Let’s talk about Trump hurting US manufacturing, the EU, and jets….

Memes and cartoons along with some recent news. Dang Bluesky is the place to get it all.

 

Trump, dressed as Napoleon, trips over a cannon ball labeled ‘Tariffs’. The cannon ball was fired from his own cannon, which is standing right behind him with smoke coming out of the barrel.

Cartoon showing the top floor and the roof of the White House. A weather vane shaped like Trump is circling in the wind on the roof, and is connected via gears to a wheel of fortune where a needle indicates which will be today's policy: tariffs, war, peace, deal or no deal. Trump's cabinet sits at a long table, looking expectantly at the wheel.

 

 

Trump selling Teslas

Remove this from your car immediately - showing a transmission. Let those woke leftists know you won't support a TRANSMISSION

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-employees-earning-six-figure-125445382.html

 

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.

Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T17:49:39.555Z

Cool so what happens if GOP attach a national abortion ban to a CR? You'll vote for that too?🚮

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T22:50:13.989Z

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)

jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) 2025-03-15T00:37:58.669Z

The US is running a Stanford Milgram experiment on a societal scale.

Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-03-15T13:30:54.402Z

NEW: Here are the 10 “democratic” senators that voted to sell out veterans, the American people, and their colleagues in the House. Cortez MastoDurbinFettermanGillibrandHassanKingPetersSchatzSchumerShaheen

Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T21:25:01.117Z

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.👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T21:15:33.513Z

Ah the party of free speech is at it again

MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-03-14T20:17:56.739Z

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.

Mark Cuban (@mcuban.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T01:32:14.237Z

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.

Erin Reed (@erininthemorning.com) 2025-03-14T18:08:40.589Z

I asked Schumer about this last night and his answer was basically that they’re wrong.

Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T19:09:23.678Z

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…

Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-03-15T17:55:25.545Z

Isn't it funny how America is the only country in the world that needs this…weird 🤷

Being Liberal ®🗽🇺🇲🇨🇦🇲🇽🇪🇺🇺🇳🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@beingliberal.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T14:55:12.102Z

Exactly what we've been warning would happen.

George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T18:30:00.687Z

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T04:26:16.072Z

The VA has removed discrimination protections from transgender vets, dishonoring their service.www.advocate.com/news/transge…

Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-03-14T22:34:15.988Z

Trump now says he was “being a little bit sarcastic” when he repeatedly promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours.

MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-03-15T16:03:36.515Z

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.

Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T18:43:18.865Z

I hate to say ‘I told you so’ but… I told you so. Seven years ago:

Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T18:38:33.851Z

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?

Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T11:30:36.343Z

 

Trump Amplifies “No LGBTQ” Symbol Using Nazi-Era Imagery in Military Ad Post

https://meidasnews.com/news/trump-amplifies-no-lgbtq-symbol-using-nazi-era-imagery-in-military-ad-post

 

Trump’s Truth Social post has a pink triangle overlayed with a prohibition symbol

Trump posted an article to his Truth Social account this weekend featuring a deeply troubling image: a pink triangle—the Nazi-era symbol used to identify and persecute gay men in concentration camps—covered with a red prohibited sign. Historically, the LGBTQ+ rights movement reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of resistance, pride, and remembrance.

Trump

Trump

Truth Social

The article itself titled, “Army recruitment ads look quite different under Trump,” published by the Washington Times praises Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for refocusing the military on “lethality” and reversing Biden-era policies that embraced diversity, including ads featuring LGBTQ+ soldiers.

Holocaust Museum Exhibit of Nazi concentration camp badges

Holocaust Museum Exhibit of Nazi concentration camp badges

Max, Wikipedia Commons

The image, placed in the context of military recruitment, strongly suggests a rejection of LGBTQ+ service members, at least in the terms of recruitment, under Trump’s leadership.

Military ads recruitment illustration

Military ads recruitment illustration

Washington Times

Trump’s choice to amplify such an image is particularly alarming given Hegseth’s past statements.

Prisoners wearing triangles in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, December 19, 1938

Prisoners wearing triangles in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, December 19, 1938

Heinrich Hoffman Collection / NARA

He has long opposed LGBTQ+ inclusion in the military, previously criticizing the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Hegseth 2

Pete Hegseth Lamented Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Change, Women in the Military

Now, under his leadership, Trump appears to be reinforcing the idea that LGBTQ+ individuals are unwelcome in the armed forces—not just through policy but through amplifying symbolic messaging with disturbing historical roots.

Pete for Senate

Pete Hegseth Campaigned to “Uphold Traditional Marriage” During 2012 Senate Run

Trump’s amplification of a Nazi-era symbol to promote this shift sends a message signaling a return to exclusionary policies that many believed were left in the past.

Peace & Justice History for 3/15

March 15, 1869
The first proposed amendment to the constitution guaranteeing women’s suffrage was introduced in the U.S. Congress.
March 15, 1942
Over 1300 Norwegian teachers were arrested by the German Nazi-installed government run by Vidkun Quisling after 12,000 of 14,000 nationwide had refused to join the new teachers’ association and resisted nazification of the curriculum. Half were held in a concentration camp outside the capital of Oslo. The rest were shipped to the Arctic for forced labor alongside Russian prisoners of war.
The loss of the arrested teachers forced a school shutdown for several weeks. Each day the imprisoned teachers were marched to their job of unloading supply ships, citizens stood respectfully by as they passed. When the teachers returned home later in the year, they were treated as heroes.

Hitler and Quisling
Following Germany’s defeat, Quisling was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Quisling is now considered a synonym for traitor.
Vidkun Quisling – ‘The Hitler of Norway’ 
March 15, 1963
Students from South Carolina State and Claflin College organized to integrate the lunch counter at Kresge 5&10 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Though their efforts were disciplined and peaceful, 400 were attacked by police then herded behind fences in the largest mass arrest of the civil rights movement.

More than a 1000 students marched peacefully to integrate lunch counters in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Convicted of “Breach of the Peace,” the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned those convictions because those arrested were petitioning for redress of grievances within the protection of the 1st Amendment.
More on the Orangeburg action 
March 15, 1965
Less than a week after the Bloody Sunday police attacks on peaceful marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the American people before a televised Joint Session of Congress. He said, “There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights . . . We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone . . . .”
Watch video or read the text of his speech 
March 15, 1993
The United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador concluded that most of the murder and human rights abuses during its civil war had been committed by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government through its various military, security and allied paramilitary organizations.
Truth Commission: El Salvador, U.S. Institute of Peace

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorymarch.htm#march15

Peace & Justice History for 3/14

March 14, 1879

Physicist and peace activist Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany. The Nobel Prize winner opposed militarism and became a champion of nuclear disarmament. Though he supported the development of the atomic bomb out of fear that Germany would develop it first, he warned in a 1944 letter to the Manhattan Project’s Niels Bohr: “When the war is over, then there will be in all countries a pursuit of secret war preparations with technological means which will lead inevitably to preventative wars and to destruction even more terrible than the present destruction of life.”
Read more 
March 14, 1934
The National Civil Liberties Council was founded in England, principally to monitor the policing of protests. Renamed Liberty in 1989, it has campaigned to protect and promote rights and freedoms for over 75 years.  

About Liberty’s history 
The organization today 
March 14, 1970
During a second attempt by Native American activists to claim Fort Lawton (about 50 miles south of Seattle, Washington), 78 were arrested for entering the site.United Indians for All Tribes was demanding the city give the unused facility to Native Americans for use as a cultural center. One week earlier about the same number had been arrested for occupying what had been declared federal surplus property. The Daybreak Star Cultural Center is now operating on the site.

Indians demonstrating at Fort Lawton
Background 
The Daybreak Star Cultural Center
Recent pictures of the center 
March 14, 2004
Opposition Socialists scored an upset win in Spain’s general election three days following the Madrid train bombings. The conservative government had joined the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq the previous year though Spanish public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to it. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his party, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), had opposed the Iraq War and Spain’s involvement.
The coordinated bombings, which left 191 dead and 1600 injured, were the worst terrorist attack in Europe aside from the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Thoughtful article on the bombings and the political situation in Spain 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorymarch.htm#march14

Let’s talk about Trump’s EU defense plans backfiring….

Bad News.

Simply very bad news. Precisely what Project 2025/Agenda 47/Republican National Platform said they want to do. I’m sorry; I don’t like to bring bad news. But people need to prepare. This is written in editorial/opinion style, but facts are within and there are citations. For people like us who need time to prepare for austerity, it’s news we ought to read.

Also, there are Senator names included for who we should write to regarding this bill. That’s our last chance. Shutdown is on Republicans, not Democrats, no matter how they try to deflect. We need to tell the Dem senators to speak what’s in this bill, every chance they get, and to refuse to vote in favor, pointing at Republicans the entire time.

There are parts in the article complaining about Democrats and their choices, etc., et. m. Read it if you want (you’ll have to click through for it,) but it won’t help anyone to read more complaining about Democrats. We the people need to energize Dem. Senators to speak out, and to vote no. Especially the speak out portion; Sen. Mark Kelly does that especially well, and is among those the author of this piece feels is wavering. I intend to start first thing in the morning, and I hope all of us will devote some time to this. It’s vital.

Senate Democrats’ Choice: Block the Republican Spending Bill or Dissolve Congress

The House’s continuing resolution would effectively hand over spending decisions to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

by David Dayen  March 11, 2025

Snippets:

Without the luxury of Republicans falling apart, Democrats in the Senate need to decide whether to prevent a dangerous and harmful budget that shrinks the power of Congress in the government. Since operating on principle goes against their “adults in the room” mindset, they are wavering on what to do. But it should be an open-and-shut case.

