Rachel Maddow has spent the last two segments of her show on MSNOW talking about the prison camps. There has been pushback! She mentions a fantastic resource on the website of a group that calls themselves PROJECT SALT BOX. On this website there is an interactive map - an online tracker that shows sites all across the country where Trump is trying to buy warehouses for these prison camps and what the status is on each site.
Right now there are 7 warehouses that ICE has bought so far. There are 5 warehouses where the sale has been blocked, essentially by citizen and community pushback! And there are 11 warehouses where the fight is still underway to stop the sales. Rachel was admonishing the large law firms that have capitulated to Trump and suggested they redeem themselves by doing pro bono legal work for these citizens that need help with their pushback. Check out the site - the group does other things too. The map is a great resource tool... The fight continues...
I don’t know how “Warehouses” convert to prisons, but it is a law in the building codes of almost all jurisdictions that when an existing building is repurposed for a new use, that all of the requirements of that use must be met. This would include life safety issues, ventilation issues, bathroom fixtures count, area per occupant, etc. From the little amount of transparency that I have seen, I would guess that this law is being partially or wholly ignored.
Among hundreds of other laws as well. Hey, if you’re gonna violate the Fourth, Fifth, First, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, why let a few pesky little building code statutes get in your way?
Except that breaking or potentially breaking those small laws may be enough to get the conversion stopped, like the 5 Michele mentioned and are on the PROJECT SALTBOX website.
Amazing what a little research can do to change your perspective and give you leverage.
Well that would be lovely indeed, if it actually happens. But I’m sure one of their legal beagles will argue you have to break local laws during a ‘national emergency.’ Or something equally as absurd.
To paraphrase the late "Queen of Mean," Leona Roberts Helmsley, another crooked real estate magnate,"We don't obey the law; only little people obey the law."
Helmsley had an "interesting" moral code. Another quote: "I always told my own child, 'If you murder somebody, tell me. I'll help you hide the body. But don't you lie to me.'"
Sometimes, a life of meanness leaves its mark on the mean person's countenance. In her youth, Leona was by any measure a beauty. Not long before her death at 87, she didn't look old; she was by any measure, ugly.
I won't be around to see, but I predict Kristi Noem will be a gargoyle at age 87 ... if she lives that long.
Mark: Sometimes, the small things like building code violations can have big impacts, like grinding projects to a total halt. Thanks for the suggestions for how to throw sand in the gears. If a few hundred locals arguing in front of a town zoning commission that a concentration camp is not desirable in their community can stop it, more power to them. And for far less cost, and of more importance far less time than is needed to run a case up to SCOTUS on constitutional grounds and have the conservative majority come up with a contorted ruling against you.
Unfortunately, Federal Buildings are exempt from local Zoning Codes. However, it is my understanding that there are only a few building code sections that the Federal Government is exempt from. The Federal Government is responsible for the adoption and enforcement of building codes otherwise. And I would guess that congress is responsible for adoption .
Thank you. That is useful information and enlightening. That I think also explains why ICE is buying the buildings. You are only considered a federal building by the Government Services Administration if the building is owned by the feds, not if it is leased.
I found ICE-specific standards for detention facilities.
Facilities must also follow Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS) for conditions of confinement, supplemented by constitutional requirements and the Immigration and Nationality Act.
I also wonder whether you can throw sand in the gears if the remodeled facility will overtax community wastewater treatment plants and water purification facilities and power infrastructure. Some of these facilities will house 5000 people which is huge compared to the size of adjacent communities.
This is a slight digression but it relates to Donald “the builder”: does anyone know whether the National Trust’s lawsuit against the ballroom build has resulted in stoppage? I thought I saw a video of Lawrence telling us the “pledges” were not materializing and the judge said 47 had to repair the ground till issues resolved. Thanks.
MLMinET: I am going to be a little silly here and a little serious.
I am going to teach you to fish. Fishing is fun and intellectually very stimulating. Way better than doomscrolling, IMHO, or pontificating. And it is vegan. No fish are harmed in the process ;-)
This uses my favorite chatbot which is free at the basic level and still privately owned, although Bezos has a stake. But Bezos has a stake in everything AI.
Best not to use their suggested follow-on questions more than a level or two deep or it will start trying to please you.
Type in your question and enter: What is the status of the National Trust’s lawsuit against the Trump Ballroom?
This is the most important part. Carefully check the sources in the shaded ovals after each part of the answer to see if the source is reliable and the answer actually reflects what is in the source. Here is where you can get burnt and led astray, especially if you are rushing. Few of the sources are paywalled.
Extra points for checking the media bias of a news site before you use it.
I always learn something unexpected. I also think it is the fastest way to see how to become an activist for the causes you believe in.
I believe that’s pretty much what happened in Ashland VA. The feds were ready to buy and that populace went to the owner of the building and said “NO!!” The sale was cancelled.
The Feds could always claim eminent domain, but given how Dems are taking the special elections with such big swings away from Trump, I do not think any member in the House would want an ICE concentration camp in their district. Trump would have had to have won by 40% to be safe.
Now that there is sand in the gears to slow down building the camps, there has to be pushback on the inhumane conditions through Congressional oversight and on getting people out of the camps on bond in the districts other than the Fifth Circuit expeditiously.
Mark you are correct. As you seem to know when a warehouse is built and plans are submitted to the building codes for review and approval the review on the infrastructure is based on warehousing stuff and a few people managing that space, hence less plumbing, less electrical, etc. and that includes what is in the ground to and from the building. As soon as you introduce hundreds if not thousands of individuals that infrastructure collapses. All cities and citizens should be against this misuse of a building in their community for obvious reasons, it won't work. You can bet none of these clowns throwing these ideas around the table have inquired with an architect or engineer about using a warehouse as a prison.
It is on that basis and other restrictions about zoning that Howard County Council in Maryland was able to deny any permit to convert an office building to a detention center. Review local zoning restrictions to deny same.
I was present in some of the Council Hearings. The air rang with energy, love, and justice. We filled the hearing room, the overflow room, the halls, and there were people outside in icy weather. All supporting the emergency legislation that allowed our wonderful County Executive to pull the permit for the conversion.
I am fortunate to live in a majority-blue county, in a majority-blue state. But I learned how we can have more influence in municipal- and county-level decisionmaking. Our local Indivisible group, Industrial Areas Foundation groups, and an interfaith coalition of congregations living their religious values (not threatening their tax exemptions - living values does not equal endorsing political candidates) educated, informed, and communicated.
From this experience I also took hope that the USA in 2026 is not the USA after Reconstruction, or Nazi Germany. Right now it is hard to make change at the top (though resisting Federal authoritarianism and oppression is also necessary). But we can still make our voices heard in important, powerful ways, and I haven't gotten killed or shipped off to a camp, not yet.
One of the objections that Maddow brought up was that one community’s sanitation system could not handle the influx of the new facility plus the…administrative staff… that would add to the community’s population.
Law? John Marshall made that point: Worcester vs Georgia, Andrew Jackson laughed him off and the Trail of Tears ramped up. Scotus gave the Felon the keys - he can't be tried as a sitting President, and so I ask, laws, what laws? Andy Jackson sits prominently on the White House wall.
Have you met the Douglas County Colorado commissioners? They would be more than happy to waive the code requirements for any building a developer wanted to convert to a warehouse for humans. Especially the wrong kind of humans, without enough money for bribes.
I don't know Douglas County, but I know of other similar locations. Most if not all states have adopted the International Building Code so that whether or not a county has a building code, the code is still law statewide - enforcement is a different story.
Occupancy of a former warehouse brings on key architectural requirements because of the safety issues surrounding 24/7 occupation. It is one thing to have workers present for shift work and quite another to have residents on site sleeping especially dangerous if they are forcibly detained. Perhaps a tent city at Mar A Lago and at governors mansion in states cashing in on this latest fraudulent Trumpian Enterprise. Maybe republicans in general could be persuaded to foot this portion of their tax bill while forgoing their right to drive on public roadways or say, forego educating their children in public schools. Compromise is a powerful tool in successfully negotiating for how you are willing to fund your want list. One of the most difficult moments in my tour of duty was being locked up in chain link enclosures in Oakland army base as we were staged for deportation to Nam. They locked us all up under guard as zero hour approached. Officials were terrified of our making a breakout. We were stripped and put into combat fatigues. I layed down on a concrete floor to sleep with the other soldiers and we waited in our pens until they escorted us single file into the transport planes. It was a humiliating experience at a time when we had no idea what tomorrow would bring.
Laws being partially or wholly ignored is not only what Stephen Miller and Trump are about, it's also what Trump has been about since long before he ran for office.
His whole life is about doing whatever he believes he has the right to do, and then, when challenged, flooding the courts with lawyers to bulldoze the opposition.
Good points. However, sadly ICE doesn't seem to believe is silly things like regulations, codes, or the rule of law. They are operating on possession is all they need and then they will do whatever they want and Bondi will never prosecute - as we saw yesterday.
Actually the building here in Howard County was an office complex that was purchased NOT by the Federal government but by a private Michigan company in 2019 (first TRUMP) and is an office building. It was denied the permit as a private company to convert it to a detention center. We have pretty strict rules about what kind of facilities may be permitted when within certain boundaries of nearby schools, religious buildings, medical facilities and open space playgrounds.
They may be exempt, but the law of supply and demand (around the infrastructure) still won't work. Too much shit will create a backup, just like Trumps cabinet and himself.
In my experience with Federal Buildings (which is limited), but also what I have learned on line, I found the following: "Building Codes are adopted and enforced by state, local, tribal and territorial entities. The federal government is responsible for the adoption and enforcement of building codes for federal building, and military buildings. If buildings are leased, the building Owner is certainly required to follow local building codes.
Right you are! Courts are currently admonishing the government to insure constitutional-level resources for those detained, to include medical care access, proper food and water, adequate bathrooms, and so on. Reports thus far suggest that the courts are speaking because these requirements have not been med. This entire ICE/DHS boondoggle is a) unconstitutional in its denial of due process; b) illegal, in its apprehension of persons at random; its refusal to acknowledge documents (green cards, work permits, even passports and birth certificates; c) utterly contemptuous of oversight requirements. Among other issues! Trump's a traitor, and his entire, unconstitutional, incompetent, corrupt regime should be impeached.
BADGES, WE DON’T NEED NO STICKING BADGES! If there are not guardrails for murder, how do we monitor the warehousing people in concentration camps, they as they fill, will we too kill!?
The Salt Box is out of Baltimore's historic salt boxes. It refers to the yellow salt boxes that were on the corners of the streets to use to melt ICE on the streets!
So what, really, is stopping the concentration camps from being put in to places like Merrimack, NH? Public awareness, mostly. The Merrimack debacle has already cost one state official their job (this official negotiated with ICE without informing the governor's office), and has a large part of the town council about to lose theirs as well. It is a bipartisan issue: the town's conservatives are concerned about property values, the town's liberals are concerned about having a warehouse/misery factory in their midst. The town is upset. Stay ornery, people!
Yes indeed... Also pressure on the sellers has been successful in some cases.. Kathy just posted a reply with an article from Wired - how ICE is leasing offices at breakneck speed all across the country. We need to get that information out to everyone ASAP... I'm tired but as you suggest ...ornery... What next... They really don't want their well-deserved criminal indictments!!!
Michele: That is fantastic news. Thank you so much for sharing this important information.
Interesting that ICE is buying them and not the big commercials Geo Group and CoreCivic that will be providing the “services”. So those companies don’t have to take on debt to buy the properties.
Here's an excerpt from Courier- (Cameron Stevenson/ Feb 10, 2026): "In an apparent attempt to avoid public outcry and scrutiny, ICE has sought to secure these leases in private, ignoring potential health and safety violations and catching local elected officials off guard."
Of course they are. Found one potential warehouse for lease, a half-hour drive away from where I live in central NJ.
The conditions at Geo Group's Delaney Hall facility in Newark, NJ are horrific even after it was reopened and was a death back in December. They need to expand.
Georgia..If you get a chance look at Kathy's post with link in it to article in Wired about ICE leasing office space at breakneck speed all across the country... People need to be alerted re/this development ASAP!
Gee Golly….! Whose money is Trump using to buy these Prison-Warehouses? Hmmmm…., my wife and I just completed our Federal Tax paperwork and brought it over to our Tax Guy. You don’t suppose Trumpie is using MY money do you?
I was thinking the same thing about yesterday’s Congressional Hearing “starring” AG Bondi. She isn’t getting any of my money, is she? And what about ALL those Congress People? I know Gym Jordan isn’t my Representative since I don’t live in Ohio, but I’m pretty sure all the Federal Income Tax money just gets dumped into one HUGE pot and then gets doled out to all government employees! That means - since we’re paying - We the People are their bosses!
Our tax money yes... Where have all our tax dollars gone...long time passing... Gone to ICE latest military fashion and to concentration camp warehouses, to military parades, probably to JD Vance's nine global vacations ( remember the one where the river had to be raised for his kayak?!), and to Trump's endless golf trips - oh, and lest we forget - to the refitting of the "gift" of Qatari plane... And probably to other places that have yet to be revealed...If you are right and our tax money does get dumped into one huge pot - perhaps we should look for it in a Swiss bank...
Perfect, Michele! “When will they/we ever learn? When will they/we ever learn?” We need Pete Seeger today! (I play my guitar and my banjo and sing those old, but inspiring songs every day. Guess which song just moved up on the Must Sing List for today? Thanks, Michele! I’ll sing it extra loud, so keep listening!)
I'm listening...As an activist all his life, it's comforting thinking of him somewhere playing the guitar and cheering us on.. Enjoy your music... Such a special gift...
Who has authorized the purchase of these "warehouses for people" similar to the poor houses of the past? Conditions in detention centers are worse than prison. Most prisoners have a cell to themselves and their own toilets and sinks. Detention centers have nothing except hard floors to sleep on, no clean drinking water, bugs in food, no toothpaste, soap, showers, or medications. This country is definitely NOT a first world country any longer. All in just one year's time!
Thanks. Very interesting. The New Mexico legislature just passed a law (and the governor signed it) that there will be NO detention facilities in New Mexico. I wonder what will happen to the one in Otero County. We'll see. As you say, the fight continues. And the for profit prisons reap in the dough.
Yes... I hear you... If you have a chance, check out Kathy's post ( somewhere in this area) which has a link to an article in Wired ... It says that ICE is leasing office space all across the country at a breakneck speed... They are desperate and trying to do their "plan" before we can catch up to what they are doing... Alert congress members and everyone else! Exhausting, isn't it?!#
Michele, stopping the concentration camp prisons should be a priority for all Americans. Once the camps are built, it will seem imperative that they are filled and those with money and power will decide who will fill them. The singer-song-writer, Tom Paxton wrote a song "When Princes Meet." in one of the verses he wrote "When castles rise, the poor little men must build them . . . they dig the dungeons from the earth and the brothers, wives, and children fill them. . . That's what the poor little men are for . . ." It's a powerful song, so check it out.
Yes - high priority... And I will check out the song... I would write more, but I am late for appointment... Thanks, as always, for your comments and suggestions...
These prison camps should alarm every American! Think about this: "deportees" are supposed to be deported. So who will populate these prison camps and why do they need so many of them? Who's next- anyone who disagrees with the regime?
Authoritarian regimes do not condone dissent. We must pushback at every chance we get... We must become investigative reporters and videographers and whistle blowers and expose their secretive plans to the light of day and push back...
If you know the locality of these camps those who are mandated reporters for child abuse/ neglect could call the hotline. One dies it anonymously and they are required by law to investigate it in 24 hours. There are issues with this approach but this seems a tool. Itvwax used in a few cases last t administration.
