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Evening Shade---Resistance Rising---Wednesday [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-02
YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY
WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE
THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS
(Or NOT As the CASE MAY BE)
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Good evening, everyone!!
Heather Cox Richardson 4/1/2025
Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history. For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy. ✂ “These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?” Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.” ✂ “He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let's get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it's right or wrong. “Let’s get in good trouble. “My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.” According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times. ✂
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This next video is very long...nearly an hour, but I found it entertaining and informative.
Is it time to “eat the rich”? More and more people are suggesting this. Well, I don’t know if we should eat the rich. But I do think we should tax the rich. And unlike eating them, there’s nothing radical about asking the rich to pay their fair share. Our current tax system is rigged in their favor -- and I’ve been sounding the alarm on this for years. So we’ve put together a group of ten Inequality Media videos that I think best sum up why we need to make the rich pay their fair share, and how to do it. We’ll look at how the richest Americans actually got so rich, and how the tax system is rigged in their favor. We’ll hear an actual billionaire, Tom Steyer, explain why tax cuts for the rich are so misguided. And we’ll also debunk some of the common myths that the wealthy trot out to justify lowering their tax rate.
So if we want to make the rich pay their fair share, how do we actually do it? We’ll look at closing some loopholes and cutting off some giveaways. Death and taxes may be inevitable for most of us, but the rich can even use death to cheat taxes! We also address the Trump Tax Scam, and how Social Security is in danger because of the regressive payroll tax. And having a fairer tax code only matters if we have an effective IRS to enforce it — which is why we need to fund the agency. Finally, we have one of the most comprehensive videos we’ve made yet about America’s growing wealth gap and the danger it poses to us all. We made this video three years ago. Since then, Elon Musk has added more than a hundred billion dollars to his wealth. I bet that’s more than your wealth has grown in the last three years! The staggering wealth gap we have allowed to grow in this country makes me sick to my stomach. But I’m pretty sure eating the rich would give us all a stomach ache too, so let’s agree to just tax them instead.
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Love this idea!
x I've spent a lot of time debunking claims that way overstate the migration impacts of wealth taxes. But fear not - if we put our minds to it, I do believe we can design a wealth tax high enough to get Elon to flee the country
[image or embed] — James Medlock (@jdcmedlock.bsky.social) March 28, 2025 at 1:20 PM
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How right wing media amplifies Trump’s war on truth
President Trump lies constantly to the American public. It’s damaging our democracy and undermining Americans’ future. Consider Social Security. It is an efficiently run program of earned benefits that protects workers in retirement. In his recent speech to Congress, Trump promoted the Elon Musk-created lie that Social Security is paying benefits to people who are hundreds of years old. This seems designed to create a bogus justification for cutting a lifeline that prevents millions of older and disabled Americans from falling into poverty. Scientific research also saves lives. But that hasn’t kept Trump from targeting it with lies. Trump claimed that the government spent $8 million “for making mice transgender,” to which he added, “This is real.” No, it is not real. Medical researchers studying cancer and asthma use mice that have been genetically altered to make testing more relevant to humans. These are known as transgenic mice. Trump’s lie was, as Rolling Stone magazine put it, “designed to go viral in the right-wing misinformation machine.” This machine is years in the making. In the 1980s, right-wing donors began pouring money into still-ongoing efforts to convince conservative Americans not to trust mainstream media. In the 1990s, radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh proved there was big money to be made from promoting right-wing bombast. This century, the Fox News juggernaut launched by Rupert Murdoch and political operative Roger Ailes changed the media and political landscape with this highly profitable strategy. Not surprisingly, a steady diet of misinformation and disinformation is unhealthy for a person’s relation to the truth. People who rely on right-wing media sources are twice as likely to believe — wrongly — that immigrants commit more crime than people born in the U.S. or that Trump won the 2020 election. Fox’s success has generated imitators and competitors like One America News Network, Real America’s Voice, and a spate of online personalities who openly promote racism, antisemitism, white nationalism and Christian nationalism. Conservative Christian media, meanwhile, has become a public relations vehicle for the “anointed” Trump, who told Congress that God had saved him so that he could save America. Trump’s implicit message — opposing him is opposing God — is made explicit by religious-right media figures. Twenty years or so into the social media age, we know that algorithms can promote online radicalization and introduce young people to hateful content. A report by the pro-democracy group Issue One found that social media “accelerates polarization, amplifies extremism and challenges the rule of law.” It warned of the consequences of “a generation being raised in a ‘post-truth’ environment.” It’s only been a couple of years since Musk bought Twitter and, under the pretense of free speech, made X a thriving home for neo-Nazi and other destructive content. Now it’s Musk’s personal weapon, and federal judges targeted for daring to rule that he and his DOGE team must abide by the law are facing threats. All this explains why The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky concluded that Trump’s victory was made possible by the consistent diet of “slanted and distorted” information from the right-wing media machine, which “sets the news agenda in this country.” Fox News’s Jesse Watters recently talked about how the machine works: “We are waging a 21st Century information warfare campaign against the left … It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.” In this universe, whatever lines exist between MAGA, right-wing media and far-right racists are too thin and blurry for comfort. They all work together to create the alternative universe inhabited by many of Trump’s supporters. ✂
As the saying goes, once we identify the problem, we can work to fix it. I am heartened that, although we’ve known this for decades, at least now it is being reported on more and that in itself is a good thing.
More evidence that truth is being manipulated and suppressed and what comes of that.
