After yesterday’s primary contests, we appear headed toward a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. But this year’s election is an entirely different kettle of fish than that of 2020. In 2020 there were plenty of red flags around Trump’s plans for a second term, but it was not until after it was clear he had lost the election that he gave up all pretense of normal presidential behavior. Beginning the night of the election, he tried to overturn that election and to install himself as president, ignoring the will of the voters, who had chosen Joe Biden. His attack on the fundamental principle of democracy ended the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power established in 1797 when our first president, George Washington, deliberately walked behind his successor, John Adams, after Adams was sworn into office.
I still think it's so weird that these supposedly disgusted Republicans who are resigning or not seeking re-election, prefering to "eat their own livers," aren't simply voting with the Democrats to end this mess. Even the "moderate" Republicans would rather fail at their jobs than support their own institution.
On another note, I suppose others have noticed that that butler from Mar-a-Lago, coincidentially named "Butler," is testifying that he loaded boxes of document onto Trump's airplane before the FBI raid. Perhaps I missed something, but doesn't that mean that there's an airplane-load of documents still unaccounted for?
To summarize, the Biden/Harris Cabinet is defined by intelligent, experienced, capable people with established careers in public service. From Dr. Janet Yellin to Dr. Miguel Cardoza, to Pete Buttigieg -these are people that are leading through vision and integrity.
The former Trump/Pence Cabinet is defined by corruption, a lack of ethics, and incompetence. Betsy DeVos -who thrives on student loan debt and interest payments like a vampire thrives on blood. Rick Perry -who struggled to remember three things at once. Wilbur Ross and his nefarious self-enrichment dealings with Putin. Ryan Zinke and Halliburton. Bill Barr "the Cover-Up General." The Trump Cabinet was a criminal organization, not a team of people dedicated to improving the life of the average American. Aside from self-enrichment, most of the agency heads despised the agency they were tasked to lead.
The difference in leadership is stunning -and I don't know if many are talking about it. It's not just the President/VP -it is the entire team that is important.
In the context of Dems really serving American needs, Heather shows MAGA descent into madness.
Funny thing is, the millions embracing the madness all seem cheery, as if it's their free choice.
The rich, all the dark money billionaires, see themselves as more free, as if more money gives more choices – energizing, motivating more passion.
Orwell long ago showed, however, how the feelings of choice for many are chimerical. As he patiently explained in "Politics and the English Language," when one sinks to cliché, slogans, hackneyed phrases, group abstractions and labels, one inevitably by that anesthetizes, blinds oneself.
Our billionaires cannot see how they have upped suffering, grown the wealth gap, enabled murderers such as Putin, Saudi royals, Kim, Xi, Erdogan, Assad, the ayatollahs, Hamas, and Netanyahu, and spread the nationalist hatreds of Orban, Fico, Modi, Sisi, and all Trump MAGA.
1st Q: how might it affect them if our billionaires knew even one of our humanities from films like “The Florida Project” and “Winter’s Bone”; novels like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” Walter Mosley’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” and many by Richard Russo and Stephen King; memoirs like Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club” and Erin Gruwell’s “The Freedom Writers Diary,” and any number of hip hop Ari Melber will cite?
2nd Q: what does it do us – to democracy – if our schools have gutted all that?
“Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms. He is proud of his role in overturning Roe, and has talked openly about plans for a nationwide abortion ban. He routinely praises authoritarian leaders and has himself vowed to be a dictator on Day One. Just this week, he said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be on the table if he receives a second term. Each of these stances ought to be considered disqualifying by itself; taken together, they reveal the former President to be an existential danger to our country.
“With his State of the Union speech last week, President Biden passionately presented our alternative vision. We will reduce costs for families, make housing more affordable, and raise the minimum wage. We will restore Roe, protect voting rights, and finally address our gun violence epidemic. The American people overwhelmingly support this agenda over Donald Trump’s extreme ideas, and that will propel our campaign in the months ahead.”
___ Kamala Harris
Vice President of the United States
'This is National Women's History Month. It honors the successes and sacrifices of U.S. women. It dates to March 8, 1857, when hundreds of women from New York City garment and textile factories rallied to protest harsh working conditions.'
‘The National Women’s History Month’s theme for 2024 celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” The theme recognizes women throughout the country who understand that, for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions.’
‘Women from every background have long realized that an uneven playing field will never bring equality or justice. Many feel the critical need to speak up and work harder for fairness in our institutions and social interactions.
