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Month: July 2025

Are You Feeling Good About 2026?

Published by digby on July 7, 2025

Don’t get too excited. Trump’s DOJ has other plans.

With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill last week, chatter in the media immediately turned to how it would affect the Democrats’ prospects in the midterm elections next year. This actually makes some sense since this legislation was the big enchilada with very little hope or, frankly, necessity of any further legislation as the White House will simply continue to govern the country through royal decree, aka Executive Orders. They did the one thing the congress is still required to do: allocate money for the president to spend. They could just recess the congress and go home until the next election and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Let the horse race begin.

Polling shows that the bill is very unpopular building the Democrats’ confidence that they will be able to exploit the usual advantage as the minority in the midterms and at least win the House of Representatives. And with North Carolina GOP Senator Thom Tillis’s abrupt retirement in response to Trump’s threats to take him out if he refused to vote for the OBBB, even winning the Senate looks less remote that it did before last week.

Trump himself is quite unpopular as well. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris points out that his numbers on deportations are lower than they are on the economy and those numbers are in the dirt:

Trump’s approval rating on deportations is currently lower than his approval on the economy www.gelliottmorris.com/p/data

— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) 2025-07-05T15:15:23.522Z

Everything in the Big Beautiful Bill is pretty much guaranteed to make all of that worse, even though some of the most calamitous provisions conveniently aren’t set to really kick in until after the election. But with the ongoing tariff drama and all the chaos and destruction meted out by the ill-fated DOGE disaster, people will certainly be feeling the effects of Trump’s carnage. The gangs of armed, mask-covered, ICE marauders will only be more present in everyone’s lives with the billions of dollars being pumped into their coffers. It’s hard to imagine that those numbers will materially improve, although anything possible in this surreal political era.

So, assuming that these mid-terms follow the usual pattern of giving the advantage to the out party, there’s a good chance that the GOP’s days of one party rule only have about 18 months to run. (And when you put it that way, it’s not actually all that encouraging is it? )

Trump’s decimation of any semblance of Justice Department independence is troubling in dozens of ways but it’s downright spine-chilling when it comes to thinking about elections. This is a man whose track record of trying to overturn elections is unprecedented. In fact, there was a time when many Americans thought that his behavior in the post-election period of the 2020 election was so egregious that he should be prosecuted and at the very least should never be allowed near elective office again.

Just to briefly recap the ways in which he attempted to manipulate the justice system in order to change the outcome, he challenged election results and filed law suits in every swing state declaring that the elections had been stolen. State courts across the board found his suits to be baseless and he lost all but one.

He leaned on state and local Republican officials to cheat in order to give him the win, famously telling the Georgia Secretary of State, on tape, that he just wanted him to “find” enough votes to put him over the top. He and his accomplices plotted to have fake electors file false paperwork declaring him the winner in the electoral college. And he pressured his often pliant Attorney General Bill Barr to have the Department of Justice declare that the election was fraudulent which Barr refused to do, resigning shortly thereafter. Trump then pressed Barr’s successor, Jeffrey Rosen, to do the same and he refused as well.

And finally, we know that he attempted to bully his Vice President Mike Pence into going along with their “fake elector” plot to overturn the election which he also refused. We all know where that led on January 6th.

I wouldn’t bring all that up again except it would seem to be an important context for what we are going to experience the next time we have an election that doesn’t go Trump’s way. He learned his lesson well. He now has a very, very eager and accommodating Attorney General in Pam Bondi whose top staff are all Trump’s personal lawyers and they have purged anyone who might say no to him. They’re all very much on the same page.

On July 4th as Trump gave his balcony speech, he mentioned that they have plans:

Trump signed an Executive Order back in March requiring that everyone presents proof of citizenship to vote and requiring that all ballots be received by election day, not simply postmarked as many states allow. He also called on states to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes threatening to pull federal funding if they refuse. And he ordered that states cease using barcode or QR code in the vote counting process, ostensibly to prevent fraud, which would bar many jurisdictions from using voting machines. Trump and his minions fatuously insist that this is being done to restore faith in the electoral process — faith that was shaken by Trump’s Big Lie.

Those orders are being challenged in court but the DOJ is following up anyway. They recently demanded that the Colorado Secretary of State turn over “all records” relating to 2024 federal elections, as well as preserve any records that remain from the 2020 election, a mammoth request apparently related to the prosecution of a Republican elected official who was convicted of election crimes and who Trump has called a “political prisoner.”

