Demand the GOP repeal Trump’s catastrophic Medicaid cuts before it's too late!xx

Sunday Dose of Democracy:

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Fox anchor drops bombshell anti-Trump news
Fox LA anchor Elex Michaelson joins Brian Tyler Cohen to discuss the newly drawn Democratic maps that would add another five seats to the Democratic caucus, canceling out the five that could potentially be added by the Texas GOP's redistricting...and Republicans are FURIOUS.

Take Action: Stop Trump’s misuse of the National Guard!

Trump’s DC takeover is a move of staggering hypocrisy
Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian: "One of most violent days in the history of Washington DC, was 6 January 2021, and the instigator was Donald J. Trump, who this week has endeavored to seize control of the nation’s capital, after reports that a former employee of the “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) was assaulted in the city. In a sense the new event echoes the old; both are illegitimate power grabs made on the basis of lies. In 2021 it was a lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election; in the summer of 2025 it’s lies about crime levels. Reliable sources – including the Biden Department of Justice in January – have noted that violent crime there is at a 30-year low. Five people died as a result of that 2021 attack on Congress, and dozens of law enforcement officers were injured, some gravely, by the mob Trump incited. On his first day in office in 2025 he pardoned 1,500 of the convicted criminals who stormed the capital, some of whom went on to commit more crimes. The hypocrisy is obvious, or it would be if most discourse about contemporary events wasn’t so contemporary that events before last month get left out. Of course hypocrisy and double standards are a key element of the rightwing commitment to inequality, and their violence imposes their version of order, even when it breaks bones and the law. As Wilhoit’s law famously put it: 'Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.' The former Doge employee who was attacked is 19-year-old Edward Coristine, AKA Big Balls. As long as we’re talking about violence, this spring the medical journal the Lancet estimated that Doge’s dismantling of USAid could result in more than 14m deaths, a third of them children, by 2030. When it comes to sheer numbers, that’s like killing everyone in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, or if you prefer everyone in Denmark, Norway and Estonia, but these deaths from disease, malnutrition and hunger will be largely out of sight for most Americans. Of course there’s been a lot of direct violence by the Trump administration on display in the United States this year too, including mothers dragged away from their children by heavily armed men in masks and immigrants brutalized in gulags in El Salvador. The attempt to take over the capital fits with rightwing and authoritarian agendas in so many ways. Modern conservatives love to hate cities because cities are places where diversity and inclusion thrive, where immigrants, people of many ethnicities, queer and trans people, nonconformists, bohemians, independent women and progressives tend to concentrate. A political map of the US mostly shows an archipelago of blue islands in a sea of red, and those islands are blue because they’re also Democratic strongholds. They are threats to the right electorally and because they are hotbeds of tolerance and of cultural, religious, racial and sexual diversity, and most have high immigrant populations. By flourishing, they disprove the rightwing theory that if these things are permitted all hell will break loose. But it is more fun for the right to pretend that these cities are dangerous because they are cesspits of crime and depravity. Authoritarians are at war with cities because they are at war with our rights and our diversity. It behooves us all to defend them – cities, rights, diversity, including by fending off the lies and propaganda that are themselves weapons in this war. And of course Trump is concocting a drama in DC, with the national guard being turned into an army of extras, because, speaking of violent crime, he would like us to really stop talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files and his long and close association with that child trafficker and rapist."

Take Action: Stop Trump's attacks on Media Matters for America!

Freshman Democrat under ATTACK for standing up to the GOP
Nellie Pou for Congress: Nellie Pou has only been in Congress a few months, but she’s already facing a barrage of GOP attacks for voting against their destructive budget bill that would hand out huge tax breaks to the wealthy while RAISING taxes on working families. Just a few days ago, the NRCC issued an error-filled press release written by Big Business lobbyists that falsely smeared her with lies. She’s one of the few Democrats to win her seat in a county that voted for Trump; she’s going to need all the help she can get if we want to protect the MUST-HOLD seat and retake Congress. Will you chip in to thank her for doing the right thing and helping her weather the storm against GOP attacks?