During 2024, we recognize the example of women who are committed to embracing everyone and excluding no one in our common quest for freedom and opportunity. They know that people change with the help of families, teachers and friends, and that young people in particular need to learn the value of hearing from different voices with different points of view as they grow up.' (National Women’s History Alliance)
As we work together toward fair and free elections and bring the strong Blue Wave home, we have many models to learn from. Here is one of them.
‘Dorie Ladner, dauntless civil rights activist, dies at 81’
‘She joined the civil rights movement as a teenager in Mississippi, braving gunfire, tear gas, police dogs and Ku Klux Klansmen in the campaign for racial equality’
Dorie Ladner was 11 months younger than Emmett Till, an African American who was 14 when he was lynched in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, his mutilated body tethered with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and submerged in the Tallahatchie River.
For their entire lives, Ms. Ladner and her sister, her junior by a year, had endured the indignities of life as African Americans in the Jim Crow South — the rides in the back of the bus, the restrooms and drinking fountains for Black people only, the segregated schools, the secondhand textbooks passed down by White students.
But with Till’s death, “I was enraged, but I did not know what to do with that anger,” Dorie Ladner told an interviewer years later. “His murder made me aware of my Blackness.”
On the encouragement of activists including Vernon Dahmer Sr., a family friend and local NAACP leader who would later be killed in a KKK firebombing of his home, Dorie and Joyce Ladner joined a youth chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg, Miss., in 1959, when they were in high school.
As students at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school in Jackson, Miss., the Ladner sisters joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, widely known as SNCC, which became a principal organizer of the civil rights movement.
Having decided that she couldn’t stay in school and “know my people are suffering,” Dorie Ladner dropped out of Tougaloo and for much of the 1960s devoted herself full-time to her activism.
“The line was drawn in the sand for Blacks and for Whites,” she said years later in an interview with PBS’s “American Experience.” “And was I going to stay on the other side of the line forever? No. I decided to cross that line. I jumped over that line and started fighting.”
At a time when Mississippi was one of the most dangerous places in the South for African Americans and civil rights workers, Ms. Ladner joined and led marches and sit-ins, mounted voter registration drives, and helped organize events including the 1963 March on Washington.
She traveled widely, encouraging Black people around the country to embrace their right to vote. She told one crowd in St. Louis that anyone who did not vote “should hang your head in shame,” explaining that in the South, “we have been shot at, beaten, cut and jailed for just trying to register to vote.”
“I gathered any courage I could from both Dorie and Joyce for being in Mississippi,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who worked there alongside the sisters as an SNCC activist. “They were fearless at a time when it was often that you took your life in your own hands to be in that state. It was they who encouraged me to come, and who encouraged me while I was there.”
The sit-in movement had been touched off on Feb. 1, 1960, when four Black college students sat down at a White-only lunch counter at an F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store in downtown Greensboro, N.C. In Mississippi, where a more virulent strain of racism prevailed, many activists regarded sit-ins as too dangerous.
But “Dorie was a doer,” recalled Freddie Greene Biddle, a fellow SNCC activist in Mississippi. “There was nothing that Dorie wouldn’t do. She went into all the areas that were tough and hard to be in. She was out front.” (WAPO) See gifted link below.
Biden has accomplished so much, yet when I read this excellent summary I only feel sad and angry. The church I attend is moderate, but has many Trump voters (though not roaring MAGA types). Their take is that Biden "hasn't done anything" or that he "didn't fulfill any of his promises" or they parrot one or another of the GOP's points about Biden being dottering or Trump being a "strong leader" on the world stage and Biden being "weak." Nothing gets through to them (and, like far too many voters, they are too uninterested or lazy to bother going beyond the slogans they are fed on the favorite media site - for many of these middle aged and older, Fox "News"). It is sad and frustrating and very, very scary.
I have begun pondering how I will protect myself in the great likelihood that Trump wins. No, not physically, but mentally and spiritually. I will be 75 by that time. I simply cannot take another 4 years as a fully engaged, news guzzling adult. Yet, I've been reading the newspaper since I was in my teens - a very hard habit to break...
I remember when George Bush left office he said the thing that surprised him the most was how little power the president had. But then Trump seemed to have no problem trashing whatever he could and plans to finish us off if he gets re-elected. Why can’t President Biden pull more weight to do such things as add more judges to the Supreme Court or get rid of Louis de Joy who is doing his best to destroy the post office? We are faced with blatant treason.
