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President Joe Biden---Day 1368---Fourth Year---Day 365---Evening Shade---Sunday [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-19
YOU WILL FIND in the DIARIES a LOT of POLITICS
THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS
EVERY PERSON WHO COMMENTS WILL GET A CRITTER
RULES IN THE DIARY
WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE
YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY
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The Day One program: The Guardian shares a summary of Trump’s plans, in case you’ve lost track of all the promises. These are the headers; click the link for details on them all.
Mass deportation program Border emergency declaration The North American tariff shock January 6 pardons Energy sector revolution School funding overhaul Transgender rights Electric vehicle mandate reversal Birthright Citizenship Cryptocurrency in the bank Deep state purge Ukraine war negotiations
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The External Revenue Service means internal trouble:
On his social media platform, he declared that he wants to create what he's calling the "External Revenue Service" to collect tariffs and other revenues from foreign sources. To be clear, that name itself is misleading: the overwhelming number of tariffs are paid by American businesses importing goods, not by external foreign sources. (NPR)
The NPR article goes on to explain how tariffs can either raise revenue or boost American manufacturing, but those are opposing goals: pick one or the other. Trump is planning on having his cake and eating it too.
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Deportations begin in Chicago on Tuesday.
"On Tuesday, ICE is finally going to go out and do their job. We're going to take the handcuffs off ICE," [border czar Tom Homan] said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Homan, a former acting head of ICE, added that immigration agents will focus on the "worst first, public safety threats first, but no one is off the table. If they're in the country illegally, they got a problem..." [Beatriz Ponce de León, Chicago's deputy mayor for immigrant, migrant and refugee rights] said the city is prepared. In addition to community agencies holding "know your rights" events all over, she said Chicago leaders have met with city departments and sister agencies, such as the police and public school district, to detail existing city policies. (NPR)
The biggest concern of Chicago immigrants is being separated from their children.
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Steve Bannon explains how hyper-wealthy elites can be expected to carry out MAGA goals: it’s because there are oligarchs, and then there are oligarchs.
“Well, there's two sets of oligarchs. There's what we call the lords of easy money on Wall Street. And then there's the oligarchs in the apartheid state of Silicon Valley. And they're clearly oligarchs. They have concentration of wealth and power. With President Trump, I think Musk has very little power. He has some influence. But has very little power.” (NPR)
He notes that California oligarchs are traditionally Democratic, so kowtowing to Trump represents a surrender. Wall Street oligarchs are typically Republican. How different flavors of oligarchs are going to drive MAGA goals when they don’t even live in the same world in anyone’s guess.
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Mother Jones has a fiery explanation of Trump’s shift from holding power via rioters to wielding power via billionaires.
On Monday, the three wealthiest men in the world—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—are scheduled to be at the Capitol as honored guests for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, seated where four years ago Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militia members, and other extremists, incited by his brazen lies about the 2020 election, violently attacked Congress to overturn American democracy and keep Trump in power. This transition—from brownshirts to billionaires—encapsulates what has gone wrong. It is a clear signal that the United States is broken. (Mother Jones)
This is an article worth taking the time to read.
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It’s off! It’s on again! TikTok went dark this morning. Trump wants TikTok back on tomorrow.
"Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations." (Raw Story)
But this would mean the President is superseding by executive order a law passed by Congress, which isn’t constitutional. Besides...
x Is Trump suggesting state owned media? I can’t stress how dangerous this is. I’m also concerned no one will care because they’ll get to keep their TikTok
[image or embed] — Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.bsky.social) January 19, 2025 at 10:18 AM
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Anybody have a Ouija board? I’d like to get in touch with the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy, we need you!
x YouTube Video
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Sunday Science
The covid pandemic has some upsides in lessons learned, if people will pay attention.
Numerous independent panels have made more than 300 recommendations to prevent a future catastrophe, but the lack of progress threatens to erase the hard-earned gains made during the pandemic. Unfortunately, it is increasingly difficult to prepare for the next pandemic, especially because of decreased trust in political leaders, institutions, and science, and urgent national priorities. Despite these challenges, WHO member states continue to craft a legally binding agreement aimed at strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. (Science)
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Fifty thousand scientists signed a letter to Congress asking to protect research and scientific jobs.
“The Trump administration's current agenda promises to eviscerate the protections that Americans count on and support: clean air and water; safe food and medicine; products that won't harm us; and protection from extreme weather and other damaging effects of climate change,” the letter stated. “Without strong federal science, people will suffer, and historically marginalized communities will continue to bear the burden of these harms.” (Scientific American)
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How to look at the sun. (No, don’t look at the sun.) But NASA looked with the Hubble telescope and cleaned its camera too. Remember when you used to get images burned into your old CRT monitor? Turns out the Hubble has a similar burn-in problem, called QEH.
The cure for QEH was to flood the camera with ultraviolet light, which “reset” the detectors and flushed them out … Given that the sun blasts out UV light all the time, Schneider and his peers decided to take advantage of that once Hubble was in orbit. But how did they get all those cleansing photons into the detector? The trick here, Schneider told me, was that the engineers didn’t actually point Hubble at the sun. That would be bad—like, “let’s destroy a lot of the precious multibillion-dollar observatory’s equipment” bad. Instead they realized they could turn the telescope’s back to the sun and aim it directly away from our star at a placeholder spot on the sky called the antisun, a point that moves in the sky because of Earth’s and Hubble’s orbital motion but is always 180 degrees opposite our star. They could then deploy a small “pickoff” reflector.
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Today is National Popcorn Day, though popcorn was a hot topic here yesterday too. Popcorn: it’s a snack and a facial treatment!
x YouTube Video
It’s also National Imagination Day! There’s an AI website just for imagining cats, as if we lacked pictures of actual cats. There are also cat owners with great imaginations for making stuff for cats.
x YouTube Video
x YouTube Video
Tomorrow, in addition to being Martin Luther King Day, is also National Cheese Lovers’ Day and National Disc Jockey Day.
Happy Sunday! What are you imagining tonight?
[END]
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