With more resources!
OK. Here’s Annie Asks You’s Immigration Resources Post.
With more resources!
With more resources!
(Because I live in a later time zone than many readers here.)
Hopium PM – Court Blocks Trump’s Dangerous Power Grab, New Reuters Poll Shows Trump Taking A Hit, Keep Making Calls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! by Simon Rosenberg
Kennedy and Gabbard Hearings Tomorrow, Patel Thursday Read on Substack
Good evening peeps. A federal judge has blocked Trump’s outrageous suspension/cancelling of Congressionally mandated funding for programs of all kinds across all 50 states. From the Washington Post:
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from imposing a sweeping pause on trillions of dollars in federal spending, capping a frenetic day of disruption to government programs that fund schools, provide housing and ensure low-income Americans have access to healthcare.
The order prevented the new restrictions from taking effect until at least Feb. 3, buying time for a coalition of public-health advocates, nonprofits and businesses — represented by the left-leaning group Democracy Forward — to proceed with a case that may test Trump’s claims of expansive power over the nation’s fiscal trajectory.
The decision arrived amid a wave of chaos and confusion in Washington, where few appeared to understand the scope and intention of a White House memo that had directed agencies to “temporarily pause” the disbursement of key federal funds. Even before it could officially take effect at 5 p.m., thousands of government services — many dedicated primarily to Americans’ health, safety and well-being — appeared to be at risk of interruption or shutdown, at least temporarily.
The NYTimes has a good backgrounder on “impoundment” – Trump’s attempt just to cancel government programs he doesn’t care for and “impound” the money (gift article). I also found this article by Russell Berman in the Atlantic helpful in understanding where we are.
Yes, in the first few weeks of Trump’s Presidency we are already facing one of the gravest Constitutional crises in America history as Trump is attempting to seize a level of control over our government no President has ever had.

If there was an upside to this dark day Democrats across the country at all levels of government loudly rose up against the latest acts of our Mad Orange Wannabe King. It appeared to have woken us from our collective slumber, as the threat Trump clearly represents became impossible to ignore. Can we compete with Trump, contest his out of control Administration, score some wins in the coming days?

First, a new Reuters poll suggests Trump has already overreached, as his approval rating has already taken a 9 point hit:
We will see if these results are replicated in other polls but this one sure shows that Trump is struggling out of the gate. Note below how unpopular many of his early actions/proposals are (but also note the broad public support for “downsizing the federal government”): (snip-MORE; go see it! It’s free and you don’t have to log in.)
As I have written and posted I love Ethel’s videos. She presents the facts with an easy to listen to rhythm and tone. She uses facts to present the medical studies and medical science for trans people not emotion, feelings, or guess work. She presents the sources she uses and gives the details of how the conclusions were reached and the validity of the studies. Such as to if it is peer reviewed, how large the sample size, and the conclusions of the data match what the person pushing the information is claiming it does. Often Ethel catches bigots simply lying by claiming a study shows negative results when in fact the studies and data present a positive or are completely opposite from what the haters claim.
Plus for those who would rather read than listen she provides a transcript of the videos she does and again as I mentioned she supplies her sources so others can look up the studies / data themselves to show she is telling the truth. That is why you never see videos by trans haters such as the TERFs trying to claim she lied. If you care about the facts and wish to have the information to combat the lies of bigots please check out her other videos supporting trans people and debunking anti-trans lies. Hugs
Watch all our videos debunking gender ‘critical’ fascism here! –
• Debunking Gender ‘Critical’ Fascism
Today’s video debunks the myth that between 61-98% of all trans youth desist if we take a ‘wait and see’ approach, exposing the linguistic sleight of hand used by those set on undermining gender affirming care as the only ethical approach. #ProtectTransKids
Hi, welcome to Essence of Thought with me, Ethel Thurston, as your host.
I’m sure I’m not the only one. Still, I found a couple of items that help with that. And I’m on the lookout for more! We still have the power, even thought it doesn’t feel like it. We the people still have the power, if we stay constructively informed.
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I don’t even recall now what I was reading this morning that linked Transvitae, but here are its resources pages. I am not trans, so I only hope there isn’t anything there are the site that is, let’s say inappropriate. I read around and it seems like a decent place, but I am no expert. Resources are resources, though. We need to know about resources.
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Plus, I’m going to try to draw Number Nine Eight One, and anyone else who has such an urge should do so, also! 🌞 🧑🎨
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(There’s a video there, if it’s something you want to see. The still shows a person doing what she appears to be doing, if I am clear.)
