January 12, 2026

You overthrow a foreign government, you're terrorizing U.S. communities with militarized forces

...attacking the Federal Reserve Chairman with your DOJ thugs like a mobster should seem well within your sphere of relative impunity.

What's next, America?

Fed's Powell says Trump administration has threatened him with a criminal indictment

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has threatened to indict Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over Congressional testimony he gave last summer about a Fed building project, an action Powell called a "pretext" to gain more influence over the central bank and monetary policy.

The development in the long-simmering effort by President Donald Trump for greater control over the Fed had immediate fallout, with Republican Senator Thom Tillis, a member of the Senate Banking Committee that vets Presidential nominees for the Fed, saying in a statement on X that the threatened indictment puts the Department of Justice's "independence and credibility" in question. Tillis said he would oppose any Trump nominees to the Fed, including the president's coming choice of a new chair, "until this legal matter is fully resolved."

Powell revealed the subpoenas and threats in a Sunday night statement.

"On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June," Powell said. "I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law."

"But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure" for lower interest rates and more broadly for greater say over the Fed, he said.

"This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role...Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President."

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/feds-powell-says-administration-has-threatened-criminal-indictment-over-his-2026-01-12/

...like a cartoon mobster, Trump claimed to know nothing about the investigation he's been repeatedly calling for; despite everyone already having witnessed his ignorant attempt to embarass Chairman Powell during a joint appearance that the president set up to put the chairman on the spot for some real estate cost overrun that had nothing to do with Powell, something undoubtedly related to these certainly trumped-up allegations.


Independent, 24 July 2025:

'You just added a third building': Powell fact checks Trump's Fed renovation as awkward hard-hat visit turns tense
Federal Reserve chair wasn’t fazed by Trump’s attempt to bully him in front of press

President Donald Trump’s attempt to shame Federal Reserve Board of Governors chair Jerome Powell over the cost of a long-running renovation to the central bank’s Washington headquarters went horribly wrong on Thursday when Powell had a ready response for the president’s accusations during a tour of the construction site.

Trump said the cost of the years-long project was now “about $3.1 billion” rather than the $2.7 billion previously stated by Powell.

The chairman replied: “I haven’t heard that from anybody” and asked if the paper Trump was reading from came from the central bank.

At that point, Trump handed him the paper and continued talking while Powell pulled out his reading glasses to look. He then told the president that the higher number he was claiming included a separate project that wasn’t part of the renovation at issue.

“You just added in a third building,” he said.

read more: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-powell-fed-renovation-meeting-b2795600.html


WaPo, December 29, 2025:

Jason Furman @jasonfurman
Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

January 10, 2026

We told y'all

...we told you that letting your government criminalize and target immigrants would lead to EVERYONE'S rights and safety being at risk from the very same regime.

Anyone paying attention has to be running a scenario through their own minds today, no matter their race or ethnicity, where they can envision themselves suddenly, without a moment's notice' at risk of losing their lives because of some hothead federal agent with a grudge and a personality flaw thinking they have a right to shoot and kill them for disobeying their traffic instructions.

This isn't an exaggeration, it's a fear that's become all too real today. How many U.S. citizens with every right to travel where they want just made the decision to remain in their home, fearful of their own government?

I haven't left my own property since I had a panic attack months ago. Even now, I just questioned my dark-skinned self and wondered if I should just venture out to feel my own freedom, but I talked myself out of that foolishness of trusting my life to roving armed federal agents looking to pull over people who look 'Somali' or Mexican, or Latin American, or Muslim; whatever opportunistic reason they've been using to pull over and drag from their vehicles, assault and detain (possibly kill) people in this country who have browner skin than, I'd guess, their own.

But I'm going to guess that any illusion that, say, white Americans might have held that they are immune from the abuses and violence the federal government has directed at 'others' has now evaporated for the majority of people in the country - wherever they are, knowing that ICE has infected all of our states with armed men encouraged to play out their personal take on the recruiting lure of 'protecting their culture' on those who don't genuflect to their false and often illegal displays of authority.