A normal continuing resolution funds the government at the same level as the previous budget. This bill does not. It cuts non-defense discretionary spending by $13 billion below last year’s level, while increasing military spending by $6 billion. It zeroes out funding for programs that fund homeless shelters and prevent child abuse. It cuts health care funding for clinics and hospitals, emergency preparedness for communities, clean water projects and tribal assistance. Meanwhile, it adds money for mass deportations, just as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has illegally detained a green card holder for his political beliefs.

Most of the budget cuts are achieved by removing earmarks, which members of Congress put in to direct projects. But usually when earmarks are removed, the money goes back to the agency to decide how to distribute it. This maneuver cuts the earmarks and the money.

The House Republican bill also fails to fix a carryover of a $20 billion rescission to IRS money from the Inflation Reduction Act, effectively doubling that cut. This was kind of pre-ordained when Democrats punted on this in a prior continuing resolution last December, but it still means that practically all of the IRA’s funding for greater enforcement of tax collection is now gone.

The bill not only adds $6 billion to the Department of Defense’s enormous budget, but adds $8 billion in “transfer authority” that allows the agency to shift spending where they deem important, a flexibility no other agency gets.

While Republicans tout a $6 billion increase in veterans health care in the bill, they neglect to mention the removal of a $23 billion appropriation to the Toxic Exposure Fund to implement the PACT Act, which cares for veterans exposed to burn pits and other cancer-causing chemicals. While there’s an extra $2.2 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund, there’s no additional money to support the rebuilding in southern California after the January wildfires.

But most important, the bill grants an open invitation to Trump and Elon Musk to continue to ignore Congress and toss out disfavored spending. Vice President JD Vance, while selling the deal to House Republicans, stated outright that “Trump would continue cutting federal funding with his Department of Government Efficiency initiative and pursue impoundment — that is, holding back money appropriated by Congress.” This has been reiterated by others in the Trump administration.

In fact, the House Republican bill gives the president more leeway to move money around. It appropriates money for things that Musk has eliminated, meaning that money can operate as a floating slush fund for Trump’s priorities, as long as the courts don’t roll back the illegal impoundments.

… The Trump administration is saying that they will sign a bill appropriating specific funding, and then go about cutting funding anyway. If you’re a member of Congress, you’re being told that your work product doesn’t matter, that the constitutional power of the purse doesn’t matter, and that there’s no guarantee that anything you pass will actually reach the people you serve.

I can see why Republicans would take this deal: they want budget cuts but know they don’t have the votes for them, so they’re plenty happy to outsource that to the president, even if it turns Congress into a separate and unequal branch of government. But why would Democrats willingly submit to a fake budget on paper that can be so easily circumvented? As Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said on X, “The Republican spending plan will supercharge Musk’s theft from working people to pay for billionaire tax cuts. Senate Democrats must stop it.”

So far, only Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has committed to voting yes. But as Josh Marshall has documented at Talking Points Memo, a number of Senate Democrats have stated no position on the bill, leaving their options open. In general, senators have been hedging their bets until forced to make a decision. That time has come.

Credible sources indicate that the most likely Democrats to offer up the remaining seven votes to avoid a shutdown are Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Michael Bennet (D-CO), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), and Mark Warner (D-VA).

Peace & Justice History for 3/10

March 10, 1968
Cesar Chavez ended a 23-day fast for U.S. farm workers in a Delano, California, public park with 4000 supporters at his side, including Senator Robert Kennedy (D-New York). Cesar Chavez led the effort to organize farm workers into a union for better pay, working and living conditions.

The story of Cesar Chavez 
March 10, 1969
James Earl Ray was sentenced to prison for 99 years by a court in Memphis, Tennessee, after admitting he murdered American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King, who preached and practiced nonviolence, was shot dead by a sniper in Memphis as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
The building now houses the National Civil Rights Museum.

Witnesses pointing toward the source of the shot that killed King.
National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel 
March 10, 2006
Turkish conscientious objector (CO) Mehmet Tarhan was released unexpectedly from a military prison after being held for having refused service in the army. A court decided that he had already been held longer (23 months) than any possible sentence for the crime. 
 Mehmet TarhanMehmet Tarhan’s supporters
He was ordered, however, to present himself again for military service and thus be subject to re-arrest for the same offense.

War Resisters’ International(WRI) led an international support campaign for him along with other CO activists in Turkey.

More on Mehmet Tarhan and other Turkish COs 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorymarch.htm#march10

Some clips from Adam Mockler

The erasing of the LGBTQ+ people from society. Along with returning to segregation and promoting racism.

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.