Even in this there is a win for Trump in that he is still squashing the release of the Epstein files and moving on to the next step which is to revive the 2020 election to keep us distracted not only from Epstein but from Venezuela, Iran, Canada, Mexico, China and above all UKRAINE. There is a method to the madness and the only counter is to keep our eyes on the ball for the coming midterms.
" It has impacted decisions to approve Trump appointees"
On this note I've sent several very angry emails to Sen. Tim Kaine asking why tf he voted to confirm Kristi Noem when he had absolutely no reason/nothing to gain from it. He and several others did.
The extrajudicial murders are bad, the attempted cover-up and slander of the victims worse in my opinion. And still about 40% of the notoriously fickle American electorate approves of the current duly elected administration. Unless and until the 60% form an effective opposition I believe we can expect things to get worse. Since SCOTUS has invented a get out of jail free card and gifted it to the T. Rump criminal enterprise both the Legislative and Judicial branches are irrelevant to the operation of said enterprise which continues to flaunt court orders and laws passed by Congress with no consequences. This leaves The People alone to defend the Constitution and rule of law or bend the knee and allow democracy to die with a whimper. YMMV.
These murders crossed a line that will lead to the destruction of the felon's insane operations and those that the idiotic Senate confirmed. We will see how much teeth the Dems will display tomorrow. Enough is enough.
I think the reason that “democracy“ wasn’t considered a campaign issue before was that no one could imagine the degree of horror the Trump regime has unleashed.
“Others told me that they believed that Pretti’s death, coming so soon after the similarly horrific killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent earlier this month, had snapped swing voters into action over basic civil liberties being violated.”
There is some disconnect in this sentence. Being shot by masked federal agents—shot to death, with multiple bullets; continuously shot after dying in Pretti’s case; in Good’s case being called a “stupid bitch”— and then being slandered by the government officials at the highest levels: this can’t be filed under “basic civil liberties being violated.” Search and seizure without a judicial warrant violates basic civil liberties. These murders are atrocities; this is total moral collapse.
Yeah, not to demean Laura's writing here, but Pretti's death stood out SPECIFICALLY because of Renee Nicole Good's murder weeks earlier and, as galling as it is to say it, because they were both WHITE.
There's been a low key civil war going on in the United States since the actual Civil War ended. However, the battlefield was fought on the bodies of non-white folk. One of the reason folks are piqued here is that they're seeing it happening to folks that look like them.
I know what you mean—“Police Kill Black Man”—is too depressingly familiar to generate the outrage it ought to. It’s like yet another mass shooting. But what really counts is whether the deed is filmed. Everyone knows George Floyd’s name for the same reason we know Alex Pretti’s—because people recorded their murders with a phone. It’s amazing what people in Minneapolis are accomplishing with whistles and phones. We are getting a real time “how to” lesson in nonviolent civil disobedience.
Here's a demand that dems should make on current DHS funding that links directly to democracy as well: "all polling place must be ICE-free zones in all future elections."
You can bet that this admin will send ICE agents to blue city polling centers under the guise of "making sure illegals don't vote" but their real purpose will be depressing voter turnout via people of color fearing that they will be profiled and wrongly detained via Kavanaugh stops if they go to a polling center where ICE agents are sitting outside checking IDs, etc.
Dems need to stop having "failures of imagination" and start putting themselves into the mindset of their opponents and think about what this admin might do in the future and move to prevent those things from happening in the present.
Substacker Matt Yglesias noted this week that “The central paradox of our time is that the single most important issue on the table—Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and the conservative movement’s indulgence of those aspirations—is by almost all accounts a political loser.”
Are we really still quoting this guy? He may be loud but he's never been accurate. A simple look back at his hot takes over the last few years will tell you that.
I can’t help but wonder if Mary Peltola is correct. “Freedom” is the easiest term to explain what we want to preserve. Us politics nerds love terms like “democracy” and “civil liberties.” My teens when they are raging against the rules of the house use the word “freedom.”
If Democrats are arguing about whether to say democracy or civil liberties, they still don't get it. The words to use are cruelty, chaos, and killing people in the streets.
I believe terminology matters. Why haven’t we determined what language resonates with the majority of citizens to describe which of their rights are being trampled? I do not believe that talking about the Constitution resonates with the average citizen. A term that clearly conveys what ordinary people have lost should be used. Maybe it’s the word rights. I don’t know, but Constitution is not the word.
If "democracy" or "civil liberties" are not selling, maybe something more direct is necessary, like, "federal officers killing citizens," "governing within the law," or "violations of the Constitution" need to be used. This doesn't need to be that difficult, does it? I'm a disenfranchised Republican and I'm eager to vote these jokers out of office. Democrats should be, too.
As a boomer, I was born in the aftermath of WWII with the blood of authoritarianism still fresh. I grew up in the Cold War against authoritarianism as well as in the democratic participatory opposition to the Vietnam War. It's no wonder that so many participants in No Kings and similar grassroots democratic opposition are boomers like me, although it was nice to see an increase in younger participation in the last No Kings day.
Minneapolis cuts across all generations and ideologies in a profound way. Leaders of the Democratic Party are right to join the democratic groundswell opposition, not just for political reasons but because it's the right thing to do. And yes, protecting everyone's rights, liberty and humanity ties in with corruption and affordability, across every demographic. I'm not sure whether we're in a democratic tsunami now, but it sure feels like it.
Even in this there is a win for Trump in that he is still squashing the release of the Epstein files and moving on to the next step which is to revive the 2020 election to keep us distracted not only from Epstein but from Venezuela, Iran, Canada, Mexico, China and above all UKRAINE. There is a method to the madness and the only counter is to keep our eyes on the ball for the coming midterms.