Maybe you would like to post that idea with as much detail and with the pros and cons??? Who are the mandated reporters for child abuse? With a little more info and the history of using this approach, etc. this is an important tool to shed light on the abuse within the walls of these concentration camps. Mary ... Did you want to speak to me about something??? I don't have a substack .and I wasn't sure if I could chat without having a substack. If you want to discuss something, maybe there is another way. One hard thing about this medium is that you can't really explain to someone, especially if someone follows you and wants you to follow them, it's not personal if you don't follow them... Or maybe I just don't completely understand the system of how substacks work yet. I still don't know where or how to post a question to HCR for her to answer in the Politics Chat... Anyway, moving on... I am tired and now rambling... Rachel Maddow, when talking about the plight of an 18 month old child (Amalia) mentioned that a law school professor and Director of the law school's Immigrants Rights Clinic filed the petition seeking the family's release. Amalia was released on Friday. I wonder if that group could somehow help... I have to get some sleep, but I think what you have is very valuable information to share... Let me know if I can help in any way...
Well any professional that deals with children from police officers to teachers to social workers, to nurses , to doctors is mandated by state and federal law to report any suspected child abuse. These mandates were created partially on the work of C. Henry Kempe MD who saw that spiral wrists fractures were more from abuse than not. They have a Center in his name in Denver, Colorado.
This all has a long long history. Selma Fraiberg and her seminal work Ghosts in the Nursery covers sone of the intergenerational aspects. It’s an old old old issue which always gets forgotten, hidden, or erased.
Ideally the professional organizations should be calling this all out.
One could call the ABA, AMA, the two APAs, NASW, and other guilds decade what are their plans to advocate for children. Other groups are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Internstional, and ACLU along with other advocacy groups. There are many nabes but it seems only done fight the good fight in true fashion. We need more.APA is coming out with a new diagnostic Manuel abd big changes Ibwoukd call them out abd have them use the UN Drvjsration on Human Rights and the declaration of Children’s Right as a base for everything.
The USA has not signed on some of these declarations. Very problematic. Take Care.
Georgia, I also noticed that Heather tends to tell historic events in ways that highlight lessons for us today. I love Lincoln's logic because it is flawless.
I am from the Land of Lincoln. Happy Lincoln's Birthday!
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words.
That is interesting. I read Douglass's autobiography in high school, but I did not remember that. It has been a while though. Each person brings their own perspective. Hindsight is 20-20 only to those who had some sight in the first place. Many who voted for Trump are blind.
The pedophile/hebephiles have a club, and perhaps at one time they would have worn white sheets and ridden at night to do what they do, but it seems they did this stuff openly amongst each other, not understanding that people can write things about them that will come back to bite them as Epstein did.
Yep Georgia, one would think that being "one nation, under god" would pretty much have wiped out the matter of skin tint. I have to wonder which wood-pile does Der Leader think his ancestors originated from? The shape of his head has some odd lines, diminished chin, perhaps more cro-magnon extinction-effect or lineal-degeneration. Definitely not of Mesopotamian origin. He lives in a fubar world of his own. And unfortunately for our country, we will never reclaim our position as one who can be trusted. It is clear to the rest of the more intellectual world that a large part of our population is dumb and easily influenced. I can't wait to see them break-ground for the Arch de' Trump.., the largest in the world. Super! Just super.
We should never forget that Trump, his efforts to legitimize white-supremacist genocide, the resultant ChristoNazi conquest and its MAGAstapo terrorism is the triumph of a multi-generation, bi-partisan scheme more than a century in the making, To learn of the carefully hidden roots of the crisis, the documentation of which include a PBS film about the enormous support for Hitler here in the '30s and additional, meticulously footnoted documentation of the plutocracy's support for Nazism, go here: https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/january-25-2026?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=205274486
Nor forget that his Grandfather was a Bavarian immigrant draft-dodger and sometime brothel keeper in the Yukon gold rush. His Father never served. He is a five time draft-dodger and his sons have never served. Two of his three wives were immigrants and the last and current wife was a some-time lesbian porn star in Slovenia and then a graduate by all accounts of Mr Epstein's grooming academy. She also was the beneficiary of an expensively purchased, one assumes, "Einstein" visa.
Elon Musk and other oligarchs are already spending ad dollars to get Republican politicians reelected to the Senate and the House.
A dark money PAC has been sending out mailings and placing radio ads touting the little trinkets Collins has procured for ME.
Funny how none of the ads talk about the millions of dollars that were approved by Congress that Trump has with held from colleges, farmers, the national parks and other businesses.
This past summer hardly any Canadians vacationed or even shopped in ME thanks to her Fascist Party.
Beware, the dark money ads propping up the Fascist Republicans.
Susan Collins has announced her intent to run to keep her Senate seat and we should do all we can to UNSEAT her with a Democrat or at least an Independent. BTW Janet Mills was a good governor but at 78 now and 79 if elected would be 85 at the end of one senate term. Please choose someone else younger?
With the effectively limitless capitalist support for ChristoNazism, the RepubliKlans will buy the services of a legion of Josef-Goebbels clones whose primary effort will be to re-intensify the infinite hatefulness that is the heart, mind and soul of the 77 percent of whites Pew polling defines as irremediably racist. That could be sufficient -- as it always has been -- to preserve the Christian white male supremacist theocracy Jeff Sharlet correctly exposed as "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" ("The Family"; Harper-Collins 2008). Unless the Democrats can counteract that hitherto always-victorious strategy -- and it will require a genuine miracle to do so, as there is literally no limit to the ChristoNazis' ability to out-spend them -- Trump will not need to cancel or fix the midterm elections. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/us/politics/republicans-democrats-midterms-fund-raising.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LlA.9FpB.8Hx-zgifTgRU&smid=url-share (Not paywalled.)
Read this yesterday and giggled a little. The blue upset victories have generally been funded by only a small percentage of the red war chest. Money may not buy votes going forward, and I plan to report all MAGA social media advertising as “irrelevant “.
And to think they took office wailing about "waste, fraud, and abuse" -- which now is their modus operandi. They got rid of so many valuable social and scientific programs (resulting in the deaths of so many) and are spending millions, if not billions, to imprison people. And yet, 37% of the population still backs this administration. Blows my mind.
77 million Americans voted for Trump. Most Republicans are still supporting him. The fact that he got reelected means the world will never trust us again. Radical change is needed in our country
You stated my response to “they are here illegally”. Well, aren’t you lucky to have been born here, while they were born where violence now threatens their children and their lives. This administration and the corrupt Supreme Court allows racial profiling in its search for those “illegals”. We had come forward for awhile, but now have taken many steps backward. My heart aches for those who were born in the wrong place or are of the “wrong” color in this country.
Is it ONLY where you drew your first breath? For example, Musk drew his first breath outside U.S. but money makes him powerful. Also, those who drew their first breath in U.S. and are non-white makes a difference to this particular administration. In fact, anyone who opposes this administration's policies is considered less than. RESIST!!!
If you go by what Trump says, he’s only putting immigrants in the camps. He is willing to make exceptions if you are rich enough or white and he thinks you’ve been discriminated against by black and brown people. Musk makes it in on both those counts, unfortunately.
If you are a citizen and you are swept up, you were siding with the immigrants, so you deserve what you get.
The sorting is crude. But it’s meant to be sadistic to get people to self-deport and to keep citizens’ from protesting.
Trump will try retribution on whoever opposes him, but it appears to be failing if it has to go through the courts, in front of grand juries. Ordinary citizens seem to be able to tell what’s bullshit and what’s not.
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words.
They don’t dominate—they only won by a small majority in the popular vote, 49.8% for Trump vs. 48.3% for Harris, according to Alexa. Johnson can only afford to lose one Republican vote—as slim as it gets.
SCOTUS is where the dominance is most apparent. That will be harder to roll back unless the two oldest Republicans depart
The Fourteenth Amendment, with it’s Equal Protection Clause, was a direct response to the Supreme Court's 1857, holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford (hereinafter, Dred Scott), which pushed America into Civil War. In Dred Scott the Court held that Mr. Scott, a person, was property with no rights. In 1886, the Court applied the Equal Protection Clause in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, holding that a corporation, property, is a person with rights. Our problem today is as it has always been since the Boston Tea Party in 1773, people who have a sick dark obsession with property. United We Amend Our Constitution and in Section 1, we repeal Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company and every law and Court opinion inconsistent with that repeal. Yes, We must learn to live together and Unite against the divide and conquer politics of the corporatist fascist or else we will never solve any single problem we face.
Daniel, HCR makes it clear in her livestreams that in order to get rid of MAGA, we have to articulate how we view our country’s future.. what do we stand for and what kind of country do we want.. we can’t just say that we are anti-maga, that won’t get us anywhere.
Daniel, two things can be done at the same time. Lincoln articulated what he thought our country should look like.. not just abolish slavery. He articulated what equality and freedom was and why we needed it… he didn’t just say get rid of slavery and we will figure things out on the other side. Two things have to happen simultaneously—resist maga and articulate what this looks like on the other side.
Agree, LM. Of course we have to beat back the current tide of fascism, but after that, what? The union won the civil war, but let’s face it, we lost reconstruction. And now thanks to current regime, we are on the verge of losing the Cold War that we had “won” three decades ago.
It is not enough to just fight in the present with no plan for the future. And that means taking stands, and taking risks. Unfortunately the leadership of the Democratic Party is too risk averse for the moment. We should be preparing to someday lead again, with a bold new direction that centers justice for all, no exceptions. The timid fools such as Carville, Schumer and others who are still living in 1992 and shrug about the injustice of wealth stratification and unequal justice because some people have money and some don’t, need to be shown the door. In their place, we need more AOCs, more Jasmine Crocketts, more Chris Murphys, who are willing to draw up new policies that bring real relief to families and ensure equal justice for all. And no trimming of sails to placate wealthy donors; doing that is how we got into this mess.
We the People need to find common ground. I have written a Memo to We the People. I hope to have it online within a week. This is what I think must be done to save our Republic, our Democracy.
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to; 1, the Equal rights of all individual persons; 2, Government having no power to create or transfer rights of individuals to assemblies thereof or fictitious creatures of statute; 3, define Republican Form of Government to include a separation of powers among a legislative, executive and judicial branches, to create a government of laws, and not of persons; 4, Congress enacting and providing funding for systems of public campaign financing; 5, Candidates having free access to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System; 6, Campaign contributions may only consist of United States Dollars; 7, Campaign contributions restricted to be made only by Citizens who can vote for such candidates on their local ballots; 8, Money is not a protected form of speech under the Constitution; 9, Congress shall limit the sum of such Campaign contributions but no contributions to a candidate or ballot measure may exceed the sum of the Federal minimum hourly wage multiplied by one hundred twenty five; 10, Only the official campaign of candidates can employ persons to promote the campaign; 11, All political expression must include the identification of the individual(s) expressing such opinion; 12, Well-regulated fictitious creatures of statute may be granted a revocable privilege to report political information in the press but with requirements that the identities of persons reported be provided and that equal reporting be provided for all such candidates; 13, All electoral redistricting shall be computer-generated one-time after the census; 14, All district boundaries within the states to be drawn parallel to the lines of the Geographic coordinate system; 15, Establishing Executive Departments; 16, Power of the United States, every State and every insular area within the jurisdiction of the United States to charter fictitious creatures of statute shall be limited to Well-regulated charters of revokable privileges and having no rights and when a charter is revoked for criminal activities or the wrongful death of a person then those persons involved in such wrong doings shall never invest in any businesses again or be involved in the operations thereof; 17 Protection of Public lands; 18, Assure equal health services; 19, Equal education for every American child; 20, Equal voting rights among each State; 21, Establishing a Federal election for Citizens of the United states; 22, Establishing an Executive Powers Council of seven executives to replace the single President; 23, Repealing the Elector system of electing the President and vice-President.
Dr. King's words ARE powerful. We can choose to plant those words in our hearts and minds and work (it is work to be better, to be kind because we often make excuses NOT TO LOVE OR BE COMPASSIONATE towards our fellow brothers and sisters!) to make our homes, our neighborhoods, our country , our world better.
When we "love" it is more likely that we will be opposed, rejected, possibly killed. Let's choose love, let's care for one no matter the opposition.
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words.
Southern landholders could never admit that they would be poverty stricken without the persons of color who cooked and cleaned and used their knowledge of herbs to care for wounds and assist in helping during childbirths, or nursing during sicknesses, preparing meals, much less daily cleaning and keeping of the grounds, preparing firewood for cooking and warmth from fireplaces. These responsibilities were taken care of daily by persons of color.
Working in the fields was from daylight until darkness. The ancestors of persons of color who were stolen from their families, taken from their language and traditions were treated inhumanly.
I think one reason the slaveowners were so cruel is because they saw the beauty and strength and power and intellect and unstoppable joy that God grew within the hearts, minds and lives of these great people and they feared this power.
Instead of hate, many persons of color clung to the attitude of love.
Who can deny the power and beauty of music that only their songs can produce! Inspite of the cruelty and abuse people of color received...God, their creator, saw His people and He refused to leave them.
This history of abuse of darker skinned people remains a problem for many white skinned persons who live in fear that they will lose their sense of the right to dominate. I have the answer..."Love one another".
Your comment reminded me of this LBJ quote which TheracistrapistRUMP n republiKKKons have used to perfection:
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
I never forget that LBJ was a poor school teacher in West Texas who went to Congress and rose to the top of the Senate and signed the Civil Rights legislation we so desperately needed.
Frederick Douglass was brilliant and forward thinking!
Much of the South will never change. I do not understand, but for some reason "hate" is a unifier. For some, this destructive attitude is difficult to change.
''The Scrap of Paper That Saved the Republic: Lincoln’s Logic of Equality on His 217th Birthday''
On a scrap of paper in the 1850s, Lincoln worked out the fate of a nation.
Not in thunder. Not in spectacle. Not in a speech to a roaring crowd. But in ink, alone, thinking through the consequences of a lie.
“If A. can prove… that he may enslave B.,” he wrote, then why may not B. enslave A?
That is the entire republic in miniature.
Lincoln understood something that remains urgent in 2026. The moment we permit the law to treat human beings as ranked, graded, or conditionally protected, we do not merely injure the vulnerable. We unravel the structure that protects us all. Equality before the law is not sentimental language. It is the load bearing beam of democratic life.
He did not argue from emotion alone. He reasoned. If color grants domination, then a lighter shade claims mastery over you. If intellect grants domination, then someone sharper may rightfully command you. If interest justifies enslavement, then whoever benefits most may bind you. Each argument collapses under its own weight. Each devours the one who speaks it.
Lincoln saw that hierarchy is a solvent. It dissolves the security of everyone who trusts it.
The brilliance of that fragment is not only its logic but its moral courage. In a culture saturated with racial supremacy, in a legal order built on bondage, he refused the premise that human worth can be sorted. He returned, again and again, to the claim that the promise of 1776 was not ornamental. It was foundational. A nation cannot endure half committed to equality. Nor can it endure once equality becomes negotiable.
On this February 12, 2026, his birthday, we do not honor him with marble alone. We honor him by asking whether we still believe what he proved.
Do we believe the law stands above tribe, resentment, and temporary advantage? Do we believe that rights belong to persons, not to categories? Do we understand that once we allow the state to decide who counts more, we have already stepped into a system of rulers and ruled?
Lincoln’s fragment is not about slavery only. It is about power itself. It is about the temptation to say, quietly, that some people are less deserving of liberty than others. It is about the ease with which a majority can justify exclusion, and the speed with which that justification can turn inward.
He teaches us that equality is not naive. It is disciplined. It is reasoned. It is the only stable arrangement in a plural nation.
When we abandon equality before the law, we do not create order. We create insecurity. We live at the mercy of whoever controls the definitions. And at that point, all that remains is hope that we are not the next category revised downward.
Lincoln refused that world.
He insisted that the logic of domination destroys itself. He insisted that the republic rests on a universal claim or it rests on nothing. He insisted that no person stands outside the circle of protection the law must draw.
His wisdom was not abstract philosophy. It was survival knowledge for a democracy.
On his birthday in 2026, amid our own arguments about belonging, status, and power, his fragment still whispers its warning. Be careful what principle you authorize. Be careful what hierarchy you tolerate. Be careful what exception you carve into the law.
