Trump’s inauguration is just days away. It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, Bernie Sanders warned the Democratic Party that Americans would fall for a far right demagogue if their material needs weren’t addressed. Hacks in the Democratic Party and mainstream media are finally admitting Bernie Sanders was right. In this video we explain why his theory of change was 100% correct and look back at how Democratic Party elites sabotaged the very movement that could’ve saved us all from Trump’s rise.
Category: Political / Governments / Nations / Countries /
Peace & Justice History for 1/24
Also, in the early 2000’s as my Dem. county party chair, I had the great honor of representing Kansas St. Senator David Haley-a very gracious man!-at a local candidate’s forum as he was running for Secretary of State (he came close but did not prevail. I tried to take the blame, but he would not let me.) KS is a red state, but he ran against the Republicans anyway. At that time, Republicans loved the computerized voting machines with no chits, but Sen. Haley wanted verification. He is author Alex Haley’s nephew.
| January 24, 1970 John Lennon & Yoko Ono cropped their hair short for the first time in years, declaring 1970 “Year One for Peace” and helped organize a Toronto Peace Festival.  John and Yoko An interview with John later that year |
| January 24, 1977 The TV mini-series ”Roots,” based on the Alex Haley novel, began airing on ABC.  LeVar Burton portrayed Kunta Kinte, a young man captured in Africa and shipped to America to be a slave, in “Roots.” The story followed an African sold into slavery, and his family’s history through emancipation. It won numerous awards and drew an enormous and broad-based audience (third-highest Nielsen ratings ever for its final episode). 85 percent of all Americans watched at least some part of the series. Listen to thoughts on Roots 30 years later |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january24
Bits of a Couple of Pieces I Found Late, Right Before Bedtime
Fast radio burst found in an old, dead galaxy for the first time
A new discovery adds to the mystery of the source of fast radio bursts.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely energetic pulses of radio-frequency light which travels across the universe that last just a few seconds or even milliseconds.
More than 1,000 FRBs have been reported since the first was discovered in 2007. (snip-More; click the title see it all.)
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Godless Libs Of Tulsa, OK, City Council To No Longer Force Jesus On People Just Trying To Attend Their Meetings by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Good for you Tulsa, Oklahoma! Read on Substack
The City Council of Tulsa, Oklahoma — faced with the choice of upsetting Christian Republican legislators or making non-Christian community members feel like they didn’t belong — voted 8-0 (with one abstaining) this week to eliminate the practice of starting each meeting with a prayer invocation.
Now, instead of invocations, there will be a moment of silence, so that everyone will have to sit there and feel uncomfortable instead of just those whose religion is not represented by the opening prayer.
As Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist reports, this all started last year after the invocation was delivered by Amy Hardy-McAdams, co-owner and creator of the Strawberry Moon Herbal Apothecary & Ritual Center in Broken Arrow. Hardy-McAdams, who described herself as “a Third-Degree High Priestess of the Artemisian Faerie Faith Tradition of Witchcraft” (which I’m sure is a real thing), was invited by retiring City Councilmember Crista Patrick, who also happened to be a Pagan and wished to see her faith represented at the meeting just as Christianity had been. (snip-More; the statements from the Gov and Schools Supt. are worth the click by themselves, but the entire thing is gold!)
How about some more memes for Wednesday. I have 15 more pages to go through but I have run out of time again.
mood for the next 4 years
This screen grab shows the Orange fucker as he is. Just fucking bitter and vile.
I went to whitehouse.gov, after not seeing it for a while. Biden’s site reflected a government for ALL the American people. Trump’s is like a fracking political campaign site, full of lies! After he WON the election!
I hesitate to even share these examples…
The Crucible and more in Peace and Justice History for 1/22
| January 22, 1953 The Arthur Miller drama, ”The Crucible,” opened on Broadway. It was a parable that reflected the climate of fear that pervaded American society and the politics of its time, witchcraft in the late 17th century, communism in the mid-20th. In both times there existed also the fear of false accusation. From the New York Times review of the Broadway revival in November 2001: “Today, the play is a cautionary tale of astounding immediacy. Its themes include the pathology of rumor, the arrogance of the religiously righteous, the dangers of private panic in the face of public terror, and the individual’s difficulty in acting rationally in the face of mob hysteria.”  scene from the original production Read the playwright’s reasons for writing it: |
| January 22, 1973 Women won control of their reproductive rights when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, and thus women may terminate a pregnancy before the last 10 weeks. Only during the last trimester, when a fetus can survive outside the womb, would states be permitted to regulate abortion of a healthy pregnancy. Prior to the Court’s ruling that the decision was private and belonged to the pregnant woman, abortion was essentially illegal in all states except New York (as of 1970).  About the decision History of New York’s law |
| January 22, 2001 President George W. Bush signed a memorandum the day after his inauguration reinstating full restrictions on U.S. overseas aid that might go to any program that provided abortions or considered them an option for women. Known as the Mexico City policy, or global gag rule, first signed by President Ronald Reagan, it had been withdrawn by President Bill Clinton as soon as he took office. |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january22
Trump Repeals Rule Allowing Trans Military Members
Politico reports:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday night that repeals a provision allowing transgender troops to serve in the military, part of a wide-ranging effort to end Biden-era policies his first day in office.
Trump issued a ban during his first administration that prevented transgender troops from serving, which former President Joe Biden eliminated. While Trump did not institute a new ban, the repeal of the Biden-era executive order clears the way for one.
The Department of Defense, in 2019, estimated that up to 8,000 transgender people served in the military, just before Trump’s first ban took effect.
Read the full article. You may recall that the Log Cabin Quislings appeared here in August 2024 when they claimed that Trump never banned trans troops during his first term. After Trump’s 2017 decree, the decision to allow already serving trans military personnel to remain only came after Trump lost four successive court cases.