You may not be personally afraid, but you should be asking yourself what the basis is for believing your protected and can defend your own safety or that of your loved ones against these thugs and their Trump-sanctioned thuggery and murder.

Do you realize that Renee Good is ALL of us, watching the Trump regime run roughshod over our rights and democracy. Can any of us who might disagree with this regime imagine we have the ultimate freedom under this government to hold those views and exercise those rights to dissent without fear of the government challenging us with the full force of the power we invested in them?

Did it take the wind right out of you to hear the president of the United States and his DHS minion describing the mother who told her killer she 'wasn't mad at him' seconds before he shot her dead as a domestic terrorist for having the temerity to merely observe the federal agent's actions from her vehicle?

Or, the vice president of the United States blame the victim of the federal execution in the street with a completely invented, and dumbfoundedly inconsequential rationale to her killing that she was a "victim of a "left wing' ideology?"

Of course, this hasn't just been a police exercise against the 'worst of the worst' or any of the other feints from the Trump regime about their intentions with the most funded law enforcement agency in the nation. It's not about making communities safer.

For Trump and his hired, taxpayer-funded goons, this is about bullying, conquering, and coercing Americans to the will of one party's president; this one intent on 'owning' Americans like one of his real estate acquisitions; like the way he just claimed to own the ostensibly independent country of Venezuela which he just abducted a political figurehead from that the U.S., in the past, once lorded over the people there as head of state.

Not only are you to be the subject of Trump, you're a hostage to his armed reign of terror in countless communities around the nation. If this isn't outright war, it's at the very least an armed government occupation of America; fomented by first politically advantaging the antipathy and antagonism of the Americans toward our own foreign-born or ethnically rooted neighbors; then by taking that power given to them to recklessly and violently direct those resources against us all.

We fucking told you.

January 10, 2026

Child care providers: "We're used to Minnesota snow days, now we have ICE days." (Watch)

Minnesota childcare providers and parents speak out with emotion and conviction on ICE targeting childcare centers and the impact on children and their community.

watch press conference:




Minnesota educators and families call on ICE agents to stay away from schools
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-educators-families-ice-agents-stay-away-schools/

January 8, 2026

I'm effectively terrorized by my own country's government, compromised by the color of my skin

...I don't go anywhere anymore. I just stay home. I'm effectively terrorized by my own country's government.

I hate to admit this, but it's true. I'm too decrepit to risk an encounter gone wrong. Had to even sadly face up to an untenable risk to my health in any protest gone wrong.

I know I'm not alone in this, but I wonder about the rest of the nation; a good number of whom have always been privileged by their majority with the ability to play whatever advantage or animus they choose off of their relative under-abundance of eumelanin.

To me, the abstractness with which our majority white society regards their brown-skinned counterparts, despite the tenuous laws which have undergirded my own citizenship and rights in this country, faltering and actually recanting promises and admonitions of my very humanity that had been so long denied by our government and people, all reminds me of the videos I've seen from Somalia where children and elderly and others dying from hunger can be seen crawling on the streets and sidewalks as others more fit rushed past, and roving armored vehicles roamed by and shot them at random.

The funny thing is that I've had a lifetime, born in 1960, that tracked the promise of the civil rights era; my on father Director of Civil Rights at the Equal Opportunity Commission. I had come to be convinced of the irrefutability of my citizenship. The joke was believing (whenever that happened) that a new generational majority of white people would reject the impulses of the past to advantage themselves by disadvantaging people who didn't share their lack of abundance of eumelanin.

Think about what it took for Donald Trump or anyone else to lurch the nation back into Jim Crow, and reflect on how easily it seems we're slipping into a Nazi Germany-type upheaval of the lives of people with brown skin in this country. Not very much, right?

How easily the nation is allowing this theft of our democracy which insidiously relies on an assault on brown-skinned people at each and every turn of Donald Trump's autocratic screw, in presidential declarations and legal arguments that insist 'diversity' is some sort of crime perpetrated on America; instead of the opportunity that I was made to believe existed for me; a tale of equality told by countless leaders, pols, and writers from my very birth and childhood through my advanced age?

