Saturday, January 18, 2025

No, Dems aren't going to forget how the country arrived at this impending moment

Some thoughts about Monday from BLUESKY.


Pls spend from now until Tuesday eve celebrating a truly great American: Martin Luther King Jr. Don't let a racist adjudicated rapist take away from MLK Day!

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— Morgan J Freeman (@mjfree.bsky.social) January 18, 2025 at 10:48 PM


Let’s hope that Tik Tok is disabled tonight at midnight and all day tomorrow and Monday. Which means the biggest story on Monday will be… And the reaction from the newly installed President will be …

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) January 18, 2025 at 9:01 PM


Monday will not kick off a good week for the country.  Juliana Kim,  Adriana Cardona-Maguigad and Sarah (NPR) report:


Incoming "border czar" Tom Homan said large-scale raids as part of President-elect Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration are set to begin as soon as Tuesday.

In an interview with Fox News on Friday night, Homan did not offer further details, but he did confirm that Chicago will be one of the cities targeted. 

"On Tuesday, ICE is finally going to go out and do their job. We're going to take the handcuffs off ICE," he said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Homan, a former acting head of ICE, added that immigration agents will focus on the "worst first, public safety threats first, but no one is off the table. If they're in the country illegally, they got a problem."


Elections have consequences.  2024 was not a question mark.  We all knew what Donald Chump was capable of, we knew how hateful he was, we knew what a crook he was and we knew he'd attempted an insurrection against the country.  We knew the Supreme Court would be at stake with at least one judicial opening likely to come in the next four years.


Yet as late as July, you had Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski endorsing Jill Stein -- grifter Jill Stein.  August, Sepember and October saw daily trashing of Kamala on DEMOCRACY NOW! and at THE NATION, COMMON DREAMS and so many other places.


Now a writer for two of the biggest Kamala hating outlets online did a BLUESKY boo boo where he wanted to tell us that this is not helpful -- remembering history is not helpful.


I'm so sorry you're so damn stupid because your stupidity is not helpful. 


If most of us are lucky enough to survive the next four years (we wont all be so lucky), we need to remember what happened and we need to remember why it happened.  It was always going to be a close election and those who betrayed the party need to be held accountable.


Rashida Tlaib, you grifter, don't take Democratic Party money and then think you can get away without endorsing the party's presidential nominee.  That didn't make you smart, it made you Zell Miller, a turncoat who needs to be shown the door before you do further damage.


Rashida and others made this mess and we need to rub their faces in it until they're house broken.

This is not minor.  They went off on their bulls**t and put so many people at risk.  

Deportations are about to begin.

Same-sex marriage?  Republicans already are moving to end it.

Instead of being welcoming to others, Conversion Case Mike Johnson bans a member of Congress from using the bathroom.  That's not exactly Love Thy Neighbor.


They're already moving to stip voting rights from American citizens.


They're going to destroy our climate and that's just part of Chump's big give-away to big business.


So I'm really not in the mood for some White boy Socialist hiding in a political closet to BLUESKY about what we in the Democratic Party need to do.


We?


You're not "we."  You're not a Democrat, you're a Socialist.  I guess if you made that public confession, you'd lose some of the support you have on BLUESKY.


By the way, when people read something like the above there's always one or two drive-bys to the public account.


I'm attacking someone above.  It's probably obvious who.  But don't think for one moment that I've shared everything I know.  Like Jeff Bridges says to Michelle Pfeiffer in THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, "Once the sweat dries, you still don't know s**t about me."


Meaning?


While I'm calling that man out, I'm not sharing everything I know.  I'm not sharing things that he's hidden besides his political identity and I'm certainly not sharing the e-mails e's exchanged.


For example, when I noted what a sell Barbie Lee was this week, eavesdroppers on this private conversation in this public square wanted me to know that I didn't know what I was talking about.  'Barbara stands for justice!  Barbara has always been there!'


Idiots.  No, she hasn't.  And no one who seriously cares about the Palestinian issue would make such a statement because she never cared until the last two years when she was eyeing the US Senate.  Then, suddenly, Barbara Lee cared about the Palestinian people.


I wasn't the only one noticing that.  For example, a member of Congress noticed it too.  The same member of Congress who told me in 2008 that if Barack Obama got elected president we would see Barbara Lee drop all her efforts to end either war.  


Let me help you out further, that friend?  One of the co-chairs of the House Out Of Iraq Caucus.


And she's always known Barbara Lee was a fake ass. 


I don't think I've ever emptied the gun at this website.  There are always other bullets in the chamber.


Following the 2000 election, I never attacked Ralph Nader voters.  First off, your vote is your vote. Second off, Bully Boy Bush was an unknown.  


Again, this wasn't 2000.  We knew how much hate was in Donald Chump's heart and we knew he was a menace.  


So I don't have any sympathy for these people who helped elect Chump.