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x New in PN: There's no sum of money that will keep you safe from Trump "The nature of a protection racket is that it doesn’t actually keep one safe. The cost to comply can always go up. The nature of what constitutes compliance can always be changed. And once you agree to pay, you can’t really stop"
[image or embed] — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 1, 2025 at 8:53 AM
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x Orban gets rushed out of Budapest in a motorcade as his attempt to outlaw protests is totally ignored. Putin's puppet is likely finished. Just a matter of time now.
[image or embed] — Jay in Kyiv (@jayinkyiv.bsky.social) April 1, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Now do ours!
(How many puppets does putin have???)
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Happy news from Wisconsin!!!
Apparently not everyone feels the joy. 🤣
x As his candidate is defeated in Wisconsin, Elon Musk hasn't posted in 21 minutes. This is the longest he's gone without posting in over three years. — Maureen Jice (@jane.meangirls.online) April 1, 2025 at 9:54 PM
But kind, normal people who love democracy are certainly celebrating!
x Musk & his money repudiated in WI Wow Autocracy taking it on the chin in court and now at the ballot box — Norm Eisen (@normeisen.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 2:48 AM
x Says the guy who spent millions to elect a judge that will soon be the deciding vote on a case involving Tesla’s ability to sell cars in the state.
[image or embed] — Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 1:47 AM
*** Please refer back to the story of right wing lies.
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Scary and horrendous. He’s just doing these things to act tough and make us all freak out. I’m trying not to give him that satisfaction. Hopefully more of us will stand up to the cruelty and push back. That’s the way to defeat a would-be dictator. I believe he will keep being defeated in the courts and I'm happy to see some cracks in R support!
x Former Costa Rican President and Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias said that the US had revoked his visa to enter the country, weeks after he criticized US President Donald Trump on social media saying he was behaving like ‘a Roman emperor’ reut.rs/4iRDMfK
[image or embed] — Reuters (@reuters.com) April 1, 2025 at 11:53 PM
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I’m waiting for the day that his losses result in his loans being called in.
x Hilarious how this isn't just a drop of 32% quarter-to-quarter, it's that this is a huge miss (around 15% lower) of already-lowered estimates; the analysts still haven't "groked" that the Tesla brand is trashed. TSLA stock down in premarket trading. 🙏
[image or embed] — Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 9:11 AM
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Today is the felon’s so called liberation day. Of course, it’s insane and unjustified and will do damage to us and the world but evil is the point.
Stop Looking for Methods in the Madness
✂ As I said, I don’t know exactly what will be announced later today. One safe prediction, however, is that over the next few days we’ll see many news analyses purporting to explain the thinking behind this radical change in U.S. policy. Such analyses will be a waste of time, because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all. I don’t know how many people realize that the administration’s case for tariffs is completely incoherent, that it has not one but two major internal contradictions. Here’s the story: Trumpers are claiming that tariffs 1. Won’t increase prices, because foreign producers will absorb the cost 2. Will cause a large shift in U.S. demand away from imports to domestic production 3. Will raise huge amounts of revenue If you think about it for a minute, you realize that (1) is inconsistent with (2): If prices of imports don’t rise, why would consumers switch to domestically produced goods? At the same time, (2) is inconsistent with (3): If imports drop a lot, tariffs won’t raise a lot of money, because there won’t be much to tax. So the public story about tariffs doesn’t make any sense. And Trump’s rants about tariffs go beyond nonsense. ✂
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Keep speaking out Shady people!!! We have lots of opportunities to protest, organize, write postcards, donate and let our representatives know how we feel and what we want them to do! I’m proud of Cory Booker and proud of everything our Dems are doing to combat this maladministration and its goons!!!
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Today is Childhelp National Day of Hope
Founded in 1959 as International Orphans, Inc. by Sara O'Meara and Yvonne Fedderson, Childhelp is one of the largest non-profit child abuse prevention and treatment organizations in the nation.
It’s also National Ferret Day!
And National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day!!! Woohoo!
The first reference of peanut butter paired with jelly on bread, was published in the United States in 1901. Peanut butter was considered a delicacy in the early 1900's and was only served in New York City’s finest tea rooms. In the late 1920's, the price of peanut butter declined, and the sandwich became very popular with children.
During World War II, both peanut butter and jelly were part of the US soldiers military ration list. Today, it is a popular staple in most households--loved by most everyone.
The average American will have eaten over 2000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the time they graduate from high school.
It is National Reconciliation Day
A day to promote unity, understanding, and reconciliation among people of all backgrounds. It is an opportunity to engage in open and honest conversations, participate in community events, and reflect on the ways in which we can contribute to creating a more just and equitable society. By working together to build bridges between communities and address issues of injustice and inequality, we can move toward a brighter and more inclusive future.
And National Walking Day
The American Heart Association declared the first Wednesday of April National Walking Day.
The benefits of walking include:
Improving your cardiovascular health and function
Increasing your aerobic capacity
Improving blood pressure
Controlling your blood sugar and reducing your risk of diabetes
Increasing your metabolism
Maintaining your weight
Reducing your risk or osteoarthritis
Maintaining mobility
Lowering your risk of dementia
And World Autism Awareness Day
In December 2007, The United Nations General Assembly unanimously declared April 2nd as World Autism Awareness Day to highlight the need to help improve the quality of life of those with autism so they can lead full and meaningful lives as an integral part of society.
Tomorrow is National Burrito Day!!
Welcome to the comments, Shady people! 😁
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