in mind.
1. Don’t sanitize the impact on humans. Saying people don’t want to see dead and wounded with their cornflakes is a terrible way to judge what to show.
2. Put events in a complete, honest historical context. The question “Why does Iran hate us” and most of the answers are shallow. The full answer includes how the CIA helped a coup in Iran install the Shah, which was seven decades ago.
3. Hold politicians accountable. Too many headlines imply politicians have no agency, that things just happen.
4. The peace movement is patriotic too. Dissent is lot disloyalty.
5. Lying politicians are more dishonest in war. Be extremely skeptical of the wins they claim.
6. Don’t act like you’re “in the know” when you’re not.
7. Beware of optimism, such as the vice nasty claiming the war won’t be a long one.
8. War allows governments more easily take away liberties. Authoritarian governments use war as a reason to control citizens. They frighten citizens into giving up rights. From 1984 by George Orwell, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
In his conclusion he adds one more: Don’t let the war engross you so much you miss the domestic misconduct.
I first heard of Sarah Kendzior through her work on Gaslit Nation. She is no longer a part of that and now had her own newsletter on Substack. I hadn’t checked it in quite a while. What I found was a post with a long list of perceptive questions from readers and Kendzior’s answers. She does this monthly and this one was posted June 13. I picked several questions and answers to include.
Be wary of the “feud” between Musk and the nasty guy.
Dictators seek to be the sole star of a spectacle state. Doing so drains public imagination, making it difficult for citizens to conceive of a politics beyond the demagogue.
And we had two demagogues trying to be the sole star. Beyond that the feud doesn’t matter.
Kendzior doesn’t trust Gavin Newsom, governor of California. At times he seems to want California to secede from the rest of the country (part of the idea that rich people want to break it up) and being the president of California instead of its governor might sound pretty cool.
One reason for gutting Medicaid (and Medicare) is “a sick and scared populace is easier to control.” But note that for a long time health care has been tied to jobs to prevent our independence.
A surprise of the nasty guy’s second term:
That pundits and politicians treat Trump’s first term as if it never happened and as if there’s not a template to these crises. They’ve done that before (they ignored his entire organized crime career) but, like, we were there! He was the president and we saw the whole four years! This bizarre selective amnesia is a big part of why people do not trust the media or the Democratic party.
Kendzior is wary of politicians, even Democrats, “because of the lack of accountability for sedition.” The Department of Justice under Biden was obligated to prosecute that and didn’t. Every state crime should be treated seriously, even if the perpetrators are old news. Not doing so make containing new operatives who use the same illegal and destructive tactics. This prosecution could bring the country together, since there were perpetrators in both parties.
Why did the DoJ refuse to prosecute? Because Merrick Garland was nominated by Biden to make sure it refused.
In the past an authoritarian would let protestors go for a few months to exhaust them and the public’s attention before calling in the national guard. By acting fast the nasty guy energized the opposition.
But in the digital and AI world speed is more important. Algorithms control attention and curtail choice, so people don’t know what is happening. The nasty guy needs a military willing to fire on Americans. The more time soldiers have to see through his propaganda the less likely they are to fire. He needs his soldiers frenzied and frightened. The nasty guy may get around a possibly reluctant military by also using “deputized” civilians.
Also, the nasty guy is more of a mob boss than a dictator. He doesn’t care if the US collapses.
Pat attention to who is labeled a “resistance fighter” and who is called a “terrorist.” Keep in mind that in the past Native Americans and Blacks had their righteous rebellions portrayed as barbaric violence. “Palestinian terrorism” was accepted description until smart phones showed Israeli violence. Watch out for sadism hiding behind a uniform.
In response to a question about tipping points in a country facing the loss of democracy, Kendzior wrote:
Protests are good ways of showing dissent and noncompliance with immoral orders, but they should be strategic when dealing with a regime that seeks the collapse of the state.
The tipping point is different for each country. I actually think the US reached our tipping point in January/February 2021, and then Biden DOJ tipped it back through inaction. The inaction confused much of the public, leading them to conclude that Trump must be innocent, or else he’d quickly be punished. The refusal of the Democrats to examine why that happened is keeping the whole country from moving forward and reaching a new tipping point. People need to have confidence that if they bravely confront the Trump administration, they will have the backing of powerful officials. They have no confidence now, due to the abandonment of accountability by Biden administration, and that is a shameful thing.
The confidence has begun to grow again.
Republicans abandoned the idea of trying to win people to their ideas and they would not win in a fair fight. So they cheat. They also see that the instigators of the Capitol attack were never punished and the participants have been pardoned. They could do it again without consequence.
Cutting the staff of National Parks – the beloved federal workers – reminds people the federal government can do great things, not just corruption. That might be a mistake in all the slashing of federal jobs.
After getting to the end of Kendzior’s Q&A session I followed a link to another one of her posts, this one from last November, about a week after the election.
I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.
That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.
They want us to hate each other so we agree to their plan to tear the country apart for the rich to plunder. There is a larger plan and we are merely a pawn. Though we can’t vote out the mafia our “power lies in refusing to abandon each other or abandon the truth.”
As for that election:
The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.
The second most important thing is who paid for it.
To see that look at the nasty guy’s donors and to who he pardoned. Look at who procured the pardons and the name Jared Kushner, the pandemic prince, comes up a lot. Kushner is relevant to Israel’s wars, yet he has vanished from punditry. Whether the US is in a mafia state centers on Kushner.