We are all going to suffer because of their actions and they need to be called out on what they did daily for the next four years.  And that's still them getting off lightly -- certainly lighter than anyone about to be thrown out of this country.  Michael Tomasky (THE NEW REPUBLIC) explains:


Trump will take the oath of office at noon on Monday. Soon thereafter, this parade of misfit toys we’ve been watching testify this week will occupy their Cabinet positions. Orders will start percolating out—from Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and other Trump deep staters—to start doings things differently. Trump already knows certain leverage points in the federal bureaucracy that took him months or years to locate the first time around. And he’ll have one big thing that he didn’t have in 2017: a pliant and willing establishment that signals a desire to be 100 percent on his side and that will give him every benefit of every doubt as he pulls at the republic’s threads.

It blows my mind, and ought to blow yours, that the three richest men in the world will be on Trump’s inaugural podium. It’s significant because, whatever their other powers and properties, they are three of the country’s most powerful media titans. Elon Musk owns the country’s most prominent news-oriented social media platform. Mark Zuckerberg owns the largest social networking service. And Jeff Bezos owns a newspaper that isn’t the ubiquitous behemoth that X and Facebook are, but even so, The Washington Post, at least to people on the broad left in the nation’s capital, means far more emotionally than the first two.

It’s worth staying with the Post for a paragraph here. Bezos bought the paper with seemingly good intentions in 2013 and poured a lot of money into it. Maybe, in retrospect, he went on too big a hiring spree. But that doesn’t excuse what’s been happening there lately. It’s a tragic mess, with its Murdoch-tainted publisher causing many excellent staffers to head for the exits. Bezos not long ago declared himself “very optimistic” and “very hopeful” about Trump’s return. This week, Post executives voted to adopt a new tag line/mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” Wow. This statement commits the paper to … what, exactly? I guess it’s quaint and hopelessly antique of me to mention that newspapers were once meant to be the people’s eyes and ears against corruption and assaults on the civic weal. The Post decided to keep “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for now. At least they didn’t vote to add, “Hey, if it happens, it happens.”

We are in an odd sort of waiting room at the moment. Trump and all his minions and enablers have told us many times what his administration will set out to accomplish: Project 2025, sweeping out the vermin, all the rest. At the same time, Trump himself has sent occasional mixed signals, indicating that it won’t really be that draconian, and every so often we read stories in the press meant to reassure us that, for example, rounding up and detaining 10 million people is literally not possible in four short years.

Well … call me cynical, but I sense a lot of people trying to convince themselves that it won’t be as bad this time around. I mean: Were you reassured by Pam Bondi’s testimony, for example? When Adam Schiff asked the attorney general nominee if she would pursue an investigation into Liz Cheney on Trump’s behalf, she said, “Senator, that’s a hypothetical, and I’m not going to answer it”—before lecturing Schiff that what he really ought to be concerned about is crime in California. But the maximum-cringe moment came when Chris Coons asked her what she’d do if Trump ordered her to do something “outside the boundaries of ethics or law.” Bondi’s reply: “Senator, I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal!” Senator Coons, how dare you!

We’ve been navigating a hall of mirrors in this country ever since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney et al. convinced America that we had to invade a nation that had done nothing to us, possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and, deplorably as it may have treated its own people, had no serious imperialist designs on its region (unlike the country—Iran—that our invasion ended up strengthening). Twenty years on, the mirrors are just stranger and more relentless and pitched at more confounding angles. And it won’t stop. 


Alice Miranda Ollstein (POLITIO) reports:


Donald Trump plans to enter the White House Monday with a show of executive force to carry out a sweeping set of campaign promises for Day One.

But just days before inauguration, senior aides continue to debate key aspects of many of his top agenda items, while softening their language on others. And the Trump team’s delays in vetting and hiring top staff, his Cabinet nominees’ lack of government experience, and his open hostility to the career federal workforce — the “deep state” he has long railed against — could impede his ability to carry out those executive orders.


We can only pray.  The POLITICO article continues by noting how the executive orders could be used to target certain issues:


Education:

The president-elect is widely expected to quickly issue an executive order that would scrap President Joe Biden’s order directing federal agencies to implement discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ Americans.


He could issue an additional executive order defining the term “sex” in a way that excludes transgender and intersex people from receiving certain protections. It could apply to all government agencies and have major implications for Title IX, the federal law that bars sex-based discrimination in school environments.

The order would follow a federal court ruling that struck down a Title IX rule from the Biden administration that aimed to bolster discrimination protections on gender identity and sexual orientation.

— Bianca Quilantan

Labor:

Trump intends to neuter the “deep state” he believes impeded his first administration, including with a revival of his notorious Schedule F plan to strip civil servant protections from tens of thousands of federal workers in various policymaking roles. That would make it easier for his administration to fire or demote those employees. Biden halted that policy and the Office of Personnel Management issued a regulation last spring aimed at preventing presidents from unilaterally converting government employees’ job category.

Trump will have to formally undo that regulation, a process that can take months or years, but the president-elect will be keen on doing so and may attempt ways to achieve similar goals in the interim.

The incoming president might also take aim at another Biden order imposing a $15 minimum wage for federal contractors at the beginning of his presidency, which was subsequently enacted by the Labor Department. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in November ruled that Biden exceeded his authority, a decision that could justify a swift reversal under Trump.

— Nick Niedzwiadek




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