I've been awake less than 8 hours today, but in those hours I've learned (and shared) that

[highplainsdem]

NASA's science budget is being cut
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143438405

an Australian living and working legally in the US was deported after being subjected to Gestapo-style treatment
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143438439

the DOJ is continuing to ignore court orders despite a SCOTUS ruling
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220229196

Trump's bimbo boobtorney, Alina Habba, now holding a post in NJ she's in no way qualified for, will use power she should never have had to go after the governor and attorney general
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143438599

the EEOC is boasting about forcing law firms to care only about white male employees
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220229691

the State Department has told employees to report one another for "anti-Christian bias"
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143438610

the Social Security Adminstration plans to use X for public communications, even though you have to be registered and logged in to X to read them properly
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143438629

and Trump's replaced Obama's official portrait in the WH with a hideous painting of himself.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220229711

It's only midafternoon, but right now I'm wondering whether I should go back to bed and hope all of what we're going through has only been a nightmare.

There's been some good news about/from musicians I know, some interesting exchanges on DU and Bluesky, it's a sunny day...and yet when I look at the news, it's dystopian. And I haven't even looked at much AI news yet, since I couldn't stand to look at X except for getting images to post for the news about the portraits. There was so much crap about the crappy Trump admin otherwise, just skimming Bluesky.

There are no words for how much I hate Trump and his enablers, and what they're doing to this country and world. And I'm usually pretty good with words. But I never imagined we'd have so many enemies of our Constitution, country and planet operating inside our government as we have now.

[SheltieLover]

1. Surreal, isn't it?

Bannon's firehose of shit...

[highplainsdem]

3. Yes. Surreal and monstrous.

[wordstroken]

9. Phantasmagoric.

I did not make that up. It’s a real word.

[highplainsdem]

23. I know it's a real word. And an appropriate one.

[speak easy]

38. PhantasMAGAric

[wordstroken]

43. Love your version even better! Good catch, speak easy!,

[John1956PA]

2. Abrego Garcia should be in the mind of every politically aware American.

Faux is completely ignoring our government's atrocious rendering of this lawful U.S. resident to El Salvador where he may have been tortured and killed.

Our Justice Department is just as bad. Its attorney related to the judge that the Department "has no information" on Mr. Garcia's whereabouts.

I agree with you. There are no words to describe the depths of disgust which a rational person should feel toward KrassEnuff and his enablers.

[highplainsdem]

7. Fox and other RW media are doing all they can to blind their audience to real news and distract

them with culture war nonsense.

[yellow dahlia]

21. Yes. I monitor RWmedia. I take notes w/ the intention of informing others,

but sometimes I don't follow through. It is as nauseating and painful to write about it, as it is to watch it. Aaargh!

[highplainsdem]

24. I listened to RW talk radio for a while during Trump's first term and discovered it was often worse than Fox.

[travelingthrulife]

35. He's not the only one though. Few of these deportees had criminal records and

most had followed our laws when they immigrated.

[wiggs]

4. Sea change. None of us have lived during a time like this. Not much reason to think these actions are to

benefit the US and 99.9% of us.

[highplainsdem]

25. I can't think of any government that ever saw a change this drastic and this fast without

a violent overthrow.

[malaise]

5. Unbelievable indeed

Rec

[highplainsdem]

26. I would never have believed it could get so bad in just a few months.

[Prairie_Seagull]

6. Sing it sister.

Thank who you wish, we have great music. Great music!

My naps are getting longer. haha

[highplainsdem]

27. Thanks for the hug, Prairie_Seagull!

[WestMichRad]

8. Every day...

… when I read the news headlines (that’s all I can stomach), I think that “this is it, they can’t possibly go any lower than this.” I’m sure I don’t need to cite for this audience the hundreds of examples we’ve endured in just the past 80 days.

But then the next day, they dig lower still.

There is no bottom to the depravity of these bastards.

[highplainsdem]

28. I know. And depravity is a very good description of their their behavior. They love to cause harm.

[Swede]

10. I must be taking crazy pills.

All these monstrous things happening in a single day.

[highplainsdem]

32. The news can really give you that feeling. Or at least the feeling that the bizarre stories have to

be from Borowitz or The Onion.

[Native]

11. It's an infestation for sure.

[highplainsdem]

33. I was thinking yesterday that it does seem like an infestation that could kill our democracy.

[Hekate]

12. KnR

[highplainsdem]

34. Thanks!

[canetoad]

13. I really feel for you

And all other Duers and Americans who loathe trump. It must be extremely difficult to watch this travesty of an administration purposely dismantle and trash your society and economy. Stay strong. Nothing is static.

