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Put Barber and the Tribal Canoe Journeys – a Tribute
Posted in History, Kindness, Obituaries, Social justice
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Skybridge proposal goes to City Council’s Transportation Committee today
The City Council’s transportation committee meets today at 9:30 AM. The second item on the agenda is a vote of approval for Skyline’s skybridge. Three residents are slated to give a brief supportive statement during the public comment period. If interested, the meeting can be viewed on the Seattle Channel (321 on Comcast and 721 on Wave). If approved, we hope that the vote for approval will go to the full City Council very soon.
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When anti-DEI becomes racist
Thanks to Bob P.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth just deleted the history of the “Go For Broke” 442nd Infantry Regiment from the Army website as part of their anti-DEI rampage to eliminate any mention of race or gender. (see update at the end of this article).
The 442nd was formed for Japanese-American heroes who believed in the Constitution so much that they volunteered to serve a nation that imprisoned their own families on the basis of race.
They were awarded 21 Medals of Honor, 4,000 Purple Hearts and 4,000 Bronze Stars for as they defeated Nazis, liberating Italy and France and freeing Jewish concentration camp survivors from a Dachau satellite camp.

The 442nd proved that American patriotism was not limited by race and creed – it belonged to all Americans who believe in our freedoms.
Ed note: From ChatGPT: There are several books about the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit composed mostly of Japanese American soldiers who fought in Italy and France during World War II. Some well-known books include:
“The Nisei Soldier: Historical Essays on World War II and the Korean War” by Edwin M. Nakasone
“Go for Broke: A Pictorial History of the Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442d Regimental Combat Team” by Chester Tanaka
“No No Boy” by John Okada (a novel that touches on Japanese American soldiers and internment)
“And Then There Were Eight: The Men of I Company 442nd Regimental Combat Team” by Suzanne Tarbell Cooper
“Honor Before Glory: The Epic World War II Story of the Japanese American GIs Who Rescued the Lost Battalion” by Scott McGaugh
Is book banning from the National Library of Congress next??
Update: Due to an outcry from many, the Army has restored the page on their website. The chaos and total weirdness of the anti-DEI continues. Let’s honor our differences, not try to ignore or erase them.
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Scam alert from MyGoodToGo
Thanks to Mary M. for yet another scam alert
SCAM ALERT: Good To Go! will not request payments on any websites but MyGoodToGo.com or send bills through texts. Do not click unknown links in emails or texts.
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Happy Birthday, Maine
March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”
He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.
Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.
They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.
But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.
The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.
There was also another powerful way in which the conditions of the state’s entry into the Union would affect American history. Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far distant slave owners, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.
And so they did.
In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.
Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. “I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,” he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln.
Lovejoy and Lincoln were also friends with another Maine man gone to Illinois. Elihu Washburne had been born in Livermore, Maine, in 1816, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. He was one of seven brothers, and one by one, his brothers had all left home, most of them to move west. Israel Washburn Jr., the oldest, stayed in Maine, but Cadwallader moved to Wisconsin, and William Drew would follow, going to Minnesota. (Elihu was the only brother who spelled his last name with an e).
Israel and Elihu were both serving in Congress in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West. Furious, Israel called a meeting of 30 congressmen in May to figure out how they could come together to stand against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. They met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson, of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, they left with one sole principle: to stop the Slave Power that was turning the government into an oligarchy.
The men scattered for the summer back to their homes across the North, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. In the fall, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates were sweeping into office—Cadwallader Washburn would be elected from Wisconsin in 1854 and Owen Lovejoy from Illinois in 1856—and they would, indeed, create a new political party: the Republicans. The new party took deep root in Maine, flipping the state from Democratic to Republican in 1856, the first time it fielded a presidential candidate.
In 1859, Abraham Lincoln would articulate an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans standing together against the oligarchs of slavery, and when he ran for president in 1860, he knew it was imperative that he get the momentum of Maine men on his side. In those days Maine voted for state and local offices in September, rather than November, so a party’s win in Maine could start a wave. “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” the saying went.
