Detail from the cover of Devo’s Freedom of Choice album.
“Insanity is contagious.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Trump left for the elite meet-and-greet at Davos in one of his manic phases. He’d just spent the previous two days trash-talking, bragging about his Venezuelan coup, boasting over pocketing the revenue from Venezuelan oil in offshore accounts, lobbing invasion threats against allies, brandishing new tariffs as if they were hypersonic weapons, badmouthing his rivals, trolling his political enemies, and serial-posting of memes depicting himself as the latest conquistador of the New World. The Re-Conquistador.
Trump’s delusional conception of his own ever-expanding power, even as his poll numbers here continue to shrivel, now outpaces the megalomaniacal reveries of the Sun King of the Ancien Régime. After all, Louis le Grand only saw himself as the embodiment of the state (L’Etat c’est moi). But Trump envisions himself, through the magical hallucinogen of the Donroe Doctrine, as the Emperor of the entire Western Hemisphere (L’hémisphère occidental, c’est moi!) And he was flying to Switzerland to proclaim his new hegemony.
But a funny thing happened on his way to Davos.
The stock market collapsed. The Prime Minister of Canada cut a trade pact with China and urged other countries to do the same. Denmark told Trump to fuck off (literally). Unhelpfully for Trump, the Russians chose this week to publicly endorse his scheme to snatch Greenland from the Danes. The European Union, usually so timid and fractious, resisted his impetuous bullying and threatened to join military exercises in defense of Greenland and levy retaliatory tariffs of their own against the increasingly frail US economy.
Trump landed a deflated man. During his nearly incoherent speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump looked morose and sounded peevish. The words slurred, the fraying sentences trailing off into the ether. His insults lacked fire and punch. He rambled aimlessly. His cognitive decline, never a fall from alpine heights to begin with, was on full public display.
Was this the fearsome tyrant, so many had trembled in obeisance before? He looked like an old man, frail in body, infirm in mind. Not the new Sun King of his cult-stoked fantasies, but a patriarch deep into his autumn, struggling to find the words for retreat. Trump’s strategy (if you can call it that) for cultivating more enemies than friends was always doomed to backfire on him. The only question was how long it would take and how many he’d drag down with him.
So, Trump backed down. The intemperate bombast was spent, replaced by wheezing and stammering. He backed down on invading Greenland. He backed down on imposing new tariffs against European nations. He backed down in front of the elites he both despises and envies.
The humiliation will gnaw away at him for weeks, as he heads home, a weakened despot, to confront the escalating war he’s waging in American cities, against an increasingly rebellious population who’ve reached their own limits of tolerance for injustice and state violence.
+++
+ During his desultory speech at Davos, Trump repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland (or Iceland with Greenland) to the point where people had to be wondering whether Iceland was now–along with Greenland, Canada and Venezuela–on his conquest bucket list: “They’re [Wall Street] not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you. Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money.”
+ Imagine the poor translators trying to make sense of this Trumpian gibberish about “Greenland” into Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), Icelandic or Danish…“Iceland, they love me. They called me ‘Daddy’ last time. A very smart man said, ‘He’s our daddy. He’s running it.’”
I say, Iceland, you say Greenland
Iceland, Greenland, Greenland, Iceland
let’s call the whole thing off…
+ Bari Weiss memo to CBS News reporters and anchors: “Yes, Trump referred to Greenland as Iceland 7 times in his speech, but make clear that he referred to Greenland as Greenland 13 times.”
+ Trump: “That’s our territory. This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America.” The “unsecured island” actually has abandoned US military bases, all of them typically left contaminated with toxic waste, on Greenland, that it can reoccupy any time it wants under a lease largely without limits.
+ Trump claims that the US needs to annex Greenland to protect its assets from the Russians and Chinese. But it turns out the Russians are encouraging Trump’s quest to grab the glaciated island for himself because it buttresses Russia’s rationale for annexing the Crimea and Donbas from Ukraine and drives another fissure between the US and European nations. Here’s Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov: “I just want to highlight that the Euro-Atlantic idea of ensuring security and cooperation has discredited itself… As President Trump said, Greenland is important to the security of the United States. Crimea is no less important to the security of Russia.”
+ Trump put the future of the US alliance with Europe on racial terms, throwing some racist slurs against Somalis along the way:
The West cannot mass-import foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed—it’s not a nation. Got no government, got no police, got no nothing. Can you believe that Somalia, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. I always say these are low-IQ people.”
Look, I am derived from Europe, Scotland, and Germany. 100% Scotland, my mother, 100% German. My father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization. This is the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common, and we share it. We share it, but we have to keep it strong. We have to become stronger, more successful and more prosperous than ever. We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the West from the depths of the Dark Ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.
+ Jesse Walker: “Joe Biden is the man in the nursing home who spent all day silently staring at an unplugged TV. Donald Trump is the man in the nursing home who spent all day loudly arguing with a squirrel.”
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+ You can see why so many Christian Nationalists think Trump is the Aquinas of our time, when it comes to his acute understanding of the teachings of the Gospels. His moral sensibility is simply unparalleled…
+ Renee Good still had a pulse when paramedics (who had to trek across the snow several blocks on foot because ICE blocked the ambulance from entering Portland Ave) reached her, more than 15 minutes after she was shot and ICE refused to allow a physician on the scene to treat her wound. They wanted the “fuckin’ bitch” dead.