[Grim Chieftain]

14. Our country is being destroyed on a daily basis

And it is being allowed to happen. Too many are complicit in this horror and the damage will take years or decades to repair, if it can be repaired. I cannot believe what has happened to our once great country in less than three months.

[Katinfl]

15. Not one positive thing has happened.

I told my husband the other day after listening to MSNBC for a short while, there is not one good thing I can report. All negative……we cannot go on another 4 years like this.

[erronis]

16. Totally agree with everything you said. Just wondering how you determine if it's "AI News"

It seems like every reporter everywhere is experimenting with this. Medical journals I read are up-front with statements like "some of this content was generated by AI and reviewed by professionals..."

[highplainsdem]

17. By AI news, I meant news about AI. Which I follow more on X/Twitter than elsewhere, since

I can find more about it there.

[erronis]

18. Ah, gotcha. I see a lot of opinions on TheRegister, Pluralistic, Edziton. Good stuff on Medium, Reddit, etc.

From a technical perspective I tend to follow individual projects on github, apache, etc. There's so much going on and now with hardware requirements that I'll never be able to afford.

[highplainsdem]

19. Ed Zitron's on Twitter. So are other critics of AI like Gary Marcus, and of course lots of artists,

writers and musicians opposing the theft of intellectual property to train AI, teachers opposing the damage it's done to education, and so on. I'm less interested in the technical developments in AI than its impact on society, which is mostly harmful. Though I do follow people like Grady Booch and Chomba Bupe who are good at technical arguments cutting through the hype from the AI cultists.

I despise Musk and his cultists and the MAGAts there, but there are still a lot of very intelligent and interesting people on Twitter. And if I get reposted by Zitron or Marcus or Cory Doctorow, I can get more views than I can for posts here. Though it's damn hard to say anything very thoughtful in a single tweet, and I will not pay Musk so I can post longer messages.

[erronis]

22. the theft of intellectual property seems to be of the same ilk of the destruction of our democracy

Maybe that's a bit too general but I have the sense that somehow, someone has introduced the concept into our society that whatever isn't tied down is free to steal.

Definitely part of the current regime. And probably part of the older robber baron era.

Artists and other creators have always gotten the short end, unless they became capitalist leaches also.

Over and out.

[highplainsdem]

36. We're definitely in a new gilded age, especially with inequality and robber barons.

[yellow dahlia]

20. Thank you for helping to keep this community informed.

It is taking its toll, on all of us.

I have read several things today that had me speechless - something that never happens.

I commend your posts and stamina.

[highplainsdem]

39. You're welcome, and thanks for the kind words! There are people who post news and info here much more

tirelessly than I can, and I'm grateful for their contributions and all the forum messages here. They all help us know what's going on, and also help us feel a part of a community opposed to the insane changes we're seeing.

Just watching or reading the news alone can make us feel much more isolated and helpless than finding posts about it - and reactions to it - on DU.

[BlueMTexpat]

29. Your last

para describes me in a nutshell!

"There are no words for how much I hate Trump and his enablers, and what they're doing to this country and world. And I'm usually pretty good with words. But I never imagined we'd have so many enemies of our Constitution, country and planet operating inside our government as we have now."

The situation is literally unbelievable.

[highplainsdem]

40. Yes. Unbelievable, and shameful. I voted against that SOB three times, and still find myself apologizing to

people I know outside the US for Trump ever having been elected, let alone a second time after he'd made his plans clear.

I know some on the right have been preparing for this for decades. I know there were vulnerabilities in both our government and media structures, and that the GOP managed to divert a lot of attention from their sabotage of democracy and the checks and balances we depended on. But it's still a shock to see how prepared they were to attack our rights and dismantle our government. So much more prepared than they were during Trump's first term.

They're still stupid - most of them, anyway. Their ideas are still stupid. But they still have control of a RW propaganda network much stronger than in any other country that isn't authoritarian, so much of the US population has little or no real awareness of what they're doing and why it's wrong.

[BlueMTexpat]

45. I had my first run-in

with fanatical John-Birchers in MT in 1964, a few months before I graduated from college.

I literally couldn't believe that there were such people in my country. When I tried to tell people of the dangers they represented, too many just pooh-poohed my concerns and said that such people could never come to power in the USA. They were wrong.

The current situation has been decades in the making. These people have been busily propagandizing through RW evangelical churches and RW mass media. They have been financially supported by RW billionaires and think tanks.

They have fully come to power in the USA now.

One major turning point occurred in 1968, with the election of Richard Nixon and the people he brought with him (think of Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.) in his Administration, many of whom recurred over and over again in subsequent Republican Presidential Administrations. But the true turn-around came in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Even then, however, there were still many Republicans who put country over party. But in 1994, with Newt Gingrich and his thugs, who mostly drove those Republicans out of the House and began seriously infecting the Senate as well, the status quo was permanently changed for the worse. The successors to those thugs are the GOP crazies who are with us now.

With the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004 (yes, I believe that there was skullduggery in 2004 too, in addition to the swift-boating that John Kerry so unjustly received), the political setbacks for Democrats were enormous.

Hillary Clinton recognized these dangers, which is why I first supported her candidacy against that of Barack Obama in 2008. While I loved Obama's brilliance and charisma, I thought that he was just a bit too naive and inexperienced for the political morass that is DC. I believed that he would make an excellent President AFTER Hillary - a consummate political strategist - shaped things up after the disastrous Bush II years.

I certainly fully supported his candidacy AFTER Hillary dropped out, however. Along with everyone else, I truly hoped for a turn-around.

While I still think of Obama's Admin as a pinnacle of hope, unfortunately, it did NOT fulfill those hopes in the way that I had hoped. Many opportunities that he had to make progressive political change were squandered, IMO, in part due to his inexperience and misguided advisors like Rahm Emanuel, and in larger part due to an intractable Congress with Mitch McConnell as the Senate Majority Leader from 2010 on, with nearly every Republican blocking everything they could.

.When the Felon-in-Chief "won" his first Presidential term, I was literally in disbelief, completely devastated, and very fearful. Due to his own incompetence, however, bad as that Admin was - and it was - it was never quite as bad as it could have been.

Joe Biden was an excellent President and indeed implemented much of what I had hoped that Obama would do. I am sure that he would have continued to make such positive changes.

I was among those Dems outraged when his own Dem Party betrayed him in 2024. That still rankles me. Would he have won if he had stayed in the race? I certainly do not know. But I know that I myself felt betrayed by those who turned against him so fast for what I saw as such little cause.

But Kamala Harris fully rose to the challenge! An excellent candidate herself, she chose an excellent running mate in Tim Walz. In spite of so many obstacles against her (timing being one of the greatest), she ran an excellent campaign. I was among those who really believed that she would win.

Again, I was devastated by the result. I STILL do NOT believe that the Felon-in-Chief legitimately "won" in 2024. I know that I am not alone in that belief. Perhaps history will show that we are correct.

But that will happen much too late.

[GiqueCee]

30. The REAL horror is...

... that this is only a minuscule sampling of the endless list of blatantly illegal, and unconstitutional crimes being committed by the most obscenely corrupt, mendacious, and malicious administration in American history. And it's only going to get worse.

[highplainsdem]

41. Yes. That was only an 8-hour sampling of some of the news stories I'd become aware of during

that time, mainly via people and news outlets I follow on Bluesky. Stories that other DUers hadn't posted first.

I believe that someday we will become aware of more of the crimes the Trump admin and their allies are plotting and perpetrating, but they're doing all they can to drive out and punish and intimidate truthtellers and whistleblowers. And Trump's managed to almost completely avoid nominating or appointing anyone with a shred of ethics and honesty.

[GiqueCee]

44. And a critical point...

... that is NOT being driven home nearly enough is the irrefutable fact that Trump is asking "How high?" on the way down whenever Putin says, "JUMP!"
President Pisswig, AKA Krasnov, has been a Russian asset – he's too stupid to be an agent – since 1987, according to those familiar with KGB activities at the time. It's pure speculation, to be sure, but but the evidence is mountainous, and if it walks like a duck...
All of Trump's words and actions have served Putin's stated desire to cripple America from the inside. What we're seeing now is the endgame, and Republicans are in on it. In 2018, seven Republicans visited the Kremlin on July 4th, ostensibly to warn against Russian interference in the upcoming election. However, given all that has happened since, a much darker motive was almost certainly at work. I wouldn't trust a Republican any farther than I could throw my truck.
Trump's own sons have stated that the family crime syndicate has received a steady flow of income from Russian sources. In the mid-eighties, Trump was up to his eyeballs in debt, and no bank in the western hemisphere would loan him a dime. He didn't have the business savvy to run a sidewalk lemonade stand, but he was suddenly solvent again, if only barely. I mean, how could anyone bankrupt a casino, let alone three of them? Unless, of course, they were laundromats for Russian rubles.
The dots connect themselves; Trump is the ultimate Manchurian Candidate, and if we don't come to terms with it, like, NOW, the horrors that will be visited upon us all will far exceed our wildest pants-shitting nightmares.

[roscoeroscoe]

31. Enough News!

Time to garden or hike, play music or cook, visit pals or go to the animal shelter.

At our house, no phones/no news after breakfast. Our life is our life. Best wishes highplainsdem!

[highplainsdem]

46. Well, the local squirrels did enough damage to outdoor gardening I've done that I gave up on that, and

my indoor gardening consists of taking care of several pots of vines that get occasional plant food and water dumped on them every two weeks or so (and the vines still grow fast enough that I have to trim them by 100-200 feet every year or two or furniture starts to disappear). So that isn't a distraction.

I do take long walks (and there's a bike trail two blocks from my home), listen to a lot of music, chat with friends and family, etc. But the people I chat with offline are divided between liberals as upset about Trump as I am, and Trump supporters I do care about otherwise but who are so brainwashed by RW media that talking to them has become a real minefield in recent months.

There isn't any single news outlet that does a good job of covering all the major news stories in half an hour or an hour - it just isn't possible. Rely on those and you end up unaware of much of what's going on. Major newspapers like the NYT and Washington Post no longer provide reliable coverage. And while DU's LBN gathers a lot of news stories from different sources - and I'm grateful for that - the ONLY reason it's able to do that is the willingness of individual DUers to post what they've found. I like to contribute to that when I can. The accounts I follow on Bluesky and Twitter include some of the better news outlets, and the individuals I follow will also post about news stories at times and are sometimes making news themselves.

If I checked news, including what's posted on DU, only once a day, much of what I'd see posted would leave me wondering what in the world OPs in the main forums are responding to. That wouldn't be a problem if I posted mostly in the Lounge or the smaller forums, and I do host Music Appreciation (another reason I check DU frequently), but in the larger forums it's harder to contribute to threads if you aren't aware of the news.

Which, especially with the chaos Trump creates, is moving faster than ever.

I have days when the volume of news, and how bad the news is, gets me down. But I've dealt with long-lasting stresses before, from a back injury that left me using an overbed table as a desk for a long time, to caregiving that meant lots of trips to the hospital and sometimes 3-5 hours of sleep a night (a physical therapist working with the loved one I was taking care of once told me I was trying to do the work of 7 or 8 people, but since I couldn't afford to hire those other people...). I still posted on DU, though less, during the caregiving, because it did give me a change of focus, to something I also considered very important. I know how to get through stresses, between proper diet and meditation techniques.

What I don't know, and it's frustrating, is how to interfere most effectively these days with RW propaganda. When I first got online - and it was to keep myself from going too stir-crazy while I was healing from the back injury - I almost immediately ended up running a forum on tech and foreign affairs where there were frequent posts from someone I'd known for a while who was a well known spokesperson for a Republican policy I considered stupid and dangerous...so I brought in as my comod a new online friend who was a spokesperson on the other side of that issue, and the Republican never won another debate there, was so badly embarrassed he tried to get my comod and myself kicked off, failed at that, and made a complete ass of himself throwing tantrums. Wrecked his own reputation online including with some people he worked with. On Twitter, RW propagandists can just block you (though I've found myself in good company when I've been blocked). I can still post to support other liberals and strengthen their arguments, but I can't create a situation to deal with a fallacious argument as soon as it's made, in direct debate. RW social media accounts, like RW media, are too effectively siloed for debates to last long.

But what I can do is post information here that other Dems can use when they want to counter misinformation and knock down fallacious arguments. DU can be, and often is, a rhetorical arsenal for Democrats posting and speaking out elsewhere. And because of that, this site has impact way beyond the people just reading and posting here.

[allegorical oracle]

42. Thank you for such a comprehensive round-up. We must be aware

so we can resist this takeover of our country. We must stay vigilant.

[highplainsdem]

47. You're welcome! I wish to God there wasn't so much bad news. But we really can't afford to

ignore it, even if it isn't affecting us personally at the moment.

[Ping Tung]

48. The "good news" is that it will all end. The bad news ist that we don't know when or how.