A supervisor of a town in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, resigned after a video in which she appeared to mimic Elon Musk’s alleged Nazi salute went viral.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of the social media platform X, and Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency, sparked outrage when he made a gesture that resembled a Nazi salute while addressing a crowd at an inauguration event for President Donald Trump.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) later posted a statement on X saying it seemed like Musk “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”
This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.
It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on…— ADL (@ADL) January 20, 2025
Despite the ADL’s statement, many have still accused Musk of performing the salute. In response, Musk posted a series of Nazi-related puns on X which led to more backlash.
He also sparked more controversy while appearing to reference Germany’s Nazi history while making a virtual appearance at a campaign event for Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party on Saturday.
Amid the controversy surrounding Musk, Laura Smith, a Republican and the Vice Chair of the Towamencin Township Board of Supervisors, posted a video of herself on the social media platform TikTok in which she appeared to mimic Musk’s gesture. (snip)
tRump is old and … intellectually challenged so he can not understand gender identification. A lot of older people can’t handle the changes in society and the acceptance of new ways to be / live. As far as the religious fanatics pushing the hate against LGBTQ+ people including trans people are cis people who do not feel a disconnect between their sex organs and their feelings of who they are in society. Just as the same religious straight people can not understand the attraction gay people feel. They don’t feel that way themselves, so don’t see being cis and straight being the only acceptable way to live as a problem. Instead they think because they don’t feel that way then no one else does so it must be a choice. Or a mental defect to be cured. They refuse to accept medical science / medical studies and all the evidence that it is real, exists, and normal. We learn as a society and we as we grow in understanding we learn to accept new things. Medical science and medical research tell us that being trans and gay is normal, also that medical care that affirms those feelings is important along with necessary. Just because I don’t like a food or feel like I want to eat it, doesn’t mean no one likes it or don’t want to eat it. But liking a food I don’t doesn’t mean it is a mental illness or makes a person unfit.
saying that the U.S. military has been “afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists” and that “many mental and physical health conditions are incompatible with active duty.”
It also takes aim at transgender people in personal terms, accusing them of living in conflict “with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” it adds.
Newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard soldier who has said that “being transgendered in the military causes complications and differences,”
The above by the drunken wife abuser accused sexual predator Hegseth is wrong. The only complication and differences caused by having transgender people in the military is not the trans people but the fundamentalist religious people / Christians like Hegseth who feel the entire LGBTQ+ is an abomination to his god and so shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Or worse mix with the real children of god, people with good morals like the drunken wife abuser accused sexual predator Hegseth. This issue over transgender people in the military reminds me of when Clinton tried to make it legal for gay people to be out in the military. Senator Sam Nunn went on a Navy ship and said no real service member wanted to be sleeping near, working next to, or using the bathroom facilities with the dreaded gay person, which some churches were desperate to keep from being accepted and live openly in society. The anti-gay people claimed all sorts of horrors if gay people were allowed to service openly from the collapse of the military to mass exit of members. None of that happened, the military stayed the world’s best and there was no mass fleeing from the service.
These same people with the same hater mind set made the same claims about first black people being allowed to serve, and then when the military was desegregated. The same was said of women in combat roles. It always comes from the haters who use their personal bigotry as the metric for how everyone should be and feel. And they never admit when all the horrors they claim will happen if those they are against get equality and inclusion never happen. They just pick a new target and repeat the same attacks and hates. Now it is the trans people’s turn to be accused of all the horrible things that blacks were, the gays were, that never were true. Trans people have served openly for some time, studies show that they do not harm the military or lower the military readiness / effectiveness in any way. Sadly far too many of our general public who know nothing about the military or who never served think they are experts and again feel that everyone has the same bigotries, racist, and misogynistic feelings they do. Being in other countries or even different parts of the US will open closed minds. Harris did not lose by much, she almost won. It is too bad these hateful ignorant people are going to be able to enshrine their hates and bigotries into law and hurt so many people in the next few years. But remember if we can get the House then most of the damage can do with the passing of laws will stop, and if we can regain the Senate we can stop hateful ideolog judges from being installed. It is up to us to get out the vote. Hugs
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The executive order took aim at transgender individuals in personal terms, noting that physical and mental health conditions make them “incompatible” with military service.
January 28, 2025 at 12:28 a.m. ESTThe Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)The list of conditions identified could affect tens of thousands of people depending on how it is interpreted. It cites diagnoses “that require substantial medication or medical treatment to bipolar and related disorders, eating disorders, suicidality, and prior psychiatric hospitalization.”
The order calls for the Pentagon to adopt updated policies on the medical standards required for military service. It also takes aim at transgender people in personal terms, accusing them of living in conflict “with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” it adds.
The order builds on a previous directive, issued hours after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, overturning a 2021 Biden administration measure that permitted transgender troops to serve openly, which reversed an earlier ban from Trump’s first term in office. The new executive order does not immediately ban transgender individuals from serving, but it directs the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard, to revise medical standards and submit a report to the president outlining steps to comply with the directive.
While the Defense Department does not keep track of the number of transgender personnel across the force, the latest shift in the long-running policy back-and-forth could impact thousands of service members. It also represents one aspect of a far-reaching Trump administration effort to roll back diversity initiatives across the government.
Trump signed the new transgender order along with others calling for the reinstatement of troops who were discharged during the Biden administration for refusing coronavirus vaccines; the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion offices in the Defense Department; and the creation of an “Iron Dome for America,” Trump’s vision for expanded missile defense.
Newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard soldier who has said that “being transgendered in the military causes complications and differences,” promised in his first remarks to reporters at the Pentagon on Monday that he would ensure implementation of Trump’s priorities, which also include ordering the military to guard the southern border.
“This is happening quickly,” he said. “Our job is lethality and readiness and warfighting.”
In a November podcast, Hegseth said personnel receiving medication related to gender transitions would be unable to serve effectively.
Advocates for transgender people have said that there may be as many as 15,000 in the U.S. military. A 2016 Defense Department survey found that about 9,000 identified as such. Both figures represent less than 1 percent of the 2 million people who serve in the active-duty, reserve or National Guard components of the military.
For decades, the military considered transgender people to be sexual deviants who were unfit for service. But in 2016, after a year-long policy review, the Obama administration repealed a ban on transgender service, citing the value of ensuring that all qualified individuals were able to serve their country in uniform.
“We have to have access to 100 percent of America’s population for our all-volunteer forces to be able to recruit from among them the most highly qualified — and to retain them,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said at the time.
The repeal followed the Obama administration in 2011 overturning the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibited gay service members from serving openly, and the 2015 repeal of a ban on women serving in a wide array of jobs in ground combat units.
After taking office in 2017, Trump announced a ban on transgender military service in a series of tweets, without notifying key defense officials. The move triggered a scramble in the Pentagon, with then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ordering another policy review.
In 2018, Mattis adopted a new policy with Trump’s tacit support that softened the full ban, effectively prohibiting new transgender service members from joining the military but allowing those already in uniform to stay on.
The ruling was challenged in court, but the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s partial ban in 2019. The military began enforcing that policy later that year.
President Joe Biden quickly reversed Trump’s ban in an executive order after taking office in 2021.
Several other intelligence agencies continue to favor the natural-origin theory, and there is no evidence SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the pandemic, was in any laboratory before the outbreak.
The conspiracy nut jobs are in power now, who needs evidence and facts for something to be true.

So Jared can build luxury beachfront condos.
All that valuable oceanfront property. Much too nice for those dirty people. The Israeli military has already done a good job of demolition. We need to rebuild for people who will appreciate the beauty of the place and be willing to pay to maintain it. /s

January 26, 2025 by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack
On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln rose before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, to make a speech. Just 28 years old, Lincoln had begun to practice law and had political ambitions. But he was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation. He took as his topic for that January evening, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.”
Lincoln saw trouble coming, but not from a foreign power, as other countries feared. The destruction of the United States, he warned, could come only from within. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The trouble Lincoln perceived stemmed from the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence. He pointed specifically to two recent events: the 1836 lynching of free Black man Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1837 murder of white abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois.
But the problem of lawlessness was not limited to individual instances, he said. A public practice of ignoring the law eventually broke down all the guardrails designed to protect individuals, while lawbreakers, going unpunished, became convinced they were entitled to act without restraint. “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” Lincoln said, “they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
The only way to guard against such destruction, Lincoln said, was to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
Lincoln was quick to clarify that he was not saying all laws were good. Indeed, he said, bad laws should be challenged and repealed. But the underlying structure of the rule of law, based in the Constitution, could not be abandoned without losing democracy.
Lincoln didn’t stop there. He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.
For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.
Lincoln reminded his audience that the torch of American democracy had been passed to them. The Founders had used their passions to create a system of laws, but the time for passion had passed, lest it tear the nation apart. The next generation must support democracy through “sober reason,” he said. He called for Americans to exercise “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
“Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’”
What became known as the Lyceum Address is one of the earliest speeches of Lincoln’s to have been preserved, and at the time it established him as a rising politician and political thinker. But his recognition, in a time of religious fervor and moral crusades, that the law must prevail over individual passions reverberates far beyond the specific crises of the 1830s.
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Notes:
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm