WELCOME
TO THE EVENING SHADE
A SANCTUARY OF SANITY AFTER A LONG HARD DAY OF FIGHTING FASCISM
YOU WILL FIND in the DIARIES a LOT of POLITICS
(Or NOT As the CASE MAY BE)
THE PERSON who MAKES the FIRST COMMENT WILL GET TWO CRITTERS
EVERY PERSON WHO COMMENTS WILL GET A CRITTER
RULES IN THE DIARY
WHEN YOU FIND SOMETHING in the DIARY that you LIKE
YOU CAN REPOST IT AS COMMENT in the DIARY
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Thank You Harry Dunn!
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Today May 15th is Peace Officers Memorial Day. Statements like this are inflammatory, disrespectful and flat out lies. Not only did you betray law enforcement, but you sided with people who attacked us. You don't support law enforcement, you are are a criminal.
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— Harry Dunn (@libradunn1.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 7:56 AM
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Thanks to Seraph for pointing this out last night.
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Just important to note: if Trump pardons Chauvin, he will be picked up from Federal prison by Minnesota law enforcement who will escort him to a Minnesota prison to serve the rest of his 22-1/2 yr state conviction that Trump cannot touch.
That’s not, tho, to say that a pardon here is irrelevant.
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— John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 8:41 PM
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Trump’s message, over and over, is that the police should face absolutely no accountability for acts of brutal violence.
State convictions keep pardons at bay, but they cannot block the political costs of such brutal, inhumane, monstrous rhetoric
— John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 8:41 PM
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Is Josh Hawley that stoopid? Or does he just think the rest of us are?
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Our allies for a century all hate us, but at least the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar appreciate how easy it is to get what they want from our govt, and appear to enjoy our president’s willingness to trade US govt policy for personal enrichment. So we have some friends.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 6:51 PM
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Although they are stuck listening to him.
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The "Baby On Board" placard - chef's kiss!
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The credulity with which people are greeting these "deals" is absurd. These countries just say "We'll invest eleventy trillion dollars in the US!" to give Trump something he can claim as a victory. If 1/100th of it ever happens it'll be a shock. It's all fake.
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— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 4:14 AM
In case you have forgotten about some of FIDJT'S past deals. Trump’s promised ‘manufacturing miracle’ failed to materialize. (From 2024) wisconsinindependent.com/…
On May 9 President Joe Biden traveled to Racine, Wisconsin to announce a plan by Microsoft to build a $3.3 billion data center. The White House said that it expects the project to result in 2,300 unionized construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs in the area.
The site selected by Microsoft is the same site where, in 2017, then-President Donald Trump announced a $10 billion investment by Foxconn for a manufacturing facility. By 2021, Foxconn abandoned most of its plans and never delivered on promise to bring 13,000 new jobs.In his remarks at the ceremony, Biden chided Trump for his failure to deliver during his time in office.
“He and his administration promised a $10 billion investment by Foxconn to build a new manufacturing complex and create 13,000 new jobs. In fact, he came here with your senator, Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the ‘eighth wonder of the world,” Biden said.
“Look what happened. They dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it.”
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It's all about the grift.
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This project in Serbia, slated to be built as a result of concession by gov of Serbia, is one of at least four Trump projects that involve foreign governments: Oman, United Arab Emirates & Qatar also. A US commander in chief as he and family are profit-seeking foreign government deal makers
— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) May 14, 2025 at 7:18 PM
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This site where the Trump International Hotel is slated to be built is the exact location that Donald J. Trump first proposed building a hotel before he was first elected president.
By Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (from March 2024)
nyti.ms/4j7v1O2
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— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) May 14, 2025 at 7:38 PM
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JUST POSTED:
Trump-Kushner Hotel Project in Serbia Hits a Snag: Alleged Forgery
Serbian authorities say an official admitted to forging a document allowing a protected site in Belgrade to be demolished and replaced with a Trump hotel.
Fate of project is now up in the air.
nyti.ms/3YLwORG
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— Eric Lipton NYT (@ericlipton.nytimes.com) May 14, 2025 at 7:06 PM
From the article. www.nytimes.com/...
The Trump family’s $500 million luxury hotel project in Serbia, slated to be built on the site of a bombed-out Defense Ministry building, has run into an embarrassing complication. A key document the Serbian government has relied on to deliver this deal was forged, officials there said this week.
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, and his business partners plan to build a luxury residential and commercial complex on the site of the long-vacant compound that is slated to include a Trump International Hotel, the first in Europe.
The leader of the Serbian agency charged with protecting cultural monuments admitted to the authorities that he had forged a government document allowing the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense headquarters in Belgrade to be demolished and replaced with the Trump hotel.
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Elsewhere,
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I was going to summarize the article but there's too much. Nearly every aspect of rural life is being hindered by Trump's policies. Schools, farmers, coal, tourism, broadband and so on.
Everything is more expensive, less safe, no longer active, understaffed and underfunded.
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— lakecounty1975 (@lakecounty1975.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 7:46 AM
From the article. The white rural reckoning. Trump is betraying the very voters who put him back in power. www.publicnotice.co/…
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More than 100 days into his second term, however, Trump’s policies are starting to wreak havoc on the very rural white citizens who have been his most loyal geo-demographic voting base. If they voted for Trump last year hoping he’d make their lives better, they’re quickly finding out they made a mistake.