+ The independent autopsy of Renee Good showed that she had 3 bullet wounds: one to the left arm, one in the right lung, and a fatal wound to the left temple that exited the right side of her head, meaning that the fatal shot was fired through the side window, when there was no threat to the officer who killed her. The MAGA argument that Good could have been turning her head when she was shot is undermined by the fact that the bullet hole in the windshield was on the lower left, well below Good’s head, even if it was turned toward the right, but directly at the level of her chest.
+ Trump’s threat to send federal troops into Minnesota without a single serious injury to an ICE agent makes whatever happened in the Gulf of Tonkin appear like a real “incident.” (Interesting footnote: The Doors’ Jim Morrison’s father was in command of the US Navy fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin. But it was also revealed (much) later that Rear Admiral Morrison told Navy HQ that he thought the second “incident” was false and the Navy brass never relayed this to LBJ, who used it as the pretext for war.)
+ ICE is shredding the Bill of Rights one amendment after another. Its agents now claim it would cause “chaos” to let people it arrested and detained see their lawyers…
+ The Wall Street Journal reports that ICE agents get bonuses based on their arrests, which they get to keep even if the person is released without charges.
+ With the support of many Democrats, the budget for ICE was tripled. Starting this year, it will have a larger budget than the FBI, DEA, ATF, and US Marshal Service COMBINED. Some, like Cory Booker, want to give ICE even more money in the name of “training.”
+ Adam Johnson on the (worse than) useless Cory Booker’s plan to give ICE officers “more training”: “The guy who killed Renee Good was a ten year ICE veteran who had been thoroughly “trained” by the US military, border patrol and ICE and Good’s murder was captured on three different cameras so what does any of this have to do with anything”
+ Trump has sent 13% of his immigration forces to Minnesota and is considering sending in the military. Yet Minnesota’s immigrant population ranks 23rd in the US, far behind red states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Utah. But most of Minnesota’s immigrant population is documented. For example, Minnesota has an estimated total immigrant population of 495,352, but only 77,836 are undocumented (16%) Compare that to the undocumented populations of Florida 1 million (20%), Texas 1.8 million (32%), Arizona 250,00 (25%), Georgia 374,000 (32%), North Carolina 325,00 (34%), Utah 100,000 (33%).
+ What part of the Constitution allows an ICE agent to bust into a Thai restaurant with his gun drawn in St. Paul, Minnesota, shouting at the terrified owners that he was “looking for a kid” he accused them, without any evidence, of “hiding”?
+ ICE conducted a warrantless raid on the home of an elderly US citizen named Chongly “Scott” Thao, dragged him out of the house into freezing temperatures in his underwear, perp-walked him in front of the press, and accused him first of being a child molester, then, after that libel fell apart, of housing two sex offenders–allegations which seem to have been completely invented to justify this abusive and unconstitutional home invasion, arrest and detention.
+ ICE wants you to believe they confused Scott Thao for the men in the wanted poster…
+ A Go Fund Me Page for the St. Paul snowplow driver who was racially profiled, arrested by ICE and transferred more than 1100 miles away to a detention prison in Texas, despite being a legal resident with no criminal record and an employee of the City of St. Paul. His wife is now afraid to leave her house and the family has no income. The detained man has a serious medical condition and ICE stopped paying its third-party medical providers in October, so many detainees with serious, and even critical, medical conditions aren’t receiving any treatment.
+ First they came for the Oglala, now the Navajo…(There was a very good reason Kristi Noem was banned from setting foot on any Lakota reservation in South Dakota when she was governor.)
+ Americans may finally be beginning to understand that when Trump tries to extort what he wants from foreign countries, it’s American consumers who pay the price. WSJ: “American consumers and importers absorbed 96%” of the cost of Trump’s tariffs in 2025. And that “echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School,” the Journal reported, writing, “Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.”
+ CNN on Americans’ attitudes on the deteriorating economy: “A 55% majority say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, with just 32% saying they’ve made an improvement.”
+ The Associated Press reported that ICE agents are being “trained” on how to break into people’s homes without a warrant.” Just think what other kinds of Constitutional mischief they could get up to if the Democrats’ plan to give ICE officers “more training” gets billions in funding…
AP’s Rebecca Santana: “For years, immigrant advocates, legal aid groups and local governments have urged people not to open their doors to immigration agents unless they are shown a warrant signed by a judge. That guidance is rooted in Supreme Court rulings that generally prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without judicial approval. The ICE directive directly undercuts that advice.”
DHS’s own handbook advises its field agents that such raids violate the Constitution. But according to Santana’s piece, the legal memo justifying the warrantless searches was kept secret from Congress and the public and only leaked after a whistleblower complaint was filed. It’s good to know there are some left at DHS.
Still, the Supremes will likely find some way to justify this blatant abrogation of civil liberties, on the shadow docket, probably, where they don’t even have to give their reasoning, because no “reasoning” would support it.
+ John Horgan, professor at Georgia State University’s Department of Psychology and director of the Violent Extremism Research Group: “State terrorism at its finest. They are so desperate to instigate a violent confrontation that they will now attempt to break down your front door and enter your home without a warrant.”
+ Mark Bruley, the Police Chief of Brooklyn Park, a suburb north of Minneapolis, speaks out against ICE’s (Brett) Kavanaugh-stops (racial profiling) of his off-duty officers, all of them either Hispanic, Native American or Black:
I’m Mark Bruley, police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Behind me is a bunch of amazing police chiefs that are here to support a very short but very important message we want to share with you. What you won’t hear from any of us today is the rhetoric of “abolish ICE” or that there shouldn’t be immigration enforcement. The truth is, immigration enforcement is necessary for our national security and our local security. But how it’s done is extremely important. In fact, we have a long history of working exceptionally well with our federal partners, including ICE agents, and we have seen the best of them perform their job extremely well in the past. With that said, as recently as the last two weeks, we in the law enforcement community have been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from US citizens. What we’re hearing is that they are being stopped in traffic stops or on the street for no cause and they’re being forced to provide paperwork to determine if they are here legally. As this went on over the past two weeks, we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints, as they fell victim to this while off-duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them. In Brooklyn Park, one particular officer who shared her story with me was stopped as she passed ICE going down the roadway. When they boxed her in, they demanded her paperwork. Being a US citizen, of course, she clearly didn’t have any. paperwork. When she became concerned about the rhetoric and the way she was being treated, she pulled out her phone in an attempt to record the incident and the phone was knocked out of her hand to prevent her from recording it. The officers had their guns drawn during the interaction and the officer became so concerned that she had to identify herself as a Brooklyn Park police officer in the hope of slowing the incident and deescalating the incident down. Then, the agents immediately left after hearing this, making no other comments, offering no apologies. Just got in the vehicles and left. I wish I could tell you that this was an isolated incident. In fact, many of the chiefs standing behind me have similar incidents with their off-duty officers. This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty police officers. But what it did do is that we know our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is and they know when people are being targeted. And that’s what they were. If it happens to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members are falling victim to this every day. It has to stop.
+ As I wrote last week, the medical examiner’s office in El Paso, Texas, was considering ruling the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide. Campos was a 55-year-old Cuban detainee in the notorious Camp Montana East at Fort Bliss, where two fellow detainees say they witnessed prison guards choke him to death. DHS disputed this claim, saying that Campos died of “medical distress.”
This week, the coroner’s report on Campos’s death was finally released. Adam C. Gonzalez, deputy medical examiner for El Paso County, ruled that: Based on the investigative and examination findings, it is my opinion that the cause of death is asphyxia due to neck and torso compression…The manner of death is homicide.”
After the release of the medical examiner’s report, DHS changed its story. They now asserted that Campos had killed himself. Meanwhile, DHS served the two witnesses to Campos’s homicide with their deportation notices.
+ This week, there was another death in ICE custody. That’s 6 in the last 18 days, one every 72 hours–not counting the people they shoot in their cars.
+ This week, ICE arrested four children in Minneapolis, one as young as five years old, in their driveway as they came home from school. Put them in detention and shipped them to Texas, where they are awaiting deportation and may have to defend themselves in immigration court, if they even get a hearing.
+ As Trump prepares to send military lawyers, military police and perhaps the military itself to Minneapolis/St. Paull, ICE reportedly has booked thousands of hotel rooms booked in the Twin Cities through May!
+ Here’s Stephen Miller threatening federal judges, who have struck down the Constitutionality of the Trump administration’s novel legal defenses for its abusive treatment and detention of migrants. But it’s not even a close call. By a margin of 335 to 18, federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration in these cases. Even Trump appointees have ruled 33-15 against the Trump administration.
+ ICE Associate Director Marcos Charles told 60 Minutes that any individual that ICE agents encounter in, around, or in-route to a “target” is fair game for an interrogation
+ This week, there was another death in ICE custody. That’s 6 in the last 18 days, one every 72 hours–not counting the people they shoot in their cars.
+ ICE is shredding the Bill of Rights one amendment after another. Its agents now claim it would cause “chaos” to let people it arrested and detained see their lawyers…
+ Judd Legum at Popular.Info reports that ICE hasn’t paid its bills for third-party medical treatment for its 73,000 detainees since October, leading to many detainees with serious, even critical, conditions not getting treatment.
+ Stateline reports that ICE is using data from Medicare–phone numbers, addresses, employment, birth dates and migration status–to track down immigrants and detain them, leading to fears that many immigrants will not seek medical care when they need it so as not to risk deportation.
Margaret Brennan, Face the Nation: What’s the percentage of those in custody who have actually committed a criminal offense?
Kristi Noem: 70%
Brennan: It’s not 70%… 47% based on your agency’s own numbers.
Noem: You’re wrong again.
Brennan: Are your agents going to comply with the order not to use chemical agents?
Noem: The order was a little ridiculous because the judge told us that we couldn’t do what we already aren’t doing
Brennan: But we just saw a video of chemical agents being used.
Noem: We only use those chemical agents when there’s violence happening.
Brennan: Well, that’s from your agency.
+ Greetings from the Twin Cities, Bovino…
+ Remember the guy that ICE knocked down, pinned to the pavement and then pepper-sprayed in the face from less than a foot away? Well, turns out, he’s a photographer named John Abernathy, who has been covering the streets of the Twin Cities for years, from George Floyd to the ICE protests. His photos are an amazing and intimate record of what’s going down. And I really like his motto, especially in the wake of Kristi Noem’s plan to try to enforce unconstitutional “free speech” zones: ”Bearing witness without permission.” Check them out here.
