Attacking Trump is not enough

Sam Smith - One of the problems with our current politics is that the Democrats are doing a good job exposing and correcting Trump but are not offering a clear alternative in programs. Even this website has not come through with a clear picture of what a post-Trump era would be like due to the lack of clearly presented new goals. Most of the alternatives offered are the names of politicians and not new policies. 

To give you an idea of how this differs from the past, here are some measures taken since 1960 by progresisves: 

• Civil Rights Act (1964) & Voting Rights Act (1965)
• Fair Housing Act (1968)
• Women's Rights & Equality: Supported the Equal Pay Act (1963) 
• Medicare and Medicaid (1965) 
  
• Affordable Care Act (2010)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
• Family and Medical Leave Act (1993)
• Environmental Protection: Established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
• Education: Increased federal student loans and funding for education.
• Consumer Protection: Created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). 

It's time to push for poisitve and human alternatives to Trumpism. You may not have the votes yet but you'll will gain the appreciation of America's most confused generation.  

Gen Z financial impacts

Yahoo - One and a half million more young adults live with their parents today than a decade ago. Theyre losers … economically.

Since the pandemic, fair market rents have increased as much as 40% in Chicago, the cost of owning a car is up more than 40%, and car insurance and health care prices have spiked. Student loan debt has quadrupled since 2000, and entry-level wages havent kept pace with inflation.

For young people without financial or family support, it's an affordability crisis that feels insurmountable.

Jeff Bezos

Financial Times - The most puzzling aspect of Jeff Bezos’s evisceration of the Washington Post is why he won’t sell it to someone else. According to Semafor, the title has plenty of prospective buyers. But America’s fourth-richest man is uninterested.

Instead, this week he closed down many of the paper’s foreign bureaus and whole sections of the paper — sports and metro reporting included. Feeding half of the newspaper into the shredder is not an obvious way to revive the loyalty of a subscriber base that has been shrinking rapidly since late 2024.

But reviving the Post is evidently not Bezos’s objective. His goal seems to be to convert what Donald Trump used to call the “Amazon Washington Post” into a harmless shell of its former self as a display of knee-bending. Selling it to a viable new owner would not help Trump. Having done seminal investigative reporting on Trump during his first term, the paper is now at least partially disabled from sustaining that vital public service in his second. The title proudly adopted the motto “democracy dies in darkness” after Trump was first elected. Now the paper is an exhibit of his attempts to smother democracy in broad daylight. 

An Epstein party

Word

“May God save the country, for it is evident that the people will not.”   — Millard Fillmore, letter to Henry Clay, 1844.

Or we could have this. . .

Via Governor Newsom Press Office

White House won't rule out sending ICE agents to the mid-term election polls

The Independent, UK - The White House refused to rule out following through on the threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents being sent out to “surround the polls” when voters cast ballots in this November’s midterm elections as a way of depressing Democratic turnout and boosting chances of Republican victories in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday said she could offer “no guarantee” that ICE personnel would not be stationed at polling sites when Americans are in the process of choosing whether to extend the Republican stranglehold on power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

She had been asked about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s recent call for Trump to deploy ICE around election sites on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, just days after Trump himself called for a Republican “takeover” of vote-counting in Democratic-led states and municipalities.

Bannon had endorsed Trump’s suggestion that his party seize control of voting machinery and counting, telling listeners: “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.”

The case for keeping your garden dark at night

Wasington Post - When you picture nighttime in a perfectly landscaped garden, chances are good that you imagine it lit. According to National Association of Homebuyers survey data, close to 90 percent of people find exterior lighting desirable. Close to half consider it essential.

But wildlife experts and ecologists say outdoor lighting has become excessive, and it’s having an outsize impact on the species that share our habitats. Artificial outdoor lighting negatively affects insects, birds, bats and other small mammals, and it can even make the plants in your garden less productive.

A number of Amazon products recalled

Newsweek - A number of products sold by Amazon have been recalled nationwide due to a risk of serious injury or death from tip-overs and entrapment hazards. The recalled products include EnHomee 10-Drawer Dressers; Shintenchi 6-Drawer Dressers; YITA-branded Dressers; Furnulem 5-Drawer Dressers; and Fixwal 7-Drawer Dressers.

....The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) warned that all the dressers violate the mandatory standard for storage units required by the STURDY Act (Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth), which was enacted in December 2022.

Amazon stocks plunge 9%

CNBC - Amazon shares sunk more than 9% on Friday after the company’s hefty spending forecast surprised investors who were already wary that the artificial intelligence boom is at risk of becoming a bubble.

Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta reported about $120 billion in capital expenditures in the fourth quarter alone. That figure could exceed more than $660 billion this year, the Financial Times reported, which is higher than the gross domestic product of countries like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Israel.

Wall Street has responded differently to the companies’ spending plans, cheering Meta and Alphabet’s forecasts, while punishing Amazon and Microsoft.

Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Google and Oracle collectively shed more than $1 trillion from their valuations over the past week, according to FactSet data.

Shares of companies developing hardware for the AI build-out will likely face continued volatility as “sentiment contagion takes hold,” Paul Markham, investment director at GAM Investments, told CNBC.

Health

Health.com - The FDA classified a recall of Qunol turmeric capsules as Class II, indicating a remote risk of serious health consequences. About 42,740 bottles were recalled due to mold contamination, including specific 60- and 120-count lots expiring in October 2028.  Consumers should stop using the affected products and return them to retailers like CVS or Wegmans for full refunds.

Donald Trump

NBC News - The Trump administration asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for the Washington region’s Dulles International Airport and New York’s Penn Station to be named after the president in exchange for releasing the federal funds required to build a long-delayed tunnel between New York and New Jersey, multiple sources told NBC News.

ICE

NBC News - Agents are aggressively photographing faces of people they encounter in their daily operations using smartphones with sophisticated facial recognition technology and professional-grade photo equipment. Some of the images are being run through facial recognition software in real time.

In recent months, ICE and other DHS officials have scanned Americans in Minneapolis, Chicago and Portland, Maine, often without their consent. The use of these tools and tactics is setting a new standard of street-level surveillance and information collection that has little precedent in the U.S.

NBC News spoke with witnesses and verified more than a dozen videos in which immigration officers appear to be taking such photographs. Several people described it as an act of intimidation.

NBC News - The growing surveillance activity on Americans comes as DHS, under which Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate, has invested heavily in AI-assisted facial recognition technologies that can rapidly compare an uploaded photo with vast databases to make a likely match, according to an NBC News review of publicly available agency contracts and a document reviewing its AI tools.

Many of the photos are taken through a customized DHS smartphone app called Mobile Fortify, which debuted last year. After a person’s face is scanned, the app is supposed to rapidly identify the individual and present their biographical information to the DHS employee using the technology, according to a document the agency published last week in accordance with executive orders signed under presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

NPR - Democrats released a 10-point plan for the Department of Homeland Security's immigration law enforcement agents in a letter to the GOP. In addition to their original demands, which include removing officers' masks, Democrats want officers to wear identifying information, such as their last name. Lawmakers also want these officers to have standard uniforms and equipment, aligning them with civil enforcement officers. 

NPR’s Claudia Grisales says Republicans are not shutting down the proposal yet, but there is a lot of negotiating left to do with little time to accomplish it. Grisales says another stopgap bill is an option, allowing lawmakers to kick the can down the road for a few more weeks.

Data centers using a lot of electricity

Axios - Data centers are slated to account for a whopping 50%-ish of U.S. power demand growth the remainder of this decade, a new International Energy Agency report projects.

The AI-driven rise of huge data centers is a big reason IEA sees overall U.S. demand rising an average of 2% annually from 2026-2030 — twice the pace of the 2016-2025 stretch.

Global power thirst is rising even faster as emerging economies lead the way, with IEA seeing it growing an average of 3.6% annually in 2026-2030.

• There's no single reason. Instead, it's a mix of industrial needs, air conditioning, EVs, data centers and more.
• Renewables, gas and nuclear are all expanding, yet coal remains the single largest global source in 2030.
• IEA sees power sector CO2 emissions plateauing through 2030.

New Trump policy makes thousands of federal workers easier to fire

MS NOW - The Trump administration finalized a policy Thursday that creates a new category of federal workers that would make it easier to fire high-ranking career civil servants for their perceived unwillingness to implement the president’s agenda.

The new rule, set to be published in the Federal Register on Friday, will affect approximately 55,000 workers. The president will decide which roles fall within the new category via an executive order, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told reporters on a call Thursday. Agencies have already submitted their proposals of positions covered under the new rule, which the White House is actively reviewing. 

It's not just the Washington Post under attack

Zeeshan Aleem, MS NOW - When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in 2013, he was hailed by many as a “white knight” whose extraordinary wealth and business acumen would be a boon for one of the great American broadsheets.