Over the years I collected browser tabs, intending to use a particular tweet or cartoon when the subject came up elsewhere. That tended to not happen. So here are some old and unrelated tweets as I go through old tabs.
Back in November 2022 (I did say “years”) Leah McElrath (who has now switched to Bluesky) wrote:
One problem with many well-intentioned efforts over the years to provide housing to the unhoused has been that the programs have difficulty getting funded without including a lot of moralistic conditions for the housing.
Just. Give. People. Housing.
THEN offer other services.
From Prof. Feynman, posted September 2022:
SCIENCE:
If you don't make mistakes, you're doing it wrong.
If you don't correct those mistakes, you're doing it really wrong.
If you can't accept that you're mistaken, you're not doing it at all.
In August of 2024 Jeff Danziger posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a college finance officer telling a student “Here... Sign this. Won’t take a moment.” The student looks down at a bin that is encasing her feet in concrete coming from a mixer labeled “College debt.”
I finished the book Blackouts by Justin Torres. The first is a mental blackout experienced by the narrator (never named), which prompts him to visit Juan. The two originally met when the narrator was about to turn 18 and Juan was much older and they are briefly together in the “nuthouse,” an asylum. The reasons they were there are never stated. I wondered if they were there because they were homosexual, but this was the 1990s. After that blackout and a decade after their first meeting, the narrator goes to visit Juan, now in a group residence of some sort, well past its prime. Juan is near death. He wants he narrator to receive his books and papers and do something useful with them.
The second blackout concerns a two volume set of books where on most pages the text is blacked out, leaving scattered words that create a description or small story quite different than the original text, which is never shown. The books are Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns from 1941. Who did the blacking out and why is a mystery.
Once together the narrator describes his time as a hooker. Juan tells the story of his life and of the books. The core of the research in the books was done by Jan Gay, longtime partner to Zhenya Gay (these are not the birth names of either women). Jan wants to get the research published but no publisher will touch it without the backing of a (male) doctor. And very few doctors will touch it.
All that was interesting and enjoyable to read. It was also curious. At the back of the book are endnotes that give copyright info on the books whose blacked out pages appear through this book. It looks like the two volumes are real. Jan and Zhenya are real historical figures. Zhenya also illustrated children’s books and they’re given copyright info and some of those illustrations are in this book, showing they are real. There is a fun scene where Juan gives a very gay reading of one of the stories Zhenya illustrated. In other endnotes the narrator discusses Juan as a real person. Yet, this book is described as a novel.
Was Juan real? That question is so obvious the author talks about it in what he calls “A sort of Postface.” He refuses to answer the question and says again the book is fiction.
My Sunday movie was Ideal Home. I see it is on a variety of streaming services. I saw it on Kanopy. Erasmus is the star of a food show, his longtime male companion Paul is a producer. They live in a big house in Santa Fe (lots of great panorama shots). They’re very good at partying and bickering. Then Bill shows up claiming to be the grandson or Erasmus. Bill has come to stay while is father serves a jail sentence.
Neither Paul nor Erasmus wants to interrupt their partying lifestyle to take care of a kid. And Bill annoys his grandfather because he only wants to eat Taco Bell. Of course, all that changes. Eventually.
IMDb notes the gay couple at the center of the story are played by straight actors (Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd) and many of the straight characters were played by queer actors.
It was very well done and I enjoyed it.
In today’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Greg Dworkin quoted part of a thread by Juliette Kayyam posted on X in response to the nasty guy ordering the dropping of a “bunker buster” bomb on underground nuclear facilities in Iran.
I don't know if this was successful or just attacks on surface level access. But there are consequences and so here are issues to discuss beyond tactics @CNN
+ Strait of Hormuz: reporting suggests about 50 oil tankers are scrambling to get out, so there may be fears that it can not be navigated soon and that will impact global economy;
+ American and American interests as a target abroad, including troops, European targets, or US targets/people abroad;
+ homeland security threat with our entire DHS apparatus now focused on ICE and the evisceration of counterterrorism and countercyber capacities there;
+ would be nice to have confidence in our intelligence but the last few days suggest our own – let alone our allies – is being ignored.
Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson of Public Notice:
“Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties.”
“Neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party.”
If you’re familiar with these phrases, you’re probably aware of Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has popularized them on social media.
Both expressions capture something profound about American politics in the age of MAGA. Not a single day goes by without performative lying from Republicans — consider the truth-resistant sales pitch they’re currently making for Trump’s big bill — or without fresh demonstrations from the press and/or the political opposition that they’re unequipped to deal with a major party that has abandoned democracy for the sake of smash-and-grab mobsterism.
A bit of a thread on X by Jeff Timmer in response to the nasty guy saying the Iran nuclear sites were obliterated.
Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites needs to be evaluated based on what we know about Trump: he never has a strategy, he is impervious to reading, learning, or understanding, and he lies. Lies all the time. About everything. Big or small.
Trump has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. We should be deeply skeptical of yesterday's mission and any information or further action to come. Trump is a liar and an idiot. Incompetent and inexperienced people surround him.
In the comments Art Garfunky posted a full-page ad The Onion put in the New York Times. The ad looks like the front page of an edition of The Onion. The main headline:
Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice
And the top headline for a side article:
Entitled Child Expects to Eat Lunch Every Day, Girl Literally Wants Food to be Handed to Her on a Plate
The Onion also sent that latest edition to every member of Congress.