Because whatever rule you create to diminish another can, and eventually will, be used to diminish you.
Lincoln’s genius was to see that equality is not merely generous. It is rational. It is the only arrangement that does not collapse into fear.
May we have the courage to reason as clearly. And may we guard, as fiercely as he did, the simple and revolutionary truth that the law must see us as equal, or it will not protect us at all.
I feel a movement stirring in our country. People are enlightened by our historical struggles, along with the destruction we are seeing and hearing each day. The regime is desperately trying destroying our Constitution and end Democracy more each day. "We the People" will have the final say of how this ends. Now it's our turn to save our country.
Lincoln's birthday, Feb. 12, 180:. Time to reflect. Imagine a man more like Trump instead of Lincoln as U.S. President in 1861. What would the U.S. be today? An oligarchy with the nation's wealth concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs, each with a net worth in excess of $1 billion as in Russia (140) or in China (500+)? Would we still have a system of slavery or simply one where workers are exploited for their labor, as is the trend today in the U.S.? [Note: the U.S. today has about 1,135 billionaires whose net worth is more than one-half of the U.S. population.]
We have been in a 2nd Civil War since corporate "the scheme " (Senator Whitehouse) to capture SCOTUS was hatched in 1971. This is a the war by sedition, not succession.
The Scheme, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse points to the famous Powell Memorandum, written in 1971.
The memo was authored by Lewis Powell (before he joined the U.S. Supreme Court) for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It called for a long-term, coordinated effort by business interests to influence academia, the courts, media, and politics — which Whitehouse argues became a blueprint for the modern conservative legal and political infrastructure.
Reverend George, thank you for what you wrote about Senator Whitehouse and the Powell memo. I admire the former and can report that Powell was the worst kind of rich southern snob.
Thank you Professor for today's letter honoring Lincoln, America's greatest president. The message of this letter must be taught in all K-12 education programs. Otherwise, America will see again another Trump and Epstein.
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words!
Here's a quote from Lincoln that should be as famous as all the others - the closing of his speech of March 6, 1860, in which he made opposition to the Slaveocracy the cause orf the 1860 election. This quote has guidance for us all today:
"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it."
The Trump administration has decided that there is a small class of people who meet his criteria to join him in controlling the health, wealth, safety, and morals of our country. His criteria is strict. It is limited to very wealthy men with no ethics or morals. The more corrupt and debauched, the better.
We should recognize the sexual victimization of terrorized children by the Trumpstein Cult is the immediate predecessor, perhaps even a test run, of the terror the MAGAstapo is now unleashing on anyone who refuses to kowtow to the ChristoNazi theocracy. Thus the vital, know-our-enemy relevance of the full text of the Jane Doe lawsuit against Trump and Epstein -- later withdrawn in response to credible death threats agahttps://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Johnson_TrumpEpstein_Lawsuit.pdfinst the plaintiff: Please let us ensure this text is linked early (and therefore prominently) on as many Resistance sites as possible every day until the traitorous regime of ecogenocidal ChristoNazi pedophiles is no more.
Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie emerged in a Wednesday (11 February) Congressional hearing as Trumpstein's most formidably effective prosecutor yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgiW06lZrvc (I watched the entire hearing on C Span, which for anyone else so inclined is linked here: https://www.c-span.org/program/house-committee/attorney-general-pam-bondi-testifies-before-house-judiciary-committee-part-1/673053 ) (Note: I skipped over the ass-kissing lies spewed by Trump's ChristoNazi Congressional puppets, as the effluent of ass-kissing lies by his ChristoNazi puppet attorney general was itself sufficient to test the limits of my blood-pressure and atrial-fibrillation medications.)
Her petulance and mean-girl attitude, along with her attempts at deflection with her burn book, turn me off. And I had to turn it off. Also, her tantrums and scolding the reps. Can’t wait till she’s tried and disbarred.
I only saw the clips of it, and it was enough for me.
I listen to the MAGA who are soooo upset with what they term the "Great Replacement" as they think those folks will change our culture. Do they not realize culture changes ALL THE TIME? The prime example: TRUMP
Ask yourself when did our elected officials lose their dignity? When did grown-ass men become whiny babies? Start applying school-yard taunting nicknames? Begin insulting anyone who has a difference of opinion?
When did our culture change? When a certain despicable greedy man rode down a golden elevator!
Imagine ANY POTUS of our lifetime behaving in this manner--Republican or Democrat? Biden was forced out of the campaign for a FRACTION of what Trump does DAILY.
Don't tell me it's immigrants who've made the biggest change in our culture!
Prior to Trump 1.0, I dutifully voted but I had NEVER called Congress! I had never volunteered for any campaigns nor donated a single dollar. I never made signs and marched on the street. I suspect this is true from many reading here. It wasn't the influence of a single immigrant that caused me to do these things; it was Trump. TRUMP CHANGED THE CULTURE.
I recall attending church where humility, kindness, and avoiding sin were regular themes of the sermons. I learned from the parable of the Good Samaritan. Now I see news reports of religious leaders committing the same sins they used to preach against. Now it seems wealth is valued over, well, everything.
Gee....who shows us that every action is transactional, and by golly, the self must always always come on top?? Sound like anyone you know?
As a teenager, I was placed in a trial group of students who were block programmed into an accelerated STEM program, it's part of the reason I became a medical technologist. I recall when scientists were respected and well regarded. Research started eliminating disease and expanding lifespans. Now, parents are willfully ignoring vaccination recommendations while measles spreads. What happened here, why would people put their most precious children in harms way?
TRUMP
Our culture was far from perfect, but it seemed that at least there was a sense of decorum that seems to be gone. I am old enough to recall when Reagan took office and while I might not agree with (anything) of his term, remember how Nancy wore furs and they wanted to bring glamor back.? I am praying that whoever gets elected in the next few years brings dignity, manners, and kindness back. Eventually. Because I hate to admit it but the Dems play by the rules and the GOP does not, and I see we need to come out swinging and using the same disgusting behaviors they use.
Because our culture has changed. Because of TRUMP.
Now you know what it's like covering our state and national clown shows. I drink very little anymore due to meds, but back in the day, when that hearing was done, I'd have filed my story and then gone straight to the saloon.
Thanks for sharing that wonderful quote. But to correct the date:
According to Google AI:
Abraham Lincoln delivered this famous concluding line during his
Cooper Union address in New York City on February 27, 1860. The speech, which argued against the expansion of slavery, was instrumental in securing the 1860 Republican presidential nomination for Lincoln.
And confirmed by New York Times article per the following link:
Connect your laptop to a monitor via a SWITCH and add your favorite keyboard to same if you can! Then your favorite mouse! There are external keyboards for either MAC based laptops as well as of course WINDOWS based ones.
This here is exactly what panic looks like in power. Tthreaten the Insurrection Act, shut out state investigators, and try to drown Renee Good in a new “enemy” story.
But truth is stubborn as hell. The record exists. The judges are speaking. The numbers are turning.
Lincoln said a house divided can’t stand and that’s why this panic politics keeps trying to split us, silence witnesses, and rewrite the record.
So let the cameras roll and let the receipts stack because we are not asking permission to be free, we are not asking permission to remember, we are not asking permission to tell the truth. www.xplisset.com
Wonderfully said, Xplisset. The cameras are constantly rolling. Data is being written down and chronicled for safe keeping. I do believe that the tides are turning because once again, I believe it was 6 Repubs who joined the Dems in voting against the tariffs. Trump was humiliated again! I will take those wins gleefully.
Since others have touched on Lincoln quotes, my favorite remains the adage about being able to fool some of the people all of the time, all the people some of the time, but never all of the people *all* of the time…
For some peculiar reason, it feels appropriate to remember that today, with regard to a certain cult whose name I shall not dignify by uttering it now.
May we take Abraham Lincoln to heart, whichever quote most appeals.
It’s remarkable that 146 years after a man of so many sterling qualities as Lincoln was elected president, the nation is being destroyed by a president who personifies evil.
Remarkable, yes. And a tragedy of historic proportions. It will take many years to rebuild America from the ashes of what will likely remain once Trump has gone... because I fear that (as Mary L. Trump predicts) Trump bill "burn the world down" when he sees he's about to lose power.
He does it so well. In a sense, we are fighting the civil war again. The white power elite do believe they are superior to all poorer people and almost all people of color. This time, sadly, the presidency and the army are in the hands of the white supremacists. Yes, there are some encouraging signs, but the power still rests with the white racists. A just end is not assured.
The greater sadness is, in my opinion, to see that so many Americans have been deceived.
We have never been perfect but I do yearn for more compassion and a will to use the gifts and talents we have each been given, to do good, to build up, to think what kind of foundation we are leaving for our children.
I do not want to ignore, but to praise and pour out my gratitude to the men and women who are truly laying down their lives to keep the best, to be the best of this country.
May we choose "light" and NOT "darkness", "freedom for ALL", opportunity for each and every person. We cannot stand by and let this great nation die.
I do Not want to be ruled by a dictator and his gang of THUGS!!!!
Perfect...we have never been....but good men and women have given their lives on the battlefield and within our government ie Washington, DC and within every state in the USA and have served as teachers faithfully pouring out their lives to teach and encourage the young ones who will be given the responsibility to lead us into the future.
Guns do not make us strong, prisons do not change persons and prisons rob us of the gifts and talents of many humble human beings who are willing to work in brutal jobs just with the hope of becoming a citizen....eventually....of this country that the world has called "GREAT"!
We are failing "our calling" at this time in our history.
Except we are NOT FAILING everywhere. Hold in your heart the people who are literally on the front lines of this contrast with DRUMPF et alia. Together we are mightier and we have LIGHT and RIGHTS on our side.
“This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” LET US NOW PRAY FOR THAT. 🙏
Last night, I was privileged to be among thousands gathered at the National Cathedral in Washington to hear Heather in person, interviewed by the Cathedral’s Dean, Rev. Randy Hollerith.
On looking out to see every pew and seat in the Cathedral taken, Dean Randy simply said “it looks like Easter in here.” He told Heather that Bono had been the Cathedral’s guest some weeks before, but even he hadn’t received the thunderous applause she had when she walked in.
She reminded her listeners that all of us are now part of a great turning point in history, and while the danger is very great, so are the opportunities. ‘How do I know that?’ she asked. ‘’Look around you, in what other time and place would thousands of people turn out on a Wednesday night in February to hear a historian talk about the details of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in 1860?’
With great peril always comes new possibilities. Let us hope we’re all strong enough to keep on keeping on when most of us are just sick and tired of being sick and tired. The rewards might turn out to be very great indeed.
You can find her talk on the Cathedral’s YouTube channel, I’m almost certain.
Still haven't forgotten Bishop Mariann Budde's asking Trump to show mercy upon his second election in the same inspiring space. It angered him, of course.
Many hours before Heather wrote hers today, it was already Feb. 12 for me.
That is, my morning in the mountains of Kyushu, Japan, came long before Lincoln’s birthday arrived on Heather’s Maine seacoast.
And first thing this morning I wanted to address how one wag yesterday wrote against the fact that standardized testing in schools (with corporate packaged textbooks) can and does feed amorality, dehumanization such as our Epstein class exhibits. No, he wrote: "Schools are not immoral, people are.”
On Lincoln’s birthday it’s good to note how he keyed democratic institutions to our good, and saw other institutions as evil, such as slavery then.
Those of us who’ve read Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder recently, or George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and Boris Pasternak earlier all know that the first thing authoritarians do – for their institutional evil – is to collapse the individual. Group think then can take over. As for their evil Putin, other dictators, and our social media billionaires have engineered.
My friend the wag can’t see institutional ills, embracing as he does the NRA’s conceit for military assault rifles: they don’t kill, only “people” do that.
Lincoln knew better. He fought institutional dehumanization in his day. If testing in our schools fuels new evils today – has fed the Epstein class’s amorality – we could do well to renew Lincoln’s wisdom today.
Same for me just outside the Navy base in Yokosuka where men and women, wearing the uniform of the United States Navy, have many different skin pigments, but they are all "Shipmates".
I worked as a contractor to the US Army on an Army base for several years. Most of the servicepeople I talked to only cared if their teammates could do their jobs, i.e., had their backs. The rest, color, gender, etc., wasn't relevant.
You’re quite the self-righteous prig, Mr. Balla. You do love to name-drop in order to remind the rest of us how genteel, super-edjamakated, and right you are about everything. To say nothing of being almost as thin-skinned as He Who Must Not Be Named…
For what it’s worth, I’ve read all the authors you just name dropped here, one in his original language. I’ve even visited his grave outside Moscow many years ago when such things were considered provocative, if not dangerous. He was a great admirer of Lincoln, by the way, fluent in English. His translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian decades ago are still read today.
And for the record, too, this dumb “wag” ain't your friend. And God knows, you’re sure not his.
Gosh, you’re smart. You figgered it out AND outed me as a liar and a fraud at the same time! I grovel at your omniscience. I should have remembered that if we all just read the right books by the right authors, we couldn’t POSSIBLY ever find ourselves in disagreement with anything Mr. Balla says, could we?
Hello Phil... Instilling a Thirst for Knowledge, and the ability to share that Knowledge with others is at least equally important as Book Knowledge... That is why some Segments of Society do better than others.... That Thirst is Cultivated at Home...
Just passing by when I noticed your post. It would be a narrow world view to think what you wrote-(not that it’s wrong)-is how life works. There is much lacking in the view you present and it may require a more open mind to see it. The view is flat and unconvincing. There are so many different circumstances and textures that aren’t being takin into consideration. It requires a much wider view.
Good teaching, Apache, can expand modeling of humane literacy.
Apt referencing of others -- of real people in life, anecdotally, or by memoirs, or of characters in books and other arts -- gets misunderstood by some as showing off. It's not. Making more connections can open wider the apertures of humane concerns we share.
The worst who reject these arts typically are those who embrace the depersonalized devices of testing, which only turn people into numbers, units, items in abstracted categories. Like those of the Epstein class, who lie and cower under the criminal cover-up Putin's lackey Donald furthers. So many of them just "used" girls, raped and discarded them, many underage girls, by the dehumanization these typically test-elite men learned, rather than the humanities they could have learned.
Thanks Phil... Education has many Components... It has many Channels, and should be Lifelong, and include Contemplation... Some of the most Vacuous, and Destructive People that I met Flashed Ivy League Degrees... Some of the Best People that I have met didn't have a College Degree, but were Rich in Practical Experience, and could Teach Others... Continue Your Good Work In Japan... Namaste....
Thank you, Apache. You are correct. My family did that for me, and we passed it on to our kids and grandkids. Curiosity and the love of learning are everything.
Thanks 'Shiny'... Good Conversation, Relating to others vastly enriches one's Life.... The Brilliant Got Through The Ice Ages That Way... Life was extremely Hazardous, but People made time to gather around a Fire at the end of days... The Arts, Culture, and Civilization were invented that Way... Curiosity Is Supreme...
When you write “those of us…” you appear to set yourself apart and superior. I doubt there are many who comment here who’ve NOT read the writings you reference. Yet you dismiss those who may have not been exposed, as unworthy or something less.
Exactly the opposite of Lincoln’s view.
Same dead horse.
At least you “beat Megan”. Your ego must be doing pirouettes.
“Imagine mishandling the release of the Epstein files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, producing documents so heavily redacted they look like a CIA memo from the Cold War, while simultaneously failing to meet the Act’s own disclosure standards. And then, during a hearing, suddenly invoking concern for “the victims.”
Concern?
If the priority were victims, transparency would not require public pressure. It would not require selective compliance. And it certainly wouldn’t result in redactions that appear to shield powerful names more carefully than vulnerable ones.
You don’t get to obstruct, over-redact, and sidestep statutory intent, then drape yourself in moral language when the optics turn ugly.
Here’s the reality: when public trust erodes, sudden compassion looks less like empathy and more like damage control. If the administration truly cared about victims, the documents would reflect that priority. Instead, what they reflect is caution, just not for the people harmed.