+ DHS’s chief of propaganda, Trish McLaughlin, this week brazenly accused the state of Minnesota of harboring 1,360 people in custody with ICE detainer warrants. This figure was almost immediately refuted by Paul Schnell, the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, who said they have only found 301 people with ICE detainers. “They continue to publicly repeat information that is inaccurate and misleading,” said an exasperated Schnell. “This is no longer a simple misunderstanding.”
McLaughlin tells more lies per hour than Trump. She truly is amazing.
+ By this summer, 65% of the US population will be on ICE’s database of “domestic terrorists”…
+++
+ Stephen Miller: “Denmark is a tiny country with a tiny economy and a tiny military. They cannot defend Greenland. They cannot control the territory of Greenland. Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial control for 500 years. To control a territory, you have to be able to defend a territory, improve a territory, inhabit a territory. Denmark has failed on every single one of these tests.”
+ In response to Stephen Miller’s vile assertion that the US has the right to seize Greenland because “Denmark is a tiny country with a tiny government and a tiny military” and can’t defend it, Danish parliamentarian Rasmus Jarlov said this: “I hope he’s kept away from young women, because that’s the mentality of a rapist. You can’t defend yourself, so I’m going to take you. That’s basically what he’s saying.”
+ Have any of the Democratic Party aspirants for the White House said they will return Greenland to Denmark if Trump succeeds in taking it through force or extortion?
+ Scott Shapiro: “DOJ investigating whether Denmark lied on its Greenland mortgage.”
+ The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Trump is actively seeking to overthrow the government of Cuba within the next 12 months.
+ French jurist Magali La Fourcade on how the Trump administration tried to intimidate her into dropping the corruption charges against France’s right-wing politician Marine Le Pen:
I would like to tell you what happened in my office. At the request of the US Embassy in Paris, I met two people sent by the Trump administration, supposedly to discuss human rights, as I often do with diplomats from France’s allies. But very quickly the conversation turned to Marine Le Pen’s trial, the idea being to find, with me or others, elements indicating this was a purely political trial to stop her running for president. The aim was to find proof of interference. I was so taken aback by what was said, by the tone, even if it was very courteous, that I did something I never do when I meet foreign diplomats: I notified the French foreign office of what was said in this conversation. I felt it was my duty to do so. I know it was taken seriously…This was May 28, 2025. Two months later, a Brazilian judge, Alexandre de Moraes, was sanctioned after [ruling against] someone close to Trump. This summer, it was Nicolas Yann Guyot of the International Criminal Court. Sanctions mean your name is put on a list of the world’s worst terrorists, the world’s worst drug dealers, meaning you can’t live normally, because you are banned from a lot of everyday services. It’s extremely worrying…There’s a political project behind all of this and we must be vigilant about what is happening in France, but also around the world. This attack goes far beyond France. Being aware of this should make us very determined about how to respond to these threats.
+ Adam Tooze: “Amazing is the world. US officials are systematically seeking to subvert the independence of judiciaries around the world in the interests of political friends of the American right-wing.”
+ Karl Sharro: “This looming US/Europe conflict poses a dilemma for me: whom to support. It’s like Chelsea playing Man U – kind of want them both to lose.”
+ The three highest-ranking Roman Catholic Archbishops in the United States–Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington; and Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark–denounced US foreign policy under Trump in a joint statement released on Monday that America’s “moral role in confronting evil around the world” is in question:
In 2026, the United States had entered into the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War. The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace. The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever-greater conflagrations. The balancing of national interest with the common good is being framed within starkly polarized terms. Our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination. And the building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.
+ Rep. Thomas Massie: “Selling stolen oil and putting billions of dollars in a bank in Qatar to be spent without Congressional approval is not Constitutional. Only Congress can appropriate money. The President can’t legally create a second Treasury overseas for his own piggy bank. Wake up, Congress.”
+ Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos, explaining why he’s turning Canadian trade away from the hostile US and towards a more cordial China: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. [G]reat powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
+ NBC News: “Trump is privately ramping up his focus on another target in the Western Hemisphere, increasingly complaining to aides in recent weeks about Canada’s vulnerability to U.S. adversaries in the Arctic, according to two U.S. officials, a senior administration official and three former senior U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.” No wonder Carney’s cozying up to the Chinese.
+ Matt Duss: “Democratic foreign policy hands who stood by as the US helped obliterate Gaza but have now decided that seizing Greenland is a bridge too far: We see you.”
+ The Davos debut of Trump’s Board of Peace, his scheme to replace the United Nations and international law, with a group of like-minded autocrats willing to pony up $1 billion a seat, was a bust. No wonder, given that its first project is to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza so the strip can be transformed into beachside resorts, gambling casinos and data centers for the Davos set. Only 19 client-state countries signed up and Netanyahu was forced to skip the signing ceremony after Switzerland confirmed it would enforce the ICC arrest warrant against him over war crimes in Gaza.