Last week, the NY Times reported that the Justice Department is considering charging election officials with a federal crime if they believe they have not adequately protected their computer systems. That’s been one of Trump’s hobby horses since 2020, in which he accused the voting machine companies of allowing their machines to be hacked on Joe Biden’s behalf. (You may recall that cost Fox News a whole lot of money when they repeated Trump’s lies.)

All of this was foreshadowed by Project 2025, which laid out plans to create unprecedented federal interference in the way elections are managed. I don’t think it’s being paranoid to expect that 2026 elections that result in victories that could change the balance of power are going to be contested. And I wouldn’t bet too much money on the courts being as straight forwardly dismissive as they were the last time. If they are, the Republicans will appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court just as they do everything else these days and we might not know who won until the election of 2028 is already underway.

Salon

The Camps Are Here

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 7, 2025

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found….

https://bsky.app/profile/aoc.bsky.social/post/3lt3fvohzjc2q

Thom Hartman last week lambasted Donald Trump’s prison camp in the Florida swamps, reminding readers that Dachau started out as “detention facility” for people the Hitler government deemed undesirables. It became a template for extermination camps built later outside Germany’s borders.

Hartmann warns:

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.

What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example — what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.

[…]

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.

Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny”) over the weekend conjectured that Trump will offer concentration camp prisoners to CEOs as cheap labor:

What happens next in the U.S.? Workers who are presented as “undocumented” will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it “owner responsibility.”

Mother Jones asks former prison chiefs how the monies will flow into the pockets of private prison companies as well.

Michael Tomasky offers perspective on the scale of the immigration, deportation and detention expansion in the bill Trump signed over the weekend:

It includes $170 billion for immigration enforcement: about $50 billion to build a wall on the Southern border; $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and $45 billion for detention camps.

A little perspective: ICE’s existing annual budget has been around $8 billion, so $30 billion is nearly quadruple. As AOC noted, it will make ICE into a huge police force that will indeed be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined.

Citing Snyder’s post, Tomasky wishes he was just overstating where this is headed:

And this is where we are, in the United States of America, in the year 2025: We’re looking at the very real possibility of a string of labor camps across the country. Am I overstating things? First of all, I’d rather err by overstating things than understating them. And second, a lot of people once upon a time thought it was overstating things to say that Trump might lead an insurrection against the United States government, or that he’d force media companies and law firms to pay him bribes, or that he’d try to dictate what they teach at American universities, or that he’d do 15 other things he’s turned around and done.

So no, I’m not overstating things at all. The time to start opposing this is right now. Snyder writes that U.S. employers should be made to sign a pledge that they won’t use camp labor. A fine idea. But someone has to write the pledge and circulate it and make noise about it. Democrats, any takers?

Let’s not forget what unelected official is driving this. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser told the New York Times. Let’s not forget that real human beings stand at the blunt end of Stephen Miller’s immigration hammer. Immigrants first. Denaturalized Americans are next. After that, who knows?

Speaking of Dachau’s inmates, Hartmann writes:

They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy.

The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.

Sound familiar?

Way too familiar.

Genius Lyrics says of The Lord High Executioner’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado:

The version here is the original version, but almost every performance rewrites this song massively – both to remove racist or sexist lyrics and update the references to diss the nuisances of modern society.

No such niceties from Stephen Miller. He’s advertising what he has planned for “society offenders who might well be underground.“

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

Good Trouble Lives On (July 17, in memory of John Lewis)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Epstein List? What Epstein List?

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 7, 2025

“Purported footage”

“It’s sitting on my desk right now,” Bondi told Fox News in February.

Attorney General Pam Bondi declares that a celebrated right-wing conspiracy theory surrounding Jeffrey Epstein has taken its own life.

ABC News:

A review ordered by President Donald Trump-appointed leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI found no evidence that notorious deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein kept a “client list” of associates whom he blackmailed or conspired with to victimize dozens of women, according to a new memo reviewed by ABC News.

The department has also released hours of purported footage as part of its review, which officials say further confirms Epstein died by suicide while in custody in his jail cell in Manhattan in 2019 — contradicting conspiracy theories long embraced or spread by allies of President Trump and others.

The memo is also likely to generate outrage among those who have claimed Epstein’s known high-profile associates could be implicated in his crimes. According to the FBI and DOJ review, no further charges are expected in connection with their probes into Epstein, as investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

“Purported footage” is a nice touch, ABC. The thing is that Bondi’s announced months ago that the “client list” rumored to include Donald Trump’s name was sitting on her desk. She alleged that the Biden administration had been sitting on the Epstein files.