And that’s the problem. When you protect reputations more aggressively than you protect truth, people notice.
A foundation built on opacity and spin doesn’t collapse because critics yell. It collapses when the paper trail contradicts the rhetoric.
And right now, the paper trail is doing all the talking.”
I felt today’s hearing marked a great, personal and political victory for Jamie Raskin — carefully planned and executed with skill and aplomb.
He put Miss Arrogance-on-Wheels on notice that he wouid not permit her to to turn a Congressional hearing into a joke, much less a pep rally for a demented, creepy old fascist whose sole joy in life is grabbing things that don’t belong to him. He and his united Democratic team got her goat, locked it in the basement and threw away the key. Within a few short minutes, they succeeded in turning her into a shrieking, screeching, raging, psychiatrically-impaired loon. People will remember that.
She called Raskin — a graduate of Harvard Law School and constitutional scholar who taught at American University for 20 years before being elected to Congress a “washed-up lawyer.” Raskin led the impeachment proceedings against Trump only a few terrible days after his own gentle son had committed suicide.
Meanwhile, she graduated from some correspondence school in Florida ranked 99th in the nation. The whole Democratic side of the aisle, including Raskin, just giggled at her comic abilities.
He got her to lose that foundation-thin, cast-iron veneer of contempt she usually cements her face with, as she turned the pages in her little shit diary of dirt, never once meeting the eyes of anybody who showed the nation exactly who she was. People are gonna remember that, too.
My husband and I dealt with losing our son at the same time as Jamie Raskin and his wife. I have watched him more closely since then. He is a great American.
EXACTLY sir! He found her out and revealed her in such a way she LOST IT and even the hemming an hawing of the JORDAN in shirt sleeves to her defense could not get her to recover any real composure! At one point I thought she was going to bang her shoe on the table - Kruschev style!
Thank you for this true account of the hearing . That Pam Bondi dared to speak to the brilliant, courageous Jamie Raskin in that way revealed her true self ... the twisted face, sort of like the "portrait in the attic."
Pam Bondi almost seemed to be laughing at her own outrageous claims as she was speaking and bloviating her way through the hearing. She never looked at the brave victims of Epstein & Maxwell pedophilia ring & organization, no support or concern for them, no regard for justice or what her DOJ should have done with this investigation.
This is what she exclaimed, in hysterics and soulless tone-deafness:
"The Dow is over 50,000 dollars. I don't know why you're laughing... The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans' 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That's what we should be talking about".
I called her much worse words than bitch, she was just so awful and infuriating, never answering questions truthfully or at all. Bondi just gave exhausting tirades and diversions, nothing of benefit for the victims or members of Congress trying to get answers or some sort of justice. She is so unworthy of the position and should be removed as Attorney General asap.
Bondi was acting just like any actress playing a role does, she had all of her props to play with, every actor loves to have props. I think she has rehearsed her performances probably with a camera to get her timing right, the looks as though she is being disturbed by an impertinent question, the feigned exasperation with any of her interrogators, it was all roll playing for the cameras, and as much as I despise everything she stands for I give her credit for never breaking character in the arena, it was an icy cold display of indifference.
"in hysterics and soulless tone-deafness: "no support or concern for them, no regard for justice or what her DOJ should have done with this investigation" ie Pam Bondi
vs..."the brave victims"....willing to put themselves in harms way...COURAGEOUS AMERICAN WOMEN ........ you are seen and you are loved and respected!
What, pray tell, does the situation of the DOW or the S&P have to do with anything but her own pocket book and not the law of the nation she has sworn to uphold? Nefariously!
It has not. They withdrew 700 leaving 2,000. I just read an article this morning from someone in that town who said they are arresting legal observers all the time-more than ever. People are hiding in other people's homes---let that one sink in. The town is under siege.
Thank you for a brilliant reminder. His story about the dangers of declaring the right to enslave others based on superficial comparisons is quite powerful.
Lincoln exuded passionate wisdom. Like anyone, he was only human, but he nailed the argument against kings and their ilk again and again with exceptional clarity. Some people may shout those arguments down, but they can't disprove them. Trump is no Abe Lincoln.
Keep speaking up so we have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people!”
Be LOUD.
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) to contact members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly.
Reach out (beyond your own) to as many in the Senate and House as you can. All of this is bigger than “I only represent my constituents” issues.
It seems to me that “of the people, by the people, for the people!” is our proper yardstick and acid test for good government; and what fails that test should go.
And don't just bookmark this spreadsheet for personal use, but share it generously with likeminded defenders of democracy! I've been sharing this link on other Substacks that I am subscribed to. This is a valuable resource and the more of us that have access to use it, the louder our collective voices will be. Thank you, Megan, for all your efforts in creating and continuing to maintain this! 💖
It was quite a few years ago but I saw Hugh Downs on TV say that he had shaken hands with a man who had claimed that he had shaken hands with Lincoln. No way to prove that but Downs looked it up and the man had been a Union soldier who had been in the same place as Lincoln at the claimed time. The epiphany for me was that in terms of human lifetimes, experientially, events in US history were more recently past than I had been accustomed to thinking.
I sort of got my start as a historian when I was 8 and my uncle introduced me to an old man, who as a young man, had ridden with Billy the Kid and the Regulators. It was also the first lesson that the real history is hardly ever like the stories that get told, when he told how they were the good guys in the Lincoln County War.
If a "life time" is about 80 years or so, overlapping that span by even 5 years makes history closer to home. I think of the generations in my own family and how many elders knew another elder and that elder knew.....and each tell their grandkids....we're all not too distanced from "history".
It is one thing that aging does for you. When I was a kid, "the past" sort of collapsed into a single time frame; the Great Depression, pharaohs, dinosaurs. Now I'm measuring with larger units. I was shocked when I realized in my 50s that my father was born just prior to to when women could fully vote. When my daughter was in middle school I mentioned my reaction when JFK was shot, and her eyes got big and she asked incredulously, "You were alive then?". Yep, in high school.
The Associated Press reported that “ A grand jury in Washington refused Tuesday to indict Democratic lawmakers in connection with a video in which they urged U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders,”...The Justice Department opened an investigation into the video featuring Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four other Democratic lawmakers [ the other Democrats who appeared in the video include Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania] urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful. All the lawmakers previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies.”
This refusal of a grand jury to indict upon the urging of Trump’s prosecutors follows on the heels of other grand jury rejections of Trump’s prosecutors’ attempts to charge felonies, including:
1. Letitia James (New York Attorney General) — alleged mortgage fraud (Virginia grand jury) Reuters reported that DOJ attempted to prosecute (and then re-try) the case and a grand jury rejected the proposed indictment. ABC likewise reported that a grand jury refused to indict James when DOJ attempted to revive the case. PBS reported a further failed attempt to re-indict, describing additional grand-jury refusals.
2. Federal grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. refused to approve felony charges in some cases involving alleged interference with federal law enforcement officers during protests, including a highly publicized instance of a person accused of throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
3.A Chicago grand jury declined to indict a couple accused of assaulting federal officers outside an ICE facility, resulting in prosecutors dismissing the complaint (though they could seek charges again).
THE GRAND JURY IN HISTORY
The principles underlying the need for grand juries can be traced back to the Magna Carta in 1215, though the name had not yet evolved at that time. It was not until the 17th century in England that the employment of a grand jury matured into existence and became embedded into the English psyche as serving as an entity that screened charges before someone could be put to trial—one of the roots of the grand jury’s “buffer” role between the government and the accused.
The use of grand juries were carried over to the American colonies, in which one famous usage of the grand jury served as a model for future generations to come:
Colonial America: The Zenger Case (1735): In the now famous case of John Peter Zenger (New York, 1735), he was a printer charged with seditious libel for publishing criticism of New York’s royal governor. Two grand juries reportedly refused to indict him before the Crown secured charges through alternative means that resulted in Zenger’s acquittal. The case represented a powerful precedent for establishing a citizen’s buffer against unjust charges upon a ruler’s command and also for demonstrating early American resistance to criminalizing political criticism. (Sound familiar?)
The requirement for grand juries was later embodied in the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which requires that defendants may only be prosecuted for federal felonies upon the issuance of a grand jury Indictment. In the implementation of this Amendment, The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure require a quorum of 16 grand jurors and no more than 23, of which at least 12 grand jurors must vote for an indictment.
Members of the grand jury, and trial jurors for that matter, are generally selected by lot among the community in which the alleged crime was committed or in which the trial is to be held (taking into account a possible change of venue due to adverse publicity against the defendant).
The point of all of this is that both grand jurors and trial jurors represent a cross section of the community’s residents and who bring their values, their principles, their integrity and their commitment to honesty, their common sense and their fairness with them into the room where they deliberate.
Grand jurors and trial jurors have often served as bulwarks against prosecutorial excesses , abuses , biases, political grand standing and as betrayers to their own profession whose fundamental principle requires them to strive to see that justice is done.
The above cases where grand jurors refused to indict political enemies of Donald J. Trump on trumped-up charges prove that our democracy works.
Let us all spread the word among our communities that those who are called to serve on grand juries and trial juries should be vigilant in insuring that no one be prosecuted or convicted for political reasons, or for exercising their Constitutional rights and that no one be convicted if they have a reasonable doubt as to their culpability.
Thank you, Professor mainly for us to be reminded of the words that he spoke and secondly for us to stop and think about what those words did at a time that was so divisive and you can’t compare it to modern times with all that comes with it. He probably was the greatest president just by pulling everybody together without the Internet and phones, etc. by simply writing letters, standing on a soapbox and being honest. The truth will always prevail and love will went out over evil. Thank you all for staying true to yourselves. We will get through this, together.☮️❤️🌻
Each era is unique, yet human nature, not so much customs, mores, and tools, but basic human nature, motives, and behaviors seem to be a unifying constant, and historical and fictional choices recorded in our oldest scraps of writing are still recognizable today.
I picture The White House like a bell tower that has no bell. That means only Bats. Bats in the bell tower. That means Bat poop everywhere: walls, floors... Crazy.
Thank you, HCR, for giving us inspiration and foundational education as needed. Today we needed to reflect again on our great leader, Abraham Lincoln, for strength to carry on.
Happy Birthday, #217, Abraham Lincoln! At the end of life, CHARACTER is all that matters.
Among the greatest words ever spoken, by among the greatest man who ever lived:
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.
We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Heather's letter was all about history today; there was not a single word directly about the present.
And yet, could there be a better description of today?
We are living in a country where we have a president and his minions declaring that one people is again better than another.
Using Lincoln's logic, what is it that differentiates the supposed betters from their lessers in Trump's nation?
It is simply the most ephemeral thing there is, not really a thing at all; the place where you drew your first breath.
And that, in America today, is enough to cage you in a concentration camp.
In fact, it is a much slenderer thread that can bind you in that camp. It is the mere presumption that you took your first breath in the wrong place.
"At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups."
Do we choose to live together as one people, or will we perish together as fools?
Rachel Maddow has spent the last two segments of her show on MSNOW talking about the prison camps. There has been pushback! She mentions a fantastic resource on the website of a group that calls themselves PROJECT SALT BOX. On this website there is an interactive map - an online tracker that shows sites all across the country where Trump is trying to buy warehouses for these prison camps and what the status is on each site.
Right now there are 7 warehouses that ICE has bought so far. There are 5 warehouses where the sale has been blocked, essentially by citizen and community pushback! And there are 11 warehouses where the fight is still underway to stop the sales. Rachel was admonishing the large law firms that have capitulated to Trump and suggested they redeem themselves by doing pro bono legal work for these citizens that need help with their pushback. Check out the site - the group does other things too. The map is a great resource tool... The fight continues...
I don’t know how “Warehouses” convert to prisons, but it is a law in the building codes of almost all jurisdictions that when an existing building is repurposed for a new use, that all of the requirements of that use must be met. This would include life safety issues, ventilation issues, bathroom fixtures count, area per occupant, etc. From the little amount of transparency that I have seen, I would guess that this law is being partially or wholly ignored.
Among hundreds of other laws as well. Hey, if you’re gonna violate the Fourth, Fifth, First, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, why let a few pesky little building code statutes get in your way?
Except that breaking or potentially breaking those small laws may be enough to get the conversion stopped, like the 5 Michele mentioned and are on the PROJECT SALTBOX website.
Amazing what a little research can do to change your perspective and give you leverage.
Well that would be lovely indeed, if it actually happens. But I’m sure one of their legal beagles will argue you have to break local laws during a ‘national emergency.’ Or something equally as absurd.
Right! Those building codes ... they're for the little people who obey such rules. If you can ignore the Constitution, why not rules on the ground?
Remember these are under federal jurisdiction now. So, do state ordinances apply?
To paraphrase the late "Queen of Mean," Leona Roberts Helmsley, another crooked real estate magnate,"We don't obey the law; only little people obey the law."
Helmsley had an "interesting" moral code. Another quote: "I always told my own child, 'If you murder somebody, tell me. I'll help you hide the body. But don't you lie to me.'"
Sometimes, a life of meanness leaves its mark on the mean person's countenance. In her youth, Leona was by any measure a beauty. Not long before her death at 87, she didn't look old; she was by any measure, ugly.
I won't be around to see, but I predict Kristi Noem will be a gargoyle at age 87 ... if she lives that long.
Again, my usual refrain: with apologies to all gargoyles.
Add the 8th Amendment: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
Reports of bad food, people beaten, testicles crushed, sleeping on the floor in urine and feces....etc. My blood duth boil over.
As well it should....
I was thinking the same thing.
Good Point!
Pretty much what I was about to say after reading what Mark had to say. Trump believes : laws? LAWS?? We don’t need no stink in’ LAWS!! 🤪. 🤦🏻🤦🏻🤦🏻
a little money changes hands and Presto-chango WHAT building codes?
And you think the legal requirements that exist are going to influence their moving forward with this nomination ??!!!
Mark: Sometimes, the small things like building code violations can have big impacts, like grinding projects to a total halt. Thanks for the suggestions for how to throw sand in the gears. If a few hundred locals arguing in front of a town zoning commission that a concentration camp is not desirable in their community can stop it, more power to them. And for far less cost, and of more importance far less time than is needed to run a case up to SCOTUS on constitutional grounds and have the conservative majority come up with a contorted ruling against you.
The enslavers of old have taken over our government and we must fight to get it back.
Unfortunately, Federal Buildings are exempt from local Zoning Codes. However, it is my understanding that there are only a few building code sections that the Federal Government is exempt from. The Federal Government is responsible for the adoption and enforcement of building codes otherwise. And I would guess that congress is responsible for adoption .
Thank you. That is useful information and enlightening. That I think also explains why ICE is buying the buildings. You are only considered a federal building by the Government Services Administration if the building is owned by the feds, not if it is leased.
I found ICE-specific standards for detention facilities.
ICE publishes detailed Contract Detention Facility (CDF) Design Standards, covering layout, functional zones (e.g., office, detainee housing, security), square footage per bed, and construction guidelines for spaces under ICE control. These 2007 standards (still referenced) ensure uniformity and safety in SPCs and CDFs.https://deportationresearchclinic.org/SanAntonioFacilityStandardsAttachment_4.pdfhttps://deportationresearchclinic.org/SanAntonioFacilityStandardsAttachment_4.pdf
Facilities must also follow Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS) for conditions of confinement, supplemented by constitutional requirements and the Immigration and Nationality Act.
I also wonder whether you can throw sand in the gears if the remodeled facility will overtax community wastewater treatment plants and water purification facilities and power infrastructure. Some of these facilities will house 5000 people which is huge compared to the size of adjacent communities.
Congress currently in hiding!
This is a slight digression but it relates to Donald “the builder”: does anyone know whether the National Trust’s lawsuit against the ballroom build has resulted in stoppage? I thought I saw a video of Lawrence telling us the “pledges” were not materializing and the judge said 47 had to repair the ground till issues resolved. Thanks.
