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Softly, as in...

 

Softly, as in...

A soft photograph of my orchid “Helene Belas”, named in memory of mother, and one of only two plants of this cultivar in existence. It has the most intoxicating fragrance when the afternoon sun warms its blooms. It is certainly a wonder to have this orchid in blooms during some of the coldest weather we in Maryland have experienced.

This blog is posted in memory of Alex Pretti. May his death bring about meaningful change. Below are two items I found news-worthy over the last week.

From Masha Geshen’s “State Of Terror Has Arrived” (NYT 260125):

“Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.”

As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers wrote: Republicans could stop this at any time they wanted to.

“All it would take to end the murder of American citizens by an untrained government goon squad is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Dem[ocrat]s to defund ICE (or 23 to impeach and remove Trump—3 in House & 20 in Senate). That’s it. 23 Americans can vote for the public and end all of this.”

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