bigtree
bigtree's JournalDEMOCRATS won because our campaigns were focused on the American people
...but I heard a load of bull this afternoon from the person who saddled America for over a decade with Sarah Palin after choosing the loud-mouthed drunkard to run with McCain, promoting the view that Democrats didn't win because of their message, but because of the dementia-ridden, befuddled fool in the White House.
I get that this whiny, never-Trump republican has made a career out of pretending she's not responsible for ushering in every lying plank of the present republican platform, complaining about 'big government' and a demagogic representation of liberals which she still conjures up when it suits her as a wedge against the majority of the Democratic party.
It should be understood that this erstwhile republican is pining for a party that regularly campaigned on eviscerating the tiny fraction of trillion dollar budgets that went to, and still represents the entirety of the federal government contribution to all of the programs for the poor that her republicans have managed to make so controversial against the only party in this mostly binary system of elections whose members have ever cared to represent the less fortunate among us against the interests of the wealthy and well-connected.
I mean, it's either she repudiates all of that 'bootstrap' fuckery from Ronald Reagan, who she reveres, as he cut the legs out from under a generation of working-class poor who mostly came from, and still come from states that regularly vote for these same republicans to take those things away from them; or she advocates in favor of those things DEMOCRATS provided with initiative, advocacy, and votes.
She's literally one of those elitists who worked overtime to convince their own rural poor base of voters that the federal government and the liberals who were trying to provide things for them were threatening their 'freedom,' ffs, and that their employers not only deserved their cheap labor, but they should return a chunk of their hard-earned pay back to the government to pay for tax breaks for their bosses and CEOs of their companies they work for; the old 'trickle down' which is still the base of their economic philosophy of rewarding the already wealthy with the slick con that our jobs depend on keeping that money flowing to the rich politicians and their wealthy friends.
Republicans don't even talk about jobs anymore, except in Orwellian headfakes like the president's claims that the economy is booming in the wake of an election where voters made clear that it is not. The entirety of the republican effort right now is to insist on just taking things away from Americans while gleefully insisting they're repudiating Democrats.
In so many ways, republicans are hurting ALL Americans, not just Democrats; not just half of the country that identifies with the party and votes with them.
But in so many ways, it's is absolutely true that republicans have been opponents of these things they're taking away and withholding from Americans with such zeal and arrogance; just as Democrats have been the primary defenders of these issues and concerns for decades and decades - all the while that republican demagoguery, scapegoating, and outright thievery of the Treasury for their own personal enrichment has been the entirety of the republican platform as they whine and moan about the piffle that the poor receive and mock recipients for being 'dependent' on taxpayers' OWN hard-earned contributions to government, taxes which these very same legislators engineer laws to for their rich selves to evade.
There isn't a 'media party,' thank gawd, so whatever this party-lacking journo is pretending voters showed up to the polls to vote for was either the party taking things away from them, or for the party that has provided those things for them.
Most of them were never friends of the people; as much as they served as cynics posturing against the very things they're lining up this week to defend; the very things their past politics pretended weren't essential or vital to people in this country, just to the Democrats fighting to enact them.
...the okey-doke goes something like this lede at the start of one of these news broadcasts today:
Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake writes in the Washington Post... This quote, "The political climate that once rewarded absolute loyalty to the president is shifting. The Democratic landslide in Tuesday's off-year elections will only add momentum to that.
The midterms, now less than a year away, clearly favor the Democrats, particularly in the House, where they are poised to take the majority. And if that happens, it will not be because Democrats have suddenly found the perfect message. It will be because the president's economic policies are fundamentally misaligned with both conservative principles and economic reality.
It's really something to listen to this hand-wringing from past-republicans about their own party's responsibility for the Democratic landslide; and completely ignore that their entire effort has been to reverse programs and benefits Democrats almost solely provided for Americans with their initiatives and their votes.
The losing politics today that former flunky Flake is alarmed about is actually the heartless and cruel government he and his fellow republicans advocated for in the past; fighting against the efforts and advocacy of Democrats working to invest in more than just tax breaks that just further enrich the already wealthy.
There are no 'conservative principles' which provide for anyone in America other than the wealthy and the well-connected. Their defense of the 'already haves' against the 'have nots' defines their entire economic dogma. It's the product of people who don't do their own shopping, and don't have a clue about what it takes for most Americans to survive.