Dworkin remided us that just below its banner The Onion has a motto in Latin, “Tu Stultus Es” and of course I went to Google Translate, which gave me, “You are stupid.”
Further down samanthab posted a tweet by Catherine Rampell with links to an article in the Wall Street Journal:
As I have argued for months: The person calling the shots in this admin was never Musk or Bannon or Susie Wiles. It's always been Shadow President Stephen Miller. Anything Trump says on e.g. immigration is cheap talk; Miller is the decider.
In Saturday’s roundup Dworkin quoted a tweet by Ruth Ben-Ghiat discussing the recent arrest of Democratic politicians. She included a headline (source not identified) that says:
For Democrats, handcuffs are the latest symbol of resistance to Trump.
Ben-Ghiat responds:
Only in America would the press treat the opposition party getting arrested as a "symbol," rather than as a concrete sign of descending authoritarianism.
Dworkin quoted a column by Jonathan Last in The Bulwark that asked an intriguing question that Dworkin’s quote wasn’t large enough to answer. So I looked up the full article.
Last quoted an email from a friend:
Are you absolutely sure that as Christians this isn’t the time to hide Anne Frank? Shouldn’t I be willing to help migrants avoid deportation/detention at whatever legal perils await me? If not now then when ... when it gets twice as bad or three times as bad or ten times as bad?
Last at first says we’re not close to that, but then he thought through the logistics: If an immigrant, perhaps with spouse, is snatched, what happens to the children, the assets, the home? Alas, that’s all I can see without subscribing.
I’m sure it all led to Last concluding hiding immigrants in the attic really is an important thing to do.
Dworkin also included a tweet by Micah Erfan, but I couldn’t see the whole chart within the roundup. So I looked at it directly. Erfan wrote, “Y’all I’m beginning to think that Trump tearing up Obama’s nuclear deal actually had consequences.” Below that is a chart from the Financial Times and shows the number of installed uranium enrichment centrifuges across all sites in Iran. Just before 2001 the number starts to rise to about 1,000 and stays there for a while. When Obama signed the nuclear deal in January 2016 the number dropped to zero. It stayed there until about 2019, a year after the nasty guy withdrew the US from the deal. Then the number of centrifuges rose rapidly until May this year when it was just under 15,000.
johnbeske of the Kos community posted an image of a sign he created that he would like to see posted on every building where immigrants might be. The first half of the sign is:
Notice
Anyone purporting to be an agent of ICE or federal agency who enters these premises with the intent of arresting or detaining any person or persons within:
Must wear clothing that accurately displays the agency they represent.
Must not wear a mask or anything else concealing their identity.
Must possess an official warrant that has been signed by a federal judge and agree to show it to anyone who asks to see it.
Mitch Perry, in an article for the Florida Phoenix posted on Kos reported that Central Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost introduced a bill that would require ICE facilities to publicly list all who were detained along with where, when, why, plus age, nationality, legal status, use of force on arrest, when they were transferred to another facility or deported.
This is good to see. Alas, in this Congress it isn’t going anywhere.
Kos of Kos discussed men and their votes for the nasty guy and what we can do about it. He first reviews voting stats – including the nasty guy won married men by 60-38 prercent.
On to examining the global problem. For example:
In Poland, rural men used to count on marrying women who’d handle domestic duties. But those women are moving to cities like Warsaw to become lawyers and professionals. That “loss of status” has fueled support for right-wing nationalist parties, making feminism the enemy and “traditional values” the solution.
From an article in The Economist:
In democracies, many politicians on the right are deftly stoking young male grievances, while many on the left barely acknowledge that young men have real problems.
Those real problems include being taught they are to be a provider. That becomes a core of their identity. Yet unstable economies threaten their ability to do that role – half of men believe home ownership is out of reach.
There is also a “Man Box” in which masculinity is defined around “dominance, and self-reliance.” Men have a mental health crisis.
We need an intervention to redefine masculinity beyond economic provision and the Man Box. Social media and its influencers promoting masculinity makes younger men feel inadequte, unvalued, and unwanted. They look for control – as in authoritarianism – or declare nothing matters.
What can we do? These men are looking for purpose and connection. They want to be caregivers (they support policies that care for children). So lets promote a version of manhood based on caring and men’s mental health.
These men are not fringe. Their numbers are growing. And their despair is being weaponized. Let’s understand how to fight back.
I had written that the nasty guy had tweeted that illegal workers at farms and hotels should not be picked up because they are necessary for these businesses. I noted that the White House said the policy of raiding those places had not changed.
Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Homeland Security tried to clarify by sending Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin to Newsmax. Yes, raids on worksites are sill a cornerstone of ICE operations. There was no exemption for farms and hotels. McLaughlin lied when she said ICE was only going after “the worst of the worst.”
I recently wrote that Sen. Alex Padilla was forced to the ground and handcuffed when asking HS Secretary Noem a question. Now there is a second political arrest.
Lisa Needham of Kos said ICE arrested Brad Lander, a Democratic candidate for NYC mayor. The reason appears to be because he was accompanying someone they wanted to nab and he tried to prevent it. One problem: ICE isn’t allowed to arrest citizens.
