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Democrats Could Learn Something from Former NFL Punter Chris KluweChris Kluwe's strategic protest shows exactly what's missing from the current resistance to authoritarianism.... Chris Kluwe, who has long been outspoken about social issues, got himself arrested at a city council meeting while protesting a proposed "MAGA" plaque for the local library.But before he did, he delivered a searing indictment of what MAGA really means: "MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is."Then he did something crucial: He got arrested.Peacefully.Deliberately.And most importantly, strategically.He made sure his arrest would be theatrical without being violent. And guess what? It worked. The story got picked up everywhere from the LA Times to Sports Illustrated to Fox News. His message reached millions of people...
Speak Now or Forever Lose Your PeaceFinal Dispatch from NATO, Brussels...we can resist the Trump/Putin plan. My hope is that in the coming months, nations like Europe, Australia, Japan, Latin America, and Canada can work together to oppose the Trump gang. Trump is being reckless on so many fronts, and he will trip and fall. And this will be the opportunity in the United States to begin pushing back.But my advice to fellow Canadians and our international allies is that we can’t wait or hope for America to get its act together. The resistance must start now.I am hoping that a coalition from around the world will join Canada. But if not, we will stand on our own. Canadians will never kiss the gangster ring, no matter how hard the fight.
You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 21, 2025
Never has a win felt this good.
— George Stroumboulopoulos 🐺 (@strombo) February 21, 2025
Lol yup 😂
— QuickDickMcDick 🇨🇦 (@QuickDickMcDick) February 21, 2025
More than just a hockey game:View on Threads
Cue the pearl-clutching -- "Ohhh, she changed the LYRICS!"View on Threads
Scorch!View on Threads
Edited because I just saw this one, too:View on Threads
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Can’t spell tariffs without FFS.
— Jen The Feisty Librarian (@Feisty_Waters) February 12, 2025
Protests ramp up across the country as rage builds against Trump and Musk...The demonstrations, called “No Kings on Presidents Day” or “No Kings Day,” are led by 50501, an online grassroots activist group that started on Reddit. The group initially stood for “50 protests, 50 states, one day,” but it has morphed into “50 protests, 50 states, one movement.”The No Kings Day protest was the group's second wave of anti-Trump and Musk demonstrations. The first nationwide protests took place on Feb. 5 across state capitols. The movement focused on the White House’s dismantling of government agencies and threatened prosecution for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. It explicitly targets Musk’s hostile takeover of sensitive personal data in the U.S. government.This time, 50501 partnered with Political Revolution to list nearly 80 events on its website. This allowed users to find a protest happening near them to attend. The group is a “leaderless” movement, which encourages others to create their own activist groups in their circles. According to a press release, 50501 states that the coalition was created to demand “justice,” “transparency,” and “accountability” to “uphold the Constitution” and end Trump and Musk’s “executive overreach.”.... This comes as another group of protesters targeted Tesla dealerships over the weekend. Musk’s Tesla sales have been in an unprecedented decline since he got on the right-wing political scene in support of MAGA. ...
Roundup: Paying $85,000 for the privilege of being humiliatedAs if that “big” meeting the premiers had with those mid-level White House officials who ended up trolling and humiliating them couldn’t get any worse, well, it did. It turns out, they paid a lobbyist connected with Don Jr. $85,000 to arrange said meeting, where they didn’t get properly briefed, and froze out the Canadian ambassador (who had a meeting in the White House with actual senior officials earlier that day) ...I’m not sure that I can stress this enough—premiers have absolutely no business trying to conduct foreign negotiations. The federal government not only has been handling the situation, but they have told the premiers not to constantly react to everything coming from the Trump administration because it’s chaotic and incoherent, and then they went and tried to get their own meetings? ...I’m also going to point a finger at the media for emboldening these premiers because they keep saying things like “there’s a vacuum of leadership” at the federal level and so on, which is not the case. Trudeau is still on the job, even if he’s on his way out. Ministers are still doing their jobs. We have an ambassador in Washington doing her job. They have explicitly told the media that they are not going to react to everything for very good reason. There is no actual need for the premiers to step in and start freelancing. Doug Ford’s “Captain Canada” shtick was him positioning himself before an election, and thanks to uncritical media coverage, waaaaaaaay too many people fell for it. But the media needs people to light their hair on fire at every utterance, and the premiers have been only too happy to step in and fill that role...
Historian Craig Baird is doing outstanding work:Elizabeth May: "This is what you get: free health care – universal free health care....Those gun laws that your Congress is too afraid to pass because of the national gun lobby. We already got our strict gun laws." pic.twitter.com/f6edx09Ec9
— PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) February 13, 2025
I'm sharing an image a day to celebrate the vibrant and unique culture and history of Canada.
— Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx (@CraigBaird) February 14, 2025
Today, it is acclaimed Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis in her Nova Scotia home in 1965. #ProudlyCanadian
📸Bob Brooks pic.twitter.com/XSkrjgxRxu
Mark Carney was an “invaluable support” to Jim Flaherty, who praised him relentlessly at their joint press conference to announce Mark’s move in 2012
— Evan Scrimshaw (@EScrimshaw) February 12, 2025
This is crass bullshit https://t.co/QhL31yYfPX
This is what is happening across all of Canada right now!
— JustMePam (@PamelaApostolo1) February 12, 2025
🇨🇦😊 pic.twitter.com/VgtW7rJvVU
The internet brightens the day, every day.
— Beefeater (@Beefeater_Fella) February 11, 2025
pic.twitter.com/TKwcb8pRya
Canada‘s biggest aluminum-producing province with a surprising threat to the U.S.: You want to tariff us? Okay. Maybe we’ll add to it with a surtax. And sell that aluminum elsewhere. And you’ll see who needs whom. https://t.co/zTAqJ2CvQr
— Alexander Panetta (@Alex_Panetta) February 13, 2025
That sound you hear is Canada cutting off intelligence sharing with The US. https://t.co/Ik5mIS6Jlc
— Dean Blundell🇨🇦 (@ItsDeanBlundell) February 12, 2025
This sentence from @davidfrum captures perfectly why it’s so difficult to write about almost anything related to Trump:
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 7, 2025
“The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.”
The Power of the BoycottCanadians Tell Trump To Stuff It...As a tool of resistance, the boycott has a very long tradition. What makes the Canada 2025 boycott unique is that no one organized it. There are no leaders. There is no strategic team looking to use it as a negotiating tool. This resistance campaign has sprung from the determination of ordinary people to resist tyranny.The boycott of products, alcohol, and vacation destinations is getting stronger all the time....Guys like Trump believe that intimidation and threats are the way of the world. It is the ideology of this new age of gangsterism. But what makes the power of the Canadian boycott unbeatable is that the more Trump threatens, the more people dig in. And it is starting to cause serious economic pain.As I have said before, the MAGA crowd might love chaos, but capitalism doesn’t.Once the impacts of the bourbon boycott, the grocery store actions and the cancelled travel bookings begin to pile up, you are going to see a lot of American businesses calling out the predator-in-chief.As for Canada? Keep the boycott going. We will last one day longer and be one day stronger than the creeper in Washington.
You Got a Friend in MeOr, the US National Security Adviser knows Canada like the back of his…?...It now turns out that [National Security Adviser Republican congressman] Mike Waltz is an expert on Canadian public attitudes. He appeared on the US NBC News’ program, “Meet the Press,” on February 9, was asked about Trump’s annexationist remarks about Canada, and pressed about Prime Minister Trudeau’s comments at the recent business leaders’ conclave in Toronto. Waltz was reassuring, sort of —no plans for a military invasion of Canada. But then he went on to reveal his fulsome knowledge of Canada, saying he thinks that “the Canadian people, many of them, would love to join the United States.” This is clearly an evidence-free assertion, reportedly based on some random discussions with Canadian snowbirds in Florida (a flock that should rapidly thin itself, or maybe be asked rude questions by CBSA border officials on their post-winter return), or perhaps hangers on at Mar-a-Lago (you know who you are, Kevin).OK, we can laugh at nutty comments like this, and no doubt will need to get used to them. But the less reassuring aspect of Waltz’s Trump-mouthpiece remarks was his note about the reassertion of “American leadership” in the Western hemisphere. He told the NBC“that’s what we’re talking about, from Greenland, to Arctic security to the Panama canal coming back under the United States.”...Canada will have to vigorously resist, at every turn, any such exercise of American “leadership,” especially in the Arctic.... You can’t play Canadian nice with these guys.