+ Isa bin Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, minister of the prime minister’s court, Bahrain
+ Nasser Bourita, minister of foreign affairs, Morocco
+ Javier Milei, president, Argentina
+ Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister, Armenia
+ Ilham Aliyev, President, Azerbaijan
+ Rosen Zhelyazkov, prime minister, Bulgaria
+ Viktor Orban, prime minister, Hungary
+ Prabowo Subianto, president, Indonesia
+ Ayman Al Safadi, minister of foreign affairs, Jordan
+ Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, president, Kazakhstan
+ Vjosa Osmani-Sadriu, president, Kosovo
+ Mian Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, prime minister, Pakistan
+ Santiago Peña, president, Paraguay
+ Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, president, Qatar
+ Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, minister of foreign affairs, Saudi Arabia
+ Hakan Fidan, minister of foreign affairs, Turkey
+ Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, special envoy to the U.S. for the UAE
+ Shavkat Mirziyoyev, president, Uzbekistan
+ Gombojavyn Zandanshatar, prime minister, Mongolia
+ Trump couldn’t even get Bukele to pony up, apparently.
+ We destroyed your schools, mosques, hospitals, water treatment plants, orchards, libraries, fishing fleets, cemeteries and houses and gave you….AI data centers!
+ Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ’s foreign affairs editor: “Trump’s Board of Peace looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.”
+ Israel just demolished the Jerusalem headquarters of UNRWA, yet Israel remains a member in good standing of the UN. Why?
+ At an Israeli-American Council session, Miriam Adelson was asked: How do you buy and exercise influence over politicians in the US?
Adelson: “Can you allow me not to answer? … I want to be truthful and there are so many things I don’t want to talk about.”
+ A straightforward headline for once from the Washington Post on the latest Israeli atrocity, with no weasel words or caveats…
+ But how did Bari Weiss report Israel killing one of her own staffers on the homepage of CBS News? By eliding the identity of the killers…
+ Stephen Semler: “By the time the House passed the State Department bill with $3.3 billion for Israel last week, the US had already given Israel $352 billion in aid since its founding.”
+ Is Obama’s silence during the mauling of the country and ransacking of the Constitution a sign that he recognizes his deep complicity in what’s going on, or is he just permanently checked out?
+ Trump is the first US president to be gifted a Nobel Peace Prize from someone whose country he just bombed. But he still can’t top his bitter rival, Barack Obama, who is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to bomb another Nobel Peace Prize winner, Doctors Without Borders, in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
+ Nicolas Kristof: “As Trump was saying in his press conference that America was never more respected, I took a call from a prominent European. He heard Trump’s voice and asked if I was listening to the ‘rambling mendacities’ of ‘the demented leader of the free world.’ So much for global respect.”
+++
+ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch: “The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole.”
+ The NYT’s Peter Goodman on how Trump has gifted the leadership of the global economy to China:
China is—at least rhetorically—invested in economic values that Mr. Trump has renounced: engagement in multilateral institutions to advance its causes, faith in the wealth-enhancing powers of global trade and recognition that no country is large enough or powerful enough to go it alone…Given that Europe’s largest economies—especially Germany—contain large-scale auto industries, and given that China has become the dominant source of electric vehicles and batteries, the two economic powers are likely to remain major industrial rivals.
+ The economy appears to be working for someone, but likely not for you, unless you’re one of the 900 billionaires in the US, whose combined wealth ($18.3 trillion) is more than the 67 million households that make up the bottom half of the nation.
+ Trump continues to hype the deals he cut with 16 major drug companies to lower prices in 2025. But NPR reported that the major drug companies, including the 16 that made the deals, raised the prices of 872 brand-name drugs at the beginning of this year: “The drugs with price hikes included medicines to treat cancer, heart failure and Type 2 diabetes.”
+ Trumpism in a Nutshell: When you manufacture a National Emergency worse than the National Emergency you (say) are seeking to avoid…
+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessentat Davos, revealing he has less understanding of the current state of the American economy than Poppy Bush being mystified by price scanners at Safeway: “Someone, maybe your parents for their retirement have bought 5, 10, 12 homes.”
+ Americans may finally be beginning to understand that when Trump tries to extort what he wants from foreign countries with tariffs, it’s American consumers who pay the price. According to a study quoted by the Wall Street Journal, American consumers and importers paid 96% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs in 2025: “Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.”
+ CNN on Americans’ attitudes on the deteriorating economy: “A 55% majority say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, with just 32% saying they’ve made an improvement.”
+ Claudia Sheinbaum, who rejected an invite to speak in Davos and instead chose to talk to the people of her own country about the exploitative economic system those at the World Economic Forum seek to impose on the planet’s working people: “In Mexico, the currency appreciated by 14%. In Argentina, the peso fell by 40%. The right talks about market freedom. What freedom is there if the salary isn’t enough?” I love it when she gets out the charts…
+ From the Solicitor General’s brief to the Supreme Court on Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board is an argument for unrestricted imperial power:
Baked into our jurisprudence from the dawn of this court is the notion that there’s going to be some things the president does that you can’t dispute.
+ Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (in which the street dog Sharik is implanted with the organs of a slain human thief, alcoholic and brawler called Chugunkin) is one of the funniest novels ever written (it’s also quite disgusting) and a century later it still seems oddly pertinent to our own quite disgusting but not-so-funny times:
‘You belong to the lowest possible stage of development,’ Philip Philipovich shouted him down. ‘You are still in the formative stage. You are intellectually weak; all your actions are purely bestial. Yet you allow yourself in the presence of two university-educated men to offer advice, with quite intolerable familiarity, on a cosmic scale and of quite cosmic stupidity, on the redistribution of wealth and at the same time you eat toothpaste!’