McLaughlin announced the charges as impeding a federal officer. That nicely confuses FBI agents who can arrest citizens with ICE agents, who can’t. They way she said it made it sound like the real victims were ICE agents, not the immigrants.
Needham talked about the old practice of company towns. When a company set up operations in a remote area workers had to live in company housing and shop in company stores. They were paid in company scrip, which couldn’t be spent elsewhere. Pay and prices were such that the workers fell deeper into debt, and thus were stuck.
Bringing that up to date, the possibility of creating new crypto currencies allows Walmart and Amazon to consider issuing their own. At least they are thinking about stablecoins, meaning their value is pegged to the dollar. But a person paid in Walmart coin would be restricted to spending it at Walmart, even if prices were better elsewhere.
There is a reason, outside of tying people to their store, for issuing their own currency – they can sidestep the significant costs of payment processing and banking fees. But it leaves consumers juggling currencies.
A different president might protect consumers. But the nasty guy made $57 billion from crypto last year and the Securities and Exchange commission dropped a crypto case after the company cozied up to a nasty guy company.
Needham reported that companies that cozy up to the nasty guy are getting a good payback. Sure, that cozying can cost millions, but the payback is much higher.
Needham gave a couple examples. I’ll mention one. GEO is a company with government contracts to run ICE detention centers. The EPA had a complaint against GEO last year for failing to provide protective gear from chemicals that can cause skin burns and eye damage. The NLRB filed a complaint for using detainees as workers and not paying them proper wages. Large fines were pending.
Then the company gave the maximum to the nasty guy’s campaign, $1 million to his PAC, and smaller amounts to other Republicans.
The NLRB no longer has a quorum and can’t hear cases. And the EPA withdrew its complaint.
That’s called corruption.
Alex Samuels of Kos wrote about the other side of the issue: “Sen. Bernie Sanders is urging Democratic leaders to stop cozying up to their own wealthy donors.” Sanders and seven other Democratic senators wrote a letter to the leaders asking them to ban super PACs and “dark money” in Democratic primaries. If Democrats are to fight the influence of rich people, something Sanders has been talking a lot about lately, they need to start with themselves.
The letter noted that these super PACS spend in Democratic primaries, then spend to defeat Democrats in the general election.
Overturning Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that opened unlimited outside spending, is a long-term project. But citizens already notice (thanks to Musk) that rich people have too much influence. That give Democrats an opening.
In 2022 the 988 suicide crisis hotline began working. One could contact that number in a variety of ways. A person is first asked a bit about who they are. One of the options is LGBTQ. If that is chosen they are passed on to the Trevor Project, counselors trained to handle queer people. This separate service is needed because of the high suicide rate of queer youth.
Oliver Willis of Kos reported that initial menu option disappears on July 17. The reason is the nasty guy is being nasty and said so. Yeah, this is part of his and Republican attacks on LGBTQ people and trans people in particular. Suicide rates will go up.
Young LGBTQ+ people are under attack by their state and federal governments. And now, if they are driven into darkness, Trump has cut off a vital and lifesaving resource that the community increasingly depends on.
Thankfully, the Trevor Project remains. All that is being lost is the vital connection to the 988 hotline, which is much easier to remember than the name and full number of the Trevor Project. That’s still losing a lot.
If you are in crisis, contact 988. If you are queer you can still contact 988 for now or find the Trevor Project number.
The nasty guy created a Religious Liberty Commission. Alix Breeden of Kos reported they met for the first time this week. Thankfully, it seems all they did was gripe about “anti-Christian bias,” how Christians are “under attack,” that religious liberty is threatened, and that the society has no moral code.
Yes, we as a nation do have a moral code. It’s quite a good one, though far from perfect. It just isn’t completely Christian.
Though this is a “Religious” commission one can easily guess how much representation there was from Muslim, Jewish, or even liberal Christian groups.
The group’s next meeting is scheduled for September. We can hope they’ll gripe some more and not actually do anything.
In last Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a couple good quotes. This was before the No Kings protest and the dreary parade for the nasty guy. Just before then the nasty guy went to the re-re-named Fort Bragg and used cheering soldiers as a backdrop for a rally style speech. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer added a bit of background.
The insurrectionist Bragg surely would have been heartened when Trump used his powerful platform to rally an entire army against democratically elected public officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — and when the uniformed troops of a once-proudly-apolitical U.S. Army answered with thunderous applause.
Like everything else about Trump’s strongman regime, the cheers had been manufactured. Military.com later reported that the chiseled forces of the storied 82nd Airborne Division behind Trump’s podium had been picked in part for their right-wing political views and also — according to one email obtained by the news site — to satisfy our allegedly 224-pound (lol) president with “no fat soldiers.” (Yes, Donald Trump’s Tinder ad for his dream-date U.S. soldier essentially read, “No fatties.”)
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted the generals did not speak up and added:
He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.
He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.
In the comments exlrrp posted a meme playing on one of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims that Democrats could control the weather. This meme shows a woman with a bright smile ready to push the button on the Democrat Party Weather Machine on the day of the parade. It did rain that day in Washington, though a White House spokesperson claimed that it hadn’t.
In today’s pundit roundup Dworkin had more good quotes. From Ron Fournier of Convulsions:
During a contentious Senate Armed Service Committee meeting Wednesday, [Elissa Slotkin,] freshman Democrat, grilled [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth over whether he had authorized members of the military to "detain and arrest protesters" in Los Angeles. He ducked and deflected. She erupted.
