So there is still no peace deal and Trump is left arguing whether Putin treated his envoy abysmally before rejecting it or just sent him packing after he was forced to listen to another 3-hour Putin lecture on his alternate version of European history.
this guy’s distinguishing quality is his boundless contempt for anyone who voices the slightest disagreement with him. you can see in his voice and mannerisms that he thinks he’s better than everyone around him. (which to my mind is just compensation for his palpable self-loathing)
NEW: Here are the 10 “democratic” senators that voted to sell out veterans, the American people, and their colleagues in the House. Cortez MastoDurbinFettermanGillibrandHassanKingPetersSchatzSchumerShaheen
As someone who has criticized Mark Kelly in the past, all I can say is that this video is fantastic, this message is fantastic, and can we have more of this from the Dems please.👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Made a mistake on the interest payment numbers. I took short term debt that needs to be refinanced and incorrectly extrapolated. So the interest savings won't be as significant as I stated.
1. Texas AG Ken Paxton is usurping the authority of Texas Courts in a brazen act of autocratic power.He's ordering court ordered gender changes void.He's demanding licenses and birth certificates revoked, with reverted replacements for trans people.Subscribe to support my journalism.
This was the DOGE staffer who was previously fired for racist and nazi tweets but was brought back after JD Vance and Elon supported him. http://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-st…
I’m not leaving the Dem party. I’ve been here for 33 years. If guys like Schumer wanna vote with republicans, THEY can leave the Dem party and join the GOP.
Why did Trump repeat Russian propaganda and lie about this? Why would he claim that a Ukrainian army in Kursk could only be saved from annihilation if Putin benevolently agreed to Trump’s request not to do so? Why is the US President deceiving Americans with Russian lies?
After all these are only migrant children being abuse, right. These people turn a blind eye to clergy abuse but claim just knowing LGBTQ+ people exist is sexualizing children. Just having a story read to them by a man dressed up in costume as a woman is sexual abuse, seeing a drag show is sexual abuse and they demand the erasing of drag queens along with all the LGBTQ+ to save the children. But a for profit detention center creditably accused of forced oral, anal, and in the cases of girls vaginal rape of children by staff as a means of punishment or control, that is OK because the kids are not white. Sick as fuck. Hugs
The lawsuit against Southwest Key included allegations of abuse at an El Paso facility. The administration said it will no longer use the company’s services.
Southwest Key national headquarters in Austin. A federal lawsuit against the company over allegations of abuse at its child migrant shelters has been dropped by the Trump administration. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
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McALLEN — The Trump administration moved to drop a civil lawsuit Wednesday against the largest provider of housing for migrant children over allegations of sexual abuse and harassment of unaccompanied minors, saying it also would no longer be using that company’s services.
The motion to dismiss the suit against Austin-based Southwest Key Programs was filed after the federal government announced it had moved all unaccompanied children to other shelters and would no longer be using that provider.
The complaint, filed last year during the Biden administration, alleged a litany of offenses between 2015 and 2023 as Southwest Key Programs, which operates migrant shelters in Texas, Arizona and California, amassed nearly $3 billion in contracts from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Out of continuing concerns relating to these placements, HHS has decided to stop placement of unaccompanied alien children in Southwest Key facilities, and to review its grants with the organization. In view of HHS’ action, the Department of Justice has dismissed its lawsuit against Southwest Key,” the HHS said in a statement.
Children were warned not to report the alleged abuse and threatened with violence against themselves or their families if they did, according to the lawsuit. Victims testified that in some instances, other workers knew about the abuse but failed to report or concealed it, the complaint said.
“DOJ’s lawsuit revealed horrific sexual abuse and inhumane treatment of children detained in Southwest Key shelters,” said Leecia Welch, an attorney who represents unaccompanied children in a separate case. “It’s shocking to me that the government now turns a blind eye to their own contractor’s actions. I hope the impacted children will have other legal recourse and support in healing from their abuse.”
At least two employees have been indicted on criminal charges related to the allegations since 2020.
The civil lawsuit had sought a jury trial and monetary damages for the victims.
Southwest Key Programs furloughed employees across the country. “Due to the unforeseen federal funding freeze and the stop placement order on our unaccompanied minor shelters and Home Study Post Release programs by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, we have made the difficult decision to furlough approximately 5,000 Southwest Key Programs’ employees,” the company said in a statement shared Tuesday.
According to allegations in the 2024 lawsuit, Southwest Key employees, including supervisors, raped, inappropriately touched or solicited sex and nude images of children beginning in 2015 and possibly earlier.
Among the accusations: One employee “repeatedly sexually abused” three girls ages 5, 8 and 11 at the Casa Franklin shelter in El Paso, with the 8-year-old telling investigators the worker “entered their bedrooms in the middle of the night to touch their ‘private area.’ ”
The lawsuit also alleged that another employee, at a shelter in Mesa, Arizona, took a 15-year-old boy to a hotel and paid him to perform sexual acts for several days in 2020.
