Stop Elon Musk from stealing the Wisconsin Supreme Court race!

Sunday Dose of Democracy:

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Musk throws full temper tantrum on national TV
Elon Musk hit a new pathetic low when he went on Fox News to complain about "huge jerk" Tim Walz for making fun of Tesla's plummeting stock price at one of his town halls. "What an evil thing to do! Who derieves joy from that?" whined Musk. Do you want to talk about "evil things," Elon Musk? You cut off all medicine and food aid to thousands of starving people across the world, killing children. You robbed the livelihood from tens of thousands of hard-working public servants and laughed about it. You're currently sabotaging Social Security to ensure that our seniors can't afford their food or medication. You turned one of the biggest social media sites in the world into a neo-Nazi propaganda mill. You are actively trying to subvert democracy and buy an election by handing out money to voters in Wisconsin. And we're supposed to feel sorry for you because the stock price of the company you bought went down? BOO FREAKING HOO.

Take Action: Support federal workers defying unlawful orders from Trump!

The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide
Moira Donegan, The Guardian: "The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building. In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face. She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?” The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by ICE agents. Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant [an] op-ed. It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can."

Take Action: Denounce Trump's attempts to criminalize protesting!

Elon Musk drops money bomb on critical state Supreme Court race
WisDems: There’s a must-win state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin on April 1st — and Elon Musk has dropped TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars in an attempt to steal back the court for Republicans and put anti-abortion extremist Brad Schimel into power. Wisconsin is one of the most important swing states in the country and the integrity of our future elections is at serious risk if the GOP retakes control of the state’s highest court. Will you make a donation to Wisconsin Democrats and help stop Elon from buying ANOTHER election with his dark money?

Welcome to the pro-death administration
Liza Featherstone, The New Republic"Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far-right elite occurred in April 2020, just a month into a pandemic that would ultimately become a mass extinction event, killing more than seven million people worldwide. Condemning public health restrictions, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “There are more important things than living.” Patrick, who has proudly stood by that ghoulish statement, meant that the government had a higher obligation to keep the capitalist economy moving than to save any of its citizens from premature death. This sounded shocking to many people at the time, but it’s a philosophy that Trump, Musk, DOGE, and company have now fully embraced. Contemporary conservativism has largely jettisoned the notion of a government’s 'duty to protect' its citizens, a phrase that goes back to the Reconstruction era. But never has the rejection of the 'duty to protect' found such vivid and chilling expression as it has in Trump’s second term. The Trump–Musk administration has morbidly committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda. Let’s take fatal illnesses. On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he was cutting 10,000 HHS employees, including those tasked with responding to disease outbreaks. (Another 10,000 employees already took “voluntary” buyouts.) Agencies affected by those cuts include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which will lose an estimated 18 percent of its staff—the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Adminstration, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, bird flu rages among the nation’s poultry and experts fear that it could turn into a deadly human pandemic. Yet the Trump administration has not even staffed the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy...Speaking of deadly diseases, this administration seems to have a special vendetta against cancer research, a priority that has long enjoyed bipartisan popularity. Trump–Musk cuts have abruptly ended lifesaving research supported by the Defense Health Research Consortium on pancreatic, kidney, and lung cancers and left much other cancer research—and cancer care centers—in the lurch. Nuclear war—or some kind of nuclear disaster—is likewise becoming an increasingly alarming possibility, with Musk’s firings and buyouts also hammering the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear weaponry. This seeming indifference to the risk of mass extinction also sheds light on this administration’s catastrophically destructive approach to climate policy: It’s not that they are climate denialists, or foolish yokels who don’t “believe in science.” Instead, perhaps Trump and Musk simply don’t care if any of us live or die. Perhaps that’s why they are working to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, exit the Paris treaty, and undo the Biden administration’s best climate policies. This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would be eliminated. As with so many of these changes, it’s not clear that the administration has the authority to do that. But given the increase in deadly climate disasters, from superstorms to wildfires, the effort to kill FEMA seems almost certain to also kill people."

Take Action: Tell Congress: Don't cut Medicaid EVER!

"Governor Hot Wheels"
Mike Brock, Notes from the Circus: "There is a particular kind of moral incoherence that has infected our political discourse—the inability to distinguish between rhetorical transgressions and substantive moral horrors. We're expected to react with identical outrage to a crude joke about a wheelchair and the systematic dehumanization of people being deported without due process, beaten, and stripped of dignity in actual detention facilities. This false equivalence serves power by equating superficial violations of decorum with profound violations of human rights. It demands that we chastise Rep. Jasmine Crockett for calling Greg Abbott 'Governor Hot Wheels' with the same moral fervor we would apply to condemning the horrors being inflicted on deportees in El Salvador—horrors that Abbott himself has championed and celebrated. Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And not all moral transgressions carry equal weight. To be clear: mocking someone's disability is inappropriate and beneath the dignity of public discourse. Yet one cannot help but notice the striking hypocrisy in how the same right-wing voices now screaming about Crockett's indignity have built an entire political aesthetic around cartoonish hypermasculinity, raw physical strength, and disdain for perceived weakness. The same movement that produces endless memes of Trump as a muscled strongman, that obsesses over “alpha” masculinity, that mocks political opponents as 'weak' or 'low energy,' suddenly discovers a commitment to dignity and respect when a Democrat makes a tasteless joke about a Republican's disability. This selective outrage reveals the fundamental insincerity of their moral position. It's not about protecting human dignity; it's about weaponizing the language of dignity selectively against political opponents. The same media ecosystem that breathlessly reports on Crockett's rhetorical transgression has largely normalized the ritualized dehumanization happening under Abbott's watch. The same Republican politicians expressing outrage at Crockett's language have remained conspicuously silent about the suffering their policies create. And the same public that demands perfect decorum from their opponents is often willing to overlook grotesque cruelty when it's wrapped in the language of security or law and order."

Deb Haaland vows to protect us from Trump and his billionaire allies
Deb Haaland for Governor: Deb Haaland has fiercely fought for justice and delivered results for working people throughout her life, be it as an organizer, from the halls of Congress, or as Secretary of the Department of the Interior. She will always refuse to sit idly by while Trump and his un-elected billionaire allies unleash chaos across the country and give polluters free rein to destroy our pristine wilderness. We can help Deb fight back against Trump by electing her to the governor’s office in New Mexico. Will you chip in to help this fierce public servant answer the call to service once again?