MLMinET: I am going to be a little silly here and a little serious.
I am going to teach you to fish. Fishing is fun and intellectually very stimulating. Way better than doomscrolling, IMHO, or pontificating. And it is vegan. No fish are harmed in the process ;-)
This uses my favorite chatbot which is free at the basic level and still privately owned, although Bezos has a stake. But Bezos has a stake in everything AI.
Best not to use their suggested follow-on questions more than a level or two deep or it will start trying to please you.
Go to https://www.perplexity.ai/
Type in your question and enter: What is the status of the National Trust’s lawsuit against the Trump Ballroom?
This is the most important part. Carefully check the sources in the shaded ovals after each part of the answer to see if the source is reliable and the answer actually reflects what is in the source. Here is where you can get burnt and led astray, especially if you are rushing. Few of the sources are paywalled.
Extra points for checking the media bias of a news site before you use it.
I always learn something unexpected. I also think it is the fastest way to see how to become an activist for the causes you believe in.
Ah the judge said! Never mattered before, unless what was said was in favor of the orange pedophile!
I believe that’s pretty much what happened in Ashland VA. The feds were ready to buy and that populace went to the owner of the building and said “NO!!” The sale was cancelled.
The Feds could always claim eminent domain, but given how Dems are taking the special elections with such big swings away from Trump, I do not think any member in the House would want an ICE concentration camp in their district. Trump would have had to have won by 40% to be safe.
Now that there is sand in the gears to slow down building the camps, there has to be pushback on the inhumane conditions through Congressional oversight and on getting people out of the camps on bond in the districts other than the Fifth Circuit expeditiously.
Mark you are correct. As you seem to know when a warehouse is built and plans are submitted to the building codes for review and approval the review on the infrastructure is based on warehousing stuff and a few people managing that space, hence less plumbing, less electrical, etc. and that includes what is in the ground to and from the building. As soon as you introduce hundreds if not thousands of individuals that infrastructure collapses. All cities and citizens should be against this misuse of a building in their community for obvious reasons, it won't work. You can bet none of these clowns throwing these ideas around the table have inquired with an architect or engineer about using a warehouse as a prison.
They don't convert to prisons- this is the point, These will be concentration camps where the plan is to warehouse people.
It is on that basis and other restrictions about zoning that Howard County Council in Maryland was able to deny any permit to convert an office building to a detention center. Review local zoning restrictions to deny same.
I was present in some of the Council Hearings. The air rang with energy, love, and justice. We filled the hearing room, the overflow room, the halls, and there were people outside in icy weather. All supporting the emergency legislation that allowed our wonderful County Executive to pull the permit for the conversion.
I am fortunate to live in a majority-blue county, in a majority-blue state. But I learned how we can have more influence in municipal- and county-level decisionmaking. Our local Indivisible group, Industrial Areas Foundation groups, and an interfaith coalition of congregations living their religious values (not threatening their tax exemptions - living values does not equal endorsing political candidates) educated, informed, and communicated.
From this experience I also took hope that the USA in 2026 is not the USA after Reconstruction, or Nazi Germany. Right now it is hard to make change at the top (though resisting Federal authoritarianism and oppression is also necessary). But we can still make our voices heard in important, powerful ways, and I haven't gotten killed or shipped off to a camp, not yet.
Having lived in the past in Columbia for 16 years, I concur...
Oops! A Law??? Laws do not exist in maga land! Sorry! No guessing needed It is ignored! Their creed is ‘Try and stop me!”
One of the objections that Maddow brought up was that one community’s sanitation system could not handle the influx of the new facility plus the…administrative staff… that would add to the community’s population.
Law? John Marshall made that point: Worcester vs Georgia, Andrew Jackson laughed him off and the Trail of Tears ramped up. Scotus gave the Felon the keys - he can't be tried as a sitting President, and so I ask, laws, what laws? Andy Jackson sits prominently on the White House wall.
Have you met the Douglas County Colorado commissioners? They would be more than happy to waive the code requirements for any building a developer wanted to convert to a warehouse for humans. Especially the wrong kind of humans, without enough money for bribes.
I don't know Douglas County, but I know of other similar locations. Most if not all states have adopted the International Building Code so that whether or not a county has a building code, the code is still law statewide - enforcement is a different story.
Occupancy of a former warehouse brings on key architectural requirements because of the safety issues surrounding 24/7 occupation. It is one thing to have workers present for shift work and quite another to have residents on site sleeping especially dangerous if they are forcibly detained. Perhaps a tent city at Mar A Lago and at governors mansion in states cashing in on this latest fraudulent Trumpian Enterprise. Maybe republicans in general could be persuaded to foot this portion of their tax bill while forgoing their right to drive on public roadways or say, forego educating their children in public schools. Compromise is a powerful tool in successfully negotiating for how you are willing to fund your want list. One of the most difficult moments in my tour of duty was being locked up in chain link enclosures in Oakland army base as we were staged for deportation to Nam. They locked us all up under guard as zero hour approached. Officials were terrified of our making a breakout. We were stripped and put into combat fatigues. I layed down on a concrete floor to sleep with the other soldiers and we waited in our pens until they escorted us single file into the transport planes. It was a humiliating experience at a time when we had no idea what tomorrow would bring.
Laws being partially or wholly ignored is not only what Stephen Miller and Trump are about, it's also what Trump has been about since long before he ran for office.
His whole life is about doing whatever he believes he has the right to do, and then, when challenged, flooding the courts with lawyers to bulldoze the opposition.
Good points. However, sadly ICE doesn't seem to believe is silly things like regulations, codes, or the rule of law. They are operating on possession is all they need and then they will do whatever they want and Bondi will never prosecute - as we saw yesterday.
Those laws don’t apply to the federal government, so once these are bought by the feds they’re exempt.
Actually the building here in Howard County was an office complex that was purchased NOT by the Federal government but by a private Michigan company in 2019 (first TRUMP) and is an office building. It was denied the permit as a private company to convert it to a detention center. We have pretty strict rules about what kind of facilities may be permitted when within certain boundaries of nearby schools, religious buildings, medical facilities and open space playgrounds.
They may be exempt, but the law of supply and demand (around the infrastructure) still won't work. Too much shit will create a backup, just like Trumps cabinet and himself.
In my experience with Federal Buildings (which is limited), but also what I have learned on line, I found the following: "Building Codes are adopted and enforced by state, local, tribal and territorial entities. The federal government is responsible for the adoption and enforcement of building codes for federal building, and military buildings. If buildings are leased, the building Owner is certainly required to follow local building codes.
Leased, yes. Owned, no.
You betcha. Wholly ignored. You almost make me laugh. A witch's cackle.
Right you are! Courts are currently admonishing the government to insure constitutional-level resources for those detained, to include medical care access, proper food and water, adequate bathrooms, and so on. Reports thus far suggest that the courts are speaking because these requirements have not been med. This entire ICE/DHS boondoggle is a) unconstitutional in its denial of due process; b) illegal, in its apprehension of persons at random; its refusal to acknowledge documents (green cards, work permits, even passports and birth certificates; c) utterly contemptuous of oversight requirements. Among other issues! Trump's a traitor, and his entire, unconstitutional, incompetent, corrupt regime should be impeached.
BADGES, WE DON’T NEED NO STICKING BADGES! If there are not guardrails for murder, how do we monitor the warehousing people in concentration camps, they as they fill, will we too kill!?
In our name! 1938 is here…
Thanks. I've signed up for the Project Salt Box newsletter.
https://projectsaltbox.substack.com
Thank you for making sign-up so easy.
The Salt Box is out of Baltimore's historic salt boxes. It refers to the yellow salt boxes that were on the corners of the streets to use to melt ICE on the streets!
Still existing!!!
Generally, the Federal Government does not have to follow local or state zoning or building codes https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/98384/are-the-federal-government-or-its-contractors-subject-to-local-building-or-zonin It does so mainly to keep constituents happy.
So what, really, is stopping the concentration camps from being put in to places like Merrimack, NH? Public awareness, mostly. The Merrimack debacle has already cost one state official their job (this official negotiated with ICE without informing the governor's office), and has a large part of the town council about to lose theirs as well. It is a bipartisan issue: the town's conservatives are concerned about property values, the town's liberals are concerned about having a warehouse/misery factory in their midst. The town is upset. Stay ornery, people!
Yes indeed... Also pressure on the sellers has been successful in some cases.. Kathy just posted a reply with an article from Wired - how ICE is leasing offices at breakneck speed all across the country. We need to get that information out to everyone ASAP... I'm tired but as you suggest ...ornery... What next... They really don't want their well-deserved criminal indictments!!!
Michele: That is fantastic news. Thank you so much for sharing this important information.
Interesting that ICE is buying them and not the big commercials Geo Group and CoreCivic that will be providing the “services”. So those companies don’t have to take on debt to buy the properties.
Here's an excerpt from Courier- (Cameron Stevenson/ Feb 10, 2026): "In an apparent attempt to avoid public outcry and scrutiny, ICE has sought to secure these leases in private, ignoring potential health and safety violations and catching local elected officials off guard."
Of course they are. Found one potential warehouse for lease, a half-hour drive away from where I live in central NJ.
The conditions at Geo Group's Delaney Hall facility in Newark, NJ are horrific even after it was reopened and was a death back in December. They need to expand.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/02/10/delaney-hall-nj-ice-detainees-letter-documents-lives-limbo/88590716007/
https://www.wired.com/story/ice-expansion-across-us-at-heres-where-its-going-next/ (This should properly enlighten anyone who foolishly believes the absurd, ultimately self-destructive notion the "Unified Reich" is anywhere close to the brink of defeat.)
Georgia..If you get a chance look at Kathy's post with link in it to article in Wired about ICE leasing office space at breakneck speed all across the country... People need to be alerted re/this development ASAP!
Gee Golly….! Whose money is Trump using to buy these Prison-Warehouses? Hmmmm…., my wife and I just completed our Federal Tax paperwork and brought it over to our Tax Guy. You don’t suppose Trumpie is using MY money do you?
I was thinking the same thing about yesterday’s Congressional Hearing “starring” AG Bondi. She isn’t getting any of my money, is she? And what about ALL those Congress People? I know Gym Jordan isn’t my Representative since I don’t live in Ohio, but I’m pretty sure all the Federal Income Tax money just gets dumped into one HUGE pot and then gets doled out to all government employees! That means - since we’re paying - We the People are their bosses!
Our tax money yes... Where have all our tax dollars gone...long time passing... Gone to ICE latest military fashion and to concentration camp warehouses, to military parades, probably to JD Vance's nine global vacations ( remember the one where the river had to be raised for his kayak?!), and to Trump's endless golf trips - oh, and lest we forget - to the refitting of the "gift" of Qatari plane... And probably to other places that have yet to be revealed...If you are right and our tax money does get dumped into one huge pot - perhaps we should look for it in a Swiss bank...
Perfect, Michele! “When will they/we ever learn? When will they/we ever learn?” We need Pete Seeger today! (I play my guitar and my banjo and sing those old, but inspiring songs every day. Guess which song just moved up on the Must Sing List for today? Thanks, Michele! I’ll sing it extra loud, so keep listening!)
I'm listening...As an activist all his life, it's comforting thinking of him somewhere playing the guitar and cheering us on.. Enjoy your music... Such a special gift...
Who has authorized the purchase of these "warehouses for people" similar to the poor houses of the past? Conditions in detention centers are worse than prison. Most prisoners have a cell to themselves and their own toilets and sinks. Detention centers have nothing except hard floors to sleep on, no clean drinking water, bugs in food, no toothpaste, soap, showers, or medications. This country is definitely NOT a first world country any longer. All in just one year's time!
Our taxpayer dollars at work...what a waste...
Thanks. Very interesting. The New Mexico legislature just passed a law (and the governor signed it) that there will be NO detention facilities in New Mexico. I wonder what will happen to the one in Otero County. We'll see. As you say, the fight continues. And the for profit prisons reap in the dough.
Yes... I hear you... If you have a chance, check out Kathy's post ( somewhere in this area) which has a link to an article in Wired ... It says that ICE is leasing office space all across the country at a breakneck speed... They are desperate and trying to do their "plan" before we can catch up to what they are doing... Alert congress members and everyone else! Exhausting, isn't it?!#
Michele, stopping the concentration camp prisons should be a priority for all Americans. Once the camps are built, it will seem imperative that they are filled and those with money and power will decide who will fill them. The singer-song-writer, Tom Paxton wrote a song "When Princes Meet." in one of the verses he wrote "When castles rise, the poor little men must build them . . . they dig the dungeons from the earth and the brothers, wives, and children fill them. . . That's what the poor little men are for . . ." It's a powerful song, so check it out.
Yes - high priority... And I will check out the song... I would write more, but I am late for appointment... Thanks, as always, for your comments and suggestions...
Thank you for reminding us about the PROJECT SALT BOX website. That was a very helpful PSA.
Thank you for the information.
These prison camps should alarm every American! Think about this: "deportees" are supposed to be deported. So who will populate these prison camps and why do they need so many of them? Who's next- anyone who disagrees with the regime?
Authoritarian regimes do not condone dissent. We must pushback at every chance we get... We must become investigative reporters and videographers and whistle blowers and expose their secretive plans to the light of day and push back...
Thankyou for passing on the information and for the encouragement
If you know the locality of these camps those who are mandated reporters for child abuse/ neglect could call the hotline. One dies it anonymously and they are required by law to investigate it in 24 hours. There are issues with this approach but this seems a tool. Itvwax used in a few cases last t administration.
Maybe you would like to post that idea with as much detail and with the pros and cons??? Who are the mandated reporters for child abuse? With a little more info and the history of using this approach, etc. this is an important tool to shed light on the abuse within the walls of these concentration camps. Mary ... Did you want to speak to me about something??? I don't have a substack .and I wasn't sure if I could chat without having a substack. If you want to discuss something, maybe there is another way. One hard thing about this medium is that you can't really explain to someone, especially if someone follows you and wants you to follow them, it's not personal if you don't follow them... Or maybe I just don't completely understand the system of how substacks work yet. I still don't know where or how to post a question to HCR for her to answer in the Politics Chat... Anyway, moving on... I am tired and now rambling... Rachel Maddow, when talking about the plight of an 18 month old child (Amalia) mentioned that a law school professor and Director of the law school's Immigrants Rights Clinic filed the petition seeking the family's release. Amalia was released on Friday. I wonder if that group could somehow help... I have to get some sleep, but I think what you have is very valuable information to share... Let me know if I can help in any way...
Well any professional that deals with children from police officers to teachers to social workers, to nurses , to doctors is mandated by state and federal law to report any suspected child abuse. These mandates were created partially on the work of C. Henry Kempe MD who saw that spiral wrists fractures were more from abuse than not. They have a Center in his name in Denver, Colorado.
This all has a long long history. Selma Fraiberg and her seminal work Ghosts in the Nursery covers sone of the intergenerational aspects. It’s an old old old issue which always gets forgotten, hidden, or erased.
Ideally the professional organizations should be calling this all out.
One could call the ABA, AMA, the two APAs, NASW, and other guilds decade what are their plans to advocate for children. Other groups are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Internstional, and ACLU along with other advocacy groups. There are many nabes but it seems only done fight the good fight in true fashion. We need more.APA is coming out with a new diagnostic Manuel abd big changes Ibwoukd call them out abd have them use the UN Drvjsration on Human Rights and the declaration of Children’s Right as a base for everything.
The USA has not signed on some of these declarations. Very problematic. Take Care.
Thank you Heather for not only your wealth of information, but also taking so much of your time to share it with us!!!🙏
Michele2, I have seen the map. I am now wondering if they are creating room for resisters unless, of course, they can shoot them first.
Georgia, I also noticed that Heather tends to tell historic events in ways that highlight lessons for us today. I love Lincoln's logic because it is flawless.
I am from the Land of Lincoln. Happy Lincoln's Birthday!
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words.