Children were warned not to report the alleged abuse and threatened with violence against themselves or their families if they did, according to the lawsuit. Victims testified that in some instances, other workers knew about the abuse but failed to report or concealed it, the complaint said.
“DOJ’s lawsuit revealed horrific sexual abuse and inhumane treatment of children detained in Southwest Key shelters,” said Leecia Welch, an attorney who represents unaccompanied children in a separate case. “It’s shocking to me that the government now turns a blind eye to their own contractor’s actions. I hope the impacted children will have other legal recourse and support in healing from their abuse.”
At least two employees have been indicted on criminal charges related to the allegations since 2020.
The civil lawsuit had sought a jury trial and monetary damages for the victims.
March 13, 1830 The term “rat,” referring to a worker who betrays the interests of fellow workers, first appeared in print. The New York Daily Sentinel reported on replacement workers who had agreed to work for two-thirds of the going rate. “ . . . [many printers are out of work, others are being paid about 2/3 the regular pay; they should join in cooperative associations, ‘as we have done’] “ [While] the master printers [fill] their offices with boys and two-thirds men, alias ‘rats,’ it will be difficult to find a remedy.”
March 13, 1864 The first contingent of 14,030 Navajo reached Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Men, women and children had been forced to march almost 400 miles from northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to Bosque Redondo, a desolate tract on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. Traveling in harsh winter conditions for almost two months, about 200 Navajo died of cold and starvation along the way. More died after they arrived at the barren reservation. The forced march, led by Kit Carson, an Indian agent and military leader in both the Mexican and Civil Wars, became known by the Navajos as the “Long Walk.” A grueling 400-mile march to imprisonment in a sterile land. More on The Long Walk
March 13, 1945 Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace organization, was founded in France. From their website: “Pax Christi is a ground up organization – it began with a few committed people who spoke out, prayed and worked for reconciliation at the end of the second world war, and is now active in more than 60 countries and five continents, with more than 60,000 members worldwide.” Pax Christi history
March 13, 1968 Clouds of nerve gas drifted outside the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, poisoning 6,400 sheep in nearby Skull Valley. Sign near Dugway: Warning Hazardous Area: This area may contain Chemical, Biological and Radiological contaminated material and explosives . . . Read more about Dugway – the home of Amerian WMD
March 11, 1988 Ten days of protest and direct action ensued demanding an end to nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. The site, larger than the state of Rhode Island, is an outdoor laboratory and national experimental center for testing nuclear weapons. The actions resulted in over 2,200 arrests, the largest number of arrests in U.S. history for a political protest outside Washington, D.C.
March 11, 2011 More than 85,000 Wisconsin citizens rallied outside the Capitol in Madison to welcome the return to the state of fourteen Democratic state senators. Known as the Wisconsin 14, they had left the state to deny the senate a quorum, thus delaying passage of legislation which took away public employees right to collectively bargain and restricting other rights of union members. State Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller remarked about the gathering, “This is what democracy looks like!” The Wisconsin 14
As anyone who follows me on this blog might or should know I love the content Ethel produces. I followed this young woman from when they were a teen struggling with their sexuality and their finally blossoming out and accepting herself as they are. How she feels inside themselves, and how they deal with that in the world around them. It is a hard struggle. I know I had to do it as a gay teen constantly surrounded and barraged by anti-gay propaganda, and that is what Ethel went through as a trans girl. It was complicated by her being autistic, which there is nothing wrong with being autistic, but it did mean a lot of people did not understand her and were unable to appreciate how detailed she can be. I know it is hard for her to cover these haters talking about abusers as she was abused as a child. However she stands up and gives grand videos supporting trans people and she includes her own strengths to the issue. Hugs
There is no meaningful difference between the claims made by gender ‘critical’ fascists when targeting trans people and those made by the Nazis of Nazi Germany. Said monster has been empowered by the press for too long and now threatens us all.
Hi, welcome to Essence of Thought with me, Ethel Thurston, as your host.
