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bardraelyn.bsky.social
Writer, artist, reader, educator, cosplayer, coffee lover. Warrior for kindness and empathy. Exhausted and angry on main. I want to live in a bookshop.
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Trump's Big Ugly Bill is the culmination of 40 years of increasing social control in America — ballooning spending on immigrant detention.  To actually make communities safer, we should be spending on social investments like housing end education.

From a colleague. Keep calling! It’s working!!! “We’re hearing that because enough moderate Republicans in the House are telling Speaker Johnson they’re against PEPFAR cuts, the White House is going to amend the package. The pressure is working!!“

“If you saw all this in any other country — soldiers sent to crush dissent, union leaders arrested, opposition politicians threatened — it would be clear that autocracy had arrived. The question, now, is whether Americans who hate tyranny can be roused to respond.” www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/o...

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Los Angeles a “city of criminals” and not a city of immigrants. But like its name, Los Angeles is a city of angels. We protect and look out for one another, especially the most vulnerable.

Of course, this is why they're still shouting that the victims of these roundups are violent criminals, even as we see them targeting elementary schools and construction sites. And this is why it's important to keep sharing examples of the people they're actually going after.

They’re trying to silence us with fear and force. But “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” On 6/14, we show them what resistance looks like. Peaceful, unshakable, and everywhere!

I don't want to hear "Happy Pride" from these corporations. I want to hear, "We have fixed all the homophobic & transphobic garbage happening; everyone is safe now and healthcare is free. And also all the queer shows you want to watch on other streaming platforms are now available to you."

Trump has a new plan to undermine judges, and it’s called “court-baiting.” The strategy forces judges to take potentially unpopular decisions that are necessary to protect constitutional principles, then attack them for those decisions. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Senator Murray nails it here: RFKjr's policies represent an "unthinkably dangerous" agenda. Saving science and health from these Trump regimists will save tens of millions of American lives. #StandUpForScience #SaveNIH #SaveCDC #DumpRFKjr

An LAPD helicopter claimed to have ID'ed protesters from above and threatened to "come to your house." The threat was greeted with extreme concern by civil liberties and digital privacy groups. It suggests the LAPD could be using facial recognition to identify and retaliate against protesters.

New in PN: ABC is too cowed to state the obvious about Stephen Miller "Miller and Trump are hateful bigots. Independent journalists can still say that. Journalists at ABC can’t, because the president gets a veto over their coverage. That’s not democracy and it’s not a free press. It’s fascism."

In March, VA officials across the US warned that their cancer-tracking databases were no longer being updated. Officials in the Pacific Northwest noted DOGE had marked its contract to maintain a cancer registry for “immediate termination.” By @ericumansky.bsky.social‬ @vernalcoleman.bsky.social‬

Breaking:   WASHINGTON (AP) - Health secretary removes every member of scientific committee that advises the CDC on how vaccines should be used.

If you're a Marine or other service member being mobilized to Los Angeles and you'd like to apply for conscientious objector status, call the GI Rights Hotline to get some guidance on your options: 1-877-447-4487

In case you're wondering, authoritarians use this strategy of escalation to manufacture crisis, provoke outrage, then use the reaction to justify repression. It’s not about restoring order, it's about creating a spectacle of chaos they can claim only they can control.

NEW: Hegseth is deploying Marines against U.S. citizens. Mayor Bass says to know your rights :

“This is a chilling statement. Even if it were a joke, it was clearly designed to make the public afraid to exercise its First Amendment rights to protest and to hold government officials, including LAPD officers, accountable for their actions.”

If you are a National Guard or Active Duty military and you are being ordered to violate the Constitutional rights of US citizens then this is the number to the GI Rights Hotline. There is support, you don’t have to go through with it. 877-447-4487 Know. Your. Rights.

"It gets somewhat lost in all the other high octane dimensions of this story that a raid on a Home Depot is literally an effort to arrest people who are eager to work and whose labor is in great demand. It’s about as far as you can get from just going after the bad guys, as the WH routinely claims."