"What is the order?" Slotkin demanded. "Be a man, list it out. Did you authorize them to detain or arrest? That is a fundamental of democracy. I'm not trying to be a snot here. I'm just trying to get the actual — did you authorize them to do that?"
Be a man, she said. But Hegseth didn’t have it in him.
Dworkin wrote about the nasty guy saying he’ll decide in two weeks if the US should help Israel against Iran:
Reports are that Pete Hegseth and [director of intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard are ignored when it comes to input on what Trump is supposed to do. No surprise; they, like DHS Sec Noem are only there to cosplay. And as for Bibi Netanyahu, Trump knows any advice he gets is to benefit Netanyahu, not Trump.
When it comes to Iran, Trump is stuck with making a decision. The buck stops with him. And he’s afraid to decide.
My best guess is that Trump will do the right thing (not bomb Iran) for the wrong reason (he’s a coward and is afraid of his base turning on him). But who knows? Trump’s a damaged human being and is hard to predict when it comes to doing something difficult.
Thomas Edsall of the New York Times worked with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, to list five grounds on which to impeach the nasty guy. Dworkin quoted two.
Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power.
President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.
Dworkin reminds us we need “a Democratic House to impeach him (and a heavily Democratic Senate to convict).”
Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. A sample:
“I am genuinely baffled. Why is it when a foreigner—or someone that shouldn’t be here—kills one of us, we’re going to put 150-billion dollars into border security, we’re going to militarize our cities, we’re going to spend trillions of dollars to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas, we're going to ban people from random countries from ever f---ing visiting here, [and] we’re going to take our shoes off at the airport forever? But when we do it to ourselves? Nothing. It makes no sense—it's jarring cognitive dissonance.”
—Jon Stewart, on the MAGA cult’s obsession with beefing up law enforcement and the military in response to barely-existent shootings by immigrants, while doing nothing to reduce the epidemic of shootings—like the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark—by home-grown Americans.
A tweet from the Daily Show has the caption, “Iran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995.”
And something I heard in the news: As part of the Israel-Iran war Iran hit an Israeli hospital. Israel’s defense chief declared that to be a war crime. I thought that statement took chutzpah to cover the hypocrisy, considering what Israel has been doing in Gaza. Bill quoted an NBC News report:
“Nearly all hospitals in Gaza are now damaged or destroyed, and half of them are no longer operational,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, told NBC News. During the war, Gaza’s hospitals have eked back services, only to be repeatedly struck or besieged again.
FIFA, the international soccer (what the rest of the world calls football) federation, has started a tournament of 32 teams to be played in a dozen US locations over the next month. This is a team World Cup, separate from the country World Cup to be played in the US, Canada, and Mexico next year.
Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote Thursday a week ago:
On Tuesday, Customs and Border Patrol posted on social media that CPB agents would be acting as security for Saturday’s opening match in Miami at the Hard Rock Stadium.
“Let the games begin! The first FIFA Club World Cup games start on June 14th in Miami,” the post read. “CBP will be suited and booted and ready to provide security for the first round of games.”
What a nice, breezy way to make sure immigrants know that not only are they not welcome, but they will also be actively targeted! Of course, because everything this administration does is a shambolic mess, CBP later deleted the post. At the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told an NBC Miami affiliate that ICE would be there and that non-Americans need to bring proof of their legal status.
So maybe agents will be there, or maybe they won’t. Either way, the Trump administration has already sown the fear it intended.
Football is a game loved by lots of people around the world, including the countries in Central and South America. So a stadium with 64,000 in a city (Miami) that is 70% Latino sounds like an easy way for ICE to make its daily quota of detaining 3,000 people.
ICE has a problem in that there aren’t enough undocumented murderers and rapists to fill that quota, though that’s who the nasty guy said was his target. And if they’re going after soft targets like people showing up at scheduled immigration hearings, why not a stadium full of football fans?
As for the big tournament next year the vice nasty has already issued a threat: Please come. Then go home – or have a chat with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
And what about the Olympics in 2028, which the US is hosting?
A week ago Friday Needham talked of other ways the nasty guy is making life hard for immigrants. He ended a program that allowed a half million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to legally remain in the country.
Though the case involving 350,000 Venezuelans on Temporary Protected Status is still in the courts the Supreme Court says the nasty guy can start deporting anyway.
Another dozen immigrants were detained at Guantanamo Bay, which means their lawyers aren’t nearby.
The nasty guy has declared a strip of land along the border to be a “national defense zone” so when a migrant crosses, they can be accused of trespassing on a military installation. Already a New Mexico judge has thrown out over 100 of these cases.
ICE raided a meatpacking plant in Omaha and half of the 140 workers were detained and others didn’t show up out of fear. Would Sen. Ted Cruz, or any member of Congress, want their children to work in such a plant?
The Trump administration’s capacity for cruelty toward immigrants is truly astonishing—not just in terms of the government resources it is deploying, but in terms of how it acts from a space of bottomless hate, an infinite ability to revel in the harm they can cause. It’s the only work that Trump and his minions actually want to do.
Also on Thursday a week ago Emily Singer of Kos reported the nasty guy tweeted an exemption to deportation raids. He realized that farming and hospitality need lots of immigrant labor, so those places won’t be raided. I’ve heard since that the tweet had no effect on the actions of ICE agents and the White House has said there has been no actual change in policy.