For most of his tenure, Bezos reportedly let editors run the paper without interference. But then, apparently spurred by changes in the political winds, he became heavy-handed. In fall 2024, with Trump’s potential return to the White House looming, Bezos himself quashed the paper’s editorial endorsing then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Then, a cartoonist resigned after she said her depiction of Bezos — and other billionaires — kneeling before Trump was rejected. And the paper gutted its opinion section to become more friendly to the right and to silence progressive dissent. None of the changes can be explained by Bezos’ concerns about fiscal health; covering the Post’s losses are an infinitesimal fraction of his wealth. The changes reflect his personal priorities.

We are in an acutely dangerous place when huge swaths of the media ecosystem are owned by untouchably rich people.

Bezos’ gutting of the Post comes as biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is pushing the Los Angeles Times to the right, and the billionaire Ellison family is transforming CBS News into a MAGA-friendly news operation. This is to say nothing of the social media sector, where mega-billionaire Elon Musk wrecked Twitter, Meta’s weather vane billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg alters algorithms depending on who controls the government and TikTok is now partially in the hands of billionaire Trump allies. 

We are in an acutely dangerous place when huge swaths of the media ecosystem are owned by untouchably rich people. Their primary interest is in enriching themselves using their highly profitable assets, and they possess no obligation to protect democratic norms if it doesn’t strike their fancy. Most of them are decidedly not in the mood these days: During this authoritarian turn, the capitalist class has found that muzzling politico-intellectual freedom is a way to curry favor with the president and protect their bottom line.

Judge quotes George Washington re Haitian immigrants

Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian - An eloquent and bracing federal court opinion issued this week began this way:

On December 2, 1783, then-Commander-in-Chief George Washington penned: “America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.” More than two centuries later, Congress reaffirmed President Washington’s vision by establishing the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. It provides humanitarian relief to foreign nationals in the United States who come from disaster-stricken countries. It also brings in substantial revenue, with TPS holders generating $5.2 billion in taxes annually. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has a different take.

What followed from U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes for the District of Columbia was a literary and legal masterpiece using Noem’s own vicious racism against her in a case challenging the revocation of TPS status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians refugees.

Reyes started by debunking the government’s clumsy attempt to smear the plaintiffs: “Plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders. They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’” Instead, Reyes explained, they are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, a college economics major, and a full-time registered nurse. The constant lies and dehumanization of immigrants are both a moral disgrace and, in this case, the regime’s legal Achilles heel.

“Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to non-white immigrants,” Reyes wrote. “This seems substantially likely.” Reyes pointed to Noem’s own blatantly racist language and failure to conduct any independent review. While the statute allows her ample discretion regarding TPS determination, she does not have “unbounded discretion.” The court therefore found that she failed to clear the low bar that would allow her to deport the Haitian refugees.

Health

Newsworthy News - A massive Medicare fraud scheme centered in Los Angeles County has distorted the entire national home health care payment system, with a single physician billing taxpayers nearly $600 million over four years while legitimate agencies across America shut their doors.

Highly suspicious billing patterns from LA County corrupted national payment data, triggering rate cuts that forced over 1,000 legitimate home health agencies nationwide to close since 2019

.... Industry experts report the fraud scheme caused $2 billion in losses for legitimate providers while fraudsters exploited a broken system

Trump cuts to blue state health and EV funds

The Hill - The Trump administration is rescinding a total of $1.5 billion in health and transportation funds from multiple blue states, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) confirmed Thursday.

The OMB directed the Transportation Department to rescind $943 million from Colorado, Illinois, California and Minnesota, and it directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to rescind $602 million from those states.

The Transportation funds are mostly for electric vehicle chargers but also include other projects such as green buses. The CDC funds would have gone toward state and local health grants that the administration feels are too “woke.”

... The targeted Transportation programs include: $100 million for deployment of electric vehicle chargers in Illinois near underserved communities; $15 million for Minneapolis and St. Paul to deploy chargers in low-income and high pollution areas; $15 million for a network across the San Francisco Bay area with an emphasis on disadvantaged communities; and $4.9 million for Colorado to install charging stations in low- and middle-income neighborhoods.

The health programs facing cuts include: $5.2 million for the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago to increase use of HIV-prevention drug PrEP among Black women; $3 million for Colorado to address COVID-19 related health disparities; $988,000 for Chicago to engage with populations impacted by HIV and other sexually transmitted infections; and $500,000 for the University of California to evaluate intimate-partner violence among LGBTQ youth.

Trump has been a chronic spreader of untruths

Although there is no recent count  of Trump's mistatements it is worth recalling that in 2021 the Washington Post reported this for his first term as president: President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims.