"Maybe us barbers have been wrong all these years to rely on ideas which have failed us. Maybe we should study the human body intently and make our observations on fact, not superstition. Perhaps this scientific method could extend to other disciplines, such as architecture, engineering, navigation. We may discover a bright new age... a Renaissance, if you will....NAAAH!"
Not only Canada, President Fuckface von Clownstick has lost the respect of most of the Western World and beyond. Not that he had much respect to begin with.
— Bubbe Wokestein 💙🇪🇺 🇨🇦✡️ (@veggieto) February 5, 2025
NEWS IN PHOTO: Fresh off unifying Canadians, Trump unites entire planet against his "turn Gaza into a Trump resort" plan pic.twitter.com/Sr48eS7GfI
— The Beaverton (@TheBeaverton) February 5, 2025
WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COUP, DADDY?...We're in an all-out war to salvage what's left of America. The war can end one of two ways: with Donald Trump and his henchmen laying waste to our system of government, or with an effective fight on many fronts that pushes the totalitarians back, limits the damage they do, and begins the process of restoring what we had. If Trump's people win, it won't matter whether you chose this battle or that battle or a whole series of battles -- you'll be marked as a traitor. But if the good guys win, what people will remember is that you fought -- wherever and however you fought.This is the central battle of our times. One way or the other, the first sentence of every prominent political figure's obituary will tell what that person did or didn't do in either the glorious Trump Revolution or the traitorous Trump Rebellion....
What the Musk is Happening?It’s a catastrophe, but what kind of catastrophe?....Musk associates have been given access to the U.S. Treasury’s systems that control all federal payments, from grants to nonprofits to Social Security checks to salaries of federal workers.The potential for mischief here is immense. The courts may have told the Trump administration that it can’t freeze spending mandated by Congress, but Musk’s people, who haven’t shown much reverence for the law, might well just ignore the courts and not cut the checks.And they could go beyond cutting off programs the Musk/Trump administration doesn’t like. Imagine that you’re a federal contractor who has made campaign donations to Democrats; suddenly the government stops paying what it owes you and brushes off inquiries by saying that they’re working on the problem. Or you’re a federal employee who, according to somebody in your office who has a personal grievance, has expressed sympathy for DEI; somehow your regularly scheduled salary payments stop being deposited into your bank account. Or even imagine that you’re a retiree who canvassed for Kamala Harris, and for some reason your checks from Social Security stop coming.Don’t say they wouldn’t do such things. We’ve seen these people in action, and of course they would if they could.For the moment they probably can’t. The federal payments system is immensely complex, and like most government infrastructure has been financially squeezed for decades. So it’s cobbled together, much of it running on old hardware and even older software, kept functioning thanks to old hands and institutional memory. The 20-somethings Musk is deploying to take over, locking out those old hands and pushing aside the people who know how the system works, almost surely don’t understand enough to politicize payments right away.As Nathan Tankus, the go-to expert on these matters, says,I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL.For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)But this observation raises another concern. What if the Musk people — Muskovites? — try to muck with systems they don’t understand, believing that they’re super smart and can master everything with the help of a little AI? It’s not hard to imagine the whole federal payments system — including, by the way, servicing of federal debt — crashing.So much damage — to U.S. credibility, to the Constitution and the rule of law, and possibly even to the very functioning of the government. And Trump only took power 2 weeks ago.
...We all got up to danceOh, but we never got the chance'Cause the players tried to take the fieldThe marching band refused to yieldDo you recall what was revealedThe day the music died?*
