2.21.25 Report from the Senate Floor, written by US Senator Chris Murphy (D – CT):

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is. 

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on...

From Illinois governor J.D. Pritzker’s State of the State address on 19 February, 2025:

“”As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an America...

After a wonderful few days visiting the grandsons, I’ve retaken a horrible mood by looking at the news. So very many horrid items to note, truly a dystopian chapter. There seems no end to what this crew of fascists is willing to do to people the world over. Just one person’s thoughts today, this from Bret Stephens:

“In April 1928, Joseph Goebbels, later the Third Reich’s chief propagandist, wrote a newspaper essay addressing the question of why the National Socialists, despite being an “anti-parliamentarian party,” would nonetheless compete in that May’s parliamentary elections.

“We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons,” Goebbels explained. “If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem...

There are too many matters of non-integrity to point out, and too many people to point at. Today’s confirmation of Robert Kennedy, Jr. would make his father and uncle turn in their graves–and has made his entire clan speak out vociferously against him. Linda McMahon, formerly of the WWE, will be confirmed as head of DoEducation, and is there to do an ax job. Kash Patel leading FBI, and on, and on, and on with compete incompetency, inexperience, and lack of independent (from Herr Trump und Herr Musk) thinking being the mark of this administration.

Just today the US Atty for the Southern District of Manhattan has resigned in protest to the Justice Dept’s bowing to his will via the order to withdraw corruption charges against the NYC mayor...

Will an honorable party in congress stand up with a spine to stop all of this? Are we going to have to wait a full two years, for the country to vote out members of congress, to see how much damage he can do to our system by taking a criminal’s approach to vendetta, to transactional-real estate diplomacy? This is a truly shameful display of an absence of congressional independence, of the execution of our system of checks and balances.

Just look at one day’s headlines.

The false claims; the constant lies; the slight of hand that brings the country to pay attention to shiny things (DEI as the fault of everything) while he and his people follow paths of complete disrespect for the processes of our representative democracy; openly and brazenly shaping every action towards vindictiveness, spite, and revenge; pursuing the disregard for the human effect of their actions. He has successfully compiled a cast of characters out of the most dystopian fiction. I have yet to see or hear of any action that even tries to claim its motivation is about improving something about the lives of our country’s citizens.

This layout of facts today re an unelected South African immigrant with Nazi sympathies taking over governmental systems is truly Orwellian. This Wired r...

There are so very many probing and articulate voices available to us today. There are so many concerned and dedicated citizens of the world who are screaming to us to be aware of the many steps being taken–illegal steps being taken by POTUS–and are begging us to speak out. Here is another one:

https://www.avindman.com/p/hostile-takeover

Why It Matters

Hostile Takeover

“Department of Government Efficiency” Hijacks The Federal Government

Alexander Vindman

Feb 02, 2025
Members of the newly created “Department of Government Efficiency” under Elon Musk have engaged in an ongoing campaign designed to cripple the basic functions of government and decimate the federal civil service...

“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don’t know, I’m an adjunct professor at Indiana University – Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.

Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of “The Art of the Deal,” a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, or if you’ve followed Trump lately, you’ll know, even if you didn’t know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call “distributive bargaining.”

Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser...

“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

“These were the presidents of my lifetime...