— The most horrifying news story of the day: Ukraine can’t fight the war against Russia without the Starlink Internet system to guide their weaponry and for communication. Yesterday, it was reported that Trump is considering having Musk cut off Starlink to that country to bring them to their knees on behalf of Vladimir Putin.
— Republicans are really in love with Nazi Hitler salutes! First it was Musk, at an event after Trump’s inauguration, throwing a Nazi salute twice. Then, Thursday, Steve Bannon did it at CPAC. They think that they’re “owning the libs” with these and other Nazi references and icons, but there’s nothing funny or cute about normalizing a racist ideology that led to 85 million deaths, massive suffering, and laid waste to most of Europe. Is it time for America to consider the German approach to hate speech, explicitly banning it and providing both civil and criminal penalties for promulgating Nazism?
— Trump is about to seize control of the Post Office. Is this all about voting by mail? Republicans have spent the better part of forty-plus years trying to make it harder to vote, following Paul Weyrich’s famous dictum: “Now many of our Christians … want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” States with mail-in voting have among the highest levels of voter participation in the country, which is why pretty much every other democracy in the world uses it extensively; this is exactly why Republicans don’t want mail-in voting. When Trump impounded money for the postal service in the 2020 election but Lewis DeJoy still got 97% of all ballots delivered within 3 days, it sealed DeJoy’s fate; he was just pushed out as Postmaster General. And now Trump is reportedly planning to bring the Post Office — an American institution since Ben Franklin became our first Postmaster General in 1775 — under his personal control by handing it to billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik to run. Lutnik has been a longtime advocate for privatizing the PO, which would also presumably mean killing off the postal workers’ union and raising rates to cover the for-profit overhead, dividends for rich investors, and millions in salaries for the new CEO and senior executives. The PO could then refuse to transport ballots or otherwise put the fix in to destroy mail-in voting. Keep an eye on this; the unions have already said they’ll sue, and several members of the Postal Board of Governors have echoed those sentiments. But with Trump openly defying court orders right now around USAID and NIH, it’s unlikely he’ll be deterred by legal niceties.
— Remember Trump’s and Vance’s lies about Haitians in Springfield eating cats and dogs? They’re now planning to deport them, many to a certain death. Over a half-million Haitians have been granted temporary refugee status within the US because that country has turned into a gang-run hellhole and both the Obama, Biden and two Trump administrations have essentially refused to do anything to help. (Odds are if Haiti was filled with white people, the situation would be vastly different.) Now, Trump has decreed that their temporary protected status will run out this August, meaning the deportations can begin for those Haitians who haven’t figured out a way to get themselves to another country or back to Haiti. Another group the Trump administration is crapping on are Iranian Christians — arguably the most persecuted minority in that country (converting from Islam is punished by death) — and the hundreds of thousands of them in the US are now also facing deportation (and a batch were just this week deported to Panama) and certain death. Whoever tries to tell you that Trump and his followers are Christians needs to look up Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:31-46 and realize it’s a lie worthy of an antichrist.
— 'We’re going back': Proud Boys and Oath Keepers plan presser at Capitol they stormed; is there anything wrong with cop killers returning to the scene of their crime? Two women, one with a bullhorn and the other with a whistle disrupted the reunion and celebration of their killing three cops and near overthrow of our government. God bless them!
— Missouri Republican wants to “register” pregnant women he says are “at risk of seeking abortion.” Jessica Valenti reports that “creepy” Missouri Republican Representative Phil Amato wants the state to set up an “EHarmony for babies” that would require every pregnant woman in the state “at risk for abortion” (presumably every pregnant woman and girl in the state) to register with the state and then be “matched” with an infertile couple looking for an adopted child. The couple would then have the contact information for the pregnant woman so they could “encourage” her not to get an abortion. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe this; it’s a clear infringement on women’s Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, or at least what’s left of them after the Dobbs decision.
— Can we all be like Chris Klewe? Jim Stewartson over at mind-war.com argues that we should all take a lesson from former NFL punter Chris Klewe, who showed up at his Huntington Beach, California City Council meeting to argue against a plaque the MAGA followers on the Council wanted to put in front of the town’s library. It would claim the library was “Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, and Adventurous (MAGA).” Klewe not only spoke up, but at the end sat down and forced the police to haul him out of the room in the finest tradition of peaceful protest. Here’s what he said:
Hi, my name is Chris Kluwe, 15 year H.B. resident. I'm here to speak out against both the plaque and the current city council. As a community made clear at the library commission meeting last Tuesday, everyone is in favor of a plaque to celebrate the library, but the vast majority are against including a MAGA acrostic.
Unfortunately, it's clear that this council does not listen, so instead I'm going to take my time to say what MAGA has stood for these past three weeks.
MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence.
MAGA stands for resegregation and racism.
MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing.
MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal.
MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide.
MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children.
MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement.
You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat but that is what it is. I will now engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.
As Jim writes, “Be like Chris Klewe!”
— You need to have a bird flu plan for your cats or they will most likely die. Bird flu, while not having yet mutated into a human-transmissible form, is deadly to cats (mortality rate over 80%) and they’re getting it from eating birds outdoors and from humans tracking bird feces or feathers into the house. It’s never a good idea to let cats outside because of the environmental damage they do with their predation, but now it’s a lethal choice. And if you live in an area (like we do) where there are a lot of birds (and a lot of bird poop), be careful about where you step and what you track into the house.
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