+++
+ Before leaving for Davos, Trump erupted into an unprovoked attack on his “radical left Marxist” prosecutors again:
I removed his [Biden’s] hand-picked radical left Marxist prosecutors from the Department of Justice like deranged Jack Sick Smith. He’s a sick son-of-a-bitch. They gave me the worst of the worst. And here I am. How did that happen? How did they happen? He’s a sick guy. And Letitia James is sick. And Alvin Bragg is sick. They’re sick people. And others. Fanny. No Fanni. You can’t call her Fanny. She doesn’t like it. She wants to be called Fawn-ie…
+ Somebody’s sick, no question about that.
+ Instead of defunding ICE, Democratic Party deep-thinkers like Matty Yglesias want to defund…er….welfare, though he doesn’t seem to know what “welfare” actually is, since several of the programs he endorses (SNAP, Medicaid and child tax credits are “welfare” programs). There’s actually very little left of the US social welfare system since Yglesias’s political heroes, Bill and Hillary, ended “welfare as we know it” in 1994. But TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is Yglesias’ likely target, which provides small monthly cash assistance for a limited time, usually with work requirements. Yglesias would support stopping the checks but keeping the work requirements.
+ Rather than simply giving poor families cash, a proven remedy for reducing child poverty, Yglesias wants to give them “tax credits,” which the Field Guide to American Political Birds says is one of the surest signs to identify a subspecies of the Neoliberal Peacock, preening its tail feathers.
+ Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present for your amusement, your Democratic Party…
+ So the 60 Minutes episode on El Salvador’s torture prison (CECOT) that Bari Weiss pulled the plug on because it didn’t include an interview with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan or Stephen Miller finally aired last night without an interview with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan or Stephen Miller. Why? Because none of them showed up for the scheduled interview that Bari Weiss had supposedly personally booked, which is exactly what the 60 Minutes producers had told her would happen…
+ According to a report by CNN’s Brian Stetler…
Alfonsi was very reluctant to make changes to the original report. But on Thursday, she was tasked with interviewing a Trump official, such as Kristi Noem or Tom Homan. Bari Weiss said she would personally book an interview, two sources told me. So “60 Minutes” producers flew to DC from New York, and Alfonsi flew in from Texas. But the promised interview did not materialize.
Everyone went home empty-handed…Alfonsi had warned about this in her December memo: “Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
+ Shortly after Trump finished his interview with the Trump-friendly CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil, hand-picked for the job by Trump-adoring Bari Weiss, White House press secretary Katherine Leavitt conveyed this message from Trump, while the microphones were still recording and the tapes ended up with the New York Times:
Leavitt: “He [Trump] said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full.”
Dokoupil: “Yeah, we’re doing it, yeah.”
Leavitt: “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”
And Bari Weiss still wanted a kiss from Trump, after this threat? Man, she is hard up!
+ Americans seem to loathe political institutions (Congress, the Presidency, the bureaucracy, the press) more than they loathe actual politicians: 49 of the 50 sitting governors have net positive ratings.
Top 10
Phil Scott (VT) 58%
Kelly Armstrong (ND) 49%
Andy Beshear (KY) 43%
Josh Stein (NC) 38%
Mark Gordon (WY) 34%
Larry Rhoden (SD) 34%
Brian Kemp (GA) 34%
Josh Green (HI) 33%
Ned Lamont (CT) 32%
Wes Moore (MD) 32%
Josh Shapiro (PA) 32%Bottom 10
Ron DeSantis (FL) 13%
Gavin Newsom (CA) 13%
Tate Reeves (MS) 11%
Mike Dunleavy (AK) 11%
Greg Abbott (TX) 10%
Kathy Hochul (NY) 10%
Janet Mills (ME) 7%
Tina Kotek (OR) 4%
Dan McKee (RI) 2%
Kim Reynolds (IA) -5%
+++
+ No one had a bigger influence on my career (if you can call it that) as an activist, a writer and editor than the Archdruid himself, David Brower, who handed me editing and writing projects when I was a kid just out of college, came out to southern Indiana a few years later to boost our fledgling grassroots environmental group, which with his influence sprouted into a network of similar outfits across the country, and then relentlessly plugged our magazine in Portland and my first books, even though they were very critical of what had become of the politically-engaged environmental movement he had largely founded. Dave was wise, fearless, passionate, and an unparalleled extemporaneous speaker. He was anti-war, anti-nuclear, pro-tribal people and a defender of all living things on the earth. And his wife, Anne, a brilliant editor, was his equal in all of these matters. This photo of us in 1985 is from one of the first civil disobedience actions in the Midwest to stop Forest Service clearcutting in roadless public forests. In late November of 1999, we met up in Seattle during the WTO. He wasn’t well. But he still possessed the old fire and when other prominent progressive leaders condemned the street protests as a “violent distraction” from their white paper presentations, Dave stepped forward to defend them unequivocally. The last time I saw Dave was in Page, Arizona, a few months before he died. He was confined to a wheelchair and I rolled him across the parking lot of Glen Canyon Dam to a small stage overlooking Lake Foul, where he gave a searing speech calling for the removal of that monstrous plug in the course of the Colorado River. It’s a shame that the Obama administration, which proved no friend of the environment, refused our (Owen Lammers, David Orr and John Weisheit) request that one of the Sierra peaks he first scaled be named after him.
