unraveling

29.Jan.2026

Stephen Miller's big moment run amok

How soon will it be before Thug adds the Department of Homeland Security to the list of wars he's stopped? That question sprang into my mind after reading Michael Scherer and Nick Miroff's piece for The Atlantic, Battles Are Raging Inside the Department of Homeland Security.

It's not exactly breaking news that the Red Team don't all play well together, but still, what a cluster! Even without mentioning that "special government employee" Corey "chief" Lewendowski is maybe boinking Noem on the side. In the friend of a friend NYMag Intelligencer item last September, we read the romantic rumors were denied, but still, "Lewandowski has long served as Noem’s gatekeeper, described to me by DHS staff as her “handler,” her “bulldog,” and the “shadow secretary.”" WTF, you know? Is it all about housing?

"In April, the Daily Mail snapped photographs of Lewandowski outside her Navy Yard complex with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, and partly in response to the presence of the Mail’s paparazzi, which a DHS spokesperson said had led to threats and safety concerns, she moved into military housing usually reserved for the top admiral of the Coast Guard, which is under DHS’s purview. This has only fueled the rumors surrounding Noem. “They’ve sent no three- or four-stars in the Coast Guard up for confirmation,” a top administration official told me, “because she doesn’t want to get kicked out of the commandant’s house.”

Is that the same Green Zone "military housing" that's housing Nosferatu Wormtongue? Anyway, back before the cold-blooded murders, it was kind of funny to have the New York Times calling her the head of the “Department of Homeland Publicity,” while her liberal detractors have taken to calling her “ICE Barbie.”

There's this guy Rodney Scott you've never heard of, "the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection" featured in The Atlantic story, for his attempts to lead the CBP but not breaking through. And who could have imagined, we're still talking about "finishing the border wall." Really? "Since the start of Trump’s second term, only about 24 miles of wall have been built, including replacement sections," some person said. That doesn't seem like much, and I went looking for "compared to what" and waded into a Wikipedia page which is tl;dir for me right now. Does The Wall matter anymore? (If it matters to Thug, maybe yes?)

It is fascinating that there's something going on in the White House counsel's office when someone (Rodney <cough> Scott) sends an "I'm in charge here" memo, and the lawyers say hush. And there was the rising star Greg Bovino who was sporting two stars (Chief Patrol Agent?) and I know I saw him with three recently, but nobody made him Deputy Chief of the Border Patrol, and "commander at large" isn't really a thing, and now he'll be headed for El Centro as just a more regular guy, who will be "expected to retire soon" as the story goes.

For the moment, Tom Homan is the point guy, and he's probably just as cruel as the others, but maybe not in a showboaty way? It's all coming from "a very chaotic scene."

28.Jan.2026

AI field day

Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, for The Atlantic, last October: Here’s How the AI Crash Happens. "The U.S. is becoming an Nvidia-state."

"The amount of energy and money being poured into AI is breathtaking. Global spending on the technology is projected to hit $375 billion by the end of the year and half a trillion dollars in 2026. Three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks; the value of every publicly traded company has, in a sense, been buoyed by an AI-driven bull market. To cement the point, Nvidia, a maker of the advanced computer chips underlying the AI boom, yesterday became the first company in history to be worth $5 trillion."

When I was keenly (in and) following the market for technology stocks, along with everyone else at the end of the last millennium, YHOO was one of the rising stars, and I wrote about Momentum enthusiasts. At the time, Microsoft was top of the stack, market cap just shy of $400 billion (equivalent to $800 billion now; conveniently, we've had 100% inflation between 1999 and now). Yahoo!'s $34B market cap put it 96th on the top 100 back in the day. At the top of the 2000 bubble, they surpassed $100B. In 2017, Verizon acquired them at a valuation just above 50B.

Long after I abandoned tracking this stuff, I see there are multiple, ad-driven sites that do what I was doing years ago. companiesmarketcap.com is convenient for present purposes (with no endorsement implied or evaluation done by me). You can compared Market Cap, Earnings, Revenue, P/E ratio, and so on. Your company will need close to a $trillion to be in the top 10, and NVIDIA, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft and Amazon—the top five—together comprise $18 or 19 trillion in supposed value. I digress. Back to Wong and Warzel.

"Here’s another way of thinking about the transformation under way: Multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was. Much like how Saudi Arabia is a petrostate, the U.S. is a burgeoning AI state—and, in particular, an Nvidia-state. The number keeps going up, which has a buoying effect on markets that is, in the short term, good. But every good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.

"America appears to be, at the moment, in a sort of benevolent hostage situation. AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and by another calculation, those AI expenditures accounted for 92 percent of GDP growth during the first half of 2025. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in late 2022, the tech industry has gone from making up 22 percent of the value in the S&P 500 to roughly one-third. Just yesterday, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet all reported substantial quarterly-revenue growth, and Reuters reported that OpenAI is planning to go public perhaps as soon as next year at a value of up to $1 trillion—which would be one of the largest IPOs in history."

I'm the wrong person to ask about any of this stuff; I generally don't want any AI up in my business, and can't imagine what would motivate me to pay money for it (directly). But it says there that "Generative-AI tools are currently used by hundreds of millions of people" (paying customers?), and it’s hard to imagine that simply ceasing overnight."

But you can't help but feel a little queasy when it comes to talk of "private equity," "financial engineering" again, "tranches" of this and that pinballing in "what is basically a global shadow-banking system," and "something circular about these investments."

"For now, money is still pouring into the AI industry...."

"Maybe it will all work out."

Oh, and AI success might not turn out to be all that great either, if "a technology so capable and revolutionary that it wipes out countless jobs and sends an unprecedented shock wave through the global economy before humans have time to adapt."

Not sure how I went through a time-warp to last October (Facebook got me started, with apparent story recycling), but there's also "The Big Story" on Wired that AI Is the Bubble to Burst Them All, and the blog post linked from The Atlantic piece about how These Data Centers Are Getting Really, Really Big. The first graph shows the knee in the "data center spending spree" graph when ChatGPT was launched. (It seems the "(billions)" in the graph dek should be "(millions)" but ok. I'll assume the text is correct:

"Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, tech companies have spent huge sums of money building data centers. In just three years, spending on data centers in the US has gone from $13.8 billion to $41.2 billion per year—an increase of 200%. This has come at a time when virtually all other construction activity in the country has slowed."

27.Jan.2026

Domestic terrorists

A sort of wake-up call from Republican Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17), who says he has and will work on bipartisan solutions to the morass. "No matter where you stand on immigration enforcement, the shootings show that what the country has been doing is not working," first of all.

I saw yesterday that even Idaho's Senator Mike Crapo's Facebook feed had a call for "a full and impartial investigation into the events leading up to the death of Alex Pretti." Maybe he expressed an opinion about the January 7 killing of Renée Nicole Good, but it doesn't show in his Facebook feed. On January 9, there was a post celebrating Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, including kudos for "the successful capture of Nicolás Maduro" supposedly providing "a historic blow to narco-terrorism," never mind the 80 or more casualties along the way, and the 100+ unlawful killings in the Caribbean and Pacific along the way.

It seems the gun that Pretti was lawfully carrying (and did not brandish) figures in. "His family, law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment right and the trust of the American people deserve a fair process," Crapo's post says. If only we had a functioning bureau for criminal investigation, or an impartial Department of Justice, eh. If only we had evidence to imagine removing Greg Bovino as "commander at large" and bringing in Tom Homan would change the course of the domestic violence that the Thug administration has deployed to American cities.

Former Idaho State Senator Cole LeFavour's response to Crapo is on point:

"Senator, We will hold you to the full and impartial investigation you support, but expect consequences and a return of people’s constitutional rights.

"— Will you hold those in charge of ICE in Minneapolis accountable for the repeated and wholly unnecessary violence against people, citizens AND those still working for citizenship alike. Most of all will you take steps to make this federal violence against the people STOP?

"— WILL YOU GUARANTEE restoration of people’s first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth amendment rights so that they can peacefully gather to protest, act as escorts and legal observers, filming with phones to protect the rights health and safety of the millions being all too often improperly targeted by ICE. You know as well as all of us that the constitution protects ALL of us from unlawful search and seizure and that any person should be able to ask for a warrant and be shown one before their door or window is smashed and they are dragged into the street.

" —We expect you to ensure the Senate intervenes to address the excessively wide span of citizens being targeted by ICE. It is time now to stop the arrest and detention of people holding legal documents and those who have lived as beloved, respected members of our communities for decades in spite of the slow progress our system has made letting them reach their goal in what, for so many, has been a long pursuit of citizenship.

"Please stop returning to the idea that this country faces some existential threat from our undocumented friends, neighbors, coworkers, and eight-year-old classmates. Nothing in my lifetime compares to the violence and threat of violence we as Americans feel right now from ICE. You are NOT protecting us. By funding ICE you are depriving us of freedoms and making us unsafe.

"We are waiting. Move forward now before more people are shot by ICE or die in custody in their barbaric detention centers.

"Respectfully, Senator Crapo, it is time now to show us your words are more than platitudes."

20.Jan.2026

BREAKING NEWS

It's an adventure!

Stocks Post Biggest Drop in Months as Tensions Over Greenland Mount
The S&P 500 dropped over 2 percent for the first time since October, as investors reacted to President Trump’s threat of higher tariffs on European allies unless they supported his plans to take control of Greenland. Asked how far he was willing to go to acquire Greenland, President Trump said, “You’ll find out.”

Contempt ain't what it used to be
"Representative James Comer rejected an offer to interview Bill Clinton on Jeffrey Epstein, setting up a contempt vote."

Charades are fun, aren't they?
A judge criticized Lindsey Halligan for what he called a “charade” of claiming to be the U.S. attorney.

I never thought the leopards would eat my face
To their shock, Cubans in Florida are being deported in record numbers.

But he's not taking a salary, right?
Here’s how President Trump has used the presidency to make at least 1.4 billion.

And in the Evening newsletter, Trump mocks European leaders before meeting with them. I'm sure that'll work out great.

No law, no order, just My own morality. My own mind.

Finally got around to reading the Jan. 8 (updated Jan. 10) NYT report of their "wide-ranging interview" with Thug in the Oval, here on this anniversary of his Chaos 2.0. Was a bit disappointed to see two hours (was it?) boiled down to a dessicated, sort of scholarly, sort of obsequious analysis of our new abnormal, dementia writ large.

There is the dek, at least, a gob-smacking summary of our make-believe strong man run amok: "On topic after topic, President Trump made clear that he would be the arbiter of any limits to his authorities, not international law or treaties." You will have already seen the punch lines:

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

That's so weird, because so many of his lickspittle lieutenants are looking to hurt people, and have been doing a bang-up job of it, shooting defenseless boats out of the water in the Caribbean, killing 100+, invading Venezuela and killing 80 people to capture two, dismantling the incredibly successful USAID with the likely effect of more than 10 million additional deaths by the end of the decade, "including 4·5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years."

It's also so weird because there are no facts in evidence that he has a kernel of what anyone calls "morality." And while his own mind betrays him (and us, and our allies), day by day. Do we really have to wait until he can't circle "giraffe" on his quarterly cognitive test any more?

Anne Applebaum gets to the point for The Atlantic, succinctly: Trump’s Letter to Norway Should Be the Last Straw.

"Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland."

Also in The Atlantic (and gift-linked for you), Tom Nichols: The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal. "Attacking an ally would be a perversion of everything the armed forces have been trained to do." Par for our new Bizarro course, with thug perverts in charge. For anyone in the back who hadn't heard, this will be on the final:

"The U.S. military is obligated by law, and by every tradition of American decency, to refuse to follow illegal orders."

"America’s armed forces are conditioned to obey the orders of civilian authorities, and rightly so. But these will be orders that force U.S. military minds to step into a horrifying mirror universe where the United States is the aggressor against NATO, a coalition that includes countries that have been our friends for centuries. Should Trump pursue this scheme of conquest, the military’s training will have to be shattered and reassembled into a destructive version of itself, as if doctors were asked to take lifesaving medicines, reconstitute them as poisonous isomers, and then administer them to patients."

As usual, Heather Cox Richardson provides a longer historical view beyond Garrett Graff's description of the demented elephant in the room: “A superpower is [dying by] suicide because the [Republican] Congress is too cowardly to stand up to the Mad King.” HCR's January 19, 2026 Letter from an American:

"In just a year since his second inauguration, Trump has torn apart the work that took almost a century of struggle and painstaking negotiations from the world’s best diplomats to build. Since World War II, generations of world leaders, often led by the United States, created an international order designed to prevent future world wars....

"Trump has taken the side of rising autocrats and taken aim at the rules-based international order with his insistence that the U.S. must control the Western Hemisphere. In service to that plan, he has propped up Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei and endorsed right-wing Honduran president Nasry Asfura, helping his election by pardoning former president Juan Orlando Hernández, a leading member of Asfura’s political party, who was serving 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking. Trump ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seized control of much of Venezuela’s oil, the profits of which are going to an account in Qatar that Trump himself controls."

In a nutshell, our increasingly demented psychopath thinks he should be King of the World.

This week, Trump has launched a direct assault on the international order that has stabilized the world since 1945. He is trying to form his own “Board of Peace,” apparently to replace the United Nations. A draft charter for that institution gives Trump the presidency, the right to choose his successor, veto power over any actions, and control of the $1 billion fee permanent members are required to pay. In a letter to prospective members, Trump boasted that the Board of Peace is “the most impressive and consequential Board ever assembled,” and that “there has never been anything like it!” Those on it would, he said, “lead by example, and brilliantly invest in a secure and prosperous future for generations to come.”

Idaho's Jim Jones, a Vietnam combat veteran who's served as our Attorney General and as an Idaho Supreme Court Justice, "a strong advocate for democracy, common sense and the rule of law" (obvs anathema to MAGA, and the whack wing of Idaho's GOP) thinks Thug may be cruising toward a rendezvous with the 25th Amendment. Thug "has exhibited a lust for power and praise that is becoming practically insatiable. In the old days we called it megalomania."

Which is pretty much never in a good way.

Martin Luther King Day, 2026

It's still the racism, you know

It took me a few days to get to the bottom of Marc Johnson's post, The Real GOP Base, but today's a good day to discuss. Start with his "in a nutshell" footnote about the important events from my last days in single digits:

"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The Voting Rights Act enacted the following year—significantly after Congressional action was galvanized following violent attacks on voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama—outlaws racial discrimination in voting and empowers the Justice Department to bring actions to enforce the law."

Back to the top, Johnson's not one to bury the lede:

"The white nationalism—call it racism, if you prefer—of the modern conservative movement is the central feature of Trumpism.

"Dress it up in any way you like, but that is the essence—a white nationalist homeland for white folks."

Thug's contribution to the genre is that "White people were very badly treated."

"That’s it. That’s the central feature of Trumpism. This is what the anti-woke, anti-DEI attacks are all about."

I recommend the whole piece for your holiday (or post-holiday) reading. Even if you already know the punchline well enough:

"Nixon had his law and order, Reagan his welfare cheats. Trump has conflated the two issues, while deploying much harsher language than either of his Republican predecessors ever used, and he now has a thuggish, murderous national police that is taking the country to a darker, more hateful, more violent and much more fearful place."

Keep your head up

After lamenting the deepening cynicism from our current Zeitgeist melting into "virtual reality," and quoting Hannah Arendt's brutally accurate assessment from the "Truth and Politics" essay in her book Between Past and Future:

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”

Joyce Vance asks "Who benefits from a loss of faith in our institutions and in our ability to come out on the other end of this national nightmare with an intact republic?"

My one-word answer didn't wait past the first two words of the question: thieves. But more specifically, "the man who enjoys upsetting the balance of power guarded by NATO because he wants to own Greenland. The man who tears down the East Wing. The man who won’t release the Epstein Files."

The man who just sent Norway's prime minister a pathetically deranged complaint that his "Country [sic] decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped [sic] 8 Wars [sic] PLUS [sic], I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace..." How many "Wars" has he actually "Stopped" you may be wondering. In round numbers, zero. The more relevant question is, how many wars has he started, and what's next?

Closest to home, the War on Minneapolis is still escalating. Lydia Polgreen is a longtime foreign correspondent, who has covered civil wars in countries across the globe. Last Wednesday night, she saw this:

"A federal agent marched up a narrow residential sidewalk, flanked by modest bungalows, kitted out in gear fit for the battle of Falluja: full body armor, camouflage fatigues and helmet, military boots, and a heavy machine gun slung by his side. His carriage was erect, his gaze fixed straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the crowd of protesters who blew whistles and shouted curses as he passed, enraged that one week after Renee Good was gunned down by an ICE agent, another civilian had been shot by ICE in their city....