Conservative principles up and left the building earlier this year after the republican Congress passed $2 trillion in across-the-board cuts to federal spending over 10 years, but raising the national debt and deficit by some $328 billion dollars, in most part to fund Trump's tax cuts.
When Democrats are in power the nation progresses, but somehow the solid record of job growth and economic progress Joe Biden accomplished was presented as some sort of hat trick, instead of a result of the policies DEMOCRATS advocated and implemented.
Hell, despite the attempts by journos to guilt Democrats into taking blame for the shutdown, clearly republicans own it; especially after Trump gave the game away and told his party leaders, who control BOTH houses of Congress, to end the filibuster themselves by a simple majority vote and move on.
Never-Trumper logic reasons that republicans and Trump lost ground in the election due to their own fecklessness, which is certainly true. But these republicans pining for their own party back have had every plank of their conservative ideology and platform repudiated by the blundering maga muppet in the White House who's enacting all of their past decade's deliberate lies and feignts like they're trying to stop an outer space invasion using an old Star Trek movie set.
I get that these republicans don't know shit about the Democratic party, and won't acknowledge Democratic action and initiatives they've been regularly ignoring all along.
But if you're a former republican running a media show that's been crying crocodile tears about a concern for the poor that you've never admitted until now is one of government's most important responsibilities, you might want to ask yourself how all those things Trump and republicans are working to take away from Americans right now got there in the first place over your past party's objections.
Don't fall for people trying to get you to blame anyone except Trump and the courts which have enabled him
..it was quite the coup in which the people prosecuting Trump were made the scapegoats, improbably, by Trump's opposition, merely on the way the indicted felon was able to delay his trial, ultimately some 15 months after being charged, by advantaging myriad and successive courts packed with republican and Trump appointees, up to the Supreme Court; dismissing one case which languished on appeal until the election due to court scheduling; and one ordered dismissed by Trump after the election.
What's funny sad is that the very person who set the left against the Trump prosecution (Carol Leonnig) - successfully steering each and every progress, including the actual indictments, away from the withering challenges and appeals, diverting our gaze from the courts that obligingly delayed trials for months with frivolous claims dragged up the chain and were ultimately dismissed, nonetheless causing the delays the Trump team and their enablers on the courts deliberately engineered - that very person, is back in the Trump-obliging and enabling media with a book based on her incorrect and incomplete assessment that Merrick Garland had delayed something in the case; an almost solitary assessment, outdone only by the ones who parrot her, which each and every critic of his efforts has used to denigrate him in the most absurd and weirdly projecting manners imaginable.
I mean, the campaign to turn the left against the prosecution was so complete that you still can't get a word of actual fact about the prosecution of Trump off of your keyboard without a barrage of one-liner claims that the man who initiated the investigation and prosecution of a former president; the person who hired Jack Smith on his own volition to take what was described by CNN's Elie Honig at the time as a 'fast-moving investigation" whose 20 Garland prosecutors he inherited had already "gathered more evidence than Mueller at the start of his SC probe" to the finish line; is actually a republican hired by Biden to sabotage the investigation (did I get that right?).
Politico put it succinctly in outlining conclusions in Smith's final report:
But Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.
...It took Smith more than a year to obtain text messages between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. And the department spent months fighting to access communications of John Eastman, a lawyer who helped devise Trump’s last-ditch efforts to remain in power.
The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trump’s “broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence,” Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some — but not all — details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trump’s privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an “obvious” effort to delay the investigation.
Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trump’s presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s tapes.
And Smith argued that the Supreme Court’s resolution of Trump’s immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
It's just weird that you get all of this animus about someone who actually spent the effort prosecuting Trump (and don't waste any time arguing to me that he didn't. As you can see googling the issue and my screename, this isn't my first rodeo), could have dismissed the prosecution at any time, but persisted until all of the evidence HIS prosecutors had gathered from as early as the Fall of 2021 was defended against appeals and claims and made available for the indictment, all eventually approved by the trial judge.
Yet, you can't get even a wit of mention of the dishonest appeals and claims, or the judges and justices who not only allowed them to get a hearing, but delayed those court dates as long into the future as they could obligingly manage.
It would be just a bit more credible, albeit still wrong, to be slinging shit at the prosecutors of Trump (all along the way, as the Trump camp did the same, even today), if it came with a equal or greater effort to hold the courts accountable for their enabling Trump to dodge a trial 15 months after he was indicted.