Did you get what you expected?
ACLU Sues Trump Admin Over Birthright Citizenship
“Denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is not only unconstitutional — it’s also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values. Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is.
“This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans.
“We will not let this attack on newborns and future generations of Americans go unchallenged. The Trump administration’s overreach is so egregious that we are confident we will ultimately prevail.” – ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero.
‘Ghoulish’: Trump Expands Federal Death Penalty
https://www.commondreams.org/news/donald-trump-death-penalty
Declaring that “the death penalty is unjust and cruel,” the ACLU warned that Trump’s order not only directs an expansion of its use at the federal level but also encourages states to do the same.
Specifically, the order says that “in addition to pursuing the death penalty where possible,” the attorney general shall seek it “regardless of other factors” for federal cases involving the murder of a law enforcement officer or a capital crime committed by an undocumented immigrant—and shall “encourage state attorneys general and district attorneys to bring state capital charges for all capital crimes with special attention to” those circumstances, “regardless of whether the federal trial results in a capital sentence.”
The order further directs the head of the U.S. Department of Justice to “seek the overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of state and federal governments to impose” the death penalty and “ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”
Last week, outgoing U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland “withdrew the Justice Department’s protocol for federal executions that allowed for single-drug lethal injections with pentobarbital, after a government review raised concerns about the potential for ‘unnecessary pain and suffering,'” The Associated Pressreported. “The protocol could be imposed by Trump’s new acting Attorney General James McHenry III, or his pick to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, once she’s confirmed by the Senate.”
Though Trump’s order doesn’t name Garland, it explicitly takes aim at former President Joe Biden for his moratorium as well as his attempt to prevent another GOP killing spree like the one that occurred at the end of the Republican’s first term, accusing the Democrat of commuting the sentences of “37 of the 40 most vile and sadistic rapists, child molesters, and murderers on federal death row: remorseless criminals who brutalized young children, strangled and drowned their victims, and hunted strangers for sport.”
Biden said last month that “in good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.” He left Charleston church gunman Dylann Roof, Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, and Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on death row. The others now face life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Trump cannot reverse Biden’s commutations, but he directed the attorney general to “evaluate the places of imprisonment and conditions of confinement for each” of those 37 men and “take all lawful and appropriate action to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
The president also said that the attorney general “shall further evaluate whether these offenders can be charged with state capital crimes and shall recommend appropriate action to state and local authorities.”
Death Penalty Action executive director Abraham Bonowitz said in a Monday statement:
President Trump’s executive order demanding capital charges for the murder of law enforcement officers or capital crimes by illegal aliens is unnecessary bluster, because the death penalty already exists for such crimes. But Trump can’t help himself. Donald Trump’s Agenda2025 articulated his plan to drastically increase executions, and we all know this is one promise he can’t wait to keep.
We are also dismayed at President Biden’s cynical compromise that commuted 37 federal death sentences while leaving seven prisoners on federal and military death rows. While expressing both his personal opposition to the death penalty and his desire to maintain the moratorium on executions he imposed in 2021, Biden has nevertheless primed the pump for Donald Trump to resume his execution spree.Social media users also slammed Trump’s order, with one saying that “this is extremely disturbing” and another calling it “one of the most ghoulish things I’ve ever fucking read.” Many critics highlighted that the president issued the measure while pardoning over 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, which led to the deaths of multiple police officers.
James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, noted that it “is straight out of Project 2025,” the sweeping Heritage Foundation-led playbook from which Trump unsuccessfully tried to distance himself during the campaign.
Trump has a long history of supporting capital punishment. As journalist Prem Thakker put it, “On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the man who bought [a] full-page [newspaper] ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five—five Black and Latino teens wrongfully convicted of rape—makes one of his first acts as president to restore and prioritize the death penalty.”
NH man accused of civil rights violation in LGBTQ sign thefts
Maga cult members and the fundamentalist Christians (maybe they are the same) are feeling very emboldened. They feel they have the right to erase those they don’t like or agree with. Remember their refrain is to make America great again and take back their country back. Their country, only theirs. No one else matters, no one else should be here if they disagree with them or live differently from the maga Christians. They want a country for only them by only them. We really have to fight this hard. Hugs.
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Frank Hobbs Jr. is accused of stealing signs supporting gay rights from an intersection in Goffstown, New Hampshire, during Pride Month
By Michael Rosenfield
A New Hampshire man is under investigation for possible civil rights violations.
Frank Hobbs Jr. is accused of swiping someone else’s signs supporting gay rights.
New Hampshire authorities say Hobbs was caught on camera stealing signs from a Goffstown intersection.
A woman had lawfully placed signs in support of the LGBTQ community, and when one of them disappeared, she decided to do some detective work.
“She set up a trail camera to monitor the intersection and make sure her signs weren’t taken down,” said Senior Assistant New Hampshire Attorney General Sean Locke.
Sure enough, that camera recorded another theft taking place.
“She was able to capture someone on video coming to the intersection removing the signs and driving away,” said Locke.
It happened last June during Pride Month, and the New Hampshire Department of Justice has now filed a complaint against Hobbs accusing him of civil rights violations.
Local law enforcement said he was easily recognizable because he’s well known in the community.
According to court documents, Hobbs denied knowing anything about the incident, but when informed there were photos, he said he’d been told by people at Town Hall he could remove signs that displayed “pedophile symbols” and that he found the signs offensive.
“These identity-based or bias-based behaviors and unlawful acts create a perception in the community that this may not be a safe place if you’re a person who identifies as LGBTQ+ if these signs are getting torn down,” said Locke.
Hobbs has not returned multiple requests for comment.
He will have a hearing and is facing thousands of dollars in fines depending on what a judge decides.