So Lincoln turned for his vice president to Hannibal Hamlin, who represented Maine in the Senate (and whose father had built the house in which the Washburns grew up). Lincoln won 62% of the vote in Maine in 1860, taking all eight of the state’s electoral votes, and went on to win the election. When he arrived in Washington quietly in late February to take office the following March, Elihu Washburne was at the railroad station to greet him.
I was not a great student in college. I liked learning, but not on someone else’s timetable. It was this story that woke me up and made me a scholar. I found it fascinating that a group of ordinary people from country towns who shared a fear that they were losing their democracy could figure out how to work together to reclaim it. Happy Birthday, Maine.
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Dr. King Holmes, UW global health chair and pioneer in STI study, dies

By Elise Takahama Seattle Times staff reporter
The title of his first book tells you a lot about the work and wit of Dr. King Holmes: “How To Have Intercourse Without Getting Screwed.”
“I wrote it for my kids,” Holmes said, with a grin, at a lecture in 2013.
That was his style — and, in a nutshell, what he spent nearly his entire professional life doing. In studying sexually transmitted infections at a time when research on the topic was almost nonexistent in the U.S., Holmes became a world-renowned pioneer in demystifying the field. And he was especially fond of teaching and mentoring younger learners, an expert at gently, yet persuasively, encouraging students to dream big.
Holmes was 87 when he died Sunday in Seattle. He had long been living with kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and was with his wife, family and loved ones in his last moments at Skyline Retirement Community on First Hill.
“He had this sort of indefatigable energy, and the ability to open up field after field,” said Dr. Larry Corey, former president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and a longtime friend and colleague of Holmes’.
“Global health became a mantra in Seattle,” Corey said this week. “And he was really one of the giants that got that started.”
Holmes was born Sept. 1, 1937, in Minnesota, and was known to friends, family and former co-workers as a visionary researcher, deep thinker and entertaining storyteller.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1959 and medical degree from Cornell in 1963. After finishing an internship in medicine at Vanderbilt, Holmes was off to Pearl Harbor, where he was based as an epidemiologist in the Navy Medical Corps.
While there, Holmes also earned a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Hawaii.
Although Holmes didn’t necessarily intend on devoting his career to STI research, his first Navy assignment was to address a gonorrhea epidemic that had become widespread among sailors stationed in the western Pacific.
“That’s where the need was,” said Dr. Hunter Handsfield, a University of Washington infectious disease professor and former mentee and longtime colleague of Holmes. “He then very quickly realized the need was everywhere. He saw the sexual revolution occurring around him.”
At the time, the field of STIs had long been ignored and underresearched in the U.S., according to infectious disease experts. Much more stigma existed around the topic, but Holmes could see these diseases were important to understand clinically.
“No one would talk about them,” said UW professor emeritus of infectious diseases and global health Sheila Lukehart, who met Holmes as a graduate student studying syphilis in 1977. “You couldn’t say ‘syphilis’ on the radio. And he worked hard to make this an academic field.”
In Hawaii, Holmes came up with the concept of prescribing a single dose of antibiotic to sailors as a preventive measure against gonorrhea after a sexual encounter, according to UW Medicine. Today, post-exposure prophylaxis against bacterial STIs with doxycycline, an approach called doxy-PEP, is endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s been adopted as the single most important new innovation in bacterial STI prevention in over five decades,” said Handsfield, who also served as director of Public Health — Seattle & King County’s STD control program for more than 25 years. “It’s out there because of initial work King did in the Navy.”
After his military service, Holmes completed his medical residency at UW. In 1969, he joined the UW School of Medicine faculty and later also held an appointment in epidemiology at the university’s School of Public Health.
In the early 1980s, Holmes became immersed in the response to the growing HIV epidemic, working with other leaders in the field such as Dr. Bob Wood, who was the director of King County’s HIV/AIDS program for over two decades.
In 1985, Holmes helped establish what’s become known as the Madison Clinic at Harborview Medical Center, which still treats and cares for people living with HIV. Four years later, he founded the UW Center for AIDS & STD, another hub that continues to provide patient care, research and training today.
On top of that, Holmes also served as chief of medicine at Harborview during this time, and continued to study other STIs including chlamydia, human papillomaviruses, genital herpes and Mycoplasma genitalium.
“Work was not work for him. He was happy to be at the office seven days a week,” said his wife, Virginia Gonzales, a retired clinical social worker who also spent her career in public health. The two met in Nepal while she was working on HIV response and he was on sabbatical in 1989.
Another high point in his career came with the creation of UW’s Department of Global Health in 2006, a partnership between the school’s medicine and public health departments that hadn’t been done before. Holmes was named the department’s first chair.
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Two pictures of similar times
Thanks to Bob P.
“On May 26, 1938, Nazi dignitaries gathered near Fallersleben in northern Germany to lay the foundation stone for the Volkswagen Works. The Führer himself was present, predicting that this Volkswagen… would be ‘a symbol of the National Socialist [Nazi] people’s community,'” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Fast forward to 2025

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Things to know about scams
Thanks to ChatGPT!
Ed note: To the below list from my inquiry to ChatGPT I’d add the following: don’t click on any link unless you know its a trusted source; check the email address of a sender which often shows a bogus address; beware of emails saying click here to hear a voice mail or click here to get a post office package sent to you that’s being held; don’t believe financial threatening emails saying your account has been hacked and you need to transfer money out to protect yourself. More ingenious scams will be no doubt be forthcoming. It’s sad but true that we need to be very distrustful when on the internet.
Scammers often target seniors because they may be more trusting, less familiar with modern scams, or have accumulated savings. Here are some common scams that seniors should be aware of and how to avoid them:
Common Scams Targeting Seniors
- Medicare & Health Insurance Scams
- Scammers pretend to be from Medicare or an insurance company, claiming the senior needs to verify or update their information.
- How to Avoid: Never share personal or financial information over the phone. Medicare will never call to ask for your personal details.
- Grandparent Scam
- The scammer pretends to be a grandchild in trouble (e.g., arrested, in an accident) and urgently asks for money.
- How to Avoid: Always verify the caller’s identity. Call the actual family member or another trusted person before sending money.
- Tech Support Scams
- A pop-up or caller claims to be from Microsoft, Apple, or another tech company, stating that the computer has a virus and needs remote access or payment to fix it.
- How to Avoid: Legitimate tech companies don’t make unsolicited calls. Never grant remote access to your computer.
- Sweepstakes & Lottery Scams
- Victims receive a call or email saying they’ve won a prize but must first pay fees or taxes to claim it.
- How to Avoid: If you didn’t enter a contest, you didn’t win. Real lotteries don’t require upfront payments.
- Romance Scams
- Scammers build online relationships with seniors to gain their trust and then ask for money for emergencies, travel, or investments.
- How to Avoid: Be cautious of online relationships where the person avoids meeting in real life and asks for money.
- Charity Scams
- Fake charities, especially after disasters, solicit donations from seniors.
- How to Avoid: Research charities before donating (check Charity Navigator or the BBB Wise Giving Alliance).
- Investment & Financial Scams
- Scammers offer “guaranteed” high-return investments, often in real estate, cryptocurrency, or gold.
- How to Avoid: Be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true offers. Consult a financial advisor before investing.
- IRS & Social Security Scams
- Scammers claim you owe back taxes or your Social Security benefits will be suspended unless you provide personal info or payment.
- How to Avoid: The IRS and Social Security Administration will never demand immediate payment or threaten arrest over the phone.
- Home Repair Scams
- Fraudsters offer low-cost home repairs, demand payment upfront, and disappear without doing the work.
- How to Avoid: Hire only licensed and verified contractors. Never pay in full upfront.
- Bank Impersonation Scams
- Scammers pose as bank representatives asking for account details to fix a security breach.
- How to Avoid: Banks never ask for sensitive info via phone, email, or text. Contact your bank directly if unsure.
Tips to Avoid Scams
✅ Be skeptical of unsolicited calls, emails, or texts.
✅ Never give personal information (Social Security, bank details, Medicare number) to unknown callers.
✅ Verify stories before sending money.
✅ Use strong passwords and enable two-factor authentication on accounts.
✅ Talk to a trusted friend or family member before making financial decisions.
✅ Report scams to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) at reportfraud.ftc.gov or call 1-877-FTC-HELP.
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Putting a Tesla to work
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NIH to ax grants on vaccine hesitancy, mRNA vaccines
Thanks to Ed M.
A UW colleague who has published multiple studies on immunization hesitancy received this notice from NIH today:
[All your] federally funded vaccine research projects terminated today effective immediately.
In the termination letter, the NIH says this:
“This award no longer effectuates agency priorities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment. NIH is obligated to carefully steward grant awards to ensure taxpayer dollars are used in ways that benefit the American people and improve their quality of life. Your project does not satisfy these criteria.”
Stunning to read those words. Read more here.
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AI Without Borders: Transforming Global Health Care
Thanks to Ann M.
NEJM AI PRESENTS |
Live Virtual Event AI Without Borders: Transforming Global Health Care April 9, 2025 / 12:00 – 1:15 PM ET REGISTER FOR EVENT |
• Where AI fills care gaps and where hurdles like regulation, health literacy, and workforce shortages slow progress. • Actionable insights on deploying AI in lower-resource settings and what can be learned from these innovative approaches. • Opportunities to collaborate and help accelerate implementation to positively impact global health. Don’t miss this chance to understand global trends in AI-driven clinical care and how they can shape your strategy. REGISTER NOW Featured speakers for this event ![]() ![]() Puneet Khanna, MBBS, MD, FAGE All India Institute of Medical Sciences ![]() ![]() ![]() Alex Ng, MPH, MBChB, BHB, PGDipHealInf Tencent Healthcare ![]() |
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Wall Street Journal blasts “…sometime self-serving sovereign senators turned servile sycophants who are supposed to be making our laws”
The conservative media is beginning to see the fruits of Trump’s promises. Will the “servile sycophants” who are supposed to serve our nation’s citizens listen?
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Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns
‘Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you.’ By Claude Malhuret in The Atlantic (thanks to Mary Jane F.)

March 8, 2025, 7 AM
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, the French senator Claude Malhuret gave a powerful speech about the implications for Europe of the reversal of American policy toward Ukraine. Malhuret is the former mayor of the town of Vichy as well as a doctor and an epidemiologist, and the former head of Doctors Without Borders. He is a member of the center-right Horizons party representing the district of Allier. The speech, whose dark urgency and stark rhetorical force made it a social-media sensation, follows, translated and adapted by The Atlantic.
Updated at 7:00 AM ET on March 8, 2025
Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.
The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.
This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.
Read: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days
I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.
Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.
And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.
What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.
Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.
At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”
We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.
With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.
The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.
This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.
Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.
Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.
Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb. The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.
Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
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The Dancing Nana – let’s dance, at 100!
Thanks to Tim B.
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Comments from a center-right French politician
Thanks to Bob P.
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Telephone Town Hall
Thanks to Rick B and Mary Jane F.
You’re Invited: March 11th Telephone Town Hall!
people Update from Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal ![]() ![]() U.S. Representative (WA-07) ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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News About Inspiring Women
Thanks to Pam P.
19 Ways to Celebrate International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day is an annual celebration of the contributions of women around the world. We’ve put together the best ideas to help you celebrate on March 8th.
54 Best Empowering Women’s History Month Quotes
To honor this important month, we’ve compiled a list of inspiring quotes from influential women who have made their mark on the world.
32 Activities To Celebrate Women’s History Month
Women’s History Month is a month-long celebration that kicks off on March 1st. We’ve put together the best ideas and activities to help you meaningfully celebrate it…
Tim Walz’s daughter, Hope Walz: On getting through Inauguration Day, building community & going outside
Hope Walz gives an exclusive interview, sharing advice for staying optimistic, clues into her future, and heartfelt stories about her dad.
Good News This Week: February 15, 2025 – Flowers, Quilts, & Chefs
Your weekly roundup of the best good news worth celebrating…
Dylan Mulvaney has a new, virtual LGBTQ+ book club: ‘For the girls, gays, and theys like me’
The book club will launch on January 1 in partnership with RuPaul’s Allstora.
Nonprofit leader sleeps on UK streets for 10 nights to help homeless: ‘We need to do so much more for women’
Lianne Kirkman, the founder of The Esther Project, slept on the streets for 10 nights in 10 different cities.
Enduring years of endometriosis pain, this engineer developed an app to help others like her
The Endo45 app aims to help women reduce pain, improve mood, navigate treatment, and more.
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is rewilding South America’s borders
Leading the national park development efforts at Tompkins Conservation, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins has a new plan to protect wildlife in South America.
Sheryl Lee Ralph honored as LGBTQ+ Advocate of the Year: ‘She is a long-time activist’
The Broadway-turned-TV star was honored for over 30 years of efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic and uplift marginalized communities.
Telehealth abortion provider now accepts Medicaid, addressing access gaps for low-income patients in Illinois
Hey Jane, a telemedicine provider that helps people access medication abortion care, will now be covered by Medicaid in Illinois.
Meet the newest Barbie: Maria Tallchief, America’s first prima ballerina and member of Osage Nation
With the release of the doll, Mattel will also make a donation to the Center for Native American Youth.
Heading out
Thanks to Mary Jane F.
![]() ![]() Still There Dear Friends, Since Tuesday I have, to be honest, not been well. This is neither the time nor place to expand on this, but I do want to reach out to all of you and offer a hug at this particular moment. I started these Sunday morning notes back in March of 2020 as we were all sliding into COVID, fully intending them to be little healing “hugs from Maine.” That obtains this morning, as much as ever. Titles are very important to me and given recent events I wanted a deeper title for this image…..but I really wanted it to be perfect…..it had to be. Yesterday I printed out The Star-Spangled Banner and read it more carefully than I ever have before. In doing so, the title found me….. And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there In closing, I’ve brought my dear friend, the late, great poet, Philip Booth in to join us. toward light, Peter [Ralston] HEADING OUT Beyond here there’s no map. How you get there is where you’ll arrive; how, dawn by dawn, you can see your way clear: in ponds, sky, just as woods you walk through give to fields. And rivers: beyond all burning, you’ll cross on bridges you’ve long lugged with you. Whatever your route, go lightly, toward light. Once you give away all save necessity, all’s mostly well: what you used to believe you owned is nothing, nothing beside how you’ve come to feel. You’ve no need now to give in or give out: the way you’re going your body seems willing. Slowly as it may otherwise tell you, whatever it comes to you’re bound to know. Philip Booth |
Time to keep hard copies?
Ed note: We are in unchartered waters with Elon Musk pulling the chain saw trigger as he seeks cuts in the “deep state” in order to allow tax cuts. So far he hasn’t attacked Social Security but he is likely to go after Medicaid and, to try to further privatize Medicare. It’s not a bad idea to make hard copies of government site documents such as your Social Security Statement which includes a history of your earnings. Sigh 🙂
From a concerned resident: Some news commentators are saying “Go NOW [my emphasis] to Social Security website and print out your earnings statement before the website is taken down by Musk and Trump.”
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From Churchill to Trump – a terrifying transition
Commentary by Heather Cox Richardson (thanks to Mary M.)
In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.
“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.
President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.
The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned that the U.S. was engaged in a titanic struggle between “right and wrong and good and evil.” The Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” preaching “the supremacy of the state” and “its omnipotence over individual man.”
When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.
Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.
But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.
Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.
This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.
To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.
Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.
According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”
That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”
In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.
Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.
Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.
The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”
Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”
In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.
Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.
In a nationally televised speech today, France president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II. “We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”
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