Weird to me because, they're still fucking there. The guy that stepped up to prosecute Trump and his band of insurrectionists and obtained dual multi-felony indictments is gone, in part because Americans turned away from that prosecution effort. I mean, who fucking encouraged THAT stupidity?
And lookee here!
The very same courts packed with republican and Trump-nominated judges and justices are just humming right along with their enabling bullshit.
In the following weeks, Trump used those same powers to impose tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada, accusing those countries of failing to stop fentanyl and illegal immigration. He then declared an additional emergency at the northern border, focused on drug trafficking from Canada.
Other emergency orders included one targeting cybersecurity threats to U.S. infrastructure, one authorizing sanctions against the International Criminal Court, and another enabling reciprocal tariffs on trade partners with large surpluses over the U.S. In late July, he signed an order declaring Brazil a national security threat, allowing sanctions against its government.
All of these orders gave federal agencies more power to act without Congress — including access to emergency funds, waivers for environmental laws and expanded law enforcement tools.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/full-list-of-national-emergencies-signed-by-trump-and-in-effect/ar-AA1PitRX
So, even as many lower courts valiantly try to block Trump's autocratic advance, the maga majority on the Supreme Court remains as his primary enabler; still in place and ready and willing to enhance Trump's power and authority.
Truthout:
The report stated that, unlike the Supreme Court, lower courts are “engaged in a bipartisan fight for the rule of law.”
The report from Court Accountability, an organization that “works to combat corrupt abuse of government power and support movements in advancing a thriving democratic future,” examined hundreds of cases dealing with the Trump administration, including executive orders or actions taken by President Donald Trump himself.
Legal challenges to the administration at the district court level won around 60 percent of the 240 orders judges have issued. That includes their winning 55 percent of the time when Trump-appointed judges were rendering the decisions.
At circuit courts of appeals, there was a similar win rate, with challengers to Trump winning around 59 percent of the time in the 90 orders examined by Court Accountability. However, there were more partisan outcomes: Republican-appointed judges sided with the president in 84 percent of the cases, while Democratic-appointed judges sided with the challengers in 85 percent of the cases.
At the Supreme Court, however, the rate was unquestionably pro-Trump — among the 23 rulings and temporary orders made and examined by Court Accountability relating to the administration’s actions, Trump had a 90 percent win rate.
ANYTIME folks are ready to move past this embarrassing abandonment of the Trump prosecution, and are willing to reject the Trump DOJ-enabling attacks on what's essentially the prosecutors who worked successfully to indictments with more than enough time for a trial (the ones getting fired right now for doing the job the left claims never happened), we can all confront the corrupt, interfering and enabling courts together, who, should be noted, unlike the efforts of the Biden DOJ, did not hasten justice in their respective positions in order to protect the American people from the clear and present insurrectionist.
The Morning Fascism Came
The morning fascism came,
It sneaked into my bedroom, invading
Along with the thin streams of light
That pierced the shutters and threatened
To disturb my lingering dreams.
And so it did disturb and permeate
So subtly that it did not deign to care
What fitful illusions it replaced with
It's insistent glare imposed on every
Remnant of expectancy and despair.
Augmenting the dresser's assembly of
Amulets, anodynes, and anesthetics,
And, the mirror image of it all, and me;
A speculum of the unalterable bister
Affixed firmly to my corporeal being.
Only for whitened wall behind me
Were my decrepit features so betrayed
As an aberration to it's simple pallidity
That I felt compelled to shrink back
Into the darkness that gave me comfort.
Do I dare go to the shuttered window
And just throw open my shades to let
My intruder's withering scintillantcy
Force my eyes to comport to it's daze,
Supposing my dominion veils its verity?
Is that rustle outside from birds feeding,
Or squirrels searching for buried nuts
Forgotten seconds after they hide them,
Recalled afterward as something they do,
Rather than something they've already done?
Chancing a glance past the blacked out sash,
I saw myriad the colors of autumn blazing warm
Against an azure sky with soft white clouds
Drifting slowly across a background of blue;
The perfect tribute to it's omnipresence.
Dare I acknowledge that beauty; and in doing so,
Deny the dangers lurking just beyond the pane
With a White House wielding weapons of war, and
Piercing my domain with their petty perfidy
Against their invented enemies dwelling within?
My refuge is my revolution, a paradigmatic conflict Against a government I enable arrayed against me; like
I'm a pawn, increasingly isolated out in society; like
Hunger games have replaced the grand experiment.