That is interesting. I read Douglass's autobiography in high school, but I did not remember that. It has been a while though. Each person brings their own perspective. Hindsight is 20-20 only to those who had some sight in the first place. Many who voted for Trump are blind.
The pedophile/hebephiles have a club, and perhaps at one time they would have worn white sheets and ridden at night to do what they do, but it seems they did this stuff openly amongst each other, not understanding that people can write things about them that will come back to bite them as Epstein did.
Me too. Happy Lincoln’s Birthday!
❤️
🙏
I pray for all humans, especially for those who, by the grace of God, drew their first breath in America.
Yep Georgia, one would think that being "one nation, under god" would pretty much have wiped out the matter of skin tint. I have to wonder which wood-pile does Der Leader think his ancestors originated from? The shape of his head has some odd lines, diminished chin, perhaps more cro-magnon extinction-effect or lineal-degeneration. Definitely not of Mesopotamian origin. He lives in a fubar world of his own. And unfortunately for our country, we will never reclaim our position as one who can be trusted. It is clear to the rest of the more intellectual world that a large part of our population is dumb and easily influenced. I can't wait to see them break-ground for the Arch de' Trump.., the largest in the world. Super! Just super.
We should never forget that Trump, his efforts to legitimize white-supremacist genocide, the resultant ChristoNazi conquest and its MAGAstapo terrorism is the triumph of a multi-generation, bi-partisan scheme more than a century in the making, To learn of the carefully hidden roots of the crisis, the documentation of which include a PBS film about the enormous support for Hitler here in the '30s and additional, meticulously footnoted documentation of the plutocracy's support for Nazism, go here: https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/january-25-2026?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=205274486
Nor forget that his Grandfather was a Bavarian immigrant draft-dodger and sometime brothel keeper in the Yukon gold rush. His Father never served. He is a five time draft-dodger and his sons have never served. Two of his three wives were immigrants and the last and current wife was a some-time lesbian porn star in Slovenia and then a graduate by all accounts of Mr Epstein's grooming academy. She also was the beneficiary of an expensively purchased, one assumes, "Einstein" visa.
Well said, Peter!
Elon Musk and other oligarchs are already spending ad dollars to get Republican politicians reelected to the Senate and the House.
A dark money PAC has been sending out mailings and placing radio ads touting the little trinkets Collins has procured for ME.
Funny how none of the ads talk about the millions of dollars that were approved by Congress that Trump has with held from colleges, farmers, the national parks and other businesses.
This past summer hardly any Canadians vacationed or even shopped in ME thanks to her Fascist Party.
Beware, the dark money ads propping up the Fascist Republicans.
"You should call Susan Collins and Thank her"
First time I saw one of these ads I was like 'say What?' I figured it had to be some seriously fringe PAC.
But noooooo... the mailings and the endless commercials are just crazy.
Susan Collins has announced her intent to run to keep her Senate seat and we should do all we can to UNSEAT her with a Democrat or at least an Independent. BTW Janet Mills was a good governor but at 78 now and 79 if elected would be 85 at the end of one senate term. Please choose someone else younger?
Have you seen the ICE commercials about how they’re “saving US.”
With the effectively limitless capitalist support for ChristoNazism, the RepubliKlans will buy the services of a legion of Josef-Goebbels clones whose primary effort will be to re-intensify the infinite hatefulness that is the heart, mind and soul of the 77 percent of whites Pew polling defines as irremediably racist. That could be sufficient -- as it always has been -- to preserve the Christian white male supremacist theocracy Jeff Sharlet correctly exposed as "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" ("The Family"; Harper-Collins 2008). Unless the Democrats can counteract that hitherto always-victorious strategy -- and it will require a genuine miracle to do so, as there is literally no limit to the ChristoNazis' ability to out-spend them -- Trump will not need to cancel or fix the midterm elections. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/us/politics/republicans-democrats-midterms-fund-raising.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LlA.9FpB.8Hx-zgifTgRU&smid=url-share (Not paywalled.)
Read this yesterday and giggled a little. The blue upset victories have generally been funded by only a small percentage of the red war chest. Money may not buy votes going forward, and I plan to report all MAGA social media advertising as “irrelevant “.
I went to your link, Loren.
Did not find evidence for your reference to "the 77 percent of whites Pew polling defines as irremediably racist."
Mr. Bliss, may you live to see some improvement in the current situation. I hope for the same at 91.
And to think they took office wailing about "waste, fraud, and abuse" -- which now is their modus operandi. They got rid of so many valuable social and scientific programs (resulting in the deaths of so many) and are spending millions, if not billions, to imprison people. And yet, 37% of the population still backs this administration. Blows my mind.
Everything they promised turn out to be what they planned to attack.
I’m hoping that as the land for the “arch” is in Arlington, Virginia Governor Spanberger will “just say no”.
77 million Americans voted for Trump. Most Republicans are still supporting him. The fact that he got reelected means the world will never trust us again. Radical change is needed in our country
Reva Potter, it’s the first time I have read “radical change.” Brava!
Benjamin Franklin: "We must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately."
'One Nation, under God'
It does NOT say 'One nation, under Jesus'
It isn't even your citizenship.
It's your wealth.
You stated my response to “they are here illegally”. Well, aren’t you lucky to have been born here, while they were born where violence now threatens their children and their lives. This administration and the corrupt Supreme Court allows racial profiling in its search for those “illegals”. We had come forward for awhile, but now have taken many steps backward. My heart aches for those who were born in the wrong place or are of the “wrong” color in this country.
Is it ONLY where you drew your first breath? For example, Musk drew his first breath outside U.S. but money makes him powerful. Also, those who drew their first breath in U.S. and are non-white makes a difference to this particular administration. In fact, anyone who opposes this administration's policies is considered less than. RESIST!!!
If you go by what Trump says, he’s only putting immigrants in the camps. He is willing to make exceptions if you are rich enough or white and he thinks you’ve been discriminated against by black and brown people. Musk makes it in on both those counts, unfortunately.
If you are a citizen and you are swept up, you were siding with the immigrants, so you deserve what you get.
The sorting is crude. But it’s meant to be sadistic to get people to self-deport and to keep citizens’ from protesting.
Georgia, I agree, but I would also add that if you oppose death star and the regime, it does not matter where you took your first breath.
Trump will try retribution on whoever opposes him, but it appears to be failing if it has to go through the courts, in front of grand juries. Ordinary citizens seem to be able to tell what’s bullshit and what’s not.
Wish SCOTUS could.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about Heather's Letters to an American for today, Lincoln's birthday!
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words.
Brava, Georgia! This is so well written, concise and hits the target! Thank you.
And why does it appear that the fools continue to dominate and drag us toward oblivion?
Because they have been fed a story of grievance, which they believed. And the blue message was not persuasive enough.
Grievance is very attractive. It requires you to do nothing. It is someone else’s fault.
Opportunity puts the choice in your hands to take advantage of it.
True, but ... why do the fools dominate?
They don’t dominate—they only won by a small majority in the popular vote, 49.8% for Trump vs. 48.3% for Harris, according to Alexa. Johnson can only afford to lose one Republican vote—as slim as it gets.
SCOTUS is where the dominance is most apparent. That will be harder to roll back unless the two oldest Republicans depart
The Fourteenth Amendment, with it’s Equal Protection Clause, was a direct response to the Supreme Court's 1857, holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford (hereinafter, Dred Scott), which pushed America into Civil War. In Dred Scott the Court held that Mr. Scott, a person, was property with no rights. In 1886, the Court applied the Equal Protection Clause in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, holding that a corporation, property, is a person with rights. Our problem today is as it has always been since the Boston Tea Party in 1773, people who have a sick dark obsession with property. United We Amend Our Constitution and in Section 1, we repeal Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company and every law and Court opinion inconsistent with that repeal. Yes, We must learn to live together and Unite against the divide and conquer politics of the corporatist fascist or else we will never solve any single problem we face.
But first order of businerss is to get rid of MAGA.
Need to keep the eye on the ball.
Daniel, HCR makes it clear in her livestreams that in order to get rid of MAGA, we have to articulate how we view our country’s future.. what do we stand for and what kind of country do we want.. we can’t just say that we are anti-maga, that won’t get us anywhere.
That resposne is why we are living in Fascism. Got to act.
Daniel, two things can be done at the same time. Lincoln articulated what he thought our country should look like.. not just abolish slavery. He articulated what equality and freedom was and why we needed it… he didn’t just say get rid of slavery and we will figure things out on the other side. Two things have to happen simultaneously—resist maga and articulate what this looks like on the other side.
Agree, LM. Of course we have to beat back the current tide of fascism, but after that, what? The union won the civil war, but let’s face it, we lost reconstruction. And now thanks to current regime, we are on the verge of losing the Cold War that we had “won” three decades ago.
It is not enough to just fight in the present with no plan for the future. And that means taking stands, and taking risks. Unfortunately the leadership of the Democratic Party is too risk averse for the moment. We should be preparing to someday lead again, with a bold new direction that centers justice for all, no exceptions. The timid fools such as Carville, Schumer and others who are still living in 1992 and shrug about the injustice of wealth stratification and unequal justice because some people have money and some don’t, need to be shown the door. In their place, we need more AOCs, more Jasmine Crocketts, more Chris Murphys, who are willing to draw up new policies that bring real relief to families and ensure equal justice for all. And no trimming of sails to placate wealthy donors; doing that is how we got into this mess.
Apparently, you've never been in a firefight.
We the People need to find common ground. I have written a Memo to We the People. I hope to have it online within a week. This is what I think must be done to save our Republic, our Democracy.
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to; 1, the Equal rights of all individual persons; 2, Government having no power to create or transfer rights of individuals to assemblies thereof or fictitious creatures of statute; 3, define Republican Form of Government to include a separation of powers among a legislative, executive and judicial branches, to create a government of laws, and not of persons; 4, Congress enacting and providing funding for systems of public campaign financing; 5, Candidates having free access to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System; 6, Campaign contributions may only consist of United States Dollars; 7, Campaign contributions restricted to be made only by Citizens who can vote for such candidates on their local ballots; 8, Money is not a protected form of speech under the Constitution; 9, Congress shall limit the sum of such Campaign contributions but no contributions to a candidate or ballot measure may exceed the sum of the Federal minimum hourly wage multiplied by one hundred twenty five; 10, Only the official campaign of candidates can employ persons to promote the campaign; 11, All political expression must include the identification of the individual(s) expressing such opinion; 12, Well-regulated fictitious creatures of statute may be granted a revocable privilege to report political information in the press but with requirements that the identities of persons reported be provided and that equal reporting be provided for all such candidates; 13, All electoral redistricting shall be computer-generated one-time after the census; 14, All district boundaries within the states to be drawn parallel to the lines of the Geographic coordinate system; 15, Establishing Executive Departments; 16, Power of the United States, every State and every insular area within the jurisdiction of the United States to charter fictitious creatures of statute shall be limited to Well-regulated charters of revokable privileges and having no rights and when a charter is revoked for criminal activities or the wrongful death of a person then those persons involved in such wrong doings shall never invest in any businesses again or be involved in the operations thereof; 17 Protection of Public lands; 18, Assure equal health services; 19, Equal education for every American child; 20, Equal voting rights among each State; 21, Establishing a Federal election for Citizens of the United states; 22, Establishing an Executive Powers Council of seven executives to replace the single President; 23, Repealing the Elector system of electing the President and vice-President.
TheracistrapistRUMP is not an aberration; rather, he is the CULMINATION of the republiKKKon party.
TriTorch,
Dr. King's words ARE powerful. We can choose to plant those words in our hearts and minds and work (it is work to be better, to be kind because we often make excuses NOT TO LOVE OR BE COMPASSIONATE towards our fellow brothers and sisters!) to make our homes, our neighborhoods, our country , our world better.
When we "love" it is more likely that we will be opposed, rejected, possibly killed. Let's choose love, let's care for one no matter the opposition.
Let's share the LIGHT we each have been given!
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words.
Richard DB,
Southern landholders could never admit that they would be poverty stricken without the persons of color who cooked and cleaned and used their knowledge of herbs to care for wounds and assist in helping during childbirths, or nursing during sicknesses, preparing meals, much less daily cleaning and keeping of the grounds, preparing firewood for cooking and warmth from fireplaces. These responsibilities were taken care of daily by persons of color.
Working in the fields was from daylight until darkness. The ancestors of persons of color who were stolen from their families, taken from their language and traditions were treated inhumanly.
I think one reason the slaveowners were so cruel is because they saw the beauty and strength and power and intellect and unstoppable joy that God grew within the hearts, minds and lives of these great people and they feared this power.
Instead of hate, many persons of color clung to the attitude of love.
Who can deny the power and beauty of music that only their songs can produce! Inspite of the cruelty and abuse people of color received...God, their creator, saw His people and He refused to leave them.
This history of abuse of darker skinned people remains a problem for many white skinned persons who live in fear that they will lose their sense of the right to dominate. I have the answer..."Love one another".
Your comment reminded me of this LBJ quote which TheracistrapistRUMP n republiKKKons have used to perfection:
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Richard DB,
My dad really liked Lyndon B. Johnson. I have stated this before but I will repeat: My dad said President Lyndon Johnson would help the poor people.
I never forget that LBJ was a poor school teacher in West Texas who went to Congress and rose to the top of the Senate and signed the Civil Rights legislation we so desperately needed.
But not the ones in Vietnam! :(
Richard DB,
Frederick Douglass was brilliant and forward thinking!
Much of the South will never change. I do not understand, but for some reason "hate" is a unifier. For some, this destructive attitude is difficult to change.
The large sign at the end of Bad Bunny’s super bowl performance said: “The only thing more powerful than hate, is love.”
''The Scrap of Paper That Saved the Republic: Lincoln’s Logic of Equality on His 217th Birthday''
On a scrap of paper in the 1850s, Lincoln worked out the fate of a nation.
Not in thunder. Not in spectacle. Not in a speech to a roaring crowd. But in ink, alone, thinking through the consequences of a lie.
“If A. can prove… that he may enslave B.,” he wrote, then why may not B. enslave A?
That is the entire republic in miniature.
Lincoln understood something that remains urgent in 2026. The moment we permit the law to treat human beings as ranked, graded, or conditionally protected, we do not merely injure the vulnerable. We unravel the structure that protects us all. Equality before the law is not sentimental language. It is the load bearing beam of democratic life.
He did not argue from emotion alone. He reasoned. If color grants domination, then a lighter shade claims mastery over you. If intellect grants domination, then someone sharper may rightfully command you. If interest justifies enslavement, then whoever benefits most may bind you. Each argument collapses under its own weight. Each devours the one who speaks it.
Lincoln saw that hierarchy is a solvent. It dissolves the security of everyone who trusts it.
The brilliance of that fragment is not only its logic but its moral courage. In a culture saturated with racial supremacy, in a legal order built on bondage, he refused the premise that human worth can be sorted. He returned, again and again, to the claim that the promise of 1776 was not ornamental. It was foundational. A nation cannot endure half committed to equality. Nor can it endure once equality becomes negotiable.
On this February 12, 2026, his birthday, we do not honor him with marble alone. We honor him by asking whether we still believe what he proved.
Do we believe the law stands above tribe, resentment, and temporary advantage? Do we believe that rights belong to persons, not to categories? Do we understand that once we allow the state to decide who counts more, we have already stepped into a system of rulers and ruled?
Lincoln’s fragment is not about slavery only. It is about power itself. It is about the temptation to say, quietly, that some people are less deserving of liberty than others. It is about the ease with which a majority can justify exclusion, and the speed with which that justification can turn inward.
He teaches us that equality is not naive. It is disciplined. It is reasoned. It is the only stable arrangement in a plural nation.
When we abandon equality before the law, we do not create order. We create insecurity. We live at the mercy of whoever controls the definitions. And at that point, all that remains is hope that we are not the next category revised downward.
Lincoln refused that world.
He insisted that the logic of domination destroys itself. He insisted that the republic rests on a universal claim or it rests on nothing. He insisted that no person stands outside the circle of protection the law must draw.