This election is the most important ever and just voting is not enough. I will be mailing 100 hand written post cards to swing states to get out the vote. I am also researching volunteering to work a polling station. This time just voting won’t be enough.
I recognize that Trump officially put forth the radical right ( I refuse to ever associate the word “Christian” with those people who spit on the teachings of Jesus) Supreme Court nominees. (Though it was highly unlikely he chose the people himself.)
But, it was McConnell who shoved these people through the system. Much of the enabling of Trump’s worst actions was due to Mitch McConnell and it should be recognized and remembered. Hitler, by himself, couldn’t have done much. It took the brown shirts (now red caps) and the cronies and enablers to do things.
Look at what Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny has to say about Putin -- a gangster pretending to be a politician.
Every word applies to America's would-be dictator, except that he's not yet done to his country what Putin has done and is doing to Russia and its neighbors.
Your analysis of Trump‘s takeover of the Republican Party, and the alignment with Christian nationalism are deeply disturbing.
Any third-party movement by so-called disaffected Republicans, and those who don’t respect the integrity of President Biden and his administration will ensure the defeat of the US Constitution and the values of a constitutional democracy.
I remember going to bed at 2 in the morning after watching the MSNBC team close down Election Day 2020. We were all elated because we absolutely KNEW that nearly 10 million absentee ballots had yet to be counted and we further ABSOLUTELY KNEW that most of them would be from Democrat voters. It wasn’t till the following morning, as districts across the country tallied those ballots, and reality began to hit trump that something had gone terribly wrong for him, that the shitshow started. The ranting, the frantic phone calls, the gross lying about faulty voting machines and dead people voting…We must remember that absentee voting, because of COVID, may have opened a door of questioning we don’t want to reopen…especially with the Supreme Court of the USA deciding key issues anymore. I say vote at your designated site on Election Day if at all possible. And bring people with you who might need a ride. We can do this!
Well, finally tRUMP has promised to institute a policy that will rid us of him forever. If he carries out deporting those who received citizenship by being born here, he's gone back to whatever country his dad was from where they speak a language no one else speaks (or so he says). As my bumpersticker in 2020 so aptly said: BYEDON
I still think it's so weird that these supposedly disgusted Republicans who are resigning or not seeking re-election, prefering to "eat their own livers," aren't simply voting with the Democrats to end this mess. Even the "moderate" Republicans would rather fail at their jobs than support their own institution.
On another note, I suppose others have noticed that that butler from Mar-a-Lago, coincidentially named "Butler," is testifying that he loaded boxes of document onto Trump's airplane before the FBI raid. Perhaps I missed something, but doesn't that mean that there's an airplane-load of documents still unaccounted for?
Thank you @HeatherCoxRichardson. Your LFAA's are so important for a society at a crossroads between democracy and kleptocracy.
One major issue that has not been well-explored are the remarkable differences in key Presidential appointments -establishing a governance leadership team. I recently talked about it in https://bomdia.substack.com/p/justice-league-versus-larceny-league.
To summarize, the Biden/Harris Cabinet is defined by intelligent, experienced, capable people with established careers in public service. From Dr. Janet Yellin to Dr. Miguel Cardoza, to Pete Buttigieg -these are people that are leading through vision and integrity.
The former Trump/Pence Cabinet is defined by corruption, a lack of ethics, and incompetence. Betsy DeVos -who thrives on student loan debt and interest payments like a vampire thrives on blood. Rick Perry -who struggled to remember three things at once. Wilbur Ross and his nefarious self-enrichment dealings with Putin. Ryan Zinke and Halliburton. Bill Barr "the Cover-Up General." The Trump Cabinet was a criminal organization, not a team of people dedicated to improving the life of the average American. Aside from self-enrichment, most of the agency heads despised the agency they were tasked to lead.
The difference in leadership is stunning -and I don't know if many are talking about it. It's not just the President/VP -it is the entire team that is important.
In the context of Dems really serving American needs, Heather shows MAGA descent into madness.
Funny thing is, the millions embracing the madness all seem cheery, as if it's their free choice.
The rich, all the dark money billionaires, see themselves as more free, as if more money gives more choices – energizing, motivating more passion.
Orwell long ago showed, however, how the feelings of choice for many are chimerical. As he patiently explained in "Politics and the English Language," when one sinks to cliché, slogans, hackneyed phrases, group abstractions and labels, one inevitably by that anesthetizes, blinds oneself.
Our billionaires cannot see how they have upped suffering, grown the wealth gap, enabled murderers such as Putin, Saudi royals, Kim, Xi, Erdogan, Assad, the ayatollahs, Hamas, and Netanyahu, and spread the nationalist hatreds of Orban, Fico, Modi, Sisi, and all Trump MAGA.
1st Q: how might it affect them if our billionaires knew even one of our humanities from films like “The Florida Project” and “Winter’s Bone”; novels like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” Walter Mosley’s “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” and many by Richard Russo and Stephen King; memoirs like Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club” and Erin Gruwell’s “The Freedom Writers Diary,” and any number of hip hop Ari Melber will cite?
2nd Q: what does it do us – to democracy – if our schools have gutted all that?
From today’s Letter:
“Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms. He is proud of his role in overturning Roe, and has talked openly about plans for a nationwide abortion ban. He routinely praises authoritarian leaders and has himself vowed to be a dictator on Day One. Just this week, he said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be on the table if he receives a second term. Each of these stances ought to be considered disqualifying by itself; taken together, they reveal the former President to be an existential danger to our country.
“With his State of the Union speech last week, President Biden passionately presented our alternative vision. We will reduce costs for families, make housing more affordable, and raise the minimum wage. We will restore Roe, protect voting rights, and finally address our gun violence epidemic. The American people overwhelmingly support this agenda over Donald Trump’s extreme ideas, and that will propel our campaign in the months ahead.”
___ Kamala Harris
Vice President of the United States
'This is National Women's History Month. It honors the successes and sacrifices of U.S. women. It dates to March 8, 1857, when hundreds of women from New York City garment and textile factories rallied to protest harsh working conditions.'
‘The National Women’s History Month’s theme for 2024 celebrates “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” The theme recognizes women throughout the country who understand that, for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions.’
‘Women from every background have long realized that an uneven playing field will never bring equality or justice. Many feel the critical need to speak up and work harder for fairness in our institutions and social interactions.
During 2024, we recognize the example of women who are committed to embracing everyone and excluding no one in our common quest for freedom and opportunity. They know that people change with the help of families, teachers and friends, and that young people in particular need to learn the value of hearing from different voices with different points of view as they grow up.' (National Women’s History Alliance)
As we work together toward fair and free elections and bring the strong Blue Wave home, we have many models to learn from. Here is one of them.
‘Dorie Ladner, dauntless civil rights activist, dies at 81’
‘She joined the civil rights movement as a teenager in Mississippi, braving gunfire, tear gas, police dogs and Ku Klux Klansmen in the campaign for racial equality’
Dorie Ladner was 11 months younger than Emmett Till, an African American who was 14 when he was lynched in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, his mutilated body tethered with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and submerged in the Tallahatchie River.
For their entire lives, Ms. Ladner and her sister, her junior by a year, had endured the indignities of life as African Americans in the Jim Crow South — the rides in the back of the bus, the restrooms and drinking fountains for Black people only, the segregated schools, the secondhand textbooks passed down by White students.
But with Till’s death, “I was enraged, but I did not know what to do with that anger,” Dorie Ladner told an interviewer years later. “His murder made me aware of my Blackness.”
On the encouragement of activists including Vernon Dahmer Sr., a family friend and local NAACP leader who would later be killed in a KKK firebombing of his home, Dorie and Joyce Ladner joined a youth chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg, Miss., in 1959, when they were in high school.
As students at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school in Jackson, Miss., the Ladner sisters joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, widely known as SNCC, which became a principal organizer of the civil rights movement.
Having decided that she couldn’t stay in school and “know my people are suffering,” Dorie Ladner dropped out of Tougaloo and for much of the 1960s devoted herself full-time to her activism.
“The line was drawn in the sand for Blacks and for Whites,” she said years later in an interview with PBS’s “American Experience.” “And was I going to stay on the other side of the line forever? No. I decided to cross that line. I jumped over that line and started fighting.”
At a time when Mississippi was one of the most dangerous places in the South for African Americans and civil rights workers, Ms. Ladner joined and led marches and sit-ins, mounted voter registration drives, and helped organize events including the 1963 March on Washington.
She traveled widely, encouraging Black people around the country to embrace their right to vote. She told one crowd in St. Louis that anyone who did not vote “should hang your head in shame,” explaining that in the South, “we have been shot at, beaten, cut and jailed for just trying to register to vote.”
“I gathered any courage I could from both Dorie and Joyce for being in Mississippi,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who worked there alongside the sisters as an SNCC activist. “They were fearless at a time when it was often that you took your life in your own hands to be in that state. It was they who encouraged me to come, and who encouraged me while I was there.”
The sit-in movement had been touched off on Feb. 1, 1960, when four Black college students sat down at a White-only lunch counter at an F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store in downtown Greensboro, N.C. In Mississippi, where a more virulent strain of racism prevailed, many activists regarded sit-ins as too dangerous.
But “Dorie was a doer,” recalled Freddie Greene Biddle, a fellow SNCC activist in Mississippi. “There was nothing that Dorie wouldn’t do. She went into all the areas that were tough and hard to be in. She was out front.” (WAPO) See gifted link below.
https://wapo.st/48WkBM9
Fascism in America. Who'd've thought it?
When Frank Zappa said on TV that America was heading towards a fascist theocracy, they all dismissed him as a weirdo musician.
In fact the man was quite the bitter genius.
Biden has accomplished so much, yet when I read this excellent summary I only feel sad and angry. The church I attend is moderate, but has many Trump voters (though not roaring MAGA types). Their take is that Biden "hasn't done anything" or that he "didn't fulfill any of his promises" or they parrot one or another of the GOP's points about Biden being dottering or Trump being a "strong leader" on the world stage and Biden being "weak." Nothing gets through to them (and, like far too many voters, they are too uninterested or lazy to bother going beyond the slogans they are fed on the favorite media site - for many of these middle aged and older, Fox "News"). It is sad and frustrating and very, very scary.
I have begun pondering how I will protect myself in the great likelihood that Trump wins. No, not physically, but mentally and spiritually. I will be 75 by that time. I simply cannot take another 4 years as a fully engaged, news guzzling adult. Yet, I've been reading the newspaper since I was in my teens - a very hard habit to break...
Moderate Republicans it's time to stand up house Speaker Johnson and defend our Democracy.
I remember when George Bush left office he said the thing that surprised him the most was how little power the president had. But then Trump seemed to have no problem trashing whatever he could and plans to finish us off if he gets re-elected. Why can’t President Biden pull more weight to do such things as add more judges to the Supreme Court or get rid of Louis de Joy who is doing his best to destroy the post office? We are faced with blatant treason.
HCR: Thanks for a wise and compelling analysis of the evolution of this U.S. presidency over the past four years!
This election is the most important ever and just voting is not enough. I will be mailing 100 hand written post cards to swing states to get out the vote. I am also researching volunteering to work a polling station. This time just voting won’t be enough.
I recognize that Trump officially put forth the radical right ( I refuse to ever associate the word “Christian” with those people who spit on the teachings of Jesus) Supreme Court nominees. (Though it was highly unlikely he chose the people himself.)
But, it was McConnell who shoved these people through the system. Much of the enabling of Trump’s worst actions was due to Mitch McConnell and it should be recognized and remembered. Hitler, by himself, couldn’t have done much. It took the brown shirts (now red caps) and the cronies and enablers to do things.
Look at what Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny has to say about Putin -- a gangster pretending to be a politician.
Every word applies to America's would-be dictator, except that he's not yet done to his country what Putin has done and is doing to Russia and its neighbors.
If he can, he will.
Your analysis of Trump‘s takeover of the Republican Party, and the alignment with Christian nationalism are deeply disturbing.
Any third-party movement by so-called disaffected Republicans, and those who don’t respect the integrity of President Biden and his administration will ensure the defeat of the US Constitution and the values of a constitutional democracy.
Welp, when you think everything within reach belongs to you by right, of course anything you want and don't get seems like a theft.
I remember going to bed at 2 in the morning after watching the MSNBC team close down Election Day 2020. We were all elated because we absolutely KNEW that nearly 10 million absentee ballots had yet to be counted and we further ABSOLUTELY KNEW that most of them would be from Democrat voters. It wasn’t till the following morning, as districts across the country tallied those ballots, and reality began to hit trump that something had gone terribly wrong for him, that the shitshow started. The ranting, the frantic phone calls, the gross lying about faulty voting machines and dead people voting…We must remember that absentee voting, because of COVID, may have opened a door of questioning we don’t want to reopen…especially with the Supreme Court of the USA deciding key issues anymore. I say vote at your designated site on Election Day if at all possible. And bring people with you who might need a ride. We can do this!
Well, finally tRUMP has promised to institute a policy that will rid us of him forever. If he carries out deporting those who received citizenship by being born here, he's gone back to whatever country his dad was from where they speak a language no one else speaks (or so he says). As my bumpersticker in 2020 so aptly said: BYEDON