+ Only 32 fossil fuel companies were “responsible” for half the global carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activity in 2024, according to a report by the Carbon Majors, which names Saudi Aramco as the “biggest state-owned polluter” and ExxonMobil the largest “investor-owned polluter.” State-owned fossil fuel companies make up 17 of the 20 “top emitters, ”all controlled by countries that opposed a measure to phaseout fossil fuel at last year’s COP30 conference in Belem, Brazil.
+ A UN report warns that the world is facing irreversible water “bankruptcy” as a consequence of decades of overextraction of water reserves combine with shrinking supplies from lakes, rivers, glaciers and wetlands. More than four billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month per year, while at least two-thirds of the US is facing “unusual dryness or drought.” The report cites a “few climate drivers” as the primary cause. According to Nature Geoscience, by 2050, nearly two-thirds of the global population will be faced with “severe water scarcity.”
+ A new paper published in Environmental Research Letters estimates that an increase in annual per-capita meat consumption of just one kilogram will result in a nearly 2% increase in deforestation elsewhere in the world.
+ For decades, polar bears have borne the highest concentrations of mercury among land mammals. But wolves might be catching up. The body of an Alexander Archipelago wolf in Alaska was found to have a record amount of mercury in its blood. This prompted researchers to begin testing the fur and scat collected from wolves between 2020 and 2023 for mercury. They looked at two groups of wolves: one living on Pleasant Island, which, after nearly eliminating the island’s native deer population, have taught themselves to hunt and kill sea otters. And the other from wolves in the Alaska interior, feeding on land mammals: voles, deer, caribou. The results revealed that the wolves eating sea otters had concentrations of mercury in their bodies 278 times the level of wolves in the interior. The source of the mercury isn’t 100 percent clear, but it appears to come from contaminated water flushed into the Gulf of Alaska from rapidly melting glaciers.
+ Meanwhile, another Yellowstone wolf has been illegally killed after crossing the invisible northern boundary of the Park in Montana. Wolf 1478F, a member of the celebrated Junction Butte Pack, was likely killed by a poacher after the legal limit for wolf kills in the area had been reached. Her killing provides yet another awful reason to stop wolf hunts near Yellowstone. Better yet, stop all wolf hunts, period.
+ Orion magazine on Brooklyn’s toxic sewer known as the Gowanus Canal: “The sludge was monstrous, or, at least, it was rumored to be a monster. During a local parade, one resident told Brooklyn Paper that she’d heard the slime was sentient. A mixture of sewage, oil, and liquid tar, it became known as black mayonnaise.”
+ The Aurora at about 3 AM on Tuesday (made slightly more spectacular looking by my iPhone’s obnoxious night mode), looking across the Columbia River toward the old fishing village of the Clatsop people that Lewis & Clark called Dismal Nitch, because like almost everything else on the north side of the river, it was exposed to lashing winter rains. Not on this night, however, when the winds were coming from the east out of the frigid high desert and the skies were clear and studded with stars and surreal multi-colored curtains of light.
+++
+ Trump once again confessed his love for the Hell’s Angels, a motorcycle gang linked to the manufacture of meth, drug trafficking, gunrunning, extortion, and contract killings.
No, they [immigrants] make our criminals look like babies. They make our Hell’s Angels look like the sweetest people on Earth. The Hell’s Angels are now considered a nice, high-quality person. I like the Hell’s Angels. They voted for me.”
Maybe he’ll hire them as his private security detail for a Ted Nugent/Kid Rock/Lee Greenwood concert at Altamont this summer? Or perhaps they’ll join ICE?
+ What a strange drug war Trump is waging…..”Trump has commuted the federal sentence of the son of US Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR). James Phillip Womack was sentenced in federal court in May 2024 to eight years in prison for distributing more than 5 grams of methamphetamine.”
+ Who talks like this? Trump: “Your lover isn’t going to be killed anymore, so you can act like a real lover. You can walk right through the middle of the town. And DC is beautiful again, too.”
In the first three weeks of 2026, there have been 102 reported violent crimes in DC (1 homicide, 2 rapes, 49 assaults with a dangerous weapon and 50 robberies), down slightly from the same period last year.
+ Last week, I joked that even Jeffrey Epstein polled better than Trump’s pursuit of Greenland. Now a CNN poll proves it: Trump’s Greenland scheme polls at -40%, while his ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files polls at only -38%. Interestingly, even Trump’s illegal actions in Venezuela, which he boasts about constantly, polls at -13%.
+ WSJ: “[Moderna and Merck] said the mRNA cancer vaccine, in combination with Merck’s immunotherapy Keytruda, reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% compared with Keytruda alone.”
+ Percent of adults who report doing no exercise or physical activity outside of work, by state followed by average life expectancy in parentheses.…Top 10 all Trump states, who infamously said that exercise shortens lives.