" It has impacted decisions to approve Trump appointees"
On this note I've sent several very angry emails to Sen. Tim Kaine asking why tf he voted to confirm Kristi Noem when he had absolutely no reason/nothing to gain from it. He and several others did.
The extrajudicial murders are bad, the attempted cover-up and slander of the victims worse in my opinion. And still about 40% of the notoriously fickle American electorate approves of the current duly elected administration. Unless and until the 60% form an effective opposition I believe we can expect things to get worse. Since SCOTUS has invented a get out of jail free card and gifted it to the T. Rump criminal enterprise both the Legislative and Judicial branches are irrelevant to the operation of said enterprise which continues to flaunt court orders and laws passed by Congress with no consequences. This leaves The People alone to defend the Constitution and rule of law or bend the knee and allow democracy to die with a whimper. YMMV.
For so many, many things going on today: MINNESOTA MATTERS. https://bsky.app/profile/opsan.com/post/3mdej5mse3c2y
These murders crossed a line that will lead to the destruction of the felon's insane operations and those that the idiotic Senate confirmed. We will see how much teeth the Dems will display tomorrow. Enough is enough.
"I was shocked", "he was viscerally enraged" etc. Wow! Gee fellas, that's really something! We're so proud of you. Now what?
I think the reason that “democracy“ wasn’t considered a campaign issue before was that no one could imagine the degree of horror the Trump regime has unleashed.
“Others told me that they believed that Pretti’s death, coming so soon after the similarly horrific killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent earlier this month, had snapped swing voters into action over basic civil liberties being violated.”
There is some disconnect in this sentence. Being shot by masked federal agents—shot to death, with multiple bullets; continuously shot after dying in Pretti’s case; in Good’s case being called a “stupid bitch”— and then being slandered by the government officials at the highest levels: this can’t be filed under “basic civil liberties being violated.” Search and seizure without a judicial warrant violates basic civil liberties. These murders are atrocities; this is total moral collapse.
Yeah, just a touch more than poor training and procedures not followed. But fear not we will gum it to death and meander on our merry way.
Yeah, not to demean Laura's writing here, but Pretti's death stood out SPECIFICALLY because of Renee Nicole Good's murder weeks earlier and, as galling as it is to say it, because they were both WHITE.
There's been a low key civil war going on in the United States since the actual Civil War ended. However, the battlefield was fought on the bodies of non-white folk. One of the reason folks are piqued here is that they're seeing it happening to folks that look like them.
I know what you mean—“Police Kill Black Man”—is too depressingly familiar to generate the outrage it ought to. It’s like yet another mass shooting. But what really counts is whether the deed is filmed. Everyone knows George Floyd’s name for the same reason we know Alex Pretti’s—because people recorded their murders with a phone. It’s amazing what people in Minneapolis are accomplishing with whistles and phones. We are getting a real time “how to” lesson in nonviolent civil disobedience.
Here's a demand that dems should make on current DHS funding that links directly to democracy as well: "all polling place must be ICE-free zones in all future elections."
You can bet that this admin will send ICE agents to blue city polling centers under the guise of "making sure illegals don't vote" but their real purpose will be depressing voter turnout via people of color fearing that they will be profiled and wrongly detained via Kavanaugh stops if they go to a polling center where ICE agents are sitting outside checking IDs, etc.
Dems need to stop having "failures of imagination" and start putting themselves into the mindset of their opponents and think about what this admin might do in the future and move to prevent those things from happening in the present.
Substacker Matt Yglesias noted this week that “The central paradox of our time is that the single most important issue on the table—Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and the conservative movement’s indulgence of those aspirations—is by almost all accounts a political loser.”
Are we really still quoting this guy? He may be loud but he's never been accurate. A simple look back at his hot takes over the last few years will tell you that.
I can’t help but wonder if Mary Peltola is correct. “Freedom” is the easiest term to explain what we want to preserve. Us politics nerds love terms like “democracy” and “civil liberties.” My teens when they are raging against the rules of the house use the word “freedom.”
If Democrats are arguing about whether to say democracy or civil liberties, they still don't get it. The words to use are cruelty, chaos, and killing people in the streets.
I believe terminology matters. Why haven’t we determined what language resonates with the majority of citizens to describe which of their rights are being trampled? I do not believe that talking about the Constitution resonates with the average citizen. A term that clearly conveys what ordinary people have lost should be used. Maybe it’s the word rights. I don’t know, but Constitution is not the word.
I'll believe it when I see it. So far the Dem response in the Senate has been weak fucking tea with only a couple of exceptions.
If "democracy" or "civil liberties" are not selling, maybe something more direct is necessary, like, "federal officers killing citizens," "governing within the law," or "violations of the Constitution" need to be used. This doesn't need to be that difficult, does it? I'm a disenfranchised Republican and I'm eager to vote these jokers out of office. Democrats should be, too.
As a boomer, I was born in the aftermath of WWII with the blood of authoritarianism still fresh. I grew up in the Cold War against authoritarianism as well as in the democratic participatory opposition to the Vietnam War. It's no wonder that so many participants in No Kings and similar grassroots democratic opposition are boomers like me, although it was nice to see an increase in younger participation in the last No Kings day.
Minneapolis cuts across all generations and ideologies in a profound way. Leaders of the Democratic Party are right to join the democratic groundswell opposition, not just for political reasons but because it's the right thing to do. And yes, protecting everyone's rights, liberty and humanity ties in with corruption and affordability, across every demographic. I'm not sure whether we're in a democratic tsunami now, but it sure feels like it.