July 7, 2025
another WTF?! edition, therapeutic action included
Hi friends,
Last Monday, I reeled from the heinous violence at home and abroad, as well as the slow violence of Trump’s budget bill, which had not yet passed. There is no more slow violence, only the onslaught of dangerous policies.
The outlandish, unpopular budget reconciliation has since been rammed through Congress. The consequences are going to be far-reaching.
Join today’s ‘rage rally’ from 4-6 PM outside Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis’s office to protest her vote for Trump’s Big Ugly Budget.
I urge you to search for similar protests of Republican members of Congress near you who voted yes. Pick up the phone and call them.
Last Thursday, my therapeutic activity was to call Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski to wish her many sleepless nights as millions of Americans lose their health care and struggle to feed their families.
After voting yes, Murkowski told reporters,
“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”
Of course, they did not. Had she voted ‘no’ in the Senate, she could have been a hero, as John McCain was when he blocked the destruction of the Affordable Care Act.
I called Murkowski again, today. I may call her every week for several years. You can call her, too, at (907)-271-3735.
This morning, Robert Reich posted under the title, “Now the Second (and Worse Stage of Trump’s Police State, in which he notes that the $170 billion allocated for border and immigration enforcement in the budget is
on the scale of supplemental budgets passed by the United States when we enter war.
ICE will add 10,000 agents to the 20,000 already on the streets.
Its annual budget for detentions will skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the current fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year. That’s a 365 percent increase.
Funding for ICE detentions will exceed funding for the entire federal prison system.
Reich notes that more than 70 percent of the tens of thousand of people detained by ICE have no criminal record, and the quadrupling of the detention budget could lead to huge increases in the number of people detained.
Sign the letter to Trump demanding the closure of Guantanamo Bay, which is being used for immigrant detention.
I also want to alert you about another matter. You probably received an email sent by the US Social Security Administration (SSA) that claims Donald Trump’s major new spending bill has eliminated taxes on benefits, as I did.
The New Jersey representative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House’s energy and commerce committee, wrote on X that “every word” of the SSA’s email on Thursday “is a lie”.
“This big, ugly bill doesn’t change that,” Pallone wrote. “It’s disturbing to see Trump hijack a public institution to push blatant misinformation.”
This is where we are. Breathe in, breathe out. Check facts.
At least 80 people have perished in the massive flooding in Texas, including 28 children. It is more comfortable for some people to think of the weather as somehow unconnected from policy. And then there are the folks who imagine that the flooding is somehow a fake story.
But the tragedy in Texas is the result of the dark marriage between climate denial as policy and the evisceration of the government agencies that provide accurate forecasts, weather alerts, and coordinated communication to warn people.
We have several offices around the country that have no chief or meteorologist in charge any longer. The Houston office has lost all three of its senior people there right now.
They're in the process of trying to get new people to fill those jobs, but they're going to have to be moved from other places, which is going to end up with stressing those offices from whence they come.
So the real issue is that you can only stretch a rubber band so tight before it snaps.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the delay in any of the warnings or forecasts that have occurred already has been a result of short staffing. I'm not suggesting that any of the deaths – and we've had a lot of deaths from tornadoes – are caused by short staffing, but eventually there will be situations that develop where the staff is so stressed that they won't be able to do a good job, they won't be able to get the information out to the emergency management community in time.
The bold is mine.
The San Antonio office of the National Weather Service was missing a coordination meteorologist to work directly with emergency managers when the Guadalupe River flooded.
Back in May, every living former NWS director, including Elbert Friday, signed an open letter to forecast the crisis we now face.
But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees NOAA, testified before Congress on June 5 that the cuts wouldn’t be a problem because “we are transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.” Apparently the “cutting edge technology” hasn’t arrived yet.
And now presumably FEMA will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of shattered lives in Texas - an agency that Trump said repeatedly that he wants to abolish.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — whom John Oliver recently referred to as “the worst thing to come out of Georgia since the Trail of Tears” — introduced legislation to prohibit “the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity.”
Wait until she finds out that the fossil fuel industry is responsible.
Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, who has been debunking misinformation on X, posted this, in response to Greene’s announcement of her initiative:
“It’s not a political statement for me as a Harvard-degreed atmospheric scientist to say that elected representative Marjorie Taylor Green doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.”
Tell Trump that he must reverse cuts to the National Weather Service.
Unless you’re in California, you may have missed the news that a massive California wildfire, the Madre Fire, has engulfed 80,000 acres and prompted evacuation orders and a highway closure.
The article I read noted that “the cause of the wildfire is under investigation,” but did not mention climate change.
Tell media outlets to connect wildfire danger to climate change.
There is no way to cover all the insanity or to take action in response, but here’s something we need to address.
Bove — formerly a personal attorney to Trump (like AG Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, another Deputy AG) — has a startling record:
There was his role as enforcer of the alleged extortion of New York City Mayor Eric Adams to cooperate in the Trump administration’s migrant roundups in exchange for dropping the federal corruption case against him. There was Bove’s dismissal of FBI agents and prosecutors who investigated the January 6 insurrection. And there was more.
On the eve of the hearing, the committee received a shocking letter from a whistleblower, a Department of Justice attorney, who claimed that Bove said, in response to a federal court ruling against the administration’s immigration deportation policy: “DoJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order.”
Bondi and Blanche attended Bove’s June 25 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the purpose of intimidating Republican senators. Unsurprisingly, they have advanced his nomination.
Appointments to the federal bench carry lifetime tenure.
Tell your U.S. senators: Oppose Emil Bove for a federal judgeship.
It’s time for a critical local matter. Eric Adams is behind a proposed ballot initiative that would eliminate party primaries in New York.
The Working Families Party in NY scored a big win in the recent Democratic primary and has credited the billionaires backing Adams for this proposal.
Recently, Arizona’s Democrats established
We are already living with the effects of billionaires spending millions to elect candidates. Tonight, there’s a public hearing at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, which will also be on Zoom.
The Charter Revision Commission will make their decision about November ballot questions in just two weeks.
From Brooklyn Indivisible:
Learn more about open primaries here, learn more about the meeting here, or join virtually here. If you will not testify at the meeting, submit your written testimony online by Tuesday, July 15 here.
I am going to submit written testimony. When I write it, I will share it. It is critical that there are dissenting voices.
Thank you for being here. Take care of your nervous system. Here’s a beautiful song for Waiting Out A Storm by Kate Sutherland.
with love,
L
I will be with you in my heart for this protest.
Continue your great work 🥰🙏