Marriage gap

Misc. Data

Via  Lakota Man

Those who believe in God

Amazing Maps

@amazingmap

  - “Are you certain that God exists?” United States vs Europe

Immigrants actually cut US deficits

Christopher Webb  - Cato Institute just nuked the lie. Immigrants have cut U.S. deficits by $14.5 trillion  since 1994, slashing the national debt by a third.

Immigrants:

Pay more in taxes and take fewer benefits

Work more, earn more than the average native-born worker

Cost less in retirement, they do not drain Social Security for decades

Barely touch welfare, there is no free ride

Lots more home sellers than buyers

Barchart - Home Sellers now outnumber Buyers by 530,000, the largest gap ever recorded

Epstein trained under an Israeli prime minister

Express, UK- Jeffrey Epstein was trained as a spy under an Israeli Prime Minister, unclassified FBI documents claim. Newly unearthed documents obtained from the FBI and released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) show a classified document discussing Epstein's relationship with “US and allied intelligence services”.

The source of the disgraced financier’s wealth has long been speculated upon, with little known about the origin of his fortune. Some have speculated that Epstein’s wealth might at least in part have been as a result of work with foreign intelligence services. The document from 2020 reads: “Jeffrey Epstein was represented by (Alan) Dershowitz."

Alan Dershowitz was a Harvard Law Professor who the document says “influenced many students from wealthy families”, including Jared Kushner who is the son in law of Donald Trump.

Democrats make ten demands of ICE

Newsweek - U.S. House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent Republican leaders a list of immigration enforcement reforms they said must be included in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding agreement.

They released a detailed set of demands Wednesday night aimed at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) practices, according to a joint press release...

The full list, as published by Jeffries’ office, includes:

Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant; end indiscriminate arrests; improve warrant procedures and standards; require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.

No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.

Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name; require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.

Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds for enforcement near medical facilities, schools, child care facilities, churches, polling places, courts and other sensitive locations.

Stop Racial Profiling – Ban stops, questioning and searches based on presence at certain locations, jobs, spoken language, accent, race or ethnicity.

Uphold Use of Force Standards – Codify reasonable use-of-force policy, expand training and require officer certification; remove officers from the field pending investigations after incidents.

Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve state and local authority to investigate potential crimes and excessive force; require evidence preservation and sharing; require consent of states and localities for large-scale operations outside targeted enforcement.

Build Safeguards into the System – Require immediate access to attorneys in detention; allow states to sue DHS for violations; prohibit limits on member visits to ICE facilities regardless of funding source.

Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Mandate body-worn cameras and establish storage/access rules; prohibit tracking or databases of individuals engaged in First Amendment activities.

No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize uniforms and equipment to align with civil enforcement.

Trump's latest attack on history

NY Times -  In Philadelphia, a few steps from the Liberty Bell, there stands a ghost house. It consists of partially reconstructed red brick walls, an empty door frame and windows and, etched on a free-standing stone slab, the names of nine enslaved people who served George Washington there.

The President’s House, as the open-air site is known, was the seat of the executive branch of the United States’ fledgling democracy from 1790 to 1800, when Washington and then John Adams lived there. But since Jan. 22, when workers arrived unannounced with crowbars and pried all 30 interpretive signs off the walls, it has become a front in the red-hot political battle over American history.

The National Park Service, whose leadership ordered the removals, says it was merely complying with President Trump’s executive order last March calling for the removal or revision of displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

The actions at the President’s House, whose signs had been flagged as problematic during a review of all sites ordered last June by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, were intended to ensure “accuracy, honesty and alignment with shared national values,” Elizabeth Pease, a Park Service spokeswoman, said in a statement.

California community hit by dozens of earthquakes

NY Times- The ground has been restless in this California community 35 miles east of San Francisco. Since late last year, dozens of earthquakes have rumbled through San Ramon and its tidy neighborhoods and cul-de-sacs, disrupting the suburban calm.

They have been mostly quick, and relatively weak, rumbles occurring here and there, with a few hefty thumps in between. Until this week, they were all a magnitude of 4 or below — not powerful enough to cause any real damage, but frequent enough to make even longtime residents of this earthquake-prone region puzzle over what’s going on.

Monday brought the biggest jolt yet, and the most active day since the quakes began in November, when an earthquake with a 4.2 magnitude rattled nerves and windows. It was felt as far away as San Francisco.

“Everyone is really on edge here,” said Seema Sophia Aggarwal, who has lived in San Ramon for two and a half years. “The ground was bouncing and jerking from morning until night.”

Worst January for job layoffs in 17 years

U.S. employers announced 108,435 layoffs in January, up 118% year over year and 205% from last December.  The worst January for layoffs in 17 years.