Pete Hegseth is creating a patriarchal Pentagon to fight domestic foes
Jeet Heer, The Nation: On August 7, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X a clip of a CNN segment featuring Doug Wilson, the pastor who cofounded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the extremist Christian nationalist sect that Hegseth joined in 2018. Hegseth added a catchphrase to the post that he learned from the church, 'All of Christ for All of Life.' In the video itself, Wilson and other CREC pastors affirm a theocratic and patriarchal vision of the world. Wilson tells CNN, 'I’d like to see the nation be a Christian nation, and I’d like to see the world be a Christian world.' Another CREC pastor calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which enshrines the right of women to vote, and a female parishioner supports the church’s teaching that wives must submit to their husbands. Hegseth’s religious faith is more than a personal matter since the church has such a far-reaching program for remaking the United States and the world. While Hegseth can’t overturn the 19th Amendment, he can reshape the Pentagon along patriarchal lines. As Amanda Marcotte noted in Salon, Wilson’s theology is grounded in the idea of female sexual subservience. In one famous passage from his book on marriage, Wilson suggests that sexual violence is women’s fault for not being submissive enough. '[T]he sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,' he writes. 'A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.' The alleged failure of women to submit, he continues, leads men to 'dream of being rapists,' deprived of the 'erotic necessity' found in women’s submission. In running the Pentagon, Hegseth has been a cultural warrior more concentrated on defeating liberalism than in fighting foreign wars. He has been especially focused on purging the military of transgender troops. Hegseth also believes that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have weakened the military’s war-making ability. He has assiduously blocked the promotion of officers he sees as opposed to his vision. Sometimes these officers are white men Hegseth views as hostile, but a strikingly large number are women and/or people of color. Hegseth grabbed on to Christian nationalist patriarchy as a solution to his personal failures. Now he is trying to impose that Christian nationalist patriarchy on the military. The logical outcome of this program is a military geared not to fighting military threats but to waging internal domestic war against the foes of Christian nationalism. Along with Trump, who is using the military as a personal army, Hegseth is paving the way for an authoritarian United States.

Take Action: Stop Trump's plot to steal the 2026 elections!

Putin won in Anchorage. Now Zelenskyy and Europe are in an even more perilous position
Rajan Menon, the Guardian: "Donald Trump portrays himself as a hard-nosed dealmaker. Yet in the run-up to Friday’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, his claim that the Russian leader held him in high regard and was therefore serious about ending the war in Ukraine sounded naive. Putin doesn’t let sentimentality shape his political and military decisions. Nor has he disavowed his longstanding claim to four Ukrainian provinces: Donetsk and Luhansk, which together comprise Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south. Despite Russia’s overwhelming numerical advantage in troops and weaponry, Putin occupies only one province, Luhansk, almost entirely. Yet he persists. In the days before his meeting with Putin, Trump said the Russian economy 'stinks' and that falling oil prices would cause Russia’s war to run aground. The war has certainly placed severe strains on Russia’s economy, including high inflation and interest rates, labour shortages and a lack of investment by private businesses. Earnings from oil sales, a key source of state income, have also shrunk by 18% this year due to falling prices. There has even been talk of a recession. But these pressures have not prompted Putin to reassess his war plans. He ignored Trump’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire, which Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accepted right away. Likewise, he was unfazed by Trump’s threats to impose additional sanctions – with 'severe consequences,' as he put it just before the summit – if Russia did not relent. Trump returned from Anchorage empty-handed for other reasons. Successful summits require painstaking advance work by leaders’ subordinates; this one was arranged in haste. Given the rush, it was unsurprising that the Anchorage talks ended hours ahead of time. (The working lunch the two delegations were to have was cancelled.) During his post-summit press conference, Trump gamely praised Putin’s goodwill and said that they had agreed on 'many points' during discussions that he described as 'productive.' Yet he failed to identify a single point of agreement and, atypically, didn’t stay to answer reporters’ questions. Putin came out ahead in Anchorage. He didn’t agree to Trump’s pet proposal for a ceasefire. It was Trump who ended up accepting Putin’s position that a ceasefire must be preceded by a comprehensive peace agreement that addresses the “root causes” of the war. Putin did show some flexibility by agreeing to freeze the frontline if Ukraine were to withdraw from Donetsk and Luhansk, and thus the entire Donbas, enabling Russia to acquire lands it has failed to conquer despite more than 40 months of fighting. Yet this offer could prove to be a trap. If Zelenskyy, who arrives in Washington for talks with Trump on Monday, refuses to do this, Putin may be able to look on as Trump tries to coerce the Ukrainian leader, forcing Europe to take sides. If Trump fails, Putin can paint Zelenskyy as the real obstacle to peace."

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