This new Jim Crow is sticking in this black man's craw. I'm an island in this country with no sovereignty.

ICE is a modern day Klu Klutz Klan comprised of good old boys who think terrorizing brown people in this country is sport - now fully sanctioned and armed by the federal government for these raids on minority communities in a nightmare that rivals the vigilante violence of the past, indistinguishable only by the official embrace and encouragement by a modern president of the United States.

I'll say this. I'll ultimately be here for y'all, so far as you show up for me.

If you have the privilege and the means, now's the time to step forward and defend your neighbors like that neighborhood in Minneapolis which broke out their whistles to warn the vulnerable among them when they saw ICE forces enter their community.

Like James Brown said...

I don't want nobody
To give me nothing
Open up the door
I'll get it myself
Do you hear me
Don't give me denegration
Give me true communication
Don't give me sorrow
I want equal opportunity
To live tomorrow
Give me schools
And give me better books
So I can read about myself
And gain my truly looks
Do you hear me now, now
Some of us try
As hard as we can
We don't want no sympathy
We just wanna be a man.

January 7, 2026

People who balked at calling Trump Hitler need to come correct

......nothing has yet restrained the man who just openly mused about his ability to unilaterally attack and invade other nations with the intention of controlling their government or national resources, some of them democratic allies, from using our military forces to abduct and rendition the Venezuelan leader to the U.S. while demanding their government kowtow to his political demands as he vows to enable corporations to rape their land and rob them of their resources behind his use of military force.

Independent:

This idiocracy has striking similarities to the Nazi movement that Hitler advantaged to lauch his own military ambitions to seize other countries' territory, just because he could.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he was determined to overturn the military and territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. By overturning the treaty, the German government sought to incorporate ethnically German territories into the Reich. Hitler moved to extend German power in central Europe, annexing Austria and destroying Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939._

Like Hitler wanted to militarily dominate Europe, Trump wants to be king of the Americas, and he's not wrong in thinking that there's no actual barrier right now to his use of our nation's military force to kill, maim, and threaten vulnerable nations into submission.

The rub is that ambition isn't limited to the U.S.. Indeed, it's been successive governments since WWII which have adhered to principles outlined in international agreements, like the The North Atlantic Treaty, signed on April 4, 1949, established the framework for collective defense and security in the North Atlantic area.

It was signed by the United States and several Western European nations, including Denmark, who Trump is now threatening by intimating he'll take their Greenland by military force if it's not surrendered to him; a treaty ironically intended to promote stability and prevent aggression in the region.

Trump is complaining that Russia and China are milling around Greenland, but the U.S., now under Trump, isn't even advantaging the land that's been made available to us by the country to police with our military forces.



Emboldened by his snatch-and-grab n Venezuela, Trump and his toadies are forcing independent nations in the region into defensive positions which are completely unnecessary, except in the face of what is, effectively, a potential military threat from the United States to their safety and independence.



While there may well be no effective counter right now to these intentions and actions, the political landscape that enables Trump in these Hitler-esque military assaults on other nations isn't a static one. We have an opportunity, along with a deep institutional memory, to roll back this autocratic imperialism.

It's a matter of national will that needs to be infused with already established understandings about the folly and danger of 'might is right' attitudes and actions used by the US to coerce other countries to bend to our self-interested will.



There are similar understandings between other nations which Trump aims to smash through and undo with his 'doctrine' and practice of Nazi-esque military expansionism abroad, precipitated by a Hitler-esque attack on minorities and immigrants in this country.

We're at an inflection point, and we're an election away from a tenuous hope that we can pull the nation back from Trump's autocratic lurch of our nation's military into the madness of coups and destabilization of governments abroad like we're Germany in 1938.

January 7, 2026

Trump immediately sets about projecting his 2020 election lies onto his Venezuelan captive

...successive presidents (Obama and Trump) made a lot of noise and effort claiming Maduro threatened the U.S., despite the fact that BOTH of those administrations once recognized Maduro as Venezuela's legitimate leader.

Over 80% of Americans disagree that something in Venezuela threatens them, but that hasn't stopped Trump from exploiting those State Dept. derived findings about Maduro in his effort to portray Venezuela and Venezuelans as evil incarnate.

But, why? Could it have something to do with the Sydney Powell's looney, disproved claims that Venezuela was deleting Trump votes in Dominion voting machines?

Or, is it just about Trump's megalomania, or some fealty or benefit he thinks he's going to get by allowing oil companies to run rampant in Venezuela behind his military coup plan?

Whatever it is it isn't about an indictment from his corrupt and compromised DOJ which abducted more than 200 immigrants en masse from the U.S. shackled, their hair shaved off, to one of El Salvador's most infamous mega prisons.

Surprise all around today, I'm sure, when Trump revived debunked claims about Venezuela helping steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden, trying as he might to sell his attempted theft of Venezuelan oil as something more than the drug charges against Maduro which his DOJ invented to embellish what had been primarily political concerns, not withstanding the legal arguments in that regard about Venezuela's contested election.

...WHATEVER people may believe about the drug charges in the indictment the Trump DOJ brought against Maduro, whatever they may feel about past administration support for 'bounties' or anything related to Maduro and the Venezuelan election, this abduction and further destabilizing coup attempt by the Trump regime is an insidiously banal and mindnumbingly arrogant extension of the 2020 election fraud the maga majority on the Supreme Court (having openly expressed skepticism about the election fraud charges) allowed Trump to dodge.

I mean, even if you want to make an obtuse point about Maduro being some bad guy who allegedly sells drugs to Americans, rather than debate the arcane details of Venezuelan election law, you'd still be forced to ride along with Trump as he takes you on a magical conspiracy tour that still insists he won the 2020 election.

Aside from his avarice and greed for Venezuelan oil, and his megalomanic desire to be king of the Americas, there's still the pesky treason he engaged in that needs muddling in the minds of Americans.

In for a penny supporting this political prosecution because you think Maduro is a bad man who sells drugs to Americans; in for a pound of Trump conspiracy-mongering in pursuit of exoneration for his election crimes.

January 1, 2026

Haiku for the New Year

We got through a year
With Trump's lies proving to be
Worth less than our truths.

There's no time this year
In any of our own lives
For any of that.

Let's resolve this year
To not let Trump waste our time
On the things he says.

But instead we will
Be more of an obstacle
To the shit he does.


-Ron

December 17, 2025

All In Our Family

...my sister and I watched EVERY episode of 'All in the Family' together with my dad, he on the couch and us stretched out on the floor in front of the only color television.

The show wasn't actually the basis for a generational or societal discussion like the critics have done for decades now. It gifted us with its own narrative and soundtrack for the edification of parents or youth watching.

At least that's the way it was in our suburban family, with my sister and I fully absorbed in the post-hippie culture of the seventies, and my parents relics of the valedictorian order of their salad days in the 40's and 50's which forced them to quickly shed the uniform and buttoned-down precepts which they had only just accepted and adopted as their own.

Dad would come home from work and take off his suit and tie and put on another suit and tie to go shopping, sans the hat that never left the hatbox after we moved to the relative informality of the suburbs to the city life that defined his coming of age into the world of business and government.

We weren't a particularly politically oriented family, outside of the necessary attention that upwardly-mobile black professionals gave to the politics that determined rights and opportunity; federal government action and protections indeed a major influence in my parent's professional success.

On vacation, and almost out the door to the beach one summer, Richard Nixon was on the motel television resigning the presidency and I had to practically beg them to stop and watch.

But while those political events weren't the actual flashpoints of our family's generational divides, there was an over-current of resistance to permissiveness against our natural drive for free expression and anti-authoritarianism which took advantage of those events as markers of our individual identities.

Conservative and liberal ideals were certainly attached to important political initiatives and events, but in our family they were mostly just abstractions; undercurrents to the everyday clashes between young and old.

We didn't actually talk about the episodes of AITF we watched; didn't really comment on what was said. It wasn't that kind of relationship. What we got from the constant debates between 'Meathead' and Archie was a subversive means of introducing subjects and ideas into each others minds and psyches without saying a word.

