Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)

Tidbits – Feb.6- Reader Comments: Reader Comments: Dictatorial UnConstitutional Power Grab; Anti-Trump Protests Brake Out; USDA IG Was Investigating Elon Musk; Nightmare Over Washington; ICE Raids and Resistance; People’s Guide to Project 2025; More.

https://portside.org/2025-02-06/tidbits-feb6-reader-comments-reader-comments-dictatorial-unconstitutional-power-grab
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We Choose To Fight  -  Stop Trump & Musk's UnConstitutional Power Grab  (Working Families Party, Indivisible, MoveOn)

 

 

Re: Anti-Trump Protests Break Out at State Capitols Across the Country
 

Protesters gathered nationwide to protest Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

AFGE LOCAL 3343
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Gaza Takeover Plan - He’s definitely given this a lot of thought…  --  Cartoon by DCartoonist

 

DCartoonist
February 5, 2025
r/PoliticalHumor

 

Gaza  --  For Context  --  Cartoon by Pat Bagley
 

Pat Bagley
February 5, 2025
The Salt Lake Tribune

 

Re: USDA Inspector General Who Refused To Leave Post Escorted From Office by Security Was Investigating Elon Musk
 

One of those IGs, Phyllis Fong at the US Department of Agriculture, decided not to leave, believing the order to be illegal. According to a report from Reuters, she was escorted from the building today by security. She was heading an investigation into Elon Musk's Neuralink.

Even Republican Senator Chuck Grassley put out a statement urging the Trump administration to explain the firings and why there was no 30-day notice as required under the law.

In 2008, she was named the first Chairperson of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) and sat on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board that oversaw federal spending related to disaster relief.

Truman Grandy
Posted on Portside's Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/Portside.PortsideLabor

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So the Boss can send goon squads into government offices to roust the people who work there, who have a legal right to stay there?
How will that affect the price of eggs and the safety of pets in Springfield?

George Krasle
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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I smell a class action lawsuit.

Robert Laite
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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Unbelievable.

It's horrifyingly frightening. I've been in a constant state of anxiety for the last couple weeks.

Jesse Hoke
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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It's starting to look more and more like a coup.

Kelley Mitchell
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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It is entirely unbelievable that no one is stopping his nonsense. The Handmaid's Tale is starting to look more and more like a work of nonfiction.

Rachel Jenkins
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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We are living in frightening times.

Cameron Yount
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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Thank you Republicans for not having a backbone the first time this loon was president.

Philip Ballmann
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Founding Fathers Will Pay  --  Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

 

Mike Luckovich
January 30, 2025
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

Re: Public Service Unions File Lawsuit Challenging Trump Administration Efforts To Politicize the Civil Service

(posting on Portside Labor)
 

The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employee filed suit against the Trump administration challenging efforts to politicize the civil service.

Michael Henry Starks
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Nightmare Over Washington? Orange gremlin says ‘The buck stops there!’  --  cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

 

Lalo Alcaraz
January 30, 2025
https://www.pocho.com

 

Devasting Collisions Are Inevitable  --  Cartoon by Dr. James MacLeod

 

Dr. James MacLeod
January 30, 2025
MacLeodCartoons

 

Re: Trump’s New Jim Crow
 

DEI is not a conspiracy to make white people feel bad about themselves; it’s a society-wide effort to combat past discrimination against everyone who is not a white, straight, able-bodied male. For Trump, that is the problem.

David Benton
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: As ICE Conducts Made-for-TV Raids, Cities From Chicago to Newark Resist Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
 

Dulce Guzmán, Chicago immigrant rights organizer, and Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice are interviewed For Democracy Now!

Christopher Gould
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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Bernie Sanders, bless his heart, is historically mistaken. The United States has always been an oligarchy. What were the so-called Founding Fathers (slave owners and wealthy NE merchants) if not oligarchs? There was, perhaps. a diminution of oligarchical rule from 1932-1952 but that was an anomaly.

Bill Hansen

 

Re: America’s Dangerous Movement Toward Oligarchy, Authoritarianism and Kleptocracy
 

In my view, the Trump administration is moving this country very aggressively into an oligarchic form of society where extraordinary power rests in the hands of a small number of unelected multi-billionaires.

Nancy Walley
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

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We need suggestions not doomsday

Grace Ross

 

Ugly Tariffs  --  Cartoon by Rob Rogers

 


 

Donald Trump says that "tariff" is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but give me a #&%@-ing break!

Rob Rogers
February 4, 2025
TinyView

 

Re: The Reckless Creation of Whiteness
 

In The Unseen Truth, Sarah Lewis examines how an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.

Joppel Reimer
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: 16 Million Workers Were Unionized in 2024 

(posting on Portside Labor)
 

Millions more want to join unions but couldn’t.

Members First
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time
 

This should be "in no particular order." How can anyone rate these? Anyway, I could come up with 100 more, as could a bunch of my friends. There's Ochs's 'Cops of the World', Brecht/Weill's 'Kannonen-Song', the original is still the greatest 'Internationale, ' Leadbelly's 'Bourgeois Blues', and this overlooked gem: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2bxsku

Ethan Young
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: Can’t Get You out of My Head: Debunking Brain Health Misinformation
 

Common misconceptions and examine evidence-based approaches to cognitive health, including the role of nutrition, supplements, and music therapy.

Mary-Alice Strom
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: Trump’s Definitions of “Male” and “Female” Are Nonsense

The supposedly "new definition" of the sex of adult humans as "male" and "female" put forth by Trump in his declarations on transgender is probably one of the few statements he has made that is NOT nonsense. Rather it's the Portside headline (shortened from the longer original version on the Mother Jones article) and the transgender ideology it puts forth that are nonsense. 

The fallout from the confusingly false-but-often-accepted claim that "sex is assigned at birth" mantra has ended up giving legs to the nonsense that biological sex is changeable. The contention that an individual can simply "identify" out of the reality of their biological sex (even with the "help" of castration and dangerously applied hormones) has brought mystification and bedlam into our politics. It has garnered support for Republicans, which seem to be the only political party that didn't go off the rails acquiescing to the demand that one's sex can be declared via a personal demand and/or some medical intervention. 

This confusion of sex with gender has been deliberate, at least on the part of those who funded its rapid emergence into a power with enough impact to question long-settled biological fact. Anyone looking into who has been pushing transgender theory will find it did not come out of a mass movement of the oppressed. Rather it leads back to some very wealthy people and their donations and foundation grants to medical facilities, big Pharma, and postmodernist theorists, especially in elite universities. See: https://gript.ie/how-a-handful-of-billionaires-created-the-transgender-…

It may well be that the reference to "a person at conception" formulation in Trump's declaration is going to be used to further the anti-abortion argument around "personhood", but that doesn't make Trump's definition of sex false nor transgender claims true. This rather desperate attempt to capture the popularity of abortion rights for the transgender cause is made clear in the article, which states, "It [Trump's declaration] seeks to define women according to the functions of their bodies and regulate how all people, not just transgender people, move through the world and their interactions with federal government entities or federally supported entities."

Nothing new for women here. We females have always been overly "defined" by the function of our bodies. Some of that definition is factual (sex/reproduction) and some is actually "assigned" by society imposing sexist gender roles, which most feminists seek to get rid of. Whether a woman individually ever have a child or not, it is female human "bodies" through which our species reproduces, a life-and-death fact crucial to our economic, social, political and personal existence. It has nothing to do with "identity"—a subjective wishful-thinking notion similar to religious belief.

As for "personhood at conception," we need to base our liberation fight, including for the right to abortion, on material reality.  Everyone knows that a life in a pre-birth early stage is destroyed when a woman has an abortion, but we women's liberationists fight to put the living, already-born woman in control of her body and labor—as we try to unite to improve our working conditions.

Carol Hanisch

 

Re: Palestinian and Israeli Filmmakers Team Up To Create ‘No Other Land’

(posting on Portside Culture)

"No Other Land", an award-winning documentary about the dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank, still hasn’t found a distributor in the US.

Jose Luis Medina
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Labor History Bibliography, 2024  (Labor Online)

 

Labor Online editor Rosemary Fuerer has produced a compelling and useful bibliography of book titles in labor history that came out over 2024. 

This is my 12th year of creating the annual bibliography, and the first time it’s on-line. If you think a book published in 2024 should have been included, I can update this list. .

 

The People's Guide to Project 2025  (Democracy Forward)

 


 

Download here
 

Democracy Forward  
P.O. Box 34553
Washington, D.C. 20043

202-448-9090

 

Online Discussion “Resistance – The Axis and Beyond”  --  February 10  (MERIP - Middle East Research and Information Project)

 

On Wednesday we launched our Winter Issue, “Resistance – The Axis and Beyond” and today we’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be hosting an online discussion with four contributors on February 10, 2025 at 12PM Eastern Time (7PM in Palestine, 9AM Pacific Time). Please join me, issue editor Kevin Schwartz, MERIP Managing Editor Marya Hannun, and contributors Zachary Cuyler, Munira Khayyat, and Olmo Gölz for a discussion of energy politics and resistance in Palestine, the aftermath of Israel’s invasion of South Lebanon, the narrative of the oppressed in Iran’s sponsorship of the Axis of Resistance, and the dramatic spirit of campus protests against genocide in Gaza. 

You can register for the zoom discussion through the link below, and please share the event information listed here with your networks. We look forward to seeing you there!

Register here  

Middle East Research and Information Project  
30 Ardmore Ave.
PO Box 390
Ardmore, PA 19003

 

Enough! Lessons from the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights (1986-96)  --  Webinar  --  February 10  (Center for Political Education, Bay Resistance and Mujeres Unidas y Activas)

 


 

Feb 10, 2025 09:00 PM EDT

Zoom registration

Join Center for Political Education, Bay Resistance and Mujeres Unidas y Activas on Monday, February 10 from 6-7:30p to learn about the work of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights during 1986-1996.

What is the Coalition origin story? What were the political conditions? How did the Coalition of over 70 diverse organizations come together to protect, defend, resist, advocate?

Speakers will include:

They will share their successes, challenges, and lessons to help meet today's hostilities, along with opportunities to get involved in migrant justice defense now.

 

A Conversation with Angela Davis: Collective Struggle in Critical Times  --  Tacoma - Olympia, WA  --  February 21  (The Rachel Corrie Foundation, Evergreen Tacoma, Palestine Action South Sound, JVP Tacoma and Olympia Film Society)

 

i

Rachel Corrie Foundation, Olympia Film Society, and Evergreen Tacoma present: 

A Conversation with Angela Davis: Collective Struggle in Critical Times

February 21, 2025

6 p.m. doors open / 7 p.m. show

Capitol Theater
206 5th Ave. Olympia, WA

GA $28.25 & OFS $23.25
(available online and at the door)
$13.25 Student
(available for purchase at the door only)
All Prices Include Service Fees

Tickets:
https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?show=269297

From prison abolition to Palestine liberation, Angela Davis has been at the forefront of radical intellectual work and political activism for decades. Her public rise in the Black Power and Women of Color movements made her an outspoken advocate for racial, gender, and economic justice. She is the author of many books, and a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex.

This intergenerational conversation will draw inspiration from Dr. Davis’s ideas for abolition, international solidarity for Palestine, and collective movement building. As she has written, “We cannot go on as usual. . .We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.” 

Dr. Davis will be in conversation with Gilda Sheppard & Ranna.

Gilda Sheppard, Ph.D., is faculty emerita in sociology, cultural and media studies at Evergreen Tacoma, and taught at Washington prisons for over a decade. She is an international award-winning filmmaker, most recently for her documentary Since I Been Down, featuring the Black Prisoner Caucus and their liberation education program.  

Ranna is part of a Seattle-based grassroots collective of Palestinian and SWANA feminists that organizes at the intersection of gender justice and anti-imperialism. As a member of the diaspora, she continues to fight for the liberation of Palestine through building education and community in Seattle. 

Sponsors: The Rachel Corrie Foundation, Evergreen Tacoma, Palestine Action South Sound, JVP Tacoma and Olympia Film Society.

Source URL: https://portside.org/2025-02-06/tidbits-feb6-reader-comments-reader-comments-dictatorial-unconstitutional-power-grab