Kos of Kos wrote last Saturday:
Donald Trump doesn’t want to lead. He wants to rule. There’s a distinction.
This week, we’ve crossed the line from authoritarian flirtation to autocratic overreach. The events of this past week—the illegal deployment of the National Guard in California, the arrest of California Sen. Alex Padilla, the ignoring of yet more judicial orders, and the chilling preparations for Trump’s grotesque birthday parade—undeniably show that Trump and his acolytes have abandoned all pretense of adhering to democratic norms.
We knew this would happen, we warned people this would happen, and now we’re watching in horror as Trump shreds our norms, laws, and institutions. All the while, the Republican Party kowtows to him when it isn’t outright cheering him on.
Kos wrote that while he’s all in favor of Democrats following the law there is no need for them to follow norms the nasty guy and Republicans have thrown out.
The nasty guy is vulnerable in one way – he’s concerned about public opinion. And polls show he and his policies are not supported by Americans.
On Monday Singer reported:
GOP lawmakers are lining up to support President Donald Trump’s declaration of war against Democratic-controlled cities, after he ordered Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers to specifically target undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York by spreading the insane and false conspiracy theory that Democrats use undocumented immigrants in those cities to hold on to political power.
"We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens," Trump wrote in a disturbing Truth Social post on Sunday night.
Of course, undocumented immigrants cannot vote, so Trump’s claim is a bald-faced lie. Undocumented immigrants are also not taking jobs from American citizens, as Americans do not want to work the low-wage, back-breaking jobs immigrants are filling in meatpacking plants, restaurant kitchens, and farm fields.
In the rest of the article Singer documented Republican praise for the statement and the Democratic rebuttal.
An Associated Press article from Thursday a week ago and posted on Kos reported that a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order directing the nasty guy to return control of the National Guard to California. The nasty guy had overstepped his bounds in ordering their deployment. Doubtful this will prompt him to obey.
Andrew Mangan of Kos reported that before Musk broke up with the nasty guy he declared, “A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle!”
Musk is no centrist, so hard to tell what he means. But the idea of a centrist party that appeals to a broad middle has been the wish for quite a while, including the political group No Labels.
A dream of the 80% middle is a naive dream. 80% of Americans will agree on only a handful of policies, such as the Food and Drug Administration inspecting food or requiring car companies to submit accident data on self-driving vehicles. Yeah, Musk hates that last one.
But what if we built a party around ideas that have 60% approval? That’s still a sizable majority. What are policies such a party could run on, policies supported by 60% of voters?
A party of the 60% would increase taxes on billionaires and large corporations, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and pour more federal funding into affordable housing. Its economic agenda would also expand antitrust enforcement against Big Tech and advocate for stricter environmental regulations, even if they cost jobs and dent the economy. This hypothetical party would prioritize expanding wind and solar power over fossil fuels, and it would want to tax corporations based on how much carbon they release. Hell, this party would even favor making power plants completely eliminate carbon emissions by 2040.
A party of the 60% would support abortion being legal in most or all cases. It would see the government as responsible for ensuring all Americans have health insurance. It would strongly support Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. It would want to pour billions into research for women’s health and cap yearly out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs on all insurance plans. It would support creating a public option for health insurance and lowering the enrollment age for Medicare from 65 to 60, though it wouldn’t be sold on Medicare for all. Nonetheless, this party would increase benefits for Social Security and Medicare.
Mangan provides links to surveys supporting what he wrote.
Also with 60% popularity are support for legal abortion, access to contraception, and support for all Americans having paid family and medical leave. There would be support for banning assault rifles, implementing universal background checks and red-flag laws. There would be support for free college tuition of middle income families and below, vaccine requirements, and increased funding for public schools. Plus, support for legal recreational marijuana, increased food assistance, term limits for the Supreme Court, and many types of foreign aid.
Sound familiar? All of these policies are supported by at least 60% of respondents, and virtually all of them are parts of the Democratic Party’s platform—and reviled by the Republican Party.
I’m puzzled what exactly is meant by “parts of the Democratic Party’s platform.” Parts of each idea are in the platform? Various states have some of the ideas in their platforms?
So what about immigration? Yeah, 55% want a decrease in the number of immigrants (note it is less than 60%). But over 60% oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who came as kids, are married to a citizen, or have children who are citizens. And majorities oppose raids at churches and schools. A very strong majority do want to deport immigrants who committed violent crimes.
The nasty guy is doing the last – and all the others.
But back to that praise for the Democratic Party. If the party agrees with 60% of the country – why didn’t they implement all those things when they had the chance? They had majorities during Biden’s first two years.
I ventured into the comments for this one. A couple of the ideas:
tuma: They’re popular only as long as they’re not labeled as Democratic policies. Anything Dems support is taken to mean benefiting black people.
Teacherbill: Democratic policy is popular. Democratic politicians are not.
In last Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a couple interesting tweets. Kareem Carr, Statistics Person tweeted:
The great irony is that “White America” itself is already a case study in multiculturalism: a near seamless fusion of ethnicities who spent centuries at war.
And Noah Smith added:
This is an incredibly important and underrated point. The reason people think "white" is this homogeneous bloc today is that America did such a good job erasing the distinctions between European ethnicities.
In the comments LJ Slater countered the claim that riots are raging through LA by posting a map of the city with one small red circle in a corner of the area marked Downtown.
I hadn’t realized Los Angeles loops in and around other cities (such as Beverly Hills and Santa Monica) with a long slim corridor down to the neighborhood of San Pedro.
In today’s pundit roundup Chitown Kev had some good quotes. Jazmyne Owens of the New America blog wrote about Juneteenth, which is today.
False distortions of history, especially to serve a political agenda, are not new. During the Civil War, propagandists across the South referred to the war as one “of Northern Aggression,” or “the War Between the States,” ignoring the role that slavery played in the Confederacy’s secession from the Union. While wholly untrue, that version of history, now known as “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy”—or simply “the Lost Cause”—took deep root in the South. [...]
Reframing history to erase acts of violence against African Americans and other groups is seeing a resurgence today. In President Trump’s first term, his administration created the 1776 Commission to promote politicized narratives that historians have called inaccurate. In his second term, the administration is committed to weakening the public education system by dismantling the functionality of the Department of Education in an attempt to close it, and slashing funding for vital public education programs. It is also worth mentioning that the administration is currently receiving a lot of legal pushback against their actions, including over several executive orders that embody alarming government overreach by undermining civil rights enforcement and asserting federal oversight in schools and classrooms.
Alex Hinton of The Conversation:
After decades of research on numerous attacks that have left scores dead, we have learned that extremists are almost always part of a pack, not lone wolves. But the myth of the lone wolf shooter remains tenacious, reappearing in media coverage after almost every mass shooting or act of far-right extremist violence. Because this myth misdirects people from the actual causes of extremist violence, it impedes society’s ability to prevent attacks. [...]
This was true long before the social media age. Take Timothy McVeigh. He is often depicted as the archetypal lone wolf madman who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.
In fact, McVeigh was part of a pack. He had accomplices and was connected across the far-right extremist landscape.[...]
How did the lone-wolf metaphor come to misinform the public’s view of extremists, and why is it so tenacious?
Part of the answer is linked to white supremacist Louis Beam, who wrote the essay “Leaderless Resistance” in 1983. In it, he called for far-right extremists to act individually or in small groups that couldn’t be traced up a chain of command. According to his lawyer, McVeigh was one of those influenced by Beam’s call.
It isn’t just Beam’s call. It is a lot of conservative leaders using the “lone wolf” myth to shield themselves and their ideas from being held responsible for the lone wolf’s mayhem.
Will Pattiz and More Than Just Parks of the “More Than Just Parks” Substack writing about a provision in the Big Brutal Bill that isn’t getting any discussion by mainstream media:
The Senate budget bill includes two provisions that would trigger the largest loss of public land in modern history.
First, it mandates the sale of 3 million acres of federal land. This land will be sold, full stop. There is no requirement for public input, environmental review, tribal consultation, or resource assessment. It will be auctioned off whether the public wants it or not.
Second, it grants the Secretary of the Interior authority to sell an additional 253 million acres at their discretion. That amounts to 40 percent of all federal public land.
There are no rules on how much land can be sold, how fast it can be moved, or who can buy it. There is no guarantee of public review. There is no conservation filter. There is nothing in the bill that protects ecologically sensitive areas, sacred sites, or places used for hunting, fishing, or recreation.
The language sounds sterile.
“Disposal.”
“Divestment.”
“Asset management.”
But make no mistake. This is a plan to break apart the public estate and transfer it to private hands.
In the comments are several cartoons and memes about Juneteenth and immigration, such as this one posted by exlrrrp and from Films for Action. It shows a Mexican man sitting on a white bucket with the caption:
Schrödinger’s Immigrant
Lazily collecting all the welfare
but somehow taking all the jobs.
And a meme posted by Liberal Jane showing a young woman with buttons showing all the minorities she supports and holding a sign that says:
I’d rather be hated for who I include that loved for who I exclude.
I finished the book The World in Six Songs; How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel Levitin. I had read and enjoyed his earlier book This is Your Brain on Music so when I saw this one I bought it.
The title might properly be The World in Six Types of Songs. The author discusses six categories of songs and how each would have influenced the evolution of humans. He also discusses the opposite – how humans developed the capacity to create music while animals cannot.
The six types, common to all cultures, are: Social bonding, including helping us develop synchronous movement. Joy, being so joyful we want to sing. Comfort, why we sing lullabyes and why we don’t listen to happy music when we’re sad. Knowledge, more than the ABC song. Religion, music that accompanies rites. And Love. That last one prompted a long discussion of what love is.
Decades ago I had heard when the Christian Old Testament (the Jewish Testament) was written down the scribes had to sort through four sources. More modern scholars had identified four threads of influence. The chapter on knowledge songs explained how the ancient text could have had four sources. The reason is that for perhaps the first thousand years of the Jewish story the Torah and other books were not written down, they were sung. Levitin explains how singing influences memorization. But over a thousand years the words and tune would drift, both within a community and between separated communities. So, yes, four (at least) sources.
I enjoyed the book and learned from it. But I can recommend the book only to people who have a strong interest in both music and how the brain works. He definitely gets into the details.
My writing time has been limited lately, enough that I finished a second book. It is the novel, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad. The pivotal event is portrayed in the first chapter – a boat full of refugees has come apart and the humans have washed onto the shore of an island. Only one of the travelers is alive. He is Amir and about nine years old.
The rest of the book is alternating chapters of Before and After that event. The Before chapters tell about how Amir got onto the boat and what the crossing was like. He, his mother, infant brother, and Quiet Uncle (brother to Loud Uncle) flee the regime in Syria. They get to Alexandria, Egypt and Quiet Uncle buys passage on a ship to smuggle him to the West and Amir also gets on board. As is frequently the case with these sorts of things the passengers pay a lot of money and are duped onto a rickety boat. The crossing is not what they thought they paid for. Because of the structure of the book we know what will happen to most of them.
TheAfter chapters are about what happens on the island. It is not named, but presumably is Greek. Amir flees from officials in uniform and is protected by Vänna, a fifteen year old girl. Both don’t know the other’s language. She wants to get him off the island in a way that doesn’t get him bogged down in the official government method of processing refugees. They are pursued by Colonel Kethros, who wants to make sure Amir does go through the approved system.
Along the way various characters discuss how the West views refugees and how the island locals view tourists. I enjoyed the book. It sheds important light on what the refugee crisis is about in human terms.
Meteor Blades of Daily Kos posted a mashup video, less than 3 minutes long, of scenes of many No Kings protests around the country.
In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Zeeshawn Aleem of MSNBC, who discussed the end “protest fatigue.”
In the early months of Trump’s second term, it was common to ask “Where is the resistance?” Whereas Trump’s first inauguration triggered the largest single-day protest in American history, his second inauguration was met with far smaller demonstrations. Combined with Democratic Party leaders’ timidity and a business community that was much more receptive to Trump than in his first term, there was a widespread sense that Trump’s victory had fundamentally demoralized the left and that MAGA was the new normal.
...
Another encouraging phenomenon: According to the Crowd Counting Consortium researchers, the total number of protest events this year is far outpacing 2017. That’s a proxy for how organized protest coalitions are — and suggests that activist networks may be building up more extensively than during the comparable part of Trump’s first term.
Kev added:
IMHO, I think that Trump’s popular vote win in the 2024 presidential election accounts for much of the “timidity” and even shock from the Democratic Party overall, including some of the party leadership. (The MSM capitulation, by and large, to MAGA coverage has also been a huge factor in a downplaying of the resistance.)
I will note that the mass protests that I have seen televised and even live here in Chicago seem to be better organized than many of the protests during Trump’s first term.
In the comments is a cartoon by DaylieDoodle. It shows an elephant lecturing:
Now remember kids... When we win, it’s because we’ve earned it fair and square. But when you win, the system is rigged. When we catch a break, it’s a reward for our hard work. When you catch a break, it’s a handout. If we stop supporting something, we boycott. If you stop supporting something it’s “cancel culture.” Our extremists have nothing to do with us. But yours are indicative of everything that you believe in.
Yearning for what this country used to be is patriotic. And changing it is un-American.
And if you aren’t American, you’re the enemy.
Last Thursday Emily Singer of Kos reported that California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla went to a Department of Homeland Security news conference to ask Secretary Kristi Noem a question. She was defending the nasty guy’s use of the military to subdue protests against deportation. Two men forced Padilla out the news conference where FBI agents pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him.
DHS accused Padilla of not identifying himself (he had) and that he “chose disrespectful political theatre” and that Secret Service thought he was an attacker.
What is known about Padilla’s actions do not sound like an attacker and anything Noem says about the incident is highly suspect. Even if this was disrespectful political theater he did not deserved to be shoved out the door, then pushed to the floor and handcuffed. No one who did what he did deserves it.
But this is another instance of the nasty guy’s administration calling law enforcement on Democrats wanting answers about the treatment of immigrants.
Last Wednesday Alex Samuels of Kos reported that Elon Musk is trying to mend his relationship to the nasty guy after the spectacular public breakup. About all he said, though, was:
I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far.
He didn’t say which of the many posts crossed the line.
Though Musk is trying to revive their alliance, the nasty guy may not want him back. Also, the public didn’t rally to Musk’s side. And he still wants those government contracts. The nasty guy did walk back his threat of pull those contracts.
The nasty guy went off to the G7 conference, held in Canada this year. He then left early. YourAnonCentral explained the various humiliations he may have felt, prompting him to leave. His microphone was cut off in the middle of a rant against US citizens. He tried to act as a spokesman for Putin. He defended Israel’s attack on Iran as the others called for de-escalation. A picture circulated on him falling asleep at the meeting, prompting the name “DonOld.” He struck a deal with the UK while calling it the EU.
Last Friday Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s a couple:
"Everyone was talking about Trump being on the Epstein list and fighting with Elon. So what did he do? He manufactured a crisis. He got back to what got him here in the first place—good old xenophobia. I don’t know what happened to the states' rights he thinks so much of when it suits him, but I know I speak for a lot of us here when I say leave us alone here. We don’t need you. We don't need your 'help.' [...]
And to those of you in the National Guard who have been thrust into this: when Donald Trump orders you to do something that is immoral, try to get your dad's podiatrist to write a note to say you have bone spurs."
—Jimmy Kimmel
"Trump's terrible policy has generated a huge backlash, which he's responded to by overreacting, which is gonna generate another backlash. We don’t know how this is gonna end, but at least we know it'll be a huge waste of money. Hello, DOGE? I found some cuts for ya."
—The Daily Show's Desi Lydic