I mean, scholars of fascism were like, “He’s going to attack universities, the media, and unions, and he’s going to arrest his political opponents,” and most of America was like, “Stop exaggerating.”

This is more than just lost grant dollars...this is patients in experimental treatments for incurable cancers having to stop their course of treatment. It's patients with medical devices going unmonitored. It's entire lines of groundbreaking science coming to a hard stop. #DownWithDOGE

And there you have it. ICE didn't target migrant workers in Kristi Noem's farms or Sarah Huckabee Sanders' meatpacking plants because they wanted to create a riot in LA as a pretext to declaring martial law. They don't care about undocumented migrants, they only care about controlling US citizens.

Trump's biggest inaugural donors are already reaping their rewards: -Pilgrim's Pride ($5M) could benefit from deregulation of meat safety standards -Ripple ($4.9M) closed its SEC legal battle -Billionaire Warren Stephens ($4M) became UK Ambassador Everything is for sale.

ICE terrorizes our communities. People protest, and now Trump is sending 2,000 National Guard troops into Los Angeles. This is how martial law begins in the so-called land of the free.

Trump is deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles without the governor’s request or consent. Governor Newsom has publicly condemned the move, calling it “purposefully inflammatory.”

Your safety is the top priority. Peaceful protesters have already been harmed for doing nothing. The story they’re selling isn’t legit. Please film everything, document everything.

If a Democratic president cut off one of the red states dependent on federal funding, it would be a political scandal. But cutting off California -- the single biggest "donor state" in the nation, one that sends in to the fed'l gov't ~$80 billion more than it gets back -- is straight-up theft.

Republicans are on the verge of passing a budget bill that would amount to one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the working poor to the super rich. And two billionaire oligarchs are fighting about it because the bill doesn't cut vital social programs enough. Hello?

Tucked inside the 1,200-page appendix to the White House’s budget request to Congress is a proposal to eliminate a grant program that provides domestic violence shelters with money to support survivors’ pets. So yeah, Republicans want to ban survivors' pets from domestic violence shelters.

Chaos leads nowhere good.

Trump's proposed data-sharing deal with Palantir would be an appalling attack on our privacy. It goes hand-in-hand with his attacks on habeas corpus. Liberals and conservatives should agree on this: we don't want mass surveillance or erosions of our civil liberties.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court order blocking its plan to dismantle the Education Department and begin firing its employees.

Mississippi asked the U.S. Supreme Court Friday to rule on the state’s ballot receipt deadline law. The Republican-backed case gives the justices a chance to rule that states can no longer accept ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked on or before it.

Georgia’s governor promotes his Medicaid work requirement as a national model for reform. Yet the program has cost taxpayers more than $86M, three-quarters of which has gone to consultants, and enrolled only 3% of the quarter-million Georgians eligible. (Published Feb. 2025)

While Elon Musk and Donald Trump continue their public break up and tear down, the real story is the man replacing Musk at DOGE: Russell Vought. Democracy Docket dug into Vought and his plans to wreak havoc on millions of Americans. Fund reporting that focuses on facts and cuts through the noise.

I know everyone is loving the Musk schadenfreude but we have to stay on the alert for the possibility that Musk is going to turn his sights to those centrist dem conventions going on and further entrench transphobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. And they would easily work with him.

DEAN: What's the tariff on bananas? LUTNICK: Generally 10% DEAN: Walmart has already increased the cost of bananas by 8% LUTNICK: If you build in America, there is no tariff DEAN: We cannot build bananas in America

#WARNING - CPSC is warning consumers to immediately stop using NEWDERY power banks, model ZHX-PB22 because they pose a risk of serious injury & death. The lithium-ion battery in the defective power banks can overheat and ignite, posing fire and burn hazards to consumers. cpsc.gov/Warnings/202...

Important thread:

This feels like Alien vs Sexual Predator

When a scorpion and a viper go head to head, better stand back and try to avoid getting stung or bitten. With luck, they’ll finish each other off take a chunk of their enablers with them.

So they want immigrants to obey the law and when they do they arrest them anyway. Seems fair.