His wisdom was not abstract philosophy. It was survival knowledge for a democracy.
On his birthday in 2026, amid our own arguments about belonging, status, and power, his fragment still whispers its warning. Be careful what principle you authorize. Be careful what hierarchy you tolerate. Be careful what exception you carve into the law.
Because whatever rule you create to diminish another can, and eventually will, be used to diminish you.
Lincoln’s genius was to see that equality is not merely generous. It is rational. It is the only arrangement that does not collapse into fear.
May we have the courage to reason as clearly. And may we guard, as fiercely as he did, the simple and revolutionary truth that the law must see us as equal, or it will not protect us at all.
https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-scrap-of-paper-that-saved-the
EXCELLENT!!!!
I feel a movement stirring in our country. People are enlightened by our historical struggles, along with the destruction we are seeing and hearing each day. The regime is desperately trying destroying our Constitution and end Democracy more each day. "We the People" will have the final say of how this ends. Now it's our turn to save our country.
Wise and touching
We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And build a better American democracy and a better world.
If love is too much of a stretch, might we begin with logic? I personally believe it’s thinking that is the antidote to hate.
Lincoln's birthday, Feb. 12, 180:. Time to reflect. Imagine a man more like Trump instead of Lincoln as U.S. President in 1861. What would the U.S. be today? An oligarchy with the nation's wealth concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs, each with a net worth in excess of $1 billion as in Russia (140) or in China (500+)? Would we still have a system of slavery or simply one where workers are exploited for their labor, as is the trend today in the U.S.? [Note: the U.S. today has about 1,135 billionaires whose net worth is more than one-half of the U.S. population.]
That quote is on the flag I place on the front of my house every January.
We have been in a 2nd Civil War since corporate "the scheme " (Senator Whitehouse) to capture SCOTUS was hatched in 1971. This is a the war by sedition, not succession.
The Scheme, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse points to the famous Powell Memorandum, written in 1971.
The memo was authored by Lewis Powell (before he joined the U.S. Supreme Court) for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It called for a long-term, coordinated effort by business interests to influence academia, the courts, media, and politics — which Whitehouse argues became a blueprint for the modern conservative legal and political infrastructure.
So the original memo dates to 1971.
Reverend George, thank you for what you wrote about Senator Whitehouse and the Powell memo. I admire the former and can report that Powell was the worst kind of rich southern snob.
Thank you Professor for today's letter honoring Lincoln, America's greatest president. The message of this letter must be taught in all K-12 education programs. Otherwise, America will see again another Trump and Epstein.
Okay, that's a good perspective. I guess living in MN it has felt like dominance.
Frederick Douglass tried to warn Lincoln that the South would NOT appeal to their better angels:
"Beware the fury of the slaveholder!" Lincoln was as foolish as Biden n Garland who allowed TheracistrapistRUMP to run once again - and perhaps again. The do-as-little-to-nothing democrats would do well TODAY to heed Mr. Douglass ' words!
Here's a quote from Lincoln that should be as famous as all the others - the closing of his speech of March 6, 1860, in which he made opposition to the Slaveocracy the cause orf the 1860 election. This quote has guidance for us all today:
"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it."
The Trump administration has decided that there is a small class of people who meet his criteria to join him in controlling the health, wealth, safety, and morals of our country. His criteria is strict. It is limited to very wealthy men with no ethics or morals. The more corrupt and debauched, the better.
We should recognize the sexual victimization of terrorized children by the Trumpstein Cult is the immediate predecessor, perhaps even a test run, of the terror the MAGAstapo is now unleashing on anyone who refuses to kowtow to the ChristoNazi theocracy. Thus the vital, know-our-enemy relevance of the full text of the Jane Doe lawsuit against Trump and Epstein -- later withdrawn in response to credible death threats agahttps://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Johnson_TrumpEpstein_Lawsuit.pdfinst the plaintiff: Please let us ensure this text is linked early (and therefore prominently) on as many Resistance sites as possible every day until the traitorous regime of ecogenocidal ChristoNazi pedophiles is no more.
And none of those men (and women) save Maxwell are in the sexual offender data bases.
They should be all be tried and incarcerated and not be allowed to have any contact with any child under the age of 18 once released.
Hopefully, Elon will receive justice in France and loses his Freedom for a time.
Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie emerged in a Wednesday (11 February) Congressional hearing as Trumpstein's most formidably effective prosecutor yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgiW06lZrvc (I watched the entire hearing on C Span, which for anyone else so inclined is linked here: https://www.c-span.org/program/house-committee/attorney-general-pam-bondi-testifies-before-house-judiciary-committee-part-1/673053 ) (Note: I skipped over the ass-kissing lies spewed by Trump's ChristoNazi Congressional puppets, as the effluent of ass-kissing lies by his ChristoNazi puppet attorney general was itself sufficient to test the limits of my blood-pressure and atrial-fibrillation medications.)
Her petulance and mean-girl attitude, along with her attempts at deflection with her burn book, turn me off. And I had to turn it off. Also, her tantrums and scolding the reps. Can’t wait till she’s tried and disbarred.
I only saw the clips of it, and it was enough for me.
I listen to the MAGA who are soooo upset with what they term the "Great Replacement" as they think those folks will change our culture. Do they not realize culture changes ALL THE TIME? The prime example: TRUMP
Ask yourself when did our elected officials lose their dignity? When did grown-ass men become whiny babies? Start applying school-yard taunting nicknames? Begin insulting anyone who has a difference of opinion?
When did our culture change? When a certain despicable greedy man rode down a golden elevator!
Imagine ANY POTUS of our lifetime behaving in this manner--Republican or Democrat? Biden was forced out of the campaign for a FRACTION of what Trump does DAILY.
Don't tell me it's immigrants who've made the biggest change in our culture!
Prior to Trump 1.0, I dutifully voted but I had NEVER called Congress! I had never volunteered for any campaigns nor donated a single dollar. I never made signs and marched on the street. I suspect this is true from many reading here. It wasn't the influence of a single immigrant that caused me to do these things; it was Trump. TRUMP CHANGED THE CULTURE.
I recall attending church where humility, kindness, and avoiding sin were regular themes of the sermons. I learned from the parable of the Good Samaritan. Now I see news reports of religious leaders committing the same sins they used to preach against. Now it seems wealth is valued over, well, everything.
Gee....who shows us that every action is transactional, and by golly, the self must always always come on top?? Sound like anyone you know?
As a teenager, I was placed in a trial group of students who were block programmed into an accelerated STEM program, it's part of the reason I became a medical technologist. I recall when scientists were respected and well regarded. Research started eliminating disease and expanding lifespans. Now, parents are willfully ignoring vaccination recommendations while measles spreads. What happened here, why would people put their most precious children in harms way?
TRUMP
Our culture was far from perfect, but it seemed that at least there was a sense of decorum that seems to be gone. I am old enough to recall when Reagan took office and while I might not agree with (anything) of his term, remember how Nancy wore furs and they wanted to bring glamor back.? I am praying that whoever gets elected in the next few years brings dignity, manners, and kindness back. Eventually. Because I hate to admit it but the Dems play by the rules and the GOP does not, and I see we need to come out swinging and using the same disgusting behaviors they use.
Because our culture has changed. Because of TRUMP.
I tried to watch the hearing…almost wore out the mute button
Now you know what it's like covering our state and national clown shows. I drink very little anymore due to meds, but back in the day, when that hearing was done, I'd have filed my story and then gone straight to the saloon.
Trumpstein. There is an amalgamated name right up there with "Brangelina" (apologies to Brad and Angelina).
THAT is the classic definition of FASCISM indeed!
Thanks for sharing that wonderful quote. But to correct the date:
According to Google AI:
Abraham Lincoln delivered this famous concluding line during his
Cooper Union address in New York City on February 27, 1860. The speech, which argued against the expansion of slavery, was instrumental in securing the 1860 Republican presidential nomination for Lincoln.
And confirmed by New York Times article per the following link:
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/12/archives/abraham-lincoln-in-new-york.html
fortnately there's an edit button. I'm still getting used to a flat keyboard on the new laptop, up from the desktop. :-)
Connect your laptop to a monitor via a SWITCH and add your favorite keyboard to same if you can! Then your favorite mouse! There are external keyboards for either MAC based laptops as well as of course WINDOWS based ones.
Yeah, there with you …
Lincoln died in 1865
Fifty-nine, smifty-nine it's all the same, and we know what was meant.
TC meant 1859.
How pedantic of you.
Thanks, TC.
1859* , presumably
Thank you TC for this. As always.
This here is exactly what panic looks like in power. Tthreaten the Insurrection Act, shut out state investigators, and try to drown Renee Good in a new “enemy” story.
But truth is stubborn as hell. The record exists. The judges are speaking. The numbers are turning.
Lincoln said a house divided can’t stand and that’s why this panic politics keeps trying to split us, silence witnesses, and rewrite the record.
So let the cameras roll and let the receipts stack because we are not asking permission to be free, we are not asking permission to remember, we are not asking permission to tell the truth. www.xplisset.com
Wonderfully said, Xplisset. The cameras are constantly rolling. Data is being written down and chronicled for safe keeping. I do believe that the tides are turning because once again, I believe it was 6 Repubs who joined the Dems in voting against the tariffs. Trump was humiliated again! I will take those wins gleefully.
Since others have touched on Lincoln quotes, my favorite remains the adage about being able to fool some of the people all of the time, all the people some of the time, but never all of the people *all* of the time…
For some peculiar reason, it feels appropriate to remember that today, with regard to a certain cult whose name I shall not dignify by uttering it now.
May we take Abraham Lincoln to heart, whichever quote most appeals.
Good quote. Appropriate. First appeared around 1885.
https://time.com/4231031/fool-all-the-people-lincoln-quote/
It’s remarkable that 146 years after a man of so many sterling qualities as Lincoln was elected president, the nation is being destroyed by a president who personifies evil.
Remarkable, yes. And a tragedy of historic proportions. It will take many years to rebuild America from the ashes of what will likely remain once Trump has gone... because I fear that (as Mary L. Trump predicts) Trump bill "burn the world down" when he sees he's about to lose power.
Trump is the Anti-Lincoln, in just about every respect.
All I can do is hope that he dies fast. Literally.
Unfortunately the “capitalists” are mostly siding with trump! It’s class warfare. Another evil that will have to be dealt with after trump.
The legend of the Democratic Republic is alive.
As I read this, all I can think of is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic “
Further amazing we're still fighting over the same issues from then, and our own fights 60 years ago.
He does it so well. In a sense, we are fighting the civil war again. The white power elite do believe they are superior to all poorer people and almost all people of color. This time, sadly, the presidency and the army are in the hands of the white supremacists. Yes, there are some encouraging signs, but the power still rests with the white racists. A just end is not assured.
Gary Slovin,
The greater sadness is, in my opinion, to see that so many Americans have been deceived.
We have never been perfect but I do yearn for more compassion and a will to use the gifts and talents we have each been given, to do good, to build up, to think what kind of foundation we are leaving for our children.
I do not want to ignore, but to praise and pour out my gratitude to the men and women who are truly laying down their lives to keep the best, to be the best of this country.
May we choose "light" and NOT "darkness", "freedom for ALL", opportunity for each and every person. We cannot stand by and let this great nation die.
I do Not want to be ruled by a dictator and his gang of THUGS!!!!
Perfect...we have never been....but good men and women have given their lives on the battlefield and within our government ie Washington, DC and within every state in the USA and have served as teachers faithfully pouring out their lives to teach and encourage the young ones who will be given the responsibility to lead us into the future.
Guns do not make us strong, prisons do not change persons and prisons rob us of the gifts and talents of many humble human beings who are willing to work in brutal jobs just with the hope of becoming a citizen....eventually....of this country that the world has called "GREAT"!
We are failing "our calling" at this time in our history.
Except we are NOT FAILING everywhere. Hold in your heart the people who are literally on the front lines of this contrast with DRUMPF et alia. Together we are mightier and we have LIGHT and RIGHTS on our side.
Racists and worse, bible thumping holier-than-thou freakin hypocrites.
Evil, vulgarity and wilful ignorance.
My concern is that they haven’t been deceived.
“This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” LET US NOW PRAY FOR THAT. 🙏
Last night, I was privileged to be among thousands gathered at the National Cathedral in Washington to hear Heather in person, interviewed by the Cathedral’s Dean, Rev. Randy Hollerith.
On looking out to see every pew and seat in the Cathedral taken, Dean Randy simply said “it looks like Easter in here.” He told Heather that Bono had been the Cathedral’s guest some weeks before, but even he hadn’t received the thunderous applause she had when she walked in.
She reminded her listeners that all of us are now part of a great turning point in history, and while the danger is very great, so are the opportunities. ‘How do I know that?’ she asked. ‘’Look around you, in what other time and place would thousands of people turn out on a Wednesday night in February to hear a historian talk about the details of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in 1860?’
With great peril always comes new possibilities. Let us hope we’re all strong enough to keep on keeping on when most of us are just sick and tired of being sick and tired. The rewards might turn out to be very great indeed.
You can find her talk on the Cathedral’s YouTube channel, I’m almost certain.
Still haven't forgotten Bishop Mariann Budde's asking Trump to show mercy upon his second election in the same inspiring space. It angered him, of course.
👍🏻👍🏻 I wrote to her to thank her for speaking truth to power.
Hello ICTT.... Thanks for Sharing this....In the Darkest Night, the Lights Burn Brightest....
That sounds so awesome, thanks for sharing.
It’s Our republic, and we should most definitely keep it…
I had good history professors, but I wish I had her as one of them.
How many ❤️s can I offer you ITCTT and Heather? So deeply inspiring. Thank you.
Correction. The Cathedral didn't post it -- maybe because it was a paid event. Apologies.
And work toward that.
Many hours before Heather wrote hers today, it was already Feb. 12 for me.
That is, my morning in the mountains of Kyushu, Japan, came long before Lincoln’s birthday arrived on Heather’s Maine seacoast.
And first thing this morning I wanted to address how one wag yesterday wrote against the fact that standardized testing in schools (with corporate packaged textbooks) can and does feed amorality, dehumanization such as our Epstein class exhibits. No, he wrote: "Schools are not immoral, people are.”
On Lincoln’s birthday it’s good to note how he keyed democratic institutions to our good, and saw other institutions as evil, such as slavery then.
Those of us who’ve read Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder recently, or George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, and Boris Pasternak earlier all know that the first thing authoritarians do – for their institutional evil – is to collapse the individual. Group think then can take over. As for their evil Putin, other dictators, and our social media billionaires have engineered.
My friend the wag can’t see institutional ills, embracing as he does the NRA’s conceit for military assault rifles: they don’t kill, only “people” do that.
Lincoln knew better. He fought institutional dehumanization in his day. If testing in our schools fuels new evils today – has fed the Epstein class’s amorality – we could do well to renew Lincoln’s wisdom today.
Same for me just outside the Navy base in Yokosuka where men and women, wearing the uniform of the United States Navy, have many different skin pigments, but they are all "Shipmates".
Indeed.
I worked as a contractor to the US Army on an Army base for several years. Most of the servicepeople I talked to only cared if their teammates could do their jobs, i.e., had their backs. The rest, color, gender, etc., wasn't relevant.
All animals are equal; some are just more equal than others.
You’re quite the self-righteous prig, Mr. Balla. You do love to name-drop in order to remind the rest of us how genteel, super-edjamakated, and right you are about everything. To say nothing of being almost as thin-skinned as He Who Must Not Be Named…
For what it’s worth, I’ve read all the authors you just name dropped here, one in his original language. I’ve even visited his grave outside Moscow many years ago when such things were considered provocative, if not dangerous. He was a great admirer of Lincoln, by the way, fluent in English. His translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Russian decades ago are still read today.
And for the record, too, this dumb “wag” ain't your friend. And God knows, you’re sure not his.
Happy Lincoln’s Birthday.
