please have politics

The point of a political PARTY is to represent the will of the people and create SYSTEMIC change, which the current Democratic PARTY refuses to do, in power or out.

These INDIVIDUAL Democrats love making an INDIVIDUAL positive impact on the world, yet they don't make a COLLECTIVE effort to change the PARTY.

If you say that Democrats and Republicans are the same, you would be lying. The average Republican is ghoulish grifter that would poison their hometown for a big oil payroll. The average Democrat (for the most part) has policies that they believe in that will help their constituents, and generally want to make America a better place to live in.

But if you want to mock people for their dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the Democratic establishment you're a tone-deaf moron.

Don't get me wrong, this is life-changing for the people she's helped by doing this. I'll never condemn Democrats for doing philanthropic things like this. But the Individualist Liberalism that drives Democrats to do all their best work alone is why the Democratic PARTY as it is will never make real change in America.

So when you say "bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe!!"

His bio and posts about Australian sports (and the fact that he used “Democrat Party”) indicate he’s not American. He saw a post about the governor of a state he doesn’t live in within a country he doesn’t live in improving the lives of 500k of her constituents, and got big mad at people within that country saying it’s proof the governor’s party is not the same as the other major political party (which absolutely doesn’t give a fuck about medical debt). We need to do a better job at pointing out how fucking bizarre it is for someone outside of the country to have such a strong, negative opinion on that. Like, you don’t even live in America or Arizona, why the fuck are you flailing about this? It’s none of your business! A lot of non-Americans insist they can be loud and wrong about American politics because American foreign policy affects them, but this is explicitly domestic policy in a single state.

And I think people need to consider and point out more that, hmmm, maybe some Very Online zoomer across the world has a knee-jerk reaction to people saying the two major political parties in America aren’t the same because so much of the internet has been trained on a constant stream of propaganda that asserts “both sides bad, Democrats cringe and bad, tearing down Democrats is praxis but Republicans are forces of nature not worth mentioning”, which originated with bot farms 10 years ago but got earnestly adopted and spread by grifting podcasters/influencers and idiots alike. Like how in the fuck else would young people across the world wind up so butthurt over mild praise of a party that has nothing to do with them unless their brains have been nuked by funnee memes, unsourced text posts, breadtube videos, twitter threads, tiktoks, and twitch streamers repeatedly telling them that Democrats are terrible and you need to start screaming at anyone who says the parties aren’t the same? Would they ever scream and cry over posts mildly praising political parties in other countries they don’t live in, or no, because it’s largely anti-Democratic propaganda that’s infested every corner of the internet for the past decade? These people are just so fucking dumb and have no idea how easily they got brainwashed by bullshit

Also, this person literally says, "If you say that Democrats and Republicans are the same, you would be lying" and then ends his post with "So when you say 'bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe!!' Yes. And I'm tired of pretending they're not."

The Community Trust Act curtails informal cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE. Earlier in the session, another bill banned 287g agreements, which are formal agreements with ICE. The Community Trust Act bill went on an incredible journey from being impossible, being thought dead after Crossover Day, to glimmers of improbable hope, to being passed on the last day of the session. I did my little part, but many others were absolute heroes, zapping the phone lines of key legislators, speaking up to them as the legislators walked through Lawyers Mall in Annapolis, repeating legislative visits, rallying, and more.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1480-1505

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 6, 2026 (Monday)

Heather Cox Richardson

Apr 07, 2026

“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice told George Grylls of The Times about President Donald J. Trump. Rupar explained that political journalists are trained to think, “‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you…convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”

Rupar spends as much as eighty hours a week watching Trump and members of his administration, clipping videos of their noteworthy statements into a few minutes at a time. His work is indispensable for translating Trump’s long, meandering speeches to people who need shorter versions of them. In this quotation, he nails the real problem of this moment in which the president of the United States is threatening “obliteration” if another nation doesn’t do as he demands: the noteworthy story is not what the president says; the story is the president himself and his obvious mental deterioration.

Today was another surreal day in the second Trump administration.

At the traditional White House Easter Egg roll this morning, Trump, whose right hand was swollen and covered with makeup after his weekend away from the cameras, stood with First Lady Melania Trump on a White House balcony, accompanied by a human-sized Easter Bunny. The columns of the White House stood festooned in soft red, white, and blue plaid over the crowd of young children and their parents in festive pastel clothes excited for the day’s events. The band played “Hail to the Chief.” After a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Trump told the audience that “it’s a day where we celebrate Jesus, it’s a day where we celebrate religion, and it’s an honor to be the president of the United States.” Then things veered off course. He continued: “Our country is doing so well like it has never done before. You’ll see that very shortly, and things that we’ve done have not been done before. We’ve broken every record on the stock market, we’ve broken every record on our military.”

And then he launched into a speech about Iran and wars and bombing and rescues. The Easter Bunny’s blank eyes seemed first shocked and then desperate. It was a scene out of a surreal movie: the president of the United States describing a war next to a giant rabbit with big, vacant, eyes. Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts wrote: “Every day, I think: there’s no possible way it can get dumber and more embarrassing. And then Trump does something like this. And yes, this is real. It is all too real.”

While the children were rolling their eggs along the ground with spoons, Trump spoke to reporters, telling them about Iran, “If it were up to me, I’d like to keep the oil. I just don’t think the people of the United States would really understand.” He suggested that attacking Iran’s infrastructure wouldn’t be a war crime because “they killed 45,000 people in the last month. More than that. It could be as much as sixty. They killed protesters. They’re animals, and we have to stop them, and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

He claimed again that former presidents are telling him they wish they had done what he did in attacking Iran; all four living ex-presidents have denied speaking to him. Sitting with children drawing pictures, he told them they could sell his autograph on eBay for $25,000. He signed their pictures, and while he signed, he told the children that former President Joe Biden was “incapable of signing his name” so he had aides follow him around with an autopen machine.

A later press conference at the White House continued the wild lies and non sequiturs. Trump began the conference by greeting the reporters with “Happy Easter. We had a great Easter. This is one of our better Easters, I think, in a lot of different ways. I can say, militarily, it’s been one of the best.”

The celebratory speeches about the war compared a rescued airman to Jesus Christ and gave a great deal of detail about the rescue operation, but they didn’t deliver much information to the journalists packed into the room about negotiations or goals or the president’s ultimatum that Iran must agree to his demands by 8:00 tomorrow night or face “obliteration.”

Trump reiterated: “The entire country could be taken out in one night. And that night might be tomorrow night.” He said that while the regime governing the country has changed—meaning its leadership, because the actual regime is still in power—that his reason for undertaking the war was not regime change, but rather to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

He assured the journalists that he has had a plan all along. “I saw somebody said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have a plan.’ I have the best plan of all, but I’m not going to tell you what my plan is. You know, they want me to say, Here’s my plan, we’re going to attack at 9:47 in the morning, and then we’re going to do this, and then we’re gonna, and if you don’t do that, they say, I have a plan. These people know what the plan is. Everybody here knows what the plan is…. Every single thing has been thought out by all of us. But I can’t reveal the plan to the media. So, you know, but we’re just thrilled by the success of this operation.”

Trump has said Iranians are upset when the strikes stop, and a reporter challenged him to explain “Why would they want you to blow up their infrastructure, to cut off their power?” He answered: “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. The Iranians have, and we’ve had numerous intercepts—’Please keep bombing.’ Bombs that are dropping near their homes. ‘Please keep bombing! Do it.’ And these are people that are living where the bombs are exploding, and when we leave and we’re not hitting those areas, they’re saying, “Please come back, come back, come back!’”

After noting he was responsible for the killing of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, he added: “I did one other but this one was not picked up. Osama bin Laden—If you read my book, I said you’ve got to take him out one year before the World Trade Center came down. So I wish you’d read the book. To be a good president, I believe you have to have good instincts, and a lot of this is instinct.”

A special operations team located and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in 2011, when Barack Obama was president. Trump’s frequent claim that his book called for a raid against Osama bin Laden has been just as frequently debunked as a lie.

Today was an exhausting day as Americans seem to have little choice but to pay attention to a man who is bizarrely threatening what appear to be war crimes against Iranians while spinning wild tales. The members of both chambers of Congress are away for another week and Republican leaders are showing no sign of calling them back, leaving the American people to face whatever Trump has in mind for tomorrow on our own.

In contrast to Trump’s vision of government according to the whims of a single man, no matter how bonkers those whims might be, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani—who, as a naturalized citizen, is not eligible for the presidency—is illustrating what it means to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Mamdani’s videos about governing New York City inform New Yorkers about what their government does. At the same time, though, they lift up and honor the workers who make the wheels of government turn. During his campaign, Mamdani promised his administration would see to it that potholes got filled, and as the road maintenance workers made the trip to fill the 100,000th pothole of the year, he tagged along. The video humanized the process and dignified work that often doesn’t get attention.

Another video today about the 311 call center in New York City that helps residents find resources to help solve everything from where to recycle a mirror to how to get an apartment repaired featured Tangie Williams putting a face to the people in the center as she coached Mamdani himself through a call. Williams told Mamdani that the calls that “tug at my heart” are elderly people who have no family and need both to be heard and to access help, which she provides with evident joy.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

5 Calls has a script. So does Indivisible. However, I find that both lean a bit too heavily on Doing The Right Thing, and that strategy doesn't always work.

Ways to frame this when talking to Republican legislators:

The GOP is punishing women for getting married.

States already have laws on the books to prevent voter fraud. We don't need the Federal government telling us how to run our elections.

This bill is big government at its worst and only serves to create more bureaucracy and paperwork.