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[lots of detail and specific examples]
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A stunning PBS/NPR/Marist poll released earlier this month showed Trump’s support in rural America since taking office cratering. His February approval rating of 59 percent — a figure that includes both Trump-loving white rural citizens and far less supportive non-white rural citizens — fell 19 points to just 40 percent.
Given the limited number of rural residents in all but the biggest national surveys, that poll could be an outlier. But it suggests doubts may be emerging in the places where Trump got his strongest support — and which are now being punished for believing that he actually cared about them.
It took three presidential election cycles, but perhaps rural Americans are beginning to realize that Making America Great Again is only going to make their lives far worse.
I encourage you to read the whole thing,
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Moar on that big, beautiful budget bill.
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Suozzi: They’re claiming the cuts will pay for themselves. But they won’t. And how do we know that? Because Republicans are putting an increase in the debt ceiling into this bill—allowing the president to borrow $4 trillion.
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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 11:30 AM
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Rand Paul on the reconciliation bill: "The problem is it's asking conservatives like myself to raise the debt ceiling $5 trillion. That's historic. Nobody has ever raised the debt ceiling that much ... where are the cuts? If the cuts are real why are we gonna borrow $5 trillion?"
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 15, 2025 at 10:18 AM
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From the SC Birthright Citizenship hearing.
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Justice Jackson pushes back on Team Trump: English common law isn't relevant because the U.S. doesn't have a king.
"The fact that courts back in the English Chancery couldn't enjoin the king, I think is not analogous or indicative of our system. The executive is supposed to be bound by the law."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 8:50 AM
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Sotomayor notes that barring nationwide injunctions, as the Trump admin asks, would mean that courts would be powerless to stop a "clearly, indisputably unconstitutional act, taking every gun from every citizen."
"We couldn’t stop that?"
— Adam Klasfeld (@klasfeldreports.com) May 15, 2025 at 7:53 AM
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Why on Earth did the Supreme Court decide to tackle the issue of nationwide injunctions—an important issue about the scope of judicial power—on a Trump administration policy that's so grotesquely unconstitutional?
They should've just left it alone—let lower courts destroy it slowly. What a show.
— Cristian Farias (@cristianfarias.com) May 15, 2025 at 7:40 AM
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This is a really good article explaining what this is really all about. The Birthright Citizenship Cases. The justices won’t decide whether a Trump proclamation stripping birthright citizenship is lawful. But they could decide to make it far harder to challenge. statuskuo.substack.com/…
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Still, lawyers on the far right, led by John Eastman of the Claremont Institute (yes, that John Eastman, who wrote the January 6 coup memo and is facing disbarment and state indictments over it) still believe we can and should revisit the question. And today, SCOTUS is set to review a set of consolidated birthright citizenship cases, each of which, unsurprisingly, went against the Trump administration.
So why take up these new cases at all? Should we be freaking out that SCOTUS is even talking about efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship?
We can breathe a bit easier knowing that this Supreme Court isn’t actually considering whether to eliminate it. The government appealed these adverse rulings on a far more limited question by launching a collateral attack upon nationwide injunctions. It is using these cases as a way to bring that question before the justices.
In a nutshell, the Trump administration is sick of single judges doing their constitutionally assigned jobs and putting a stop to its worst excesses. So it’s trying to weaken the power of the judiciary by limiting how far the rulings of federal judges can go by asking the Supreme Court to strip them of their power to issue nationwide injunctions.
This puts us into some deep legal weeds, so let me try to hack through them for you.
Although they're just fine if they want to say, judge shop to ban abortions or mifepristone...
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This is a really good gift article from Judge Luttig in The Atlantic.
The End of Rule of Law in America. The 47th president seems to wish he were king—and he is willing to destroy what is precious about this country to get what he wants. www.theatlantic.com/…
The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
Donald Trump seems also not to understand John Adams’s fundamental observation about the new nation that came into the world that same year. Just last month, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the president in the Oval Office, “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?” To which the president replied: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”
When the interviewer pointed to the portrait, Trump asked: “We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we’re a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn’t agree with it 100 percent. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”
Read the rest of Judge Luttig's takedown. It's long, brutal and good.
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Follow this guy, Michael de Adder. He's good and deserves some pub. If the pic is cut off for you, click it to see the whole thing.
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Moar good news!
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Have I mentioned how much I love, respect and admire Bruce Springsteen? Last night, in Manchester, UK.
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Evening Shade Seekers! Happy International Kangaroo Mother Care Awareness Day!
Oh, wait.
Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is a simple method of care for low birth weight infants that includes early and prolonged skin-to-skin contact with the mother (or a substitute caregiver) and exclusive & frequent breastfeeding. However, KMC should not be confused with routine skin-to-skin care at birth.
But care for Kangaroo kids is important too,
Happy International Conscientious Objectors Day! Here's a doggo doing his part.
Happy National Bring Someone Flowers Day!
Happy National Chocolate Chip Day! Or carob chips for critters.
Happy National Nylon Stocking Day! I know how miserable they feel!
AND Happy National Notebook Day!
Tomorrow is National Mimosa Day and National Pizza Party Day. Sounds like a great way to celebrate TGIF!