When fascism came, I woke up already an adversary.
-Ron
Trump is a domestic terrorist, rapist. He's despoiling our histories and erecting monuments to himself in their place
By the end of Trump's term he will have unilaterally destroyed whatever is in his way to transform the history of a city he's never supported - not the government or the people - into a fetishism of himself.
He's like an elderly serial rapist whose victim is forced to bear his children, obligated to care for the ever-present reminders of his putridity into eternity.
If we don't stop him in his tracks before he builds this idolistic palace, and the others he has planned, republicans will defend them forever as monuments to his and their open contempt for America and the American people
Garrett Graff puts a finer point on this...
For generations, we have been saved from these fates and uncertainties because voters chose leaders of both parties with good character who, in turn, appointed people of good character, who, in turn, were constrained by a professional and nonpartisan civil service of good character that took seriously their oaths to serve the Constitution and not an individual.
That most basic protection was lost last year when voters returned Donald Trump to office. And what Donald Trump internalized early on was that our government by norms was for sisses. Most of what we think of as the functioning of the US government turns out to be norms, not laws — and the laws aren’t very powerful if you don’t care about the fear of breaking them. (Look at the video Kristi Noem is playing at TSA checkpoints across the country, as clear a violation of the Hatch Act as there ever has been.) His very elevation and return as president violated the one check-and-balance that the Founders didn’t write down: Be a good, caring person.
Once you elect or appoint someone who has no moral core — who then appoints people with no moral core and fires those who do — nothing else in the system of checks-and-balances turns out to matter.
If you step into the White House as president thinking it’s your own house — not the people’s house, not a national treasure you’re inheriting for four years, handed down across centuries and generations by the 44 men who have lived there before — it turns out that there’s not really anything that can stop you from tearing down the literal White House if you really want to. What’s stopped the previous 44 is that none of them would have ever dreamed of such a thing in the first place.
The President’s House – as the White House was known – was seriously affected by the fire, as seen in this watercolor by George Munger (ca. 1814-1815).
“The British invaded Washington with a primary goal,” Bill Bushong, a historian with the White House Historical Association (WHHA), told BBC Mundo. "That goal was to demoralize Americans, to symbolically put them on their knees by burning their public buildings."
Judith Lewis Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror wrote that,
“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.
The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
(excerpts from Orwell's 1984)
It's their fucking budget.
...I know we care about govt services & workers, but I'd bet republicans will start caring about their stalled budget before Democrats become beside themselves over re-opening a government completely under the thumb of Donald Trump.
The most relevant and important issue before us is the republican budget which contains devastating cuts to health care and other social obligations; a partisan endeavor that is entirely their party's own creation and ambition.
Democrats have no interest in speeding their destructive package of nebulous cuts to vital benefits to the White House for Donald Trump's signature; no interest in hurrying along republicans' continued and enhanced tax giveaways to theirs and their rich friends' bank accounts.
I understand the responsible stance of our party remaining in town ready to negotiate while republicans duck in and out, but that Kabuki dance of concern is much more in earnest among republicans than in our party, as Democrats aren't actually in control of any of this process that we don't enable, and unable as we also are to legislate a successful conclusion to this impasse on our own initiative.
If you look a little closer at the players, avoiding the deliberately clouded lens the media is offering us to equalize concern between parties, they've advantaged republicans with a veneer of victimization, despite their complete control of all branches of government including the Supreme Court; unwittingly advantaging Democrats by supposing they hold something more in their hand than their very potent, and increasingly successful bluff.
Republicans have effectively stalled their own budget. They have no way of advancing it unless they change the filibuster rules and put future budgets on partisan fast tracks for Democratic majorities. They and their president keep reminding us how cruel they can be, and how willing they are to kill the hostages and shoot their way out, but there's very little on the other side of that promised melee that they haven't already massacred and buried.
If they're going to shoot up the rest of the place, they'd better get to it, but with very few but their own sweet selves left standing in the halls of government, they'll need to be especially careful of ricochets and friendly fire.
It won't be long before the republicans who go to work each day to accomplish something or the other, remind themselves that their solid majority in every branch is more than just a political feint for Donald's Trump's self-interested political theater.
If and when they're ready to enact their budget, republicans come to Democrats to negotiate a way forward. Or, they'll just settle into a pantomime of governing without any pretense that they care about the country beyond their own interests, no more than Trump.
I would the old God of war himself were dead, Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills, Rotting on some wild shore
Give us, then, your mind at large:
How say you, war or not?'
'Not war, if possible,
O king,' I said, 'lest from the abuse of war,
The desecrated shrine, the trampled year,
The smouldering homestead, and the household flower
Torn from the lintel--all the common wrong--
A smoke go up through which I loom to her
Three times a monster: now she lightens scorn
At him that mars her plan, but then would hate
(And every voice she talked with ratify it,
And every face she looked on justify it)
The general foe. More soluble is this knot,
By gentleness than war. I want her love.
What were I nigher this although we dashed
Your cities into shards with catapults,
She would not love;--or brought her chained, a slave,
The lifting of whose eyelash is my lord,
Not ever would she love; but brooding turn
The book of scorn, till all my flitting chance
Were caught within the record of her wrongs,
And crushed to death: and rather, Sire, than this
I would the old God of war himself were dead,
Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills,
Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck,
Or like an old-world mammoth bulked in ice,
Not to be molten out.'
___selection from, 'The Princess: A Medley' by, Alfred Tennyson
Maha Hussaini @MahaGaza
We have returned, like we’ll always do.
📍Gaza City
I have no fear of the U.S. Military, Active Duty or Reserve or National Guard; not from any soldier
...I have fear for myself and other Americans of the mission and activity of the irregular, armed and armored new recruits who make up the militarized forces of ICE.
The 'Kavanaugh stops' which advantage the republican Supreme Court justice's writing for the maga majority that ICE agent's practice of stopping, detaining, and jailing people in the country who have darker skin than white; work at certain jobs; or don't speak a certain way is just a minor inconvenience; have allowed Trump to yank this nation back to the Jim Crow era where government not only established myriad ways to deny black residents rights and opportunities regularly afforded to their white counterparts, but allowed the rest of society to do so, as well, with impunity and even encouragement.
Up until now, even as the jackass that runs the Pentagon who thinks he's some god of war is drawing up battle plans against the diversity of his forces that he believes threatens the purity of his "male standard," the U.S. military foces, like our government workforce, has benefited from a slightly higher percentage of women, people of color, and alternatively able individuals than in most businesses.
In uniform and under command they don't threaten Americans, they defend and protect us as if we are their own. It's their creed, it's why they joined the service - to defend and protect the nation and it's inhabitants.
The U.S. Army's official motto, "This We'll Defend," has been in use since 1778 and embodies the core values of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. This motto signifies the Army's commitment to safeguarding the nation and its citizens, reinforcing the idea that soldiers are dedicated to protecting the Constitution and the values that define the United States.
The recruitment effort behind Trump's campaign of mass deportations to fill out the unaccountable police agency with faux soldiers aimed to recruit law enforcement officers inclined to object to their cities' restrictions on immigration enforcement, thereby aligning with ICE's broader deportation efforts.
The ads featured a narrator stating, "You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family, your city, safe. But in sanctuary cities, you’re ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals walk free."
Beyond that, the spots are identical, inviting officers to “join ICE and help us catch the worst of the worst. Drug traffickers. Gang members. Predators," according to a review of the ads on the ad-tracking service AdImpact.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-recruitment-raids-trump-ads-b2840178.html
“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN. “They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.”
Echoing that view, U.S. District Judge April Perry, in halting the advance of military troops into Illinois this week, said that tactics used by immigration agents in Chicago so far have only increased the risk of protests, and that bringing in the National Guard would only make matters worse.
Judge Perry, too, asked if under 10 U.S.C. 12406 it mattered that the government was unable to execute federal law because of its own provocative conduct. Alexander Hamilton said it didn’t, implying that the government could deliberately foment unrest and cite that unrest in deploying troops.
Indeed, that is what our military does when deployed against enemies abroad. It immediately sets about protecting its own forces from attack; an absurd proposition that armed and armored troops in flak jackets and helmets needing more protection from residents hollering objections and defenses of their neighbors, coworkers, and fellow country folk under increasingly terrorizing assault from these forces directed against mostly workers and their families as if arrayed and armed against the fictional "worst of the worst" Trump has demonized as drug traffickers gang members, and predators."
It's a war game for anti-American malcontents who enjoy assaulting non-white people, enabled by this racist, criminal president and unleashed on American communities like disciples of the KKK Grand Wizard.
As U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum said today, as she called on ICE to stop abducting her Oregon constituents, “These ICE raids are reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act, when the U.S. Marshals would hunt down and kidnap Black Americans. That was a dark and shameful time in our nation’s history—we must not allow that to repeat.
Trump is colluding with republican governors and their military to force their political agenda on Democratic states
___Texas' republican governor agreed with the republican president this week to commit troops to Illinois against their wishes or need, and ostensibly, to 'carry out the president's orders'; this seemingly illegal imposition of troops happening at the same time as Trump is threatening to jail the Democratic governor and mayor.
This is basically one state warring against another with the full weight and authority of the federal government behind them. It's a perversely reverse Civil War.
After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Act of 1867 placed Southern governments under military rule. The South was divided into five military districts, each run by a general in the U.S. Army. The five districts were Virginia; North and South Carolina; Georgia, Alabama, and Florida; Mississippi and Arkansas; and Texas and Louisiana. Tennessee was the only prior Confederate state that was not placed under military rule because Tennessee had many Union supporters during the war. Around 200,000 troops were placed in the South to enforce military rule.
What I'm waiting for is the realization by these republican majority states, that a Democratic president could find any number of reasons to invade and occupy southern and red cities under the same pretext that republicans manage to get away with, with the goal of defending American rights like protecting the vote; protecting access to reproductive health; protecting those exercising their right to protest.
The precedent being set by Trump's political exercise of his assumed authority to deploy troops against Americans should be a wake up call to republicans who believe their states are safe from executive government unilaterally revisiting and revising the abusive and repressive laws they pass; laws and regulations which a Democratic president might not agree with and seek to halt or control using the force of our nation's military troops to either intimidate or impede state actions.
Republicans are simply allowing Trump to pave a roadmap for Democrats to advantage in nullifying any power or authority a republican majority acting today might assume will be the law of the land tomorrow; yet undermined when their political opposition assumes and exercises power exclusively on behalf of their own party and their own prerogatives.
They're getting their cheap thrills today, with hell to pay tomorrow. They are threatening democracy, itself, so it should stand to reason for them that their future out-of-power holds nothing but the righteousness of Democrats and Americans advantaging those same levers of control republicans are allowing Trump to use today, wielding those same autocratic allowances in the effort to restore the nation back to where this convicted felon and his republicans enablers took over and began dismantling the entire 20th century of American legislative and social progress.
“I want that to sit in right now,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said on Oct. 6. “...the President of the United States of America has declared war on the people of Chicago and people across America.”
This republican president is enlisting republican governors and their state's military forces to conduct what Trump himself characterized as a 'war against the enemy within' inside of our nation's states, cities, communities, and neighborhoods.
Just days ago Trump was railing against what he termed an 'enemy within' in front of generals who must have been wondering how all of his ranting could possibly reconcile with all of their own schooling, study, and practice about the constitutionally limited role of our military within the U.S..
Generals who would ostensibly command troops against an American city had to be asking themselves whether any such mission was now compromised by the president's politically-charged directive intending their forces to be deployed against what are this president's political 'enemies,' in the cities he ticked off to the generals like they were hostile military targets.
"It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out one by one," the president asserted. "And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within."
Our nation's military is bestowed to the nation by the Constitution and our contributions as a defense not an imposition; indeed, that's why every American military officer swears an oath that begins with ten critical words: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” not retribution and repression ordered by the president against his perceived political enemies.
These new alliances between this republican president wielding authority as commander-in-chief are employing military troops provided by republican state governors to wage war against citizens in states where residents have voted for Democratic leaders and legislators to have primary responsibility for their security and defense needs; not troops unfamiliar or unconcerned with state laws, regulations, or the expectations of the occupied citizenry of fair treatment under their own state's laws and initiatives.
Texas and the Trump WH are colluding together against a Democratic state and city, and we should all be wondering just what this new unholy alliance of a republicans states advantaging the resources and authority of the federal government to impose their political agenda, by military force, against a Democratic one will try to impose what on who next.
Fascists and totalitarians who attack the most vulnerable first aren't inevitable, they're enabled
...their actions are directly related to society's acquiescence to their discrimination and attacks; as everyday citizens fail to stop it due to agreement; indifference; or maybe shared antipathy toward the prevailing rule's targets.
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC
The Supreme Court appears ready to side with Trump in bringing back “gay conversion therapy.”
This practice involves physically abusing teenagers to try to turn them heterosexual, including with electric shocks and chemically-induced nausea.
https://x.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1975605645857476878
Trump and his adminions want you to be afraid and resentful of black and brown people. How's that working out?