I know this is old but I worked hard on it. Now that I got the issues between computers worked out and I am in the process of reinstalling all the programs I need to make the computer do what I want, checking to make sure the issue that came up a week ago from reappearing. The issues of full acceptance and equality for the full LGBTQ+ community. Hugs
Please notice that the entire campaign to erase LGBTQ+ from society started with the false premise that the LGBTQ+, especially children need to be protected from trans people and drag queens. But the same people claim to be grand Christians yet they never address sexual abuse of children in churches or other organizations like foster homes / orphanages. These same people support a man for president that was credibly accused of violently raping a 13, how many more did not report the abuse? They support a man who bragged about barging into the changing rooms of teen girls as they were in different states of being undressed some of them nude during the teen pageants claiming it was his right as the owner. He is a child sex predator by his own words claiming he would date / have sex with his own young not adult daughter. They supported a man convicted of sexually assaulting a woman with the commonly understood phrase raped her. But they claim the real problem is women being raped in bathrooms if trans women are in there also. They support Pete Hegseth for Sec. Of Def. He also has been accused of sexually assaulting / raping a woman and assaulting other women. It was reported that he was often drunk and enjoyed going to places where women take off their clothing and at least one occasion needed to be restrained from going on stage with the nude women. Tell me where is the effort to removed white men from the social media and from the military? Sorry but when they say woke it means anything they dislike just as CRT did. When they say DEI it is them saying the “N” word and that females are inferior to males. Well let me get to separating the posts. Hugs.
Dria James is a former DEI executive, with over a decade of experience driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across financial services, management consulting, higher education, and non-profit sectors. Now, she’s the CEO and founder of Black In Diversity, dedicated to empowering Black leaders and allies to thrive while driving systemic change. Here, shetakes us inside what it’s like to work in America’s most contested industry.
The emptiness of not-quite belonging followed me like a shadow from a young age. Born in the late ’80s in Paterson, New Jersey, to two young parents, private school education was seen as one of the few lifelines available for Black folks looking to transcend the social, economic, and political firestorm that engulfed Paterson in the 1990s. At the time, the city was marred by rising crime rates, declining businesses, and severe budget cuts to public schools, leaving many families searching for alternatives. In fact, my mother’s high school, Eastside, is featured in Lean On Me, the Black film classic that details the true story of Paterson’s own Principal Joe Clark, an educator who went to extreme lengths to help improve the test scores and livelihoods of Black students at the inner city school.
My parents, both educators, witnessed firsthand the crumbling state of local public school education: overcrowded classrooms, underfunded programs, and a growing sense of despair among students and teachers. So, they made immense sacrifices, often forgoing their own comforts, to ensure I had access to a quality education in a private school life. But that choice carried an unseen cost—a nagging fractured sense of identity that lingered long after I left the classroom.
Courtesy of Dria James, The author, Dria James
In college, I penned a personal statement titled The Struggle of Adaptation, detailing the weight of double-consciousness I carried as a child while wading alone in a sea of white for most of my formal education. On the one hand, I knew I was privileged to attend the schools I did, gaining access to extracurricular opportunities, like playing the violin and traveling, rare opportunities that few Black kids from Paterson could even dream of at the time. But inside those classrooms, as one of the only Black girls in a space where no one looked like me, I often felt small, like my experiences and perspectives were invisible or undervalued. My educational experience was a tightrope walk between two worlds, never quite falling safely into either.
Looking back, my own awkward dance with cultural isolation set the stage for my future career as a corporate human resources executive in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Perhaps subconsciously, I was driven to resolve my internal conflict by helping other underrepresented communities navigate the challenges of educational and workplace integration with less angst. But DEI work extends far beyond my personal story, it is deeply woven into this country’s history. The earliest forms of this work trace back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed equal employment rights to Americans regardless of race, age, sex, religion, or national origin. With that storied history on my shoulders, I enrolled at Cornell University, determined to make a tangible impact. My first step? A DEI internship at a major financial institution, where I arrived with the enthusiasm of a true changemaker, eager to reshape the narrative.
As an intern, I was involved in diversity recruiting efforts on college campuses. As a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college junior, I put together a list of schools to visit, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), determined to bring diverse, qualified Black talent into the Wall Street pipeline. But I was quickly hit with my first strip of DEI yellow caution tape — I was told those schools were too small to justify a campus visit from a budget perspective and was instead directed to focus on institutions with larger enrollment numbers.
That early career disappointment was a wake-up call. As much as I wanted my work to be heart-centered and passion-driven, I realized that passion alone wasn’t enough in the corporate world. Everything had to have a clear return on investment (ROI). That’s why the current narrative that DEI is a shell-tactic to simply give a handout to undeserving folks is so wildly misleading. Companies wouldn’t invest in these policies if they weren’t economically advantageous to their bottom line. (snip-there is MORE; not tl,dr.)
“Nothing that you are seeing right now is normal,” says Gabrielle Perry, a political commentator, nonprofit founder, and organizer. “We are seeing the Latino community buying groceries in bulk so that they do not have to leave their homes frequently. We are seeing Native American people’s citizenship being called into question. We are seeing Black people in mass being laid off from their jobs at the federal level.” In each of these situations, the law is being weaponized as a tool of fear and anxiety, but it’s the latter threat — the legal war against diversity, equity, and inclusions in workplaces — that hits home for Perry. “DEI has now become synonymous with Black people and that’s not an accident,” says Perry, who is the founder and executive director of The Thurman Perry Foundation, a nonprofit organization that lost a $35,000 grant that they normally receive annually. “White people, particularly white men, are suing nonprofits and universities for awarding any aid to anyone on the basis of race or gender,” she tweeted out afterwards. Though Perry’s organization wasn’t sued, her funders are responding to this moment with an abundance of caution which means pulling “risky” investments. And after Trump’s executive order urging the roll back of DEI at the federal level, everyone else seems to be falling in line and investing in anything Black is deemed a “risk”.