“And it’s a new day. It’s a new administration, and everything’s going to come out to the public. The public has the right to know Americans have a right to know,” Bondi declared in March.

Now the DOJ declares the list MIA.

Axios reminds readers that prominent members of the Trump administration made names for themselves (and money) on social media promoting consiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s trade in child sex trafficking:

Why it matters: The findings represent the first time Trump’s administration has officially contradicted conspiracy theories about Epstein’s activities and his death — theories that had been pushed by the FBI’s top two officials before Trump appointed them to the bureau.

  • As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI’s director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died.
  • Patel and Bongino have since said Epstein killed himself. But it has become an article of faith online, especially on the right, that Epstein’s crimes also implicated government officials, celebrities and business leaders — and that someone killed him to conceal them.
  • The memo says no one else involved in the Epstein case will be charged. (Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and related offenses.)

Former Trump bro Elon Musk made sure to mock the report: “There is no Epstein list.“

Musk had previously tweeted (then deleted) an accusation that Trump’s name was on the Epstein list:

Now the list does not exist. But since the veracity of all involved is seriously in question, this is a story about liars lying about lies.

Just last week, Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Today Pam Bondi declares Oceania is at war with Eurasia, as it always has been.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

Good Trouble Lives On (July 17, in memory of John Lewis)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

“Please, please sir, I’ll do anything”

Published by digby on July 6, 2025

BASH: The president has a reputation as a dealmaker, so why haven’t we seen the kind of trade deals he promised in the last 90 days?

BESSENT: He didn’t promise this … many of these countries never even contacted us.

Uh huh, ok:

I think Trump is bored with the whole tariff thing. It wasn’t as much fun as he thought it was going to be. He wanted to bend the world to his will and it turns out it’s not that easy. So now he’s just going to issue edicts, hoping that some will be desperate enough to come crawling back while he lets the rest ride. He honestly believes that everything always works out for him no matter what and he’s not wrong.

The art of the deal is really just hoping you can intimidate people into doing what you want them to do. That’s what Roy Cohn taught him. But it never really worked for him. If he hadn’t had his daddy’s money and a talent for hype he’d be some old guy living in a tract house on Staten Island eating junk food and yelling at the TV. Instead, he’s some old guy living in the White House eating junk food and yelling at the TV — and half of America thinks it’s brilliant and the whole world is forced to deal with it.

I’ll just leave this here:

Baltimore Rising

Published by digby on July 6, 2025

It’s such a weird time to demonize America’s cities when things like this are happening:

In 2021, shortly after starting his first term, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) rolled out a comprehensive plan to reduce gun violence in a city that had long been troubled by one of the deadliest homicide rates in the nation.

The strategy was to approach gun violence as a public health threat instead of simply a crime issue and to treat that threat at the source by investing in violence interrupters, community organizations and trauma-informed support systems in impacted neighborhoods. The plan’s goal: reduce shootings by 15 percent every year for five years.

Now four years in, Scott said, the plan is working.

As of July 1, 68 people in Baltimore had died by homicide this year, the fewest during the first six months of the year in more than five decades. It marks a nearly 23 percent decrease compared with the first half of 2024. Shootings where nobody was killed have also fallen by nearly 20 percent compared with the same time period last year. The falling statistics, mirroring a national drop in violent crime, follow years of similar declines.

“Everybody plays a part,” Scott said in an interview. “Yes, I’m the mayor. Yes, I had to come up with and deliver this plan. But none of it works without every single one of our partners.”

Among them, the mayor said, are the 40 or so employees of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement; the dozens of people who work as violence interrupters with the city’s flagship gun violence reduction program, Safe Streets; the Baltimore Police Department; the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office; the U.S. attorney’s office and the Office of the Maryland Attorney General.

“But most importantly,” Scott said, “the folks in the community.”

It’s not just Baltimore but his administration has done a particularly good job. I don’t hear much about this though. In fact, all we hear is that America’s big cities are nothing but expensive shitholes. Well, they are too expensive but they aren’t shitholes and at least some of it can be attributed to excellent Democratic mayors like Brandon Scott. (He also happens to be one of those Democrats who represents that generational change everyone says they want…) It’s a good story and someone ought to tell it.

Freudian Slip?

Published by digby on July 6, 2025

Gaines: “You have to remember, it’s Joe Biden who allowed millions and millions and millions of Democrats into this country…”

— Vince D. Monroy (@vincedmonroy.bsky.social) 2025-07-05T23:20:56.909Z

That’s the newest Real Housewife of Fox News, Riley Gaines, who is best known for coming in 5th in a swim meet and caterwauling about a transgender competitor so loudly that she whined herself right into a pundit gig.