Mississippi 31% (74.8)
West Virginia 29% (75.2)
Arkansas 29% (75.8)
Alabama 28% (75.4)
Louisiana 28% (75.6)
Oklahoma 28% (75.6)
Missouri 25% (77.3)
Indiana 25% (77.3)
Florida 25% (79.3)
Texas 25% (78.3)
Delaware 25% (78.7)
New York 24% (80.7)
Georgia 23% (77.4)
Nevada 23% (78)
Rhode Island 23% (79.5)
New Jersey 23% (80.1)
Illinois 23% (79)
Pennsylvania 23% (78.3)
Nebraska 22% (79.2)
Ohio 22% (76.9)
Michigan 22% (78)
Arizona 22% (78.8)
South Carolina 22% (76.8)
Virginia 22% (79.1)
North Dakota 22% (78.8)
New Mexico 22% (76.9)
Iowa 22% (79)
Idaho 21% (79.5)
Hawaii 21% (80.9)
Wyoming 21% (77.7)
South Dakota 21% (78.4)
California 21% (80.9)
Connecticut 21% (80.3)
Maine 21% (78.3)
North Carolina 20% (77.6)
Maryland 20% (78.5)
New Hampshire 19% (79.4)
Massachusetts 19% (80.4)
Oregon 19% (79.6)
Alaska 18% (77.7)
Washington 17% (80)
Utah 17% (79.7)
Vermont 16% (79.8)
DC 14% (78)Data: United Health Foundation / U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Char
+++
+ I hadn’t heard Al DiMeola play in a long time. Frankly, I didn’t even know he was still around and thought he might have joined Chick in wherever the souls of the Scientologists transmigrate to. Strange that it took Bob Weir’s death for him to pop back into my purview…I’m glad he’s still here and doing his thing.
+ Several CounterPunch correspondents have requested press credentials this week to cover protests against ICE. They look sharp, but they’ve never done me much good, except in getting into European museums for free and speeding to the front of the long lines at the Musée d’Orsay. They don’t always work, of course. At the Musée de l’Armée in the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, eager to get a look at Napoleon’s stuffed Arabian, Vizir, I submitted my CP press card to the guard.
“De quel pays êtes-vous ?” he inquired.
“États-Unis,” I replied.
“Non!” He said, shaking his head assertively. “Non!”
This was during the height of the Iraq War and, despite the refusal, I was very proud of him.
+ Defund ICE and the LA Dodgers!
+ This is quite the opening paragraph from The Baffler’s latest blaster:
As homeschool-teaching trad wives, raw-milk swigging earth mamas, and brownshirted, dog-killing girlbosses seek to drag American womanhood back to its pre-woke form—or some nostalgic pastiche thereof—readers seeking sense (and respite from our insane reality) may find it in the pages of a good book…
By the way, the books they recommend are novels by Elaine Kraf (such as Find Him!) whose pages are filled with “delirious women of dubious sanity,” which, it strikes me, would have been a great name for a Riot Grrrl band from Olympia…It convinced me to order a copy.
+ The Secret Agent, The Voice of Hind Rajab and It was Just an Accident, were all nominated for Oscars, although, despite his film being nominated for both best picture and best international feature, the great Brazilian director, Kleber de Mendonça Filho, was inexplicably snubbed in the best director category… Now, maybe a company will defy Israeli censors and finally agree to distribute the Voice of Hind Rajab in the US. Though probably not, if the ordeal of last year’s Oscar winner for best documentary, No More Land, is any indication…
+ The justly celebrated jazz guitarist Ralph Towner died this week at 85. A PNW original, who was born in Chehalis, studied at the U of O, and played in the band Oregon, Towner was one of the most innovative guitarists of his time: “[Oregon] is a very thrilling group to be involved in. We can play everything from the 12-tone tradition to atonal-sounding music to polkas to tangos to anything else you’ve run across. We can somehow ingest it in some way and have it come out as something we’ve made our own.” Here’s a sampling of Towner at work in his dazzling introduction for “The Moors,” from Weather Report’s seminal I Sing the Body Electric, where he countered the fusion-trend by playing an acoustic 12-string ….
+ When the late great James Ridgeway and I were working on a series of stories about Western militia movements for the Village Voice in the mid-90s, we drove through Tehachapi, Tucson and Tonopah. But for the life of me, I couldn’t convince him to venture a little farther east into New Mexico and visit Tucumcari. He wasn’t willin’ go to Tucumcari. Jim just didn’t see the point or hear it.
+ Springsteen tells ICE where to go…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
The Hidden Lives of Lab Animals: A Vet’s Vision for a More Humane Future
Larry Carbone
(California)
The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World
Clifton Crais
(Chicago)
Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World: Chief Charlo and Father De Smet in the Rocky Mountains
Sally Thompson
(Bison Books)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week
Off the Fence
James Hunter Six
(Easy Eye Sound)
Rhythm People
Eddie Allen’s Push
(Origin)
Can’t Take My Story Away
Elles Bailey
(Cooking)
The Patients Who Never Read Newspapers Felt Excellent
“Food, Ivan Arnoldovich, is a subtle thing. One must know how to eat, yet just think – most people don’t know how to eat at all. One must not only know what to eat, but when and how.’ (Philip Philipovich waved his fork meaningfully.) “And what to say while you’re eating. Yes, my dear sir. If you care about your digestion, my advice is – don’t talk about Bolshevism or medicine at the table. And, God forbid – never read Soviet newspapers before dinner.’ ‘M’mm . . . But there are no other newspapers.’ ‘In that case, don’t read any at all. Do you know I once made thirty tests in my clinic? And what do you think? The patients who never read newspapers felt excellent. Those whom I specially made read Pravda all lost weight.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog
