It is Monday again, yes Monday, January 20th, 2025. I guess it is sort of a take your pick day. Today is Martin Luther King Day, a holiday established to honor a man who dedicated his life to promoting diversity, equality, and inclusion in our society. He died for promoting those ideals and trying to make a better society for America. It is also, this year, Inauguration Day. Trump will commence his second term in office where he promises to destroy any diversity, equality and inclusion in our government and outlaw it for anyone else. Wow! Now there’s a contrast in goals if I ever saw one. The third thing you may choose from today is that there is a College Football Championship game. Some choice, huh! I may just opt for football in an attempt to maintain some sanity in my day.
Today we start a new reality with the Tromp 2.0 Administration. Do not let the crazy chaos that will be hurled at you, alter your ideals and values. We must maintain our principles and values and not lose our way. We must lead by example. Ultimately, we will succeed.
The following short read that I pulled off my computer was originally published at MSNBC.com. Read it, digest it. It is clear that we are going to need patience if we are to break through the wall of misinformation. Trump will fail! Prices are not going down. They will mess with health care, and not in a good way. The deportation program will be a disaster, and there will be others.
Why We Have Difficulty in “Messaging”
Watching Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing was an exasperating experience for a great many reasons, though it offered a peek into an alternate version of reality with little resemblance to our own.
To hear the prospective attorney general nominee and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican members tell it, the Justice Department has been corrupted. In fact, they targeted federal enforcement as if it were incontrovertibly true that Main Justice had been “weaponized,” “politicized” and turned into a partisan tool.
Republicans have spent recent years pretending that their myth about school board meetings is true. It’s not, and NBC News debunked it again during Bondi’s confirmation hearing. But no matter how many times GOP officials are presented with the truth, they continue to prefer their alternate version of reality.
Similarly, FBI has explained in writing that Director Christopher Wray and other agency officials “have stated clearly on numerous occasions before Congress and elsewhere, the FBI has never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be. Our focus is and always will be on protecting people from violence and threats of violence. We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights including the right to free speech.”
What’s more, let’s not forget that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan launched an investigation into this myth — not surprisingly, the Ohio Republican found nothing — and a group of conservative activists even filed a lawsuit related to the myth, which was thrown out of court for being foolish.
And yet, in GOP circles it remains an article of faith that the myth is true. A party that’s become dependent on rewriting recent history keeps asking Americans to believe their made-up narrative.
What the party appears reluctant to consider, however, is the resulting question: If the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden is so genuinely awful, shouldn’t Republicans be able to make a reality-based case against it?
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
I don’t claim this as my work. However, it is what I have been using as a reasonable explanation for why we are unable to break through the Republican fantasy shell with factual information. This is only one example of how they operate. They do this with everything. I don’t know what the answer to this is, but it is not that Democrats cannot message. It may very well be that Democrats will not lie. Keep this next section front of mind, please. It will be important for our rights moving forward and will affect our courts for the next ten years.
Judicial Elections 2025
We are all disappointed by the November election, but we must plan for future success. The first fight we have on our hands is the retention of Justices on the Statewide Courts. Members of the PA Democratic Party convened in Harrisburg and unanimously voted to endorse the following PA Judicial candidates for the 2025 Election Cycle:
• PA Supreme Court: Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht for (10 year) retention.
• PA Superior Court: Judge Alice Beck Dubow for (10 year) retention and Judge Brandon Neuman for the open seat.
• PA Commonwealth Court: Judge Michael H. Wojcik for (10 year) retention and Judge Stella Tsai for the open seat.
Retaining these experienced judges, and electing Brandon and Stella, is crucial to upholding justice and protecting our freedoms in the Commonwealth. Judicial races are more important than ever—let’s show up this November and support all seven of these outstanding candidates!
We will be hosting these candidates at a Petition signing event at the office in early March. More details later.
Groundhog Day Chili With the Dems
This event is shaping up nicely. I believe we have most of what we need, except to fill in the volunteer grid. I am told we will need 7-8 people to fill several jobs as servers, sellers, cleaner uppers, coffee pot monitors, etc. So we have hours to fill on Saturday, Feb 1st from 5pm till 10pm and, Sunday, Feb. 2nd from 7am till 11am.
Participate, Donate, Vote.
John Huot, JeffDems Chair