___Americans should either be fed up by now with the ways Trump and his administration minions have adopted and used his anti-immigrant lies to rob and hurt ALL Americans; or they are or would, in the WH's best hopes and dreams, be so resentful that a popular movement against the migrants, blacks, women, LGBTQ, even Catholics who inhabit this nation would rise up to embrace their freakish clan's drive to divide Americans among ourselves like something out of the late 1800's; complicit with their with denials of the horrors of slavery; in lockstep with their evisceration of all of the federal and legal protections so tenuously afforded to a people so thoroughly repressed by the very government and society which their labor and contributions have enabled into power and authority over them; all that acquiescence capped off by a Supreme Court which just weeks ago gave permission to irregular, militarized federal immigration agents to claim the color of someone's skin, where they work, or the way they speak is enough probable cause required to bring the full force of this unaccountable police force down on a subset of our population who should otherwise enjoy the presumption of innocence that is inherent in our Constitution and incumbent on our own sense of morality.
Are folks out there good that the very first justification the White House and republican leaders in the Congress they control offered up for their shutdown was a dumbfounding, but in their fashion, lie about how Democratic leaders had instead shut down government because they wanted 'health care for immigrants' in some fictional budget proposal?
I get that there hasn't been even a modicum of attention or outcry from the media or practically anyone but the hapless Americans and others in the sights of this administration to the way Trump's ignorant and backward slander about minorities in government and workplaces in America using the moniker of 'DEI" as shorthand for something his administration and Justice Dept. has put forward as actual legal justification for declaring 'emergency' powers in several Executive Orders; as well as justification in court for firings of federal workers, sometimes en masse, which would otherwise be illegal.
Now we're seeing a classic military tactic used to infiltrate, destabilize, and perpetuate military action in foreign countries being employed in our nation's cities, as irregular, militarized units of ICE agents are deliberately destabilizing communities with mass arrests which round up both Americans and immigrants together in majority migrant communities without regard for any of the warrants or reasonable suspicion of a crime that white Americans demand and most often are advantaged with in encounters with law enforcement.
After the destabilizing forces have drawn enough visible resistance from an outraged citizenry, the pretext is established to protect those militarized federal agents with regular soldiers so they can perpetually lord their militarization over communities indefinitely claiming it's about their own protection - not the citizens, but the very military forces that are oppressing American communities.
Acquiescing to criminalization of immigration violations is what enabled this govt to threaten all Americans' liberties.
It's what's enabled the republicans into office who voted in billions of funding for the mostly unaccountable militarized federal force whose defense against threats from a citizens protesting them is being used as pretext to deploy armed troops with repressive control over ALL the inhabitants of states; not just the invented criminals the president claims he's protecting citizens from. No oppressive criminalization of immigration violations, no need for a militarized regime that requires the force of the military to enable its tyranny over the people in this country.
Likewise, if Americans begin to demand that the federal government reverse their war on diversity; recognize the value of Americans who have not only been traditionally locked out of opportunity and denied justice, but are RIGHT NOW in a state of repression by the government on a scale not seen in this nation since the long, withering tyranny for black and brown people in this country after Reconstruction; after the passage of 'Jim Crow' laws that enforced segregation based on race and imposed measures aimed at keeping black Americans from voting; often enforced by local KKK who would terrorize communities and individuals with the full compliance of the police and courts.
Americans need to recognize and acknowledge just how much our civil society has been set back by Trump and his republicans - to the point where demagogues who have long advantaged their narrow interests by denigrating or attacking others, have now set their divisive sights far beyond the black and brown people they've become accustomed to discriminating against with impunity.
The more tepid the defense has been from the majority of Americans against Trump and his adminions using these open assaults on diversity, against minorities and traditionally marginalized groups and individuals in the U.S. as justification for their often illegal overreach, the more emboldened they have been to perpetuate this perverse misrepresentation of so many of our countryfolks' value and worth to the nation; recklessly trashing a diverse public and private workforce that reflects the communities they serve and benefit.
To what end? Are folks tired yet of this revival of government oppression and bondage of people who been scapegoats all throughout the building and expansion of this nation; tired of the denigration of their labor and contributions which have enhanced the quality of every American, often to the exclusion of their own welfare and opportunity in this country?
Or, are folks just waiting to see if their own interests will insulated from attack, or elevated on top of the people their government is knocking down and crushing?
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