If you'd really read Pasternak, ICTT, you'd not exhibit yourself as you do here.
Gosh, you’re smart. You figgered it out AND outed me as a liar and a fraud at the same time! I grovel at your omniscience. I should have remembered that if we all just read the right books by the right authors, we couldn’t POSSIBLY ever find ourselves in disagreement with anything Mr. Balla says, could we?
Why do you keep denigrating the reading of books and referencing them?
And you keep doing so with such hatred, venom, Donald-era viciousness.
Hello Phil... Instilling a Thirst for Knowledge, and the ability to share that Knowledge with others is at least equally important as Book Knowledge... That is why some Segments of Society do better than others.... That Thirst is Cultivated at Home...
Just passing by when I noticed your post. It would be a narrow world view to think what you wrote-(not that it’s wrong)-is how life works. There is much lacking in the view you present and it may require a more open mind to see it. The view is flat and unconvincing. There are so many different circumstances and textures that aren’t being takin into consideration. It requires a much wider view.
Good teaching, Apache, can expand modeling of humane literacy.
Apt referencing of others -- of real people in life, anecdotally, or by memoirs, or of characters in books and other arts -- gets misunderstood by some as showing off. It's not. Making more connections can open wider the apertures of humane concerns we share.
The worst who reject these arts typically are those who embrace the depersonalized devices of testing, which only turn people into numbers, units, items in abstracted categories. Like those of the Epstein class, who lie and cower under the criminal cover-up Putin's lackey Donald furthers. So many of them just "used" girls, raped and discarded them, many underage girls, by the dehumanization these typically test-elite men learned, rather than the humanities they could have learned.
Thanks Phil... Education has many Components... It has many Channels, and should be Lifelong, and include Contemplation... Some of the most Vacuous, and Destructive People that I met Flashed Ivy League Degrees... Some of the Best People that I have met didn't have a College Degree, but were Rich in Practical Experience, and could Teach Others... Continue Your Good Work In Japan... Namaste....
Thank you, Apache. You are correct. My family did that for me, and we passed it on to our kids and grandkids. Curiosity and the love of learning are everything.
Thanks 'Shiny'... Good Conversation, Relating to others vastly enriches one's Life.... The Brilliant Got Through The Ice Ages That Way... Life was extremely Hazardous, but People made time to gather around a Fire at the end of days... The Arts, Culture, and Civilization were invented that Way... Curiosity Is Supreme...
Just a thought.
When you write “those of us…” you appear to set yourself apart and superior. I doubt there are many who comment here who’ve NOT read the writings you reference. Yet you dismiss those who may have not been exposed, as unworthy or something less.
Exactly the opposite of Lincoln’s view.
Same dead horse.
At least you “beat Megan”. Your ego must be doing pirouettes.
Ain't good for nothin' but put a man six feet in a hole.
“Thoughts After the Bondi Hearing”
“Imagine mishandling the release of the Epstein files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, producing documents so heavily redacted they look like a CIA memo from the Cold War, while simultaneously failing to meet the Act’s own disclosure standards. And then, during a hearing, suddenly invoking concern for “the victims.”
Concern?
If the priority were victims, transparency would not require public pressure. It would not require selective compliance. And it certainly wouldn’t result in redactions that appear to shield powerful names more carefully than vulnerable ones.
You don’t get to obstruct, over-redact, and sidestep statutory intent, then drape yourself in moral language when the optics turn ugly.
Here’s the reality: when public trust erodes, sudden compassion looks less like empathy and more like damage control. If the administration truly cared about victims, the documents would reflect that priority. Instead, what they reflect is caution, just not for the people harmed.
And that’s the problem. When you protect reputations more aggressively than you protect truth, people notice.
A foundation built on opacity and spin doesn’t collapse because critics yell. It collapses when the paper trail contradicts the rhetoric.
And right now, the paper trail is doing all the talking.”
~The Rational League (2/11/26 on Substack)
https://substack.com/@therationalleague/note/c-213179742?r=kxzps&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I felt today’s hearing marked a great, personal and political victory for Jamie Raskin — carefully planned and executed with skill and aplomb.
He put Miss Arrogance-on-Wheels on notice that he wouid not permit her to to turn a Congressional hearing into a joke, much less a pep rally for a demented, creepy old fascist whose sole joy in life is grabbing things that don’t belong to him. He and his united Democratic team got her goat, locked it in the basement and threw away the key. Within a few short minutes, they succeeded in turning her into a shrieking, screeching, raging, psychiatrically-impaired loon. People will remember that.
She called Raskin — a graduate of Harvard Law School and constitutional scholar who taught at American University for 20 years before being elected to Congress a “washed-up lawyer.” Raskin led the impeachment proceedings against Trump only a few terrible days after his own gentle son had committed suicide.
Meanwhile, she graduated from some correspondence school in Florida ranked 99th in the nation. The whole Democratic side of the aisle, including Raskin, just giggled at her comic abilities.
He got her to lose that foundation-thin, cast-iron veneer of contempt she usually cements her face with, as she turned the pages in her little shit diary of dirt, never once meeting the eyes of anybody who showed the nation exactly who she was. People are gonna remember that, too.
Well played, Mr. Raskin, well played.
It's Come to This,
Jamie Raskin is an American Hero!
My husband and I dealt with losing our son at the same time as Jamie Raskin and his wife. I have watched him more closely since then. He is a great American.
EXACTLY sir! He found her out and revealed her in such a way she LOST IT and even the hemming an hawing of the JORDAN in shirt sleeves to her defense could not get her to recover any real composure! At one point I thought she was going to bang her shoe on the table - Kruschev style!
Isn't that what ya do when ya don't have the facts or the law on yer side? 😈
Thank you for this true account of the hearing . That Pam Bondi dared to speak to the brilliant, courageous Jamie Raskin in that way revealed her true self ... the twisted face, sort of like the "portrait in the attic."
Pam Bondi almost seemed to be laughing at her own outrageous claims as she was speaking and bloviating her way through the hearing. She never looked at the brave victims of Epstein & Maxwell pedophilia ring & organization, no support or concern for them, no regard for justice or what her DOJ should have done with this investigation.
This is what she exclaimed, in hysterics and soulless tone-deafness:
"The Dow is over 50,000 dollars. I don't know why you're laughing... The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans' 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That's what we should be talking about".
She was a bitch - entitled and combative and lying. The Dow for heaven's sake? They should impeach her. She is one nasty, lawless piece of work.
I called her much worse words than bitch, she was just so awful and infuriating, never answering questions truthfully or at all. Bondi just gave exhausting tirades and diversions, nothing of benefit for the victims or members of Congress trying to get answers or some sort of justice. She is so unworthy of the position and should be removed as Attorney General asap.
Bondi was acting just like any actress playing a role does, she had all of her props to play with, every actor loves to have props. I think she has rehearsed her performances probably with a camera to get her timing right, the looks as though she is being disturbed by an impertinent question, the feigned exasperation with any of her interrogators, it was all roll playing for the cameras, and as much as I despise everything she stands for I give her credit for never breaking character in the arena, it was an icy cold display of indifference.
horhai,
"in hysterics and soulless tone-deafness: "no support or concern for them, no regard for justice or what her DOJ should have done with this investigation" ie Pam Bondi
vs..."the brave victims"....willing to put themselves in harms way...COURAGEOUS AMERICAN WOMEN ........ you are seen and you are loved and respected!
Thank you!
What, pray tell, does the situation of the DOW or the S&P have to do with anything but her own pocket book and not the law of the nation she has sworn to uphold? Nefariously!
Thanks JaKsaa...
I couldn't listen. Looking at that smug hideous face while her right hand flips her hair back. I just couldn't.
This nation will not be free until all of its citizens are free. JFK
Thank you once again Heather. I had a fretful brow tonight and I needed that Letter.❤️
Breaking ... Holman says the Minnesota Surge has ended.
I don't believe it. Liam has not gone back to school.The murders have not been properly investigated.
The Governor of Minnesota will hold a Press Conference in less than 1 hour.
You are not alone.
Too many nights waking up in a sweat...letting it all sink in once again. And then getting up and keeping on with the resistance.
It has not. They withdrew 700 leaving 2,000. I just read an article this morning from someone in that town who said they are arresting legal observers all the time-more than ever. People are hiding in other people's homes---let that one sink in. The town is under siege.
Holman is playing the media game.
You are on it, 🎯 Barbara Mullen, thank you.
Thank you for a brilliant reminder. His story about the dangers of declaring the right to enslave others based on superficial comparisons is quite powerful.
Lincoln exuded passionate wisdom. Like anyone, he was only human, but he nailed the argument against kings and their ilk again and again with exceptional clarity. Some people may shout those arguments down, but they can't disprove them. Trump is no Abe Lincoln.
Keep speaking up so we have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people!”
Be LOUD.
Use/share this spreadsheet (bit.ly/Goodtrouble) to contact members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly.
Reach out (beyond your own) to as many in the Senate and House as you can. All of this is bigger than “I only represent my constituents” issues.
It seems to me that “of the people, by the people, for the people!” is our proper yardstick and acid test for good government; and what fails that test should go.
And don't just bookmark this spreadsheet for personal use, but share it generously with likeminded defenders of democracy! I've been sharing this link on other Substacks that I am subscribed to. This is a valuable resource and the more of us that have access to use it, the louder our collective voices will be. Thank you, Megan, for all your efforts in creating and continuing to maintain this! 💖
You’re AMAZING! 👏👊
👍🏻🫶🏼👏
Lincoln was my 2nd cousin 5 generations back on my late father’s side.
It was quite a few years ago but I saw Hugh Downs on TV say that he had shaken hands with a man who had claimed that he had shaken hands with Lincoln. No way to prove that but Downs looked it up and the man had been a Union soldier who had been in the same place as Lincoln at the claimed time. The epiphany for me was that in terms of human lifetimes, experientially, events in US history were more recently past than I had been accustomed to thinking.
I sort of got my start as a historian when I was 8 and my uncle introduced me to an old man, who as a young man, had ridden with Billy the Kid and the Regulators. It was also the first lesson that the real history is hardly ever like the stories that get told, when he told how they were the good guys in the Lincoln County War.
If a "life time" is about 80 years or so, overlapping that span by even 5 years makes history closer to home. I think of the generations in my own family and how many elders knew another elder and that elder knew.....and each tell their grandkids....we're all not too distanced from "history".
It is one thing that aging does for you. When I was a kid, "the past" sort of collapsed into a single time frame; the Great Depression, pharaohs, dinosaurs. Now I'm measuring with larger units. I was shocked when I realized in my 50s that my father was born just prior to to when women could fully vote. When my daughter was in middle school I mentioned my reaction when JFK was shot, and her eyes got big and she asked incredulously, "You were alive then?". Yep, in high school.
GRAND JURIES STAND UP TO TRUMP’S PERSECUTORS
The Associated Press reported that “ A grand jury in Washington refused Tuesday to indict Democratic lawmakers in connection with a video in which they urged U.S. military members to resist “illegal orders,”...The Justice Department opened an investigation into the video featuring Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four other Democratic lawmakers [ the other Democrats who appeared in the video include Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania] urging U.S. service members to follow established military protocols and reject orders they believe to be unlawful. All the lawmakers previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies.”
This refusal of a grand jury to indict upon the urging of Trump’s prosecutors follows on the heels of other grand jury rejections of Trump’s prosecutors’ attempts to charge felonies, including:
1. Letitia James (New York Attorney General) — alleged mortgage fraud (Virginia grand jury) Reuters reported that DOJ attempted to prosecute (and then re-try) the case and a grand jury rejected the proposed indictment. ABC likewise reported that a grand jury refused to indict James when DOJ attempted to revive the case. PBS reported a further failed attempt to re-indict, describing additional grand-jury refusals.
2. Federal grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. refused to approve felony charges in some cases involving alleged interference with federal law enforcement officers during protests, including a highly publicized instance of a person accused of throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
3.A Chicago grand jury declined to indict a couple accused of assaulting federal officers outside an ICE facility, resulting in prosecutors dismissing the complaint (though they could seek charges again).
THE GRAND JURY IN HISTORY
The principles underlying the need for grand juries can be traced back to the Magna Carta in 1215, though the name had not yet evolved at that time. It was not until the 17th century in England that the employment of a grand jury matured into existence and became embedded into the English psyche as serving as an entity that screened charges before someone could be put to trial—one of the roots of the grand jury’s “buffer” role between the government and the accused.
The use of grand juries were carried over to the American colonies, in which one famous usage of the grand jury served as a model for future generations to come:
Colonial America: The Zenger Case (1735): In the now famous case of John Peter Zenger (New York, 1735), he was a printer charged with seditious libel for publishing criticism of New York’s royal governor. Two grand juries reportedly refused to indict him before the Crown secured charges through alternative means that resulted in Zenger’s acquittal. The case represented a powerful precedent for establishing a citizen’s buffer against unjust charges upon a ruler’s command and also for demonstrating early American resistance to criminalizing political criticism. (Sound familiar?)
The requirement for grand juries was later embodied in the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which requires that defendants may only be prosecuted for federal felonies upon the issuance of a grand jury Indictment. In the implementation of this Amendment, The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure require a quorum of 16 grand jurors and no more than 23, of which at least 12 grand jurors must vote for an indictment.
Members of the grand jury, and trial jurors for that matter, are generally selected by lot among the community in which the alleged crime was committed or in which the trial is to be held (taking into account a possible change of venue due to adverse publicity against the defendant).
The point of all of this is that both grand jurors and trial jurors represent a cross section of the community’s residents and who bring their values, their principles, their integrity and their commitment to honesty, their common sense and their fairness with them into the room where they deliberate.
Grand jurors and trial jurors have often served as bulwarks against prosecutorial excesses , abuses , biases, political grand standing and as betrayers to their own profession whose fundamental principle requires them to strive to see that justice is done.
The above cases where grand jurors refused to indict political enemies of Donald J. Trump on trumped-up charges prove that our democracy works.
Let us all spread the word among our communities that those who are called to serve on grand juries and trial juries should be vigilant in insuring that no one be prosecuted or convicted for political reasons, or for exercising their Constitutional rights and that no one be convicted if they have a reasonable doubt as to their culpability.
Thanks for taking time to write this informative and timely submission on grand juries.
Thanks Judy.
I wonder where the term "trumped-up" came from.
Trumpery had a great definition way back there, false finery, useless trivia, etc
trump up (trump something up, trump up something) invent a false accusation or excuse: they've trumped up charges against her.
early 16th century: alteration of triumph, once used in card games in the same sense.
Oxford Dictionary of English definition
It fits so perfectly, doesn't it? It's almost as if it was created with him in mind.
Thank you, Professor mainly for us to be reminded of the words that he spoke and secondly for us to stop and think about what those words did at a time that was so divisive and you can’t compare it to modern times with all that comes with it. He probably was the greatest president just by pulling everybody together without the Internet and phones, etc. by simply writing letters, standing on a soapbox and being honest. The truth will always prevail and love will went out over evil. Thank you all for staying true to yourselves. We will get through this, together.☮️❤️🌻
Each era is unique, yet human nature, not so much customs, mores, and tools, but basic human nature, motives, and behaviors seem to be a unifying constant, and historical and fictional choices recorded in our oldest scraps of writing are still recognizable today.
I feel like the White House is filled with the reincarnation of Alexander Stevens
I've often though Benedict Arnold, but he was once a good guy first. Unlike Trump who has never been good.
Even as a toddler
I picture The White House like a bell tower that has no bell. That means only Bats. Bats in the bell tower. That means Bat poop everywhere: walls, floors... Crazy.
at this point gold-leafed bat poop
He thinks he is President McKinley but forgets the way McKinley's presidency ended!
Thank you, HCR, for giving us inspiration and foundational education as needed. Today we needed to reflect again on our great leader, Abraham Lincoln, for strength to carry on.
Happy Birthday, #217, Abraham Lincoln! At the end of life, CHARACTER is all that matters.