I shouldn’t bother with something like this but you have to admit, this slip of the tongue very accurately reflects the Great Replacement Theory (which she knows nothing about I’m sure) and also reflects the notion that Democrats aren’t Real Americans. This is what the MAGA faithful truly believes. She just said it out loud.

Watch What You Say

Published by digby on July 6, 2025

The NY Times reports that a young EPA employee went on a tinder date and unbeknownst to him, it was a trap set by a Project Veritas ratfuck operation. He didn’t say anything incriminating but that didn’t stop the Trump administration and its creepy EPA administrator Lee Zeldin fatuously exploited his words to claim that the Biden administration was corrupt. It’s so stupid it gives you a headache but that’s the world we live in now:

Mr. Efron, a passionate believer in the E.P.A.’s mission “to protect human health and the environment,” came up with an analogy to describe what was happening: The agency was a cruise ship that had hit an iceberg. It needed to launch its lifeboats — climate and clean energy projects — right away.

“It truly feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” he told Brady.

Brady left after about an hour and Mr. Efron said he barely thought about the date again. Until a video of him appeared on the website of Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for using covert recordings to embarrass political opponents. Brady, who had posed as a politically liberal commercial real estate agent and recent transplant to the capital, was actually a Project Veritas operative with a hidden camera.

The conversation — particularly the phrase “gold bars” — has come to haunt Mr. Efron. Conservative media and Republicans immediately trumpeted those words as supposed evidence that the Biden administration had mishandled funds.

Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, repeatedly cited the video as he worked to cancel $20 billion that the Biden administration had granted to finance projects like electric vehicle charging stations in low income communities and installing geothermal systems to heat and cool subsidized housing.

Mr. Zeldin has blasted out media releases with headlines like “Administrator Zeldin Terminates Biden-Harris $20B ‘Gold Bar’ Grants” and “EPA Formally Refers Financial Mismanagement of $20B ‘Gold Bars’ to Inspector General.”

“The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal,” Mr. Zeldin said on Fox News in February, adding, “We found the gold bars. We want them back.”

The Justice Department found no evidence of any corruption and a federal judge found the allegations unproven. Trump’s own lawyers admit that this whole thing is bogus.

But whatever:

The unfortunate truth, for Mr. Efron, was that he had handed the E.P.A.’s critics a powerful political weapon, and he is still paying a personal price. Since the Project Veritas video aired — but especially since Mr. Zeldin posted it to his X account two days in a row in February, receiving almost three million views — he has been publicly shamed by Elon Musk, obscenely berated by anonymous callers and hauled into an interview with the F.B.I.

This really feels like a social media STASI strategy. Watch what you say.

When Elon posted about this to his 200 million followers, he was harassed, doxxed and threatened, of course. He ended up leaving his job.

In case you were wondering, this is what he meant by the “gold bars” comment:

“…the funding for clean energy projects going to states, cities, tribes and nonprofit groups were like gold bars being tossed into lifeboats to protect some of the Biden administration’s work.”

“What I meant was, we were giving money to protect rural Washington from wildfire smoke, and fund a health clinic in Georgia and a community farm in Missouri and help tribal communities that are falling into the ocean in Alaska,” he said. “Those were lifeboats.”

It’s clunky but it’s typical of Republicans to happily run with something this anodyne as evidence of a nefarious plot, the dumber the better.

The lesson in all this is to be careful of what you say to strangers these days. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Believe Him Or Your Lying Eyes

Published by digby on July 6, 2025

One of Trump’s superpowers is that he lies so much that people who like his personality (God know why) can discount anything he says that doesn’t sit right. Like “mass deportation now” signs at his convention:

The family of a Canadian national who supported Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations of immigrants say they are feeling betrayed after federal agents recently detained the woman in California while she interviewed for permanent US residency – and began working to expel her from the country.

“We feel totally blindsided,” Cynthia Olivera’s husband – US citizen and self-identified Trump voter Francisco Olivera – told the California news station KGTV. “I want my vote back.”

Cynthia Olivera, a 45-year-old mother of three US-born children, thus joined a growing list of examples contradicting the Trump administration’s claims that the immigration crackdown it has spearheaded since the president’s return to the Oval Office in January has prioritized targeting dangerous criminals.

Being in the US without legal status is generally a civil infraction rather than a criminal violation. Nonetheless, despite its claim that the immigration crackdown is mainly meant to rid the US of violent criminals, the White House has maintained that anyone in the US who lacks legal status is a criminal subject to deportation

Olivera was unwittingly thrust under the weight of those policies after Trump spent his successful 2024 presidential campaign promising to pursue them, earning her husband’s vote along the way, according to what he told KGTV. She was just 10 when her parents brought her to the US from Toronto without permission, she said to the station.

And, of course, their hero would only hurt other people, never themselves:

In 2024, toward the end of his presidency, Joe Biden’s administration granted her a permit allowing her to work legally in the US. She had also been navigating the process to obtain legal permanent US residency – colloquially referred to as a green card – for years.

Nonetheless, instead of supporting the candidate Biden endorsed to succeed him, then vice-president Kamala Harris, Olivera’s husband supported Trump in November’s White House election. He told KGTV that Trump’s promises to deport criminals en masse appealed to both him and Cynthia. And, echoing other mixed immigration status families who have had members affected by Trump’s policies, the Oliveras did not believe she would be hurt by her lack of legal US residency…

Francisco Olivera, for his part, summed up his and his wife’s disillusion by saying: “My wife … up until [a couple of weeks] ago, was a strong believer in what was going to happen the next four years.”

They were true Republicans: as long as all the bad stuff happens to someone else it’s fine.

Full-on State Repression

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 6, 2025

Coming attractions

“We are definitely on a path towards full-on state repression.” — Fiona Hill

Being an American once conferred a level of security — or at least perceived security. People who arrived on these shores looked forward to gaining their citizenship. Being a citizen meant being able to participate in the political process. It also meant no longer having to renew a green card or a work visa. The U.S. was no longer your contingent foster home, but a permanent one.

I remember clearing customs once on a return from Europe and having the customs officer hand back my passport and say, “Welcome home.”

Then came Donald Trump and Project 2025. James Greenberg writes at his Substack that the Trump 2.0 has stripped away the security that comes with citizenship. Oh, for joy.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate on June 11 signed a directive reclassifying denaturalization (revocation of U.S. citizenship). Greenberg writes that it authorizes federal attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law.”

He continues:

That includes not only fraud in the naturalization process but a broader list of offenses: terrorism, gang affiliation, financial crimes, and serious felonies committed after naturalization, even if they were not disclosed at the time.

Historically, denaturalization has been rare, reserved mostly for cases involving fraud or war crimes. That began to change under Trump’s first term. This memo signals not only a continuation of that trend but a significant expansion.

Nearly 25 million naturalized citizens now face heightened scrutiny, not just for how they became citizens, but for what they have done since. The implications are not theoretical. At least one person has already lost their citizenship under the expanded guidelines—a naturalized citizen who had concealed a child pornography conviction from over a decade ago.

These cases unfold in civil court, not criminal. There is no jury, no right to a public defender, and no requirement of a new charge. Citizenship can be lost without a criminal trial.

This shift marks something deeper: the transformation of citizenship from a settled legal status to a conditional one, subject to the discretion of the state.

The flag-humper promised to make America great again (whatever that marketing means). What he’s done for nearly 25 million Americans is make their citizenship contingent on remaining in his good graces. Their “great again” means looking over their shoulders and keeping their heads down. Big Brother is watching. Freedom, huh?

For those keeping score, Greenberg adds:

We’ve seen this pattern before, not only in U.S. history but in darker chapters abroad. In 1935, Nazi Germany’s Reich Citizenship Law reclassified Jews as non-citizens and enabled mass denaturalizations under the pretext that they were foreign elements. That legal erasure paved the way for what followed.

This isn’t a comparison of regimes. It’s an alert to method. Stripping citizenship may appear administrative, but it functions as a political tool. It redefines who belongs. And when belonging is linked to behavior, belief, or dissent, exclusion becomes a form of punishment. The state doesn’t need to imprison its critics if it can convince them to remain silent.

This shift did not happen in isolation. It follows a clear and familiar sequence, rooted in a politics of narrowing inclusion.

German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” is already replaying in your head. I won’t repeat it.

I ran across this warning this morning from former National Security Council member, Fiona Hill. It was April. People who sought refuge in the United States and became citizens now find themselves uncertain about their futures. Funny, so do I.

“There is a moral hazard embedded in this logic. If rights can be revoked, they are no longer rights. Protest becomes dangerous. Silence becomes a form of self-protection,” Greenberg cautions.

But that’s the point of purging the civil service, the FBI, and the military, isn’t it? Protection fot the paranoid in seats of power means insecurity for the rest of us.

God bless America.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

Good Trouble Lives On (July 17, in memory of John Lewis)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense