International Women’s Day was March 8.

The celebration continues all week.

From two women who recently ran for President in the USA.

From the UN.

From the President of the European Central Bank.

Even the Pope, who entered public view flanked by two altar girls, celebrated.

From a country where women politicians win.

One more thing. Or two.

While we are in our silo, celebrating women’s achievements, there are those on the Right who are calculating policies and laws that will set women back further than the 50 years they calculated when they overturned Roe.

Neonatalism -those who want to see more children born—is all the rage on the Right, espoused by Tech Bros such Elon Musk, who think their semen should be spread far and wide, to create superior children, and by the Right Wing Think Tank, The Heritage Society, which gave us Project 2025 and now has issued a report, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” This is a report urging one man-one woman, one bread-winner definition of marriage and family and the policies that will achieve it.

“The problem is that if traditional families continue to disappear, we will eventually lose America itself. America is a nation rooted in its people, culture, laws and customs, as well as its ideals—and it cannot be sustained if Americans themselves do not marry, form families, and raise children.”

Ah, support for anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-women government policies, by those who claim they want government out of our lives!

Emma Waters, a Policy Analyst at the Heritage Society, further made the argument for neonatalism in a Heritage Society paper, entitled “The Birth Dearth Gives Rise to Pro-Natalism.”

For many women, the answer is far simpler. They need to trust that the losses and changes of parenthood they might fear—of their bodies, lifestyles, sense of self, and current relationship dynamics—will be worth it. They need to believe that having children is a good that is worth the sacrifice. Just as Christ promises that it will be. Indeed, as Jesus says in John 12:24–26: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

Remember these are the folks who brought us Dobbs and an end to Roe. Be scared! Be really scared.

And one last thing.

That girls school in Tehran.

Trump claimed that the US didn’t do it.

But they did.

One more factoid for fun.

You may have heard what happened when Trump greeted the bodies of our military men and woman killed in Iran.

Heather Cox Richardson describes the whole painful situation that occurred on Saturday.

Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.

Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.

The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.

The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.

Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.” (Letters from an American Substack).

Here are pictures that tell the story best.

Afterwards, of course, he went golfing.

This happened on Saturday too.

Long-delayed Jan. 6 plaque honoring police installed in Capitol at 4 a.m.


The memorial was required by law to be installed by March 2023. This morning, while most of Washington slept, it appeared.
March 7, 2026.

The police officers were taunted and beaten. Some were knocked unconscious and dragged down stone steps, tear gas stinging their throats, to chants of “U.S.A! U.S.A!” on Jan. 6, 2021, as hundreds, then thousands, swarmed the citadel of American democracy.

Now, more than five years later, and three years since Congress ignored its own deadline to install it, a memorial plaque recognizing the service of law enforcement that day is finally on display in the very building they defended from a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters intent on overturning his 2020 election loss.


In the predawn hours Saturday, around 4 a.m., staff with the Architect of the Capitol bolted the bronze plaque to a granite wall near an entrance on the west front, close to where the armed crowd had amassed and scaled scaffolding set up for the inauguration. They wheeled the plaque, stored in plywood, across the stone basement floor and guided it through the double doors. They raised the tribute with a jack table and began fixing it in place, the clang of their tools ringing out through otherwise empty hallways.

There was no announcement, no ceremony, no news cameras — just two employees on their routine overnight shift working while most of Washington slept. The quiet installation, which Congress ordered completed by mid-March 2023, marks the latest turn in the contested effort to remember Jan. 6, as Trump continues to reframe the riot as patriotic and the rioters as victims of a weaponized justice system.

Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating the installation of a memorial plaque within a year. Instead, the plaque sat in the Capitol basement, surrounded by maintenance equipment.

It lists the names of almost two dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies including the D.C. police, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Capitol Police, the National Guard and the Maryland and Virginia state police.


Democrats have pressed for implementation in the years since, saying the only thing keeping the plaque from public view was that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) had yet to instruct the Architect of the Capitol — which oversees the complex — to install it. A spokesperson for Johnson at the time argued the project was “not implementable.” Some lawmakers took it upon themselves to memorialize the law enforcement response, mounting copies of the plaque outside their office doors.


Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday morning.
(Washington Post)

The GOP and Fetterman voted to allow Trump to continue his war in Iran without Congressional approval.

Some will not let this be. 👇

Democrats vow to shut down Senate over Iran conflict

A group of Senate Democrats are threatening to use every procedural tool at their disposal to hold up business on the Senate floor unless Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior officials testify before key committees under oath on the military conflict with Iran.

Senator Cory Booker.

“We have collectively agreed that we’re going to use the levers that we have,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said Monday evening. “We should be having hearings on the biggest military engagement since the war in Afghanistan.”

“Each individual senator has a tremendous amount of power to disrupt the normal functioning of the Senate as well as certain privileges that we can exercise, and what we have agreed right now is that we’re not going to let the Senate continue business as usual, which seems to be ignoring the urgent issues the American people are dealing with,” he said.

The Democrats want to grill Rubio and Hegseth in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee over the expected duration of the conflict, its cost, the lack of a clear endgame, and the lack of clear rules of engagement amid growing civilian casualties, including an estimated 170 people killed by a missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have asked the GOP chairs of those panels to hold hearings and ask Trump Cabinet officials to testify.

“As senators we have the right to force a vote and debate every single day in the Senate. That’s not a right under the rules, by the way, granted to us by the majority. That’s a right given to us by the statute,” Murphy said, referring to the 1973 War Powers Act, which Kaine used to force a vote last week on halting military action against Iran.

“What we’re saying is we’re not going to let the Senate be silent. We want there to be a hearing so that the American public can hear from their leaders why they think this war is in the national interest. I think they’ll fail in that exercise,” he added.

Democrats have the ability to force votes on the Iran conflict under the War Powers Act, which creates a privileged pathway for resolutions ordering the halt of military action not authorized by Congress. (The Hill)

One more thing.

The Senator from New Jersey is busy.

Ahead of 2028, Sen. Cory Booker to unveil bill to make $75,000 in income tax-free.

The bill is a marker for the next time Democrats get a chance to rewrite the tax code. The New Jersey senator told NBC News he's keeping the door open to a 2028 presidential.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Cory Booker, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, told NBC News he’ll introduce a tax bill this week to significantly expand the standard deduction, effectively lowering taxes on low- and middle-income earners.

The New Jersey senator’s plan would set the standard deduction at $75,000 for married couples, or $37,500 for individuals. That’s more than double what it is today: $32,200 for couples filing jointly and half that for single filers.

“It’s a simple idea: American households don’t pay taxes on their first $75,000 of earnings,” Booker said in an interview. “It will have a significant impact on the average American in raising their income.”

Booker’s bill, which he plans to formally introduce in the Senate on Tuesday, would have far-reaching ramifications on the tax system, encouraging more Americans to use the standard deduction rather than itemize. For a “head of household,” his bill would set the standard deduction at $56,250.

It’s a sweeping plan to address a constellation of economic concerns from high costs to wages failing to keep up with necessities like health care and housing.

“Americans are working harder and harder, and they’re making less and less relative to their parents and grandparents. The economy is not working. So we need big ideas that could redeem the dream of America,” Booker said.

Booker’s upcoming legislation can best be understood as a new idea in the mix for the next time Democrats take power in Washington. The New Jersey senator, who ran for president in 2020, said his “focus is on running for re-election,” with his Senate seat coming before voters this fall.

But he’s keeping the door open to a 2028 White House bid.

“I think the Democratic Party needs to become the party again of big ideas that resonate. Donald Trump has put forward a lot of big ideas. He doesn’t follow through on them, but they resonated in his last election,” Booker said. “I have not closed the door on ’28, but I’m really focused on now that the Democratic Party needs to not be defined by what it’s against, simply, but start talking about the big things it stands for.”

There’s some bipartisan interest in the idea: The standard deduction was expanded in the 2017 Trump tax law and again in the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” in 2025. But the current Congress has no plans to rewrite the tax code anytime soon.

And the proposal, which is guaranteed to be expensive, doesn’t yet have a cost estimate. Booker said his goal is to ensure his bill is “fully paid for” by raising taxes on upper earners and large corporations, while closing loopholes and cracking down on “tax avoidance schemes.” The bill doesn't specify those provisions.

The legislation would also boost the child tax credit to $4,320 per child under 6 years old, and $3,600 per child between 6 and 17, while adding a $2,400 “baby bonus” for the year a child is born. (NBC News)

Trump said this yesterday.And Hegseth said this.👇

See you tomorrow.