If you’ve ever taken the oath to uphold the Constitution, this is the time to live up to it.

Kent Country is red, but the City of Grand Rapids tends to vote blue. The mayor of GR has reliably been a Democrat for years now.

Glad you made it through safely!

Has anyone gotten so bad with browser tabs that they regularly close like 60 of them without even checking what they are?

America is learning the hard way that the “deep state” was actually the “deep security blanket” - nameless agencies and workers keeping us safe.

🤷🤦

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

This week's @nature.com editorial
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Here are the real reasons they are dismantling the FDA, NIH, and CDC Dr. Katelyn Jetelina wrote a powerful post last night listing some of the ongoing carnage at the CDC and FDA. It is truly going to hurt most of us at some point in our lives — right wing, left wing, a...

www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

Fascism is out of its cage and tore off its muzzle. This violates all sorts of laws but, even more importantly, it violates the basic unifying goals of our society:

This is such a great call to make and I really hope more media outlets follow suit 👏👏👏👏

I told him to frame his fight to gain as many allies as he can. Mobilize your alumni networks. Enlist families whose children's lives have been saved in your hospitals; reach out to companies that have commercialized your research, make contact with universities in red and blue states, public and private, who face the same threat. Do it fast. Make sure your campaign is not just about you, because that opens you to attack as a defender of privilege. Make the case to the public that these attacks are senseless assaults on institutions that promote what America is famous for: life-saving science and world-class innovation.

=1Q THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION The real challenge, whenever an authoritarian government attacks a university, is that they have already prepared the ground, portraying universities as privileged enclaves of the entitled and the condescending, trapped in their own self-regarding bubble of wokeness. These politicians play expertly on the resentments of those who don't have college degrees. They grab hold of the flag of academic freedom and wave it in the face of university administrators struggling to balance the imperatives of campus order and civility against their First Amendment obligations. The Germans have a word for this strategy. It is called Kulturkampf, and it proceeds from an intuition associated with Trump's former strategist, Steve Bannon: "Culture is upstream from politics." Translation: If you can win the culture war, you win the political war.

So, I said to the embattled president who called me, You're going to need an alliance that pulls together American families, employers, unions, companies, the whole network of people and institutions beyond your campus who understand that the universities of America are critical to everything that is good about the country: its commitment to freedom, its devotion to excellence, its leadership in science and medicine. This alliance is going to have to get political - to reach across red state and blue state, identify the members of Congress from both sides of the House who understand why universities matter to their communities, to the American economy, and to America's deserved reputation for excellence. Don't mince words. It's too late to play nice. Call a spade a spade. Convince enough Americans that the administration's strategy deserves only one name: vandalism.

There are lessons from history. There are lessons from authoritarian takeovers elsewhere. The strategy isn’t that complex -maybe even obvious. But it requires mobilization. It requires shifting institutional mindset from “someone should…” hoping & hunkering down, to networked activism & speaking up.

X post by Timothy Snyder (@TimothyD ...), posted 6 hours ago. The post reads, "The people Attorney General Bondi is calling 'terrorists' have had no trial and no chance to defend them. We do not know they are. Ignoring the Constitution does not make us safe. It puts us all in peril."

I know this first hand. When I was a child, my entire community was branded as spies and sabateurs, justifying our internment inside barbed wire camps for years without due process, trial or charge.

The people Attorney General Bondi is calling “terrorists” have had no trial and no chance to defend themselves. We do not know who they are. Ignoring the Constitution does not make us safe. It puts us all in peril.

Becoming more Orwellian by the day

Here's why they don't care what gets damaged or destroyed...

Letter: The SAVE Act wouldn’t meaningfully change election security, but it would harm married women Letter: The SAVE Act wouldn’t meaningfully change election security, but it would harm married women

Letter: The SAVE Act wouldn’t meaningfully change election security, but it would harm married women

The FAA’s Troubles Are More Serious Than You Know The agency responsible for air safety is facing deep cuts and interference by Elon Musk.

Pay attention to this: Musk is trying to make our air traffic control system "dependent” on him by integrating his equipment, which has not gone through security and risk-management review.

It's corruption. And it's dangerous.

Fire Elon Musk.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

The acting head of the government’s human resources arm, Charles Ezell, is refusing to testify in tomorrow’s case that challenges the legality of the recent mass firings of federal workers. His absence raises serious questions—what is there to hide?

Trump turns White House lawn into car lot for megadonor Musk It’s easy to get inured to the corruption, but hawking Teslas on the South Lawn was among the most obscene events in White House history.

“Just because the corruption plays out in public doesn’t mean it’s not corruption”

www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

Republicans Quietly Move to Relinquish Power to Undo Trump’s Tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China (Gift Article) House G.O.P. leaders tucked the provision into a procedural measure needed to pass a government spending bill.

Call your Senators and tell them to vote against this. Not only is this an erosion of Congressional power, it's also just manipulative nonsense.

When is a day not a day? When Republicans says so.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/u...

"If you're still looking for that One Big Message to share with friends and family about the man who would be king, here it is:

Donald Trump is stealing from you."

Trump is targeting Medicaid. Don’t let him win. - The Boston Globe The consequences of cutting Medicaid will be felt in nearly every community.

Trump, Musk, and Republicans in Congress understand that cutting health care for millions of people is unpopular.

So they’re probably hoping you won’t pay attention to this.

But if we ring the alarm bells, we have a chance to stop them.
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/03/03/o...

The Republican Party’s agenda fits on a bumper sticker: Billionaires win. Families lose.

The coolest thing I’ve seen today is that a bunch of volunteer public health professionals and developers have restored the CDC website from before January 20th 2025.

This differs from an archive in that they want to rebuild the links between pages and replicate the full website.

Might as well be 47 years. Every month sure feels like a year.

DOGE is driving Social Security cuts and will make mistakes, acting head says privately The Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner said members of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team are outsiders who are unfamiliar with the nuances of the agency’s programs.

Republicans would rather let DOGE mess with your hard-earned Social Security checks than grow a spine and stand up to Elon.

In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word ”gay,” including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

The Pentagon flagged a photo of the Enola Gay in its DEI purge…
apnews.com/article/dei-...