Fear is a powerful motivator and the threat of having the full force of the American legal system against you is enough to make anyone cower. For example, even when Latine Americans do have citizenship, there is a fear of being rounded up anyway with no clear path to resistance. And even when there is no legal grounds to strip employees of their right to equity and inclusion, Trump’s grandstanding has stoked enough uncertainty that his rhetoric is working. Multiple brands have announced they are either ending or curtailing their DEI efforts in what seems to be a pre-emptive show of compliance to the Trump administration. That’s exactly what makes these shifts so dangerous; conservatives don’t even need to have constitutional cover for their onslaught. Republicans only need to make the average American fear their proposed policies enough to shift their behavior proactively.
These attacks are not new. Over the past few years, Republicans have come after “woke culture,” critical race theory,affirmative action, and now DEI. Trump has positioned DEI as standing in the way of others’ freedoms, a falsehood that his base has run with in recent years. “The distortion of our words and work is right out of the playbook for opponents of freedom for all people,” says Susan Taylor Batten, President and CEO of ABFE. She encourages people to refocus the conversation around the true history of this country and Black organizations’ consistent investment in fighting for all people regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and more. Similarly, Dr. Alvin Tillery believes we need to shift our strategy for how we communicate what is happening. Tillery is a tenured professor at Northwestern University and founder of The Alliance for Black Equality. “I see so many beautiful Black kids on social media posting things like, ‘Donald Trump is a DEI hire.’ No, he’s not,” Tillery corrected. “DEI hires are qualified and legitimate. Donald Trump is a white supremacy hire.” When conservatives co-opt progressive messaging, the answer isn’t to fall in line with their revisionism. “We don’t need to respond to racism by saying we’re excellent,” Tillery warns. “Rebranding our work won’t protect us or these programs because this fight isn’t rational. We have to fight back.”
Perry also expanded on this moment and how these attacks are bleeding into all facets of American life — not just Black communities. “People began to see this coming to a head on a national lens last February when the Fearless Fund venture capital lawsuit hit national headlines,” Perry expounded. The Fearless Fund previously extended grants to small businesses led by women of color and was sued by Edward Blum and his conservative organization, the American Alliance for Equal Rights. The claim was essentially one of reverse-racism; that by only opening their grant program to Black women, Fearless Fund was discriminating against others in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. “At the time,” Perry said, “I knew it was horrible what was happening to her but I had no idea that was going to trickle down to my little organization in Louisiana. [Arian Simone] made the absolutely selfless decision to settle and to close her doors because she knew that if she took it to the Supreme Court, so much would be stacked against her, and that it would affect all of us.” Blum and the AAER claimed victory, labeling the Fearless Fund’s work as “divisive and illegal” and painted the founders — working to resource the most marginalized among us — as exclusionary (Unbothered has reached out to Blum and the AAER and they have yet to respond). Unfortunately, the decision has hurt Black founders anyway as funders pull resources in fear of litigation and as the federal government remains on the attack. Litigation is expensive and sets precedence which can completely shift the landscape facing Black-led organizations. It takes deep coffers to go up against a high-powered law team and, if you lose, a single legal decision can hurt thousands of organizations. For many, it’s easier to avoid lawsuits altogether.
“The cruelty is the point,” Gabrielle Perry reiterated. “Trump is testing what will hold and what won’t. Who’s going to push back and who won’t.” Perry urges that there needs to be a strong and unrelenting response to these attacks, something Democrats haven’t been doing with nearly enough force. Tillery agrees and brought up some important historical context to emphasize how much more could be done right now. “We have more power in 2025 than Dr. King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks and Ralph Abernathy had in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act passed,” Tillery called out. “There were three Black members of Congress, then, and it was a segregated institution. Today there are over 60 Black members of Congress including five Black senators who have the ability to filibuster. Why aren’t we putting pressure on them right now to step up?” (snip-MORE; again, not tl,dr.)
Former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who was injured by the mob on Jan. 6, told NBC News that he tried to purchase a number of the replica medals this week, planning to hand them out as gifts, and was surprised to see they were no longer available.
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Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace organization, was founded in France. From their website: “Pax Christi is a ground up organization – it began with a few committed people who spoke out, prayed and worked for reconciliation at the end of the second world war, and is now active in more than 60 countries and five continents, with more than 60,000 members worldwide.”
Scottie's Playtime 