"Thousands of masked, heavily armed agents, some with minimal training, have been unleashed on the streets of an American state. They have been promised near-total legal immunity by the president, effectively unshackled from any constitutional constraints."

"They have been given limitless license to abduct anyone — not just the undocumented immigrants, but American citizens who happen to look foreign, whatever that might mean...."

The cruelty is the point. The psychopathy of Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, Pete Hegseth, and more beneath the headlines is the engine of Thug. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison:

“This is tyranny. There is no other way to put it. We’re all shocked by it. Nobody ever thought America would look like this. We now don’t have to speculate as to what American fascism looks like. It’s right outside the door.”

Polgreen notes that Minnesota is "an odd choice for such a huge operation," but of course it has to do with their voters rejecting Thug, time and again. Minnesota is a medium-sized state of fewer than 6 million people, with fewer undocumented immigrants than 23 other states, and a lower percentage than 32 others, according to Pew Research's statistics from 2023. Red Texas has 16 times as many undocumented immigrants as Minnesota; Red Florida 12 times. Joyce Vance:

"At this stage, [Thug] no longer cares if people believe his lies. He just needs the chaos they generate and the absence of shared truths, shared facts, in our country. People who can no longer discern what’s true from what’s false lose their moral compasses, like the agents who are now shooting at the people they took an oath to protect and serve. It all benefits a leader who wants to take authoritarian control of a democracy.

"Giving up your belief in how things should be is dangerous."

The way forward, as we mark the one-year anniversary of the gathering darkness of Thug 2.0:

"Find your own way to protest it. Donate to a food bank. Help a neighbor out, or help someone you’ve never met but have empathy for. Sign up to work at a polling place, or decide to run for office. There is so much that we can do."

17.Jan.2026

Saturday AM overload

Up a little earlier than usual, I started with the library check-out I'm working on, Jill Lepore's outstanding 2018 These Truths: A History of the United States. I'm in the middle of the 2nd of 4 sections, "The People (1800-1865)," the battles over slavery that preceded the actual war between the states, when we invaded Mexico in 1846, after we annexed Texas the year before, before we pretty much won, and while negotiating kept going to take over Mexico City. We settled for a little over half of old Mexico, now re-made into California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, part of Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and of course, the great state of Texas. (The Wikipedia page for the Mexican–American War has its own overload problem, flying a banner that says it "may be too long to read and navigate comfortably," since it went past 18,000 words.)

Then I thought I'd check some of the 2026-01 heap of bookmarked articles not yet read, and noticed that there was a subfolder, titled SaturdayAMoverload. From last Saturday. I thought I'd get them off my back by just splatting the list, but that seems like too much and not enough at the same time. Some of the headlines speak for themselves. Some need more. Maybe I could catch up a little as I catch you up? Note: this is all week-old news, right?

• More Agents Head to Minnesota as U.S. Takes Over Shooting Investigation
• I.C.C. Judges Denounce Effect of Trump’s Sanctions "No Amazon, No Gmail: President Trump’s retaliation against top officials at the International Criminal Court has shut them out of American services and made even routine daily tasks a challenge." Because... international criminal fears the court, even without it (currently) have jurisdiction over him. The sanctions "come at a time when the court is investigating claims of atrocities in Afghanistan, Libya, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela, as well as Gaza."
     "[T]he main thrust of Washington’s sanctions is to press the court to cancel arrest warrants issued in 2024 for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and for Yoav Gallant, a former Israeli defense minister. The warrants allege that the two were accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza."
• Trump Is About to Lose Control of the Economy
  Jason Furman's opinion about power shifts at hand: "The Supreme Court is expected to rule on both the Trump administration’s huge slew of tariffs and the president’s ability to control the Federal Reserve Board. In addition, a new nominee to lead the Fed will be handed over to the Senate for scrutiny. Meanwhile, Congress no longer seems to be listening to Mr. Trump on taxes and spending — and might even start enacting its own agenda."
• Bill Gates Makes a Multibillion-Dollar Divorce Payout
  $8 billion-ish to Melinda French Gates' private foundation, and other DealBook news
• Texas A&M Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato Because of Gender Rules
  Wish I could say it's not as stupid as that sounds, but it's actually worse. MAGA-enforced idiocracy advances.
• Are Trains Now the Most Luxurious Way to Travel?
  Not necessarily coming to a depot near you. "From Angola to Turkmenistan, sumptuously outfitted railroad cars are taking passengers on over-the-top journeys back in time." I'm going to leave that one up, because "Train!"
• Trump Action Tracker | Keeping a tally of Trump's actions
  Multi-level overload. As of this morning, there are 2,259 tracked actions, sorted into categories: Undermining democracy; Hollowing state; Supressing dissent / Weaponising State; Controlling information including spreading misinformation and propaganda; Control of Science & Health to Align with State Ideology; Attacking Universities, Schools, Museums, Culture; Weakening Civil Rights; Corruption & Enrichment; Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization; Anti-immigrant or Militarised Nationalism.
• Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, A Big Lesson For The World
  Oh look: Uruguay "built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels"
     "Once the country adjusted the playing field that had long favored oil and gas, renewables outperformed on every front: halving costs, creating 50,000 jobs, and protecting the economy from price shocks."
     "The key is not technology; it is institutions," former energy minister Ramon Méndez Galain said. "Once the rules are fair and predictable, the system builds itself."
• Stunning stretch of California coast opens for hiking for first time
  The 547 acre Estero Americano Coast Preserve, south of Bodega Bay
• Trump Addresses Venezuela, Greenland and Presidential Power in New York Times Interview
  You know, the one in which he responded to the question if there were any limits on his global powers, he said “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
     Funny (not ha ha) because he's never demonstrated anything that could be called morality whatsoever, and he's losing his mind. But he can still identify "giraffe" and "hippo," so I'm sure everything will be fine.
• Russia Says It Used Nuclear-Capable Missile to Strike Western Ukraine
  With a dummy warhead? But to western Ukraine, and the edge of NATO. As if it were tit for tat for that alleged attack on "one of Mr. Putin's residences," but U.S. intelligence said there is no evidence of such an attack.
• Former Uvalde Teacher’s Testimony Throws a Trial Into Chaos
  That school shooting 3½ years ago in which hundreds of good guys with guns did not protect 19 children and 2 teachers from being murdered by a teenager with two assault rifles and ample ammunition.
• Trump Orders Fannie and Freddie to Buy $200 Billion in Mortgage Bonds
  "The move, a bid to make homes more affordable, would be a back-to-future moment for the two mortgage firms. Buying risky mortgage bonds helped push them to near-bankruptcy in 2008."
• G.M. Books a $7.1 Billion Loss as It Scales Back E.V. Ambitions
  "after changes in federal policy undercut demand." Refer back to the Uruguay story above.
• The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2026
  Or something. Talk to your computer, something cooler than your smartphone (maybe), more AI slop (and stuff), and robo-taxis. Whee.
• The Smithsonian Faces New Pressure to Submit to Trump’s Will
• George Saunders Says Ditching These Three Delusions Can Save You
  Says there he was once "an Ayn Rand Republican" (I'd say "the worst kind," but Thug has blown that out of the water), "out of a vast insecurity." "Along comes “Atlas Shrugged,” and at least the way I read it was: You’re special, because you believe in selfishness. I got caught up on “You’re special.” It got better for him when he discovered empathy. And struggling with kindness. I was skimming, did not discern which "three delusions" I should ditch, but when I'm ready for some fiction, he sounds like a good read, maybe.
• Journey to American Democracy: The Battle of the Bulge
  Oo, teaser to a history story in videos from Heather Cox Richardson. Bound to be good. Bookmarked for "later."
• Trump's Deadly Forces | The Coffee Klatch for January 10, 2026
  Heather Lofthouse, Kamau Bell, and Robert Reich "examine this horrific week in which Trump took control of Venezuela and its oil and unleashed his ICE and Border Patrol agents on Americans." (Before the next horrific week.) "Trump versus the world" and stuff. Shout-out for Bell's t-shirt:
     LOVE IS STILL THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE ON THE PLANET
• January 9, 2026 - by Heather Cox Richardson
  "Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.” On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
• Fact-checking Trump’s latest claims about mail ballots and voting machines
  The "latest" as of last August, from Wisconsin Watch. Not-a-spoiler alert: Thug lied about pretty much everything, including his imagining he can just declare new election rules.