It was like when we'd be in the car and 'Signs' would come on the radio, or Jonathan Edwards singing 'Sunshine; as we turned the sound up loud for Dad to take it all in:

"Some man's gone, he's tried to run my life
He don't know what he's asking
When he tells me I better get in line
I can't hear what he's saying
When I grow up, I'm gonna make it mine
These ain't dues I been paying..."

Watching those staged debates didn't elicit any open confessions of support or belief from any of us watching other than a revealing laugh or groan, or maybe a frown acknowledging that the message had been received and processed, all for better or for worse.

The brilliant writing by Lear and others exposed flaws in the zealous politics expressed on both sides of the Bunker living room; generating grudged understanding of each other, and informing us of contradictions in some of our own reasoning that we used to deliberately divide ourselves, as well.

I think we all lost some of the edge of our own projections against each other when actually faced with their others' probable beliefs. It possibly defined for us what we believed in ways that didn't just cast our opponents as enemies, but as family members who may disagree.

So, it wasn't at all surprising that Rob Reiner grew into a man so resembling of the character he played, with all of the principle and values that we used as a representation of our own social awakening, against the stubbornness of our parents' generation in accepting change; a stoic alternative to blind patriotism, warmongering, and vulture capitalism.

When we couldn't, or wouldn't express those truths to each other, Rob said them for us for our own edification; and boy, he would get right under their skin.

December 11, 2025

So they sent the slobbering shithead felon president on the road to slur Americans while his followers cheer him on

...the republican president whose grandfather's surname was Drumpf when he immigrated to the U.S.; and despite affinity for Germany and Austria, changed his name to Trumpf, and then Trump before obtaining a U.S. passport to conceal his country of origin (his father later claiming to be of Scandinavian descent to improve relations with Jewish tenants and business partners who might have had negative associations with German roots after World War II); he was on the road this week demagoguing Somalians in Minnesota like a klansman.

Trumpf's rant included an attack on a congresswoman of Somalian descent as he derided Minnesota Somalis as “garbage” and said he didn’t want them in the U.S..

This isn't just an attack on what many Americans may regard as 'refugees' who sought and received asylum in this country from withering violence and deadly poverty in Somalia; it's a broadside attack on what Americans have understood to be part of the fabric of a nation comprised of the descendants of individuals and families from numerous nations which sought to make this land their home.

It's been understood for generations that life in American is to be considered an ideal, as opposed to the relative challenges people in less capable nations face in their struggle to survive and prosper. But that specialness isn't self-actualized by the mere existence of the nation. That refuge of opportunity is the product of the collective will of the myriad influences from around the globe who've settled in these lands.

That welcome to this country wasn't the edict of any one privileged group of Americans. Indeed, it's been the collective decision of the majority of this country to remain a beacon of hope and opportunity which has been opposed by a consistent minority mostly comprised of a majority of white American males who have advantaged most of what they consider to be their exclusive own off of the labor and enterprise of a diverse nation of immigrants.

That reality has been reduced to some anecdotal homily about the past by some eager to claim immigrants are a drag on their own sweet selves; their own nativist contributions to America supposedly essential based in little more than a narrative about their entitlement based on some Anglo-Saxon notion of citizenship.

Racists, bigots, and demagogues like Trump who get attention and the most support in America for their views and campaigns against 'illegal' immigrants - have become just fine with the white Anglo-Saxons who have become a large part of the fabric of America, having turned the majority of their hatred, fears, and self-interest against Mexicans and Latin Americans voting in our elections and competing for jobs - not just the ones who run afoul of our immigration laws, as evidenced by the republican administration's military campaign waged against entire ethnically-diverse communities.

We have a mob action against immigrants today, sanctioned and exercised by Trump and his federal government, all in Americans name. We don't need defense against the people we work and live among everyday; to be brought to fear our neighbors because of some politicians' opportunistic lies; hiding antipathies behind vastly unfounded fears and the outright lies our politicians have taught Americans to use when they mob up against migrants in our legislatures and railroad them out of the country in Potemkin, Kafka-like hearings with 'administrative' judges meting out criminal penalties of punishment against mostly working people and their families like they're terrorists; LIES politicians have revived from our nation's racist past to curry the favor of Americans fearful of and hateful toward mostly Mexicans, Latin Americans, and Asians, perpetuating and expanding that prevaricating racism across the country.

It's no different than the way politicians a century ago exploited Americans' fears about people immigrating to this country as an extension of their own political and religious zeal; to consolidate political power for their own narrow and partisan interests.

But what is coming from Trump today is behavior that was supposed to be part of an unfortunate past that was ostensibly repudiated by a nation resolved to recognize ALL people in this country as potentially important and vital to all of our successes, right from birth.

What then is to be made of a republican president who's campaigning in an off-election year for a return of the country to a time where our government and society devalued people who didn't possess, or couldn't pretend to be associated with the physical or geographical attributes of the white American majority?

More importantly for the nation, what does the nation gain by the present white male majority distancing our government from the benefits of the diversity of the nation which has allowed that white male majority to prosper from their labor and contributions?

The economic argument against even 'illegal' immigration is pure bullshit.

...the argument that they are a threat is belied by who is actually getting deported at the height of the most discriminatory and arbitrary enforcement scheme ever in our nation's history:

Cato Institute's June 20, 2025 report states that as of June 14, ICE had 204,297 book-ins in FY2025, with 65% (133,687) having no criminal convictions and over 93% never convicted of violent offenses, based on ICE data.



...yes, some immigrants commit crimes. But a 2024 study showed that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans.



...so who's really into Trump's latest Klan rally? It's bound to be the most ignorant, self-destructive people in the nation who can't possibly make up even a fraction of the contributions to the nation from the people they're hollering to be thrown out.

These people don't even have an interest in helping themselves, much less have the capacity or will to help anyone else in this country. They're not only mindlessly self-centered, they're a demonstrated danger to themselves and others, having elected a convicted felon to the highest office in the land to lead us.

Trumpfs of America who think their skin color, or their ability to hide their family's place of origin makes them superior to those who don't share their Aryan attributes aren't really as confident in themselves as they pretend. Most of them are concealing or ignorant of their own associations with the world outside of America that they're posturing their virulent xenophobia off off.

They're leaning so far into their racism that they can't even claim to be from Scandinavia anymore.

December 3, 2025

There no legit blaming of some general for the summary executions Hegseth ordered and later supported

...there's not dispute over whether Hegseth ordered the military to destroy boats they claim are smuggling drugs.

According to the administration and Hegseth, the military in the field are operating under the orders and direction of the Secretary of Defense and the commander-in-chief to destroy boats they claim are carrying drugs; ostensibly smuggling them to the U.S from some 1000 miles away where they're being destroyed.

They not only claim they have the authority to murder people instead of interdict them as we've done for decades, but they're asserting those orders are delegated to whoever is directing those actions; and by extension, the ones carrying them out.

Why is anyone paying attention to Hegseth trying to squirm out from under his own orders; or the president, for that matter who directed the Secretary of Defense to carry it all out, affirming his intentions in numerous public statements?

No one in the WH or the DoD is claiming the generals operated under their own authority, or acted independently from them or in contradiction of their intentions or directives.

The buck for the strikes originates and stops with Donald Trump who could order them stopped anytime. It's a specious and nonsensical process to even name the troops and their command as the essential instigators of the attacks.

Responsibility for how those attacks are carried out ultimately rests with the president and his SoD; something that was made obvious by the shift in policy to rescue survivors of their attacks, sending some to Costa Rica, for example, after the survivor killing took place. It's easily within his reach to halt any of what he himself has initiated and has been cheering on from his safe perch in the WH.

What are they going to do? Take punitive action against the troops they themselves ordered to kill nameless people in international waters?

Why do we even know the sorry general's name who gave the command? The only names that matter here are Hegseth's and Trump's; the duo responsible for this barbaric policy that they're propping up with sophistry, scapegoating, and appeals to what they must believe is a desire in the American people for them to act in our presumed defense with cruelly, fear, and cowardice.