Dear Everybody:
Yesterday was the “No Kings” Early Voting Day, and there were 3000+ marches and rallies held.
–At the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, a crowd rallied under a huge banner which read, “VOTERS OVER VANITY! TRUMP MUST GO! VOTE EARLY!”
–Just as the rallies started, Meta/Facebook/Instagram cut all contact with the groups organizing the marches and rallies so that coverage of them could not be posted and/or live streamed, and administrators could not communicate with each other, report turnout, etc. (I’m sure it was just a coincidence.) Pro-No-Kings promoters’ accounts were also shut down.
–Chris Murphy: “Meta took down the No Kings Organizing page today–the biggest day of protest this fall. They provided zero explanation. it stayed down for the entire afternoon until most of the protests were done. Outrageous. Put this on the January investigation list.”
–ctrl+alt+RESIST: Meta suspended the No Kings Instagram account on the exact day millions are marching. The free speech bros only love speech that cannot organize against them. Zuckerberg owns the megaphone and he still cannot stand a protest.”
–Ezra Levin: “Update: About 4 hours later and we still don’t have admin access so we still can’t post to the No Kings Instagram account. This isn’t slowing down the 3000+ early vote events. We will drive the biggest early vote in history. But this should be a flashing alarm about what’s to come.”
–People posted photos when and where they could–from Middletown, Pennsylvania, where hundreds gathered to Boston and Palm Beach. There were rallies all over, in places like Livonia, Michigan; Lamar, Colorado; Venice, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia; New York City; and Gastonia, North Carolina.
–Even though there was no official rally planned for Newport, Oregon, people showed up anyway.
–Note: If you have photos, you need to share them wherever and however you can because of the attempts to block them and look up stories online about the rallies and post and share those to get the word out. USA Today had a good story with lots of pix and so did Al Jazeera.
In Ukraine vs. Russia war news:
–Starlink continues to be throttled in Ukraine, no matter what Trump and/or Musk say. If missiles and/or drones try to go over 160 km/hour they lose the Starlink connection. To prove it, Zelenskyy ran an experiment. He had people drive Starlink-equipped vehicles into the EU at over 180 km/hr and the Starlink worked perfectly the moment they were out of Ukraine.
–Alina Pereverzieva: “At the end, it doesn’t matter whether it’s SpaceX/ Starshield, Musk, or the White House. For the end user, the result is the same. The product will be politically weaponized against you. Whether the White House orders it or Musk proposes it makes no difference.”
–Russia took full advantage of the situation, sending 320 drones over Ukraine overnight and going after 15 critical power facilities.
–Putin’s envoy Kirill Dimitriev: “Checkmate.”
–In return, Ukraine struck the Surgnt refining complex.
–Trump has really infuriated Congress by this latest move of waiving sanctions on Russia. Both houses of Congress had overwhelmingly passed the legislation in a bipartisan display of American support for Ukraine in the war with Russia.
–Lawmakers from both parties blasted the executive order. GOP Senator Thom Tillis called it “Beyond irresponsible.” GOP Senator John Cornyn said Lindsey Graham would be appalled. Dem Senator Chuck Schumer said, “By giving the Russian economy life support, Trump’s deal with the devil keeps getting dirtier.”
–Dem Senator Elizabeth Warren said the Senate needs to take action, but the Senate is out on recess till after the midterm elections, by which time Ukraine may be in ruins and it will no longer be an issue. (Gosh, just like the East Wing. And the trees in East Potomac golf course.)
–Meidas Touch says the president’s refusal to faithfully execute a law Congress passed is grounds for impeachment.
–Ron Filipkowski: “The United States is actively helping Putin murder civilians in Ukraine. Trump is doing everything he can to force Ukraine to surrender to his friend and ally Putin so they can be subjugated by the Russians again.” (I actually disagree with Ron Filipkowski on this–I think Putin wants to completely wipe them out.)
–Trump declared that Russia would have won the war in one day if only all 180,000 Russian soldiers hadn’t taken a wrong turn onto a dirt road instead of going down the highway. He sounded deeply disappointed.)
In Iran war news:
–Iran continued to fire missiles at the UAE’s port anchorages.
–Iran struck a tanker in the Gulf of Oman. 35 vessels have been hit in the last two weeks.
–Iran claims that 5 of its tankers were hit. It thinks Trump is planning to resume strikes on them. Iranian forces were put on highest alert for 71 hours.
–They are now claiming that the US asked them permission to hit their nuclear site without retaliation. The US is denying that.
–The US has fired 19 years’ worth of Patriot interceptors in just 7 months. Trump blamed Ukraine for the shortage. He told newsmax in an interview that the military’s stockpile of Tomahawk cruise missiles had not been depleted because of the war with Iran but because they had been transferred to Ukraine. ((Note: TRUMP DID NOT SEND A SINGLE TOMAHAWK TO UKRAINE. He reneged on that deal, too, and never sent the promised Tomahawks.)
–Oil prices spiked again. The price of Brent crude hit a record $160 a barrel.
–When Trump was asked this week when the war in Iran would end, he said, “It’s going to end soon. As soon as I want it to end, it will end.”
–Lawrence O’Donnell called it “the stupidest statement a wartime president could ever make.”
–Lawrence O’Donnell: “No wartime President of the United States has ever said, ‘As soon as I want the war to end, it will end.’ And so what Donald Trump told American voters last night is ‘I don’t want the war to end today. I don’t want the war to end tomorrow. I don’t want the war to end next week.’ Donald Trump is saying, ‘It’s my war, and it will end whenever I want it to end. And because I’m not out there fighting it myself, I do not want it to end.’”
–Saturday Trump said, “It’s gonna end very quickly…We’re gonna have to be there a little bit longer.”
In Trump’s Arch news:
–This week the Trump administration submitted its final plans for the Arch, and there’s no sign of a military installation on top or anywhere else. The plans make no reference at all to drones, snipers, or ammunition storage which Trump promised would turn the 250-foot arch into a “top grade military complex.” (So they were lying. As usual. Say anything to get what you want.)
–When the administration was challenged about this, their excuse was that the plans weren’t finalized yet, even though these are the final plans.
–Trump has also changed the plans for the top of the arch. The plans say that Trump wants the torch held by a Lady Liberty statue atop the arch to be turned into an “eternal flame.” (You know, just like the one on JFK’s grave, the grave whose view will be completely blocked by the arch.)
–The Arlington City Board in Virginia has filed a lawsuit against the National Park Service for the “egregious and unlawful way” it is racing through the approval process for Trump’s arch.
–Arlington County in Virginia has sued to stop the arch until an environmental review can be conducted.
–In their suit, they said, “Using the Arch to store large stockpiles of ammo and as a staging point for drones and snipers, so close to commuters and tourists, will dramatically worsen these public-safety harms and the risk of accidents.”
–They noted that the line of sight between Arlington and the Lincoln Monument was deliberately created to symbolize the nation’s post-Civil War reunification, a line of sight the arch would destroy.
–The New York Times reports that the federal panel, whose members were all hand-picked by Trump, approved his plan to build a 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington, even though massive numbers of citizens and organizations have objected.
–John Dickerson: “Traditionally, before you got a triumphal arch, you had to have a triumph.”
–Public Notice: “Trump’s taste, such as it is, doesn’t come out of nowhere. Wittingly or not, he has joined a long tradition of fascists imposing a grinding totalitarian aesthetic on the populace.”
In Other Trump Destroying Washington, DC, news:
–Trump’s toadies managed to cut down 430 trees on the East Potomac Public Golf Course before the judge was able to stop them (which was the plan, of course. In fact, if rain hadn’t interfered, they would have cut down many more.)
–The judge was furious and ordered them to stop immediately and remove all tree-cutting equipment from the golf course. She said she was very angry that the advance notice she had previously ordered was not made until right before closing time on the Friday of a long weekend.
–The DOJ wants the judge taken off the case after she excoriated them in court for lying to her and defying her–and threatening them with contempt.
–The tree-cutting equipment is gone from the park and so is the yellow tape used to mark the trees which were to be cut down. The judge told Trump’s attorneys if the stop work order is violated by even two seconds, she will begin contempt proceedings.
–Trump’s unfortunate press secretary may have done Trump some damage on her way out, although unconsciously. Her last picture, taken standing next to Trump in the Oval Office, shows a blurred-out map of the East Potomac golf course on the top of Trump’s Resolute Desk.
–Trump’s lawyers have been claiming in court that there are no plans to renovate the golf course and turn it into a private course and that the trees that were cut down were just part of routine grounds management. They argued in court that the cutting simply carried out a 2019 landscape report and has nothing to do with Trump’s redesign. They were obviously lying, but now there’s hard evidence that in fact there was a plan and that the orders to cut down all those trees came straight from Trump.
–And now there’s a new twist to the story: Trump’s misbegotten press secretary, Katie Zachariah, has undermined Trump’s story, albeit unintentionally. The White House released a farewell photo of Trump and Zachariah in the Oval Office, I guess to show there were no hard feelings for his throwing her under the bus, and on top of a stack of blue binders was a blurred-out map. But it wasn’t blurred-our enough, and people could see it was a map of East Potomac Golf Course.
–This was bad enough, but after people commented on the fact that the map proved Trump was in fact the one who ordered the tree-cutting, a new photo was released. This one is of Katie Zachariah and Trump with her whole family photo-shopped in–and the map gone. Now there’s just a stack of blue binders with nothing on top.
In The Grift Goes On news:
–There’s been a new wrinkle in one of the stories I reported on yesterday, the one where Trump’s parking-garage attorney and her Turkish-oligarch husband claimed that Kennedy Center chairman Ric Grenell stole the $5.6 million dollars that they donated tot he Kennedy Center.
–Now it turns out they didn’t give the funds at all–they came from a bank account affiliated with the Congolese government. In other words, Habba and her husband were serving as a shell company to hide the actual donor.
–Habba’s husband, Turhan Mildon, acknowledged that he advises the Congolese president.
–Ric Grenell claims he never got any donation at all.
In Let Them Eat Cake news:
–RFK, Jr. said if Americans can’t afford ribeye steak any more, there are lots of cheaper cuts of beef, though he said ribeye was his favorite.
–Stephen Miller’s wife Katie posted a photo of “food porn,” bragging about a heaping display of “grass-fed steak, asparagus, and white sweet potatoes” she planned to cook for dinner.
–During a discussion of the high price of beef, GOP Senator and candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith defended Trump by saying, “There are so many other kinds of protein.”
–At Trump’s rallies this weekend, he talked about the $5000 checks he was going to give everybody who voted for him if he wins and how they should spend it: “Let’s go to Palm Beach and enjoy the President for lunch. Let’s have lunch at Mar-a-lago, where for $5000 you’ll get one hamburger and a small dessert.”
–He then went off on a riff about “boeuf” vs. “beef,” only he pronounced “boeuf” “boff.” (It’s actually pronounced “buuff” as in “roof.” Trump: “Do you know what boff is? Expensive beef. it costs a lot more if you call it boff.”
–Dem Rep Ted Lieu: “What are Trump enablers focused on?…Another let them eat cake moment. November is coming.”
–Journalist David Leavitt: “Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and you’re flaunting your wealth.”
In promising news:
–CNN pollster Harry Enten: “I would say Donald Trump is probably at this point in his term the least popular Republican president since Herbert Hoover.” (And he said that before Trump stabbed Ukraine in the back.)
In other news:
–Dem Rep Ilhan Omar’s attorneys are demanding the return of her property, which the DOJ seized in the federal search of her property (including her phone.)
–4 Democratic Congressman have received suspicious packages containing a white powder. The letters are being investigated by the FBI, US Postal Inspection Service, and US Capitol Police. (Oh, goodie.)
–Now that Paramount has finalized its merger, it’s talking about bringing Elon Musk on board as an investor. (Oh, goodie.)
In good news:
–Mayor Mamdani has started an Opera for All program in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera to release 10,000 free tickets in a lottery every month for opera season because, “Opera is meant to be seen by everybody.”
–The Dave and Cheryl Duffield Foundation will give $250 million dollars over the next five years to allow millions of pet owners to access critical veterinarian care beyond their budgets.
–In Trinidad, Texas, police arrested a local resident for complaining about the city’s contaminated water supply, saying it had bacteria which had sickened people and caused hospitalizations, and made them spend the night in jail. The police falsified the arrest report, claiming that they had arrested the supporter for putting a “Fuck Bad Cops” placard outside City hall. An investigation by the Texas Commission on Law ended with the the resident’s claim being upheld, the water supply being fixed, and the police department being disbanded after they were unable to provide evidence to the commission that they provided any public benefit to the community.
And finally, today marks the birthday of Chuck Berry, the “Father of Rock and Roll.” His songs “Maybelline” and “Roll Over Beethoven” revolutionized popular music as he refined rhythm and blues with country music into something completely new. As the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said, “While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together.” How important was he? Well, when the Voyager probe took off, it had a record (and playing device on board.) The “Golden Record” included snatches of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky–and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
Best meme of the day, from Winnie the Pooh and Piglet: “‘What day is today?’ asked Pooh. ‘It’s the day we burn the motherfucking Republican Party to the ground,’ squeaked Piglet. ‘My favorite day,’ said Pooh.”
Best comment of the day, from Fran Caselles: “Why I am not a Republican: I do not hate women. I do not hate minorities. I do not hate the poor. I am not homophobic. I believe in science. I am not a traitor.”
Keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willi