14.Jan.2026

Civil War 2.0

Joyce Vance considers the question Should ICE Agents Be Able To Wear Masks?

"Protect and serve. That’s supposed to be the job.

"What could be further from that than masked agents roaming American streets in packs, refusing to identify themselves, and terrorizing—there is no other word for it at this point—American citizens?

Top of the NYT's headlines this morning is ‘Like a Military Occupation’: Clashes Rise With Federal Agents in Minneapolis; "Arrests and aggressive tactics by ICE and the Border Patrol, many seen on viral videos, have intensified the frustration and fear among residents." Also the 4 hero [no pun intended] images accompanying the story, each horrific in its own way.

The guys with the face masks and neck gaiters are feeling assaulted, resisted, and impeded by citizens protesting their behavior, documenting what they're doing on video, and they're fighting back, with wildly inappropiate paramilitary force, and utter disregard for civil rights.

There's a Status Coup News/Jon Farina video of at least 17 Border Patrol agents, including Gregory Bovino strutting his stuff and doing crowd control, to assault one guy a gas station. "We got a Honduran here and we gotta get status." Green light for smashing a window and forcible arrest. "Probable cause," you know.

Some of the agents are doing their own documentation of terrorism. I'm sure Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem love watching those vids.

I agree with Joyce Vance's conclusion:

"There is literally no legitimate reason for ICE and Customs Border Patrol (CBP) to continue to operate this way during immigration “enforcement actions,” especially in light of the recent history of documented abuses. Anonymity accelerates that kind of behavior. It tells the agents they aren’t accountable for violating people’s civil rights."

As does letting them walk away from murder, and prosecuting their victims. These supposed "law enforcement officers" are "act[ing] like the accelerant to a smoldering fire." My emphasis added:

"The overwhelming majority of federal law enforcement agents I worked with during my 25-year career at DOJ were men and women who were committed to following the law themselves while protecting their communities and prosecuting crimes. They believed citizens had constitutional rights. There’s no reason for the sudden change, a world where an agent shoots and kills a woman for no good reason, except that the current leadership in the White House and at DHS is willing to tolerate, if not encourage, what we’re now seeing. There are people ripped out of their cars, homes entered without a judicial warrant, agents who treat American citizens like they have no rights. This administration dishonors the service of the federal agents who spent their careers committed to constitutional policing."

I would just add that you don't have to be a citizen to have Constitutional rights.

"Non-citizens possess essential rights that are foundational to the American legal system, including due process and equal protection under the law. These rights ensure that all individuals, regardless of their immigration status, are treated fairly and justly in legal proceedings."

13.Jan.2026

A passing of note

Back in my cubical dwelling days, I had Dilbert strips posted here and there. Didn't everybody? (Probably not, but memory blurs as the decades add up.) They seemed funny at the time, exposing the foibles of middle management from an insider. I also don't remember exactly when it stopped being funny, but some time after I left the cube farm (22 years ago now).

Richard Sandomir's obituary of Scott Adams for the New York Times is a sad, and sobering read about an ultimately tragic figure. Dead at 68, first of all, damn.

His satirical prediction of Trump's 2016 success, "based on his powers of persuasion," and his 2017 victory? lap, “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter” were darkly prescient. He got an invitation to the White House. "He said" it says, with a link to "Episode 2987 CWSA 10/13/25", "his support for Mr. Trump in 2016 proved costly."

(My YouTube viewing was interrupted by a tailored barking salesman ad-insert—a guy looks vaguely like Pete Hegseth, weirdly—telling me "THE WORST FREAKING STATE TO LIVE IN RIGHT NOW IS IDAHO" Maybe you've seen him AI'd with your state and city name?)

Speaking of Trump, Adams says "He definitely seems to love America and always has."

He seems to what now?

"His heart's in the right place." His heart?!

"He definitely has skills that other people just don't have."

"I predicted that his love of country" (what now?) "his love of winning, his extreme toolbox of skills would get us to a good place. Now was that based on reality, and truth, or was it just predictive?"

"Well, other people said, 'Hey, I think his personality and character are unsuitable to be president. Therefore he will steal our democracy and just steal money from the treasury for himself, and he's only in it to win it for himself.' Was that predictive?"

Actually, it was. But Adams opines "It was not. That was not predictive." Just last October.

"If you thought that Trump was a big old narcissist who just wants everyone to love him and look good, that's why he works so hard. [chuckling] That's not a negative. That's why he works so hard. I have the same situation. I want to be appreciated for what I've done for other people. That's my big payoff in life."

With the benefit of just three months' hindsight, watching a dying man's last words, that's pretty chilling. His parting prediction is that "people like Trump are going to get a lot of shit done." In October, 2025, swimming in a zone flooded with trumpian excrement, quite the "prediction." But he was riding high on Israeli hostages freed (along with 2,000 "Hamas" that he didn't want to say much about), and Trump's hero's welcome in Israel from Netanyahu. "There's no such thing as praising Trump too much," he chuckles over. I got as far as 7 minutes into his hour+ soliloquy before it was more than I could take. See how you do. Back to the obit, quoting from later in the show:

“When I decided that I would throw away my entire social life to back Trump and when I eventually threw away my entire career — which even before I was canceled, my licensing business and book sales went to almost nothing — because I was supporting Trump,” he said on his podcast in October 2025. “I sacrificed everything. I sacrificed my social life. I sacrificed my career. I sacrificed my reputation. I may have sacrificed my health. And I did that because I believed it was worth it.”

The Peter Principle

Speaking of Wikipedia, says there that the 1969 book by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull was "intended to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations." ICYMI, the idea is

People in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent."

That came to mind in regard to Peter Brian "Pete" Hegseth, the made-up, oil-slicked, self-styled "Warrior" now directing various war crimes and murder, and his PP arc capsulized by Heather Cox Richardson (with my emphasis added, and the link to the scathing op-ed brought in-line):

"Defense Secretary Hegseth came to his position from his job as a weekend host on the Fox News Channel. Before that, he served in the Army Reserve and the National Guard but, as Kelly and Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) noted in a Military Times op-ed questioning Hegseth’s fitness for the position, he never rose to a command position and his “track record falls short of military standards.” He is the least-experienced defense secretary in U.S. history."

So much for "meritocracy," but in a maladministration led by a grifting felon, we could hardly expect better. One bad hire always leads to more.

Happy (pre)Anniversary, Wikipedia!

At yesterday's coffee date with a friend, the subject of encyclopedias came up. Jeanette noted that our Library! no longer accepts them as donations. They have pretty much gone the way of the buggy whip, if you remember those. Or even if you don't.

I grew up with The World Book Encyclopedia, the 1955 edition, augmented with annual supplements for ten or maybe fifteen years. When learning or researching about a more current topic, I would wonder when we were going to get a new edition. The answer was "never." What happened to that big set of dozens of hard-bound books? Maybe they were donated when someone would still take them; I don't think anyone in the family carried them to their new home as an inheritance.

When Wikipedia was the new thing at the turn of the millennium, it seemed like an interesting idea. An occasional source of useful information, a novel form of communal creative writing, but not really a go-to reference. I created an account at some point, motivated by adding to its body of knowledge (maybe), or correcting some bit I thought wasn't right. I'm not sure what the threshold of "contributor" is, but I wouldn't claim that for myself. (Logging in for the first time in a long time, I see my most recent edit, my tenth, was 5 years ago.)

In a couple of days, Wikipedia will celebrate turning 25 years old, and they're having a 25th Anniversary Virtual Celebration. 4:00pm UTC, is 9:00am MST. I've got another date, darn it, but the lineup looks like fun: a countdown and pre-function, a tour of history, how the 300+ [!] language Wikipedias have grown" since its "Hello, World!" An "ode to the talk page," and building consensus, music, games spotlights, guest appearances. Like "The Free Encyclopedia," the virtual party is free (but could donate to support it).

The pre-prefunction video on the invite is a fun minute and a half retrospective. "Everyone can edit... When you add to it, the whole world can learn.... Behind it all? People." (Speaking of people, here's the last page I had occasion to look up, before meeting with this year's "Coming of Age" class last Sunday: List of Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists.)

The announcement they sent tells me that "billions of people use Wikipedia, but less than 2% of readers donate." We've been in that 2% for some years now, and it is, for sure, a gift that keeps on giving.

12.Jan.2026

At a dangerous time

There's a lot of competition for the headline this morning, and I may be succumbing to recency bias (as in, "the last thing I saw"), but there's the Speaker of the House saying:

"I am concerned about that* and we should not be limiting funding for Homeland Security at a dangerous time..."

The Fox News clipped by Aaron Rupar didn't explain what "that" was in the question Johnson was responding to.

Judging by performance, ICE and CBP are making our times more dangerous then ever, talking about "wartime" on the American people. From the WaPo on Dec. 31:

"ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires, recruiting "gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.

"The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and recruitment channels, including through ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document distributed among officials this summer detailing ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy.”

After the murder of Renee Good, the DHS response is to SEND IN MORE PARAMILITARY, and up the ante on illegal tactics to terrorize the populace. What it looks like, and what Rep. Ilhan Omar said she thinks (and I suspect she's exactly right)

"the ultimate goal of Kristi Noem and President Trump is to agitate people enough where they are able to invoke the Insurrection Act to declare martial law."

That's why the execrable toady Greg Bovino said "hats off" to Renee Nicole Good's killer.

11.Jan.2026

42 of 47

I may be jumping to conclusions here, but this BlueSky post from Adam Serwer seems to explain everything about the current gaslighting extravaganza. (Also, we're multiple layers deep: ICE murder is distracting from Venezuela invasion, distracting from Caribbean drone murders, distracting from the Epstein files.) Not quite sure what "centrist" is doing there, but ok.

The reactionary centrist logic is simple: if the left does something bad it’s the left’s fault, and if the right does something bad, it’s also the left’s fault for making them do it. It’s a simple formula and once you see it every one of their arguments is the same

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) January 10, 2026 at 4:24 PM

And this. To work around the problem of the midterms bringing accountability.

The goal here is martial law. It’s martial law. Let’s be clear about that.

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan.bsky.social) January 10, 2026 at 11:22 AM

10.Jan.2025

One positive development

After writing the post below, I noticed this item on Democracy Docket's website, dated Jan. 9: Federal court blocks key parts of Trump’s anti-voting order, restores states’ control over elections. Two states, in particular, Washington and Oregon, which both have universal "vote-by-mail" systems.

"A federal court blocked core provisions of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting executive order Friday, ruling that the president had no authority to impose new election rules that threatened to disenfranchise voters and override state law.

"In a sweeping order, District Judge John H. Chun, appointed by President Joe Biden, ruled in favor of Washington and Oregon, permanently halting enforcement of key sections of Executive Order 14248 — Trump’s March 2025 directive aimed at reshaping how states run elections....

"The judge also blocked Trump’s attempt to strong-arm states by tying federal election funding to compliance with his order.

“The President has no authority to unilaterally impose new conditions on federal funds or ‘thwart congressional will by canceling appropriations passed by Congress,’” the court wrote.

Weaponizing the federal government against voters

In her subscriber-only "Five Questions with" feature, Joyce Vance talked to Marc Elias this week, and made it 10 questions, about the midterm elections this year. It boils down to one big issue: Will Donald Trump and his sycophants be held accountable to the American people, or not? We don't know.

I'm old enough to remember when John Roberts and the Supremes gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that bipartisan majorities of Congress had maintained through amendments in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006. In that last round, 20 years ago, Congress voted unanimously to reauthorize the VRA. And now, in Thug's fascist takeover with the Supremes' carte blanche:

"[O]ne of the most important new developments this year is the Trump DOJ’s emergence as one of the most prolific sources of anti-voting litigation. In less than a year, the Department of Justice has filed 25 anti-voting lawsuits. While pro-democracy attorneys often found ourselves allied with the DOJ in the past, we are now forced to oppose them to prevent the federal government from trampling on voting rights....

Republicans "know their policies are unpopular, and they know their only chance to stave off a major defeat in 2026 is to rig elections through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election subversion."

The DOJ has now sued 23 states and Washington DC for unfettered access to voter information to feed its national omni-database. (Imagine if they tried to do that with gun registration!) The battlefield includes redrawing district maps half-way between decennial censuses; mining voter registration and voter data; meddling with election administration, and mail-in voting. And campaign finance regulations. (Yeah, who knew there still were any?) NRSC v. FEC has been "brought by Republicans to challenge one of the last remaining limits on money in politics: the restrictions on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates."

Elias "represented Democratic committees that intervened to defend the coordinated expenditure limits after Trump’s Department of Justice broke with decades of precedent and refused to defend this cornerstone of our campaign finance system. A law that both Democratic and Republican administrations had long defended was suddenly deemed unconstitutional by the Trump Administration."

"Artificial intelligence and big data have fundamentally changed the redistricting process. It doesn’t just make the act of drawing new maps easier; it makes gerrymandering efforts exponentially more effective and precise."

And then there are "third-party voter challenges."

"Republican activists have built private voter databases to submit lists of voters they want removed from the rolls or hassled at polling places. In practice, third-party voter challenges do not uncover voter fraud. There is no legitimate reason to allow these right-wing activists to file mass voter challenges."

What's to be done? One step is to support the leaders of democracy. We're paying subscribers to Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse blog, and Marc Elias' Democracy Docket. Elias' call:

"First, stay engaged and informed. We can’t count on the corporate media to keep us informed, so it’s important to seek out and support the independent media outlets you trust, like Civil Discourse.

"Second, help Democrats win in the midterms. The success of any durable opposition movement depends on the opposing party taking power. Support Democratic campaigns up and down the ballot.

"Third, as I mentioned earlier, every one of us has a platform. Use it to speak out in favor of democracy and against what Republicans are doing. You may not think you have anything to add to the conversation, but the truth is that we need more people who are willing to speak out.

"Fourth, get involved locally. Volunteer as a poll worker. Attend your county election board meetings. Know who your local election officials are, and support them when they’re under attack.

"Finally, don’t give up hope. The right wing wants to convince us that resistance is futile, and too many on the left echo that despair. It’s not true. Time and again, we have shown that when we fight back, we can win."

Your vote matters. A lot. If it weren't so important, they wouldn't be fighting so hard to take it away from you.

9.Jan.2026

Kudos to all youse

The CEO of the activity tracking app I've found essential over the last couple years, Strava, sent out "Kudos on a great 2025," and wishing all his customers a Happy 2026. That's nice. "In 2025, the Strava community received 14 billion Kudos!" it begins. The stack of app-generated responses to each activity, no matter how big or small doesn't do much for me, but it they're working to make it a social currency. (Hence the Title Case.)

In the 3rd sentence, he refers to "every Kudo," and I thought that was novel. The run of the mill dictionary entries returned for a search were unsatisfying, so I moved directly to "kudo american heritage" and was rewarded with their entry for kudos, which instructs that it's already singular. "Acclaim or praise for exceptional achievement," from Greek, kūdos, magical glory, nice. I know from my own experience that not all my activies were exceptional, so that 14 billion number is doubtless a bit high.

Ultimately, as I'm sure you know, dictionaries don't prescribe language; they describe the way people use words, so if it's "often been treated as a plural, especially in the popular press," what are you going to do? (Spoiler alert: whatever you want.) As for me, I shall not truck in any fractional kudos.

8.Jan.2026

Judiciousnessiology

Our vast machine of audio-visual entertainment serves up any manner of interesting talking heads these days. If only there were more hours in the day (or more editing of hour-long convos to idk, 12 minute highlight reels?), I'd enjoy more of them. But this morning, Saturday's conversation between Anne Applebaum and Charlie Sykes, two of my favorite smart people: Trump's America Becomes the Neighborhood Bully. For the first "To the Contrary" podcast of the new year, just shy of the Smash and Grab 2.0 anniversary, "the United States is already threatening military action or some sort of aggression against Colombia, Greenland, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela, I think we've bombed Nigeria in the last few weeks..." Cadet Bonespurs and Major Major are on a hell of a roll.

The opening news clip is Thug trying to read the script Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio (I imagine) wrote for him, "talking about how we're going to be 'running' Venezuela:

"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition"

with wow, too many sibilants slithering about, we know they didn't have a dry run of this go. "So," he continues, looking up, and now improvising,

"we don't want to be involved with, uh, having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years."

"Situation" is a hard word for him now. As is "last." He didn't used to hiss and slather so much, I'm sure the record shows. "So," again, and he tries to find his place in the script.

"We are going to run the country"

Very, uh, powerfully. Like no one has ever seen before.

"until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious"

and for this second go-through the word really hangs him up, and he looks up again, and back down, ad libbing as he tries to find coherence.

"transition. And it has to be judicious, because that's what we're all about."

That is What We Are All About.

"We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela..."

That's why we killed at least 80 of them to kidnap two people. Just to be clear, and contrary to what Stephen Miller declared late at night, Applebaum notes that "we are clearly NOT running Venezuela." We haven't sent in an occupying force. In fact, we decided, or acquiesced or something, and Maduro's people are still running things. As for Thug,

"People imagine that he must have a strategy. You know, he wouldn't do these dramatic things if there wasn't a stategic, long-term goal.... I believe that Donald Trump doesn't have strategies."

It's just about "dominating, or winning any particular, given moment. He likes dramatic actions." The WWE of global politics.

"What happens next? What happens to the country? What happens to the country's really unbelievably impressive and well-organized democratic opposition? What happens to the political prisoners? What happens to the regime? What happens to the paramilitaries who still have their guns and the other groups who control some parts of the country where the government doesn't even reach anymore? He doesn't really care."

A reporter asked Thug what's up with this 'War on Drugs' trope justifying the attack on Venezuela when we just pardoned that Honduras guy, indicted, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to prison for drug running, what you might call "narcoterrorism."

"He can't explain it." "There isn't a strategy." "He treats everything one by one, you know, 'in this situation, what's the advantage for me?'"

Maybe some of the people in the administration try to think things through, and care? But not Thug.

"Trump himself just doesn't care. You can hear from his rambling answers" [as he bounces from thing to thing, "Biden treated him so unfairly"], "it's a deeper problem than hypocrisy, it's the lack of any strategy whatsoever."

Other than our new "Donroe Doctrine" (you know at least that he came up with that name, scintillating in its stupidity), under which "I run everything in North and South America." As Applebaum notes, it's "I will exert my authority according to my personal whim."

Shades of the hippie era, "if it feels good, do it," when Thug was dodging the draft, and venereal disease. Remember when?

“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

Brace yourselves for the backlash of this insanity, this end of aspiration, trust, principle, rule of law, alliances (how soon will the Anschluss come to Greenland?), all in service to random psychopathy.

Speaking of disalliance, our still-unraveling betrayal of Ukraine as part of a deal for Venezuela was teased six years ago—before Russia's full-scale invasion— by Fiona Hill, in testimony to Congress.

“The law of the strongest is clearly stronger than ordinary justice,” Dmitri Medvedev, the formerly liberal president of Russia turned war hawk wrote on social media, while adding in an interview with the official Tass news agency that Washington now has “no grounds, even formally, to reproach our country.”

7.Jan.2026

The Oily Lords of Misrule

Here we are on Thirteenth Night, with the clown who found the baby in the cake somehow still holding forth as if he were King. Not even Year One of the improv surreality of Trumpism 2.0. It must be a weird ride on that bandwagon, setting aside all you've learned and know in favor of Whatever You Say, Sir. Big, strong men, with tears in their eyes, salivating at the image of bullet-headed Stephen Miller shouting at Jake Tapper, who was gobsmacked and aging before our eyes.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

We used to be so confident that we were "the good guys," the exceptional nation, the Cold War winner, the shining city on the hill. Now it has all been covered with Donald Trump's virtual feces, following on the actual feces that were smeared in the Capitol 5 years ago yesterday.

After the White House web team rewrote the history of January 6 for us (shorter: it was all the Democrats' fault), there was the tawdry spectacle of the ongoing trial balloons for just canceling voting this year. From Heather Cox Richardson's Jan. 6 Letter from an American:

"[I]n a rambling speech in which he jumped from topic to topic, danced, and appeared to mimic someone doing something either stupid or obscene, Trump explained the ideology behind his actions. He and MAGA Republicans have absorbed the last 40 years of Republican rhetoric to believe that Democratic policies are “horrible” and that only Republicans “have the right policy.” If that’s the case, why should Republicans even have to “run against these people?” Why even have elections? When voters choose Democrats, there’s something wrong with them, so why let them have a say? Their choice is bad by definition. Anything that they do, or have done, must be erased."

The stalwart "American First" branch of MAGA must be shifting in their seats a bit as the façade of the war on Venezuela being a "police action" drops. We killed at least 80 people to grab Maduro and his wife and bring them to New York?

The big man troothed the brag that "the interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America," and that the oil would be "sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!"

It sounds like a lot, but is it, really? In yesterday's NYT story, Venezuela Braces for Economic Collapse From U.S. Blockade, we read that "if the blockade held, the Venezuelan government expected national oil production to collapse from about 1.2 million barrels per day late last year to less than 300,000 later this year."

30 to 50MMbbl could have been 4 to 6 weeks' production of heavy crude, but the disruption of invasion and war could turn that into nearly months' worth, or as much as half their capacity. Until, you know, the oil men come in and pony up large investments to rebuild things. We've got such a great history of nation building lately.

But we won't be sipping off the hind teat; our Energy Secretary declared today that "the United States intended to maintain significant control over Venezuela’s oil industry, including by overseeing the sale of the country’s production “indefinitely.”

“Going forward we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” Chris Wright said at a Goldman Sachs energy conference near Miami.

This delicate slice in the NYT reporting: "It was not clear what legal authority the Trump administration would operate under to oversee Venezuela’s sales of oil." As if we need any steenkeen legal authority, hmm?

Oil men imagine Venezuelan production could get back to a MM bbl/day "relatively quickly," but beyond that, it would take investment, first of all, and time.

“To get back to the historical production numbers, that takes tens of billions of dollars and significant time,” Mr. Wright said. “But why not?”

I'm old enough to remember that Iraq's oil revenues were supposed to pay for the 2003 war, but guess what: we've been handling all that revenue for more than two decades now. The "Coalition Provisional Authority" back then, Paul Bremer, gave the routing number for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Status report from one slightly dodgy source, on the payback pipeline:

"This monthly transfer of US dollars – which are literally flown into Baghdad in pallets of hard cash – determines Iraq and its 40-million-population’s ability to pay for basic needs like salaries, food, and medicine."

Epiphany.2026

Never forget

Special Counsel Jack Smith spent his day on Wednesday, December 17, 2025 being deposed (under oath, of course) by the House Committee on the Judiciary, in a private session (against his expressed wish to give public testimony).

It's a big committee, with "each state represented by at least one member" (they say, but with only 44 members listed, go figure). The chair, Jim Jordan and ranking member, Jamie Raskin were joined by 23 members: Biggs, McClintock, Nehls, Kiley, Fry, Grothman, Knott, Onder, Harris, Fitzgerald, Gooden, Cline, Schmidt, Lofgren, Scanlon, Balint, Moskowitz, Goldman, Cohen, Neguse, Crockett, Johnson, and Jayapal. Idaho's two members of the house, Mike Simpson, and Russ Fulcher, are not on the committee.

The deposition ran from 10:05am to 6:44pm. The PBS News video of the session is just under 8 hours and 22 minutes, and starts in the middle of page 12 of the transcript (after introductions and preliminary remarks for the chair, and ranking member). The transcript, redacted, and with errata appended runs 255 pages.

The latter begins with an introduction by someone whose name is redacted; 14 people for the Committee on the Judiciary, and 9 for "Investigations and Senior Advisor" all had their names covered up. The names of the 3 lawyers for Jack Smith were not redacted. (The redactions don't fail for copy/paste; I checked. In watching the video, I see it wasn't as carefully sanitized; Steve Castor, who was minority counsel in Donald Trump's first impeachment—and whose cousin, Bruce Castor represented Trump in his second impeachment—is named. Castor is the committee's General counsel, and according to The Hill [Sept. 2024] "has been involved in nearly every major congressional investigation launched over the past 20 years.")

The introduction is twisted, like so much of what Jim Jordan has dipped his oar into, by a conclusory accusation:

"Chairman Jordan has requested this deposition as part of the committee's oversight of the Biden-Harris administration's weaponization of the Justice Department and its misuse of Federal law enforcement resources for partisan political purposes."

Rule of thumb: every accusation by a psychopath is a confession. Given the well-documented weaponization of the DOJ and federal law enforcement for partisan political purposes and for "retribution" by Donald J. Trump and his sycophants, Jordan's accusation is breathtaking in its shameless hypocrisy.

But there were (at least) two sides to hear from. [Redacted] for the minority "hit a couple notes" before the Q&A got underway:

"First, this committee's proceeding with this deposition today without access to Volume Two of the special counsel's report. And this is despite the Eleventh Circuit's ruling that Judge Aileen Cannon must address her order regarding Volume Two by January 2nd of 2026. It might seem obvious, but that's just two weeks away.

That was then, this is now, 4 days after the deadline. A quick search didn't turn up any news. Too busy with Venezuela, I guess.

"President Trump and his co-conspirators have sought to prevent Volume Two of the report from becoming public, including to Congress.

"Recently, President Trump petitioned Judge Cannon to continue keeping Volume Two of the report under seal, and that amounts to gagging Mr. Smith today and preventing him from telling this committee about his investigation into President's Trump's crimes.

"And, specifically, these crimes include stealing and lying about classified documents he kept in the ballrooms and bathrooms of his Mar-a-Lago clubhouse. And there is no reason at all to continue to keep Volume Two under seal -- besides, of course, the fact that Mr. Trump doesn't like what it says.

"Second, the Department of Justice forwarded what appears to be investigative files and communications related to the Special Counsel's Office to counsel for the minority just yesterday, on Tuesday, December 16th, with another series of files that came in on Monday, December 15th.

Giving the Democrats less than 24 hours to review the material before the deposition, ok.

In his opening remarks, Smith's counsel, Peter Koski, also noted that Volume Two of the Special Counsel's report remains under Judge Aileen Cannon's gag report from a year ago, so "all that" was out of bounds for the deposition. And finally, this: "observation about the risks of [Smith's] participating in this deposition":

"The most powerful person in the world has said that Mr. Smith should be in jail because of his work as special counsel, not because Jack did anything wrong, but because he had the audacity to follow the facts and the law and apply them to that powerful person. And through its actions, this Justice Department has demonstrated its eagerness to follow President Trump's orders, despite the facts and the law.

"Yesterday the President's chief of staff is reported to have confirmed in interviews that the President is indeed pursuing criminal prosecutions against his perceived adversaries as part of a retribution campaign.

"In the face of those threats, Mr. Smith appears today undaunted, comforted by the knowledge that not only did he do nothing wrong, he conducted his work as special counsel with integrity, impartiality, and an uncompromising commitment to the rule of law."

Smith spoke for himself in his opening statement which was succinct, and memorable. Cut to the chase:

"The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts.

"Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.

"Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents."

But they had to fill up the rest of the day, so... Steve Castor tried to impeach the credibility of the witness. It did not go well. I remember being struck by Castor's clumsiness in his performances for the 1st impeachment. This seems worse, in that he's running the show, with a feeling of privacy. It's rancid in the light of day, and Smith wasn't having it. Calmly. Clearly.

The supposed wedge between the attorney general (Merrick Garland) and Smith is: wasn't Smith relying too much on "statements that the President had made" and so infringing on his Free Speech?

"[W]e wanted to make clear that this was not about trying to interfere with anyone's First Amendment rights, that this was a fraud. And as you know, under Supreme Court precedent, fraud is not protected by the First Amendment."

Castor: "But the President's statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?"

Smith: "Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not."

Castor's next angle was that Trump didn't do "his own due diligence," so couldn't be blamed for anything? Seriously?! it was just people in his office. You know, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell. Sayin' stuff.

Castor: "And, you know, for the most part, he is just receiving this information and, you know, his statements are almost just regurgitating what these people have told him. I mean, isn't that the case?"

Smith: "No. And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we had such strong proof is all witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies....

"Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party. And so the President got information from people he trusted on other issues. He 14 rejected it whenever it didn't fit him staying in office."

I kept reading, and got as far as page 138 before a meeting, and then it was time to post something and finishe for now. I got a hearty LOL from one vignette: Rep. Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) looped around to the supposed disrespect Smith had shown for the former president's schedule by scheduling a court date in Florida on April 3, 2024, sandwiched between Trump on trial in New York on April 1, 2, and 4. She asked:

"Considering all the years of experience that you have prosecuting, is it more often or less often that you've had a defendant that has been charged in four different jurisdictions with crimes?"

It reminds me of Tricky Dicky from Yorba Linda, trying to bluff his way through the demise of his political career. "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook," he said. We got to know. And we've known about Donald J. Trump for a long time, now. The second spin of the roulette wheel in 2024 is not going so great.

Hours earlier, on on page 33, the gag orders in the DC and Florida cases came up for discussion. Smith explained why they sought them:

"We sought an order in the D.C. case ... because Donald Trump was making statements that were endangering witnesses, intimidating witnesses, endangering members of my staff, endangering court staff.

"As you might remember, in the -- right around when the indictment was released, he issued a tweet saying: "If you come after me, I'll come after you." He called -- in a tweet he called General Mark Milley a traitor and mentioned that what he'd done in olden times people would be put to death. As a result of the things he was saying, the judge in this case was put -- received vile death threats.

"And with respect to D.C., both the district court and the court of appeals, a panel of judges, found that his actions were, in fact, causing what we said they caused. They were causing witnesses to be intimidated and endangering people."

Thanks to Joyce Vance for getting me started on this, with links to the deposition video and transcript in her post late yesterday: January 6 Again.

5.Jan.2026

The new world disorder

This week has been a long month already. I went looking for a handy image of a stress meter past the peg to OVERWHELM and I was (obviously) overwhelmed by the hits, most connected to ADHD one way or the other. Social media are ADHD-inducing, aren't they? But we have to start somewhere. If you're podcasting, it was "bonus episode" time this weekend. For Monday's starter, I appreciated the (Saturday) conversation between David Frum and Anne Applebaum, How Is Trump Planning to ‘Run’ Venezuela?

Never mind that SecState (and leader for attacks on South America?) Marco Rubio was already trying to walk that back on the Sunday talk shows. (Shorter HCR: "It did not go well.") We'll just, ah, "press changes through [an] oil blockade," as the AP summed it for their headline, "oil quarantine" in the delicate illegal dance Rubio is doing to render acts of war into something healthy. Not murderous at all, like the boat shooting run-up to the weekend extravaganza?

Frum, harkening back to the 1960's observed that during the Cold War, "the country had to be a democracy at home if it were to demand democracy abroad." Quoting(?) from JFK's civil right speech in 1962: "How can we defend freedom in Berlin if we don't have freedom in Alabama?" And goes on: "The United States, to win the cold war, become a more perfect democracy at home." "If the United States gives up on that, the way is set to unravel all those changes" that benefited us, and the world.

Applebaum, after remarking on the "half-hearted" Saturday press conference supposedly justifying anything: "When you look at any of his reasons, they all kind of shrink on touching them. This why we're all looking for other kinds of explanations."

"That the United States aspired to be a beacon, and aspired to be a country that wanted to make itself better, and make the world better was I think one of the things that gave Americans a lot of pride and a lot of satisfaction, and I think it would be tragic for us to lose that."

Our great political divide is between Trump-Miller-Hegseth-Vought-Rubio-Musk shameless psychopathy, and everyone outside the violent, radical right who is still capable of feeling empathy, and shame.

Our increasingly demented president sang along with the bees in his head that "We're a respected country again like, maybe, like never before."

Like, maybe. And,

"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don't want to be involved with, uh, having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition."

We're going to have a "partnership" with Venezuela! And in the inevitable accuracy of a stopped clock, this: "It's, uh, it's both horrible and breathtaking that something like this could've been allowed to take place." That was before he wandered off into the weeds of fabulated crime statistics showing success wherever he casts his gaze.

4.Jan.2026

Shoot-Ready-Aim

HCR's latest Letter from an American reflects our flooded zone and fascist-induced turbulence. Unfinished stories are blunderbussed off the front page by the most blatant wagging of the dog anyone can remember. She starts with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the terms of which the president and his DOJ are steadfastly violating. What's leaking out is bad enough; imagine what they're still hiding.

There's the rare SCOTUS smackdown that deploying American troops to our own cities was not legally justified, and the subsequently announced retreat, as if "we meant to do that." And that bombshell the House Judiciary Committee tried to hide among the New Year's Eve fireworks, hoping no one would notice Special Counsel Jack Smith's testimony did not bury the lede. In his opening statement, he said

that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

Take that jump and read Parker Molloy's review of Jack Smith's testimony. The lumbering and increasingly demented elephant in the room is that yeah, we knew all that. "It is against this backdrop," Richardson continues, "that the Trump administration launched a strike against Venezuela in the early hours of Saturday, January 3."

"Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to emphasize that the attack and extraction of Maduro and Flores were a law enforcement mission, Trump made it clear the goal was regime change in order to gain control of Venezuela’s oil. The administration acted unilaterally, without consulting Congress, and in apparent violation of international law."

Bragging that “one of the most stunning effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history” has outdone WW II, even before the bodies have been sorted out and before putting forward the “designated various people” who are going to “run” Venezuela now, while we take "back" "our" oil from it. Who's calling him L'il Marco now that we've announced Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Greenland and probably Canada are on the to-do list?

“By proceeding without any semblance of international legitimacy, valid legal authority or domestic endorsement, Mr. Trump risks providing justification for authoritarians in China, Russia and elsewhere who want to dominate their own neighbors,” wrote the New York Times editorial board. That justification seems to be the point.

So long, Ukraine. Good-bye Taiwan.

3.Jan.2026

The USA is a rogue state

That's Carole Cadwalladr's assessment as we wake to the news of the war in Venezuela. Considering how "the rest of the world" should respond, she notes: "Trump isn’t just a rogue, out-of-control president, America is a rogue state. And the longer we fail to acknowledge that, the more danger we are in."

On day 3 of the new year, that "startling" US National Security Strategy plan has been put in gear, "assert[ing] ourselves confidently where and when we need to feel like it in the region."

She provides the background reading, from the Dec. 27 NYT piece, How Oil, Drugs and Immigration Fueled Trump’s Venezuela Campaign:

"TLDR: political expediency fomented by two of his closest consiglieri, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a Venezuela hawk, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration overlord who’s embraced the chance to go after an entire demographic."

Pete Hegseth's first war

Tired of shooting defenseless boats with drones, and murdering people they alleged were "narcoterrorists" for extrapolated death tolls from drugs they weren't actually smuggling, and not to the U.S., our Major Major psychopath "Secretary of War" has upped the ante. Moving an aircraft carrier and all to the Caribbean reminds me of the "military exercise" the Russians had in Belarus, before invading Ukraine.

From the NYT's live updates, sometime before sun-up out where we live this moring, Tyler Pager, "Reporting from West Palm Beach, Fla." wrote this:

"Trump brushed off concerns about the legality of the U.S. operation in Venezuela. When asked about criticism from Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the president said Democrats were “weak, stupid people.”

“They should say great job,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “They shouldn’t say ‘Oh, gee, maybe it’s not constitutional.’ You know the same old stuff that we’ve been hearing for years and years and years.”

So now President Nicolás Maduro and his wife are getting an all-expenses paid flight to New York, where some lickspittle prosecutor will do whatever is necessary to come up with an indictment to justify what just happened. Pager also reported:

In an interview on Fox News, Trump said that Maduro wanted to negotiate in the final days before U.S. forces captured him but the American president said he rejected that offer. “I didn’t want to negotiate,” he said. “I said, ‘Nope, we got to do it.’”

Trump's head lawyer, Pam Blondie was also posting on social media, saying they'd come up with indictment for the wife too, who knows what for. Both of them, she said, “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

Are we going to rename the DOJ the Department of Wrath, too? So weird how one indicted, tried and convicted president gets pardoned (with the wheels of unjustice greased by Roger Stone, no less), and another gets extreme rendition. I hear Venezuela has lots of oil, anyway.

Shades of Iraq, this little war will pay for itself? That was Paul Wolfowitz' eyebrow-licking fever dream, anyway. A recent opinion in The Hill estimates that "just the interest on what was added to the national debt for the direct costs of the Iraq War from 2003 to 2014" was $60 billion this year. Never mind 4,400 deaths of our military personnel nearly 32,000 wounded, "the cost in lost productivity due to injuries, PTSD, increased drug use, domestic violence and other ills associated with the trauma of war," and all the Iraqi lives destroyed that we don't generally get around to counting.

In April, 2019, I wrote about Lisa Margonelli's then 12-year-old Oil On the Brain under the blog headline What a long, strange trip it's been , and here we are still tripping. "I wish she'd been able to write a second edition to bring the story up to date," I wrote, "with Venezuela on the brink of a proxy war, and our own petrostate trending more toward "shithole" than "great again" in our current president's inimitable verbal styling."

I'm sure Vlad V. Putin and Xi Jinping are taking note of the new Trump Doctrine: Smash and Grab. David Rothkopf, on The Daily Beast: Trump has taken the Putinization of U.S. foreign policy to the next level.

"Trump is attacking our neighbors while showing a complete disregard for international and U.S. law. He is doing so based on fabricated grounds that do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. His reasons for doing so are likely corrupt and certainly are not in the national interest of the United States. In ordering the military to be the vehicle for his aggression, he is degrading them and inviting our military’s leaders to debase themselves by agreeing to his illegal orders."

2.Jan.2026

Back in the day

My dates are interwoven with the story of immigration in Heather Cox Richardson's New Year's Day Letter from an American. Our visit to the Statue of Liberty National Monument (including Liberty and Ellis islands) was the standout highlight of our 1989 "Music and Theater Study Tour" to New York City. (And New Jersey, I see from the map; both those islands are in New Jersey!) Ellis Island had closed as an "Immigrant Station" 35 years before that, the year before I was born, and had been made into a museum, homage to the 12 million immigrants who had gone through the facility from 1892 to 1954. My great great great-grandfather was part of the wave of "Germans fleeing economic hardship and the failed 1848 revolution" in the 1850s. My mother's grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1880 with their five children, including my grandfather, then age 5, before Ellis Island had its Immigrant Station.

I can't read or hear Emma Lazarus' famous poem without getting thrills. The statue was dedicated just six years before Ellis Island's Immigrant Station opened; "The New Colossus" was cast in bronze and mounted on its base in 1903.

New Year's Day.2026

Culling the herd

Saw a "gift article" link to this WaPo interactive yesterday, and clicking through from my not-logged-into-it phone, I see their "gift" has strings attached: "create your free account" to redeem it. Ugh. So here's the not-gift link: U.S. vaccination rates are plunging. Look up where your school stands. The captions for the first three hero datagraphics:

Before the pandemic, roughly half of counties had kindergarten vaccination rates high enough to prevent measles outbreaks.

After the pandemic, many counties increased their vaccination rates, reaching the recommended level of protection.

But far more lost ground, leaving only about a quarter of the counties with herd immunity in kindergartners.

Post reporters looked at public records from 44 states and DC and found "The share of U.S. counties where 95% or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50% before the pandemic to 28%..."

Here in our Ada County, Idaho, we were at 90% pre-pandemic, and are now reporting 79% for MMR vaccination rate for kindergartners. ICYMI, that's Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (aka German measles).

One school nurse in Minnesota is quoted, “Our community has been very hesitant since COVID-19. Many have voiced that they do not trust the CDC or Public Health officials any longer.”

The CDC and public health officials made some mistakes back in the day, but I'm confident they were well-intentioned. Now? Not so much. Donald Trump's trophy Kennedy, "an American politician, environmental lawyer, author, conspiracy theorist, and anti-vaccine activist" is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and doing his damndest to dismantle the whole shebang. (There's a trophy(?) Nixon, too; Andrew Nixon, who looks younger than most of my grandchildren, and is apparently too young to have earned a Wikipedia page, so I don't know if he's related.) As the gas man asked us all, before we started finding out: What have you got to lose? Herd immunity, for one.

"The nation currently is experiencing its highest annual measles case tally in at least 33 years, a stunning reversal. In South Carolina this month, a measles outbreak topped 175 cases, mostly among unvaccinated individuals, with hundreds quarantined. The resurgence of measles is seen by doctors and public health experts as a harbinger of the return of other deadly, vaccine-preventable illnesses, like whooping cough, which has killed three children in Kentucky in the past 12 months.

"For generations, schools have required children to have proof of vaccination as a step toward protecting entire communities, starting with Massachusetts’ adoption of a school mandate for the smallpox vaccine in 1855. Following the success of the polio and measles vaccines in the mid-20th Century, schools and the American public widely supported vaccination. By the 1980-1981 school year, all 50 states had vaccination laws covering students first entering school."

A KFF-Washington Post poll last September found that "parents who are choosing to skip or delay vaccines for their children are more likely to home-school their children, be White and very religious, identify as Republican or be under 35."

They're "taking a stand" against their children's immunity from disease.

raveling

Tom von Alten