A federal judge appears to be leaning toward hitting the pause button on the White House ballroom's construction.

The US operation to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro came down to an intense final firefight in which US helicopters were exposed to an extraordinary level of risk as they descended into a heavily fortified compound in Caracas, according to key eyewitness videos. https://cnn.it/4r2vchY

Jack Smith: It was Trump who was most responsible for January 6 My latest =====> youtube.com/shorts/aG_d9...

Three years after his appointment as special counsel, Jack Smith finally delivered the legal argument against President Trump on Thursday that he was never allowed to make in court: that Trump "engaged in criminal activity" that undermined democracy. Listen to "The Daily."

The number of habeas petitions ICE detainees in Minnesota have filed this year already surpassed the number all of 2025, per the local Fox station. www.fox9.com/news/ice-det...

Newly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...

The man behind the name — Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple — would be standing outside with protesters if he were still alive, one historian and scholar said. https://cnn.it/4qBBsxh

Great piece from @orinkerr.bsky.social in @lawfaremedia.org explaining why ICE should not be able to enter homes with administrative warrants. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/can-...

The reality is that 2024 was a fundamental test of the moral character of the nation and we failed spectacularly. We’re living with the consequences now. Maybe we improve. I hope so.

Those cuts to science, culture, medicine? They aren't just about research, they are about power. Episode Three of Autocracy in America: www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/202...

I've been wondering why Minneapolis hasn't seen the same surge of 18 USC 111 prosecutions that other cities targeted for immigration enforcement have experienced. At least part of the story may be that magistrate judges are turning down charges

ICE made a Minneapolis man leave his house in his underwear

What does ICE have to do w/ the midterms? Trump wants to treat dissenters like terrorists. They did it to Renee Good. This is the environment shaping the midterms. If we don't keep our free speech now, we won't have free elections later. From me. www.ifyoucankeepit.org/p/free-speec...

New court documents reveal even more ways DOGE improperly accessed and shared sensitive personal data last year — and how that data appears to have been used to advance dubious fraud claims. n.pr/4qDfABZ

Like tariffs, the 'Board of Peace" is a thing Trump can use to bludgeon other countries share.google/HHN8xqgHhS1S...

Israel killed three journalists, including a CBS News contributor, the latest attacks in Gaza despite a U.S.-backed ceasefire that began in October. Israel has killed about 220 journalists in Gaza since October 2023, according to Reporters Without Borders. https://wapo.st/4r5ZmRr

COLBERT, on the so-called “Board of Peace”: “.. Paying a billion dollars to obey Donald Trump seems a little steep. After all, CBS got to do it for just 16 million." @latenightercom.bsky.social #$PSKY

JVL is always right.

Carney: "In a time of rising populism and ethnic nationalism, Canada can show how diversity is a strength, not a weakness... Canada can't solve all the world's problems. But we can show that another way is possible. That the arc of history isn't destined to be warped toward authoritarianism".

We did a focus group this week with nine Gen Z men who voted for Trump in 2024. Only one said they wanted JD Vance to be the nominee in 2028. So who would they like to see follow Trump? DeSantis, Rubio, Ramaswamy, Tom Cotton, or even James Fishback. www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

no matter how hard Greg Bovino tries to exude rugged masculinity he always comes off like Don Knotts in a Portlandia sketch

from the top rope

5 years removed from when he helped barricade the House Chamber fearing for his life…he ONLY escaped because our actions (the officers). We risked our lives protecting him. He has no integrity, moral conviction or honor.

By automatically excusing law enforcement and dismissing protesters as criminals, Republicans are making a familiar mistake, @jonathanbchait.bsky.social argues:

NEW: Docs unsealed tonight show the official reasoning DHS sent to the State Dept. recommending that Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Badar Khan Suri and Yunseo Chung be deported. Marco Rubio signed off, despite warnings by DHS that their findings looked like protected speech.

Democracy is an epistemic discipline, it only works if truth can constrain power. Without a faster, more transparent architecture for shared reality, the arc of democracy bends away from substance, through simulation, and toward authoritarianism. Without major action, it's the inevitable end state.

We’ve spent years trying to fact-check our way out of this, and it failed. Democratic decay isn’t about bad information versus good information, it’s about the collapse of the systems that turn information into reality. If every bot and Russian troll vanished tomorrow, the rot would still be there.

🧵 @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...

This is the biggest self own the Democrats have ever done. They handed a group of eight wing billionaires control of the largest social media company. Just absolutely stunning incompetence. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

There was this bully in our neighborhood name Johnny Sabo, & for payback, we took a pencil box, wrote “KITE KIT” on it, & glued it shut. After trying to open it for an hour, he got pissed and told us we couldn’t be a member of his lean-to shithole clubhouse in his side yard. This reminds me of that.

One day, if we are lucky, the erasure of American history will itself be remembered as a shameful chapter in American history

Trump will now control TikTok. www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026

AYFKM. One of the guys ICE/DHS claimed was living with the innocent US citizen they dragged into the snow in his underwear is currently IN PRISON and already had an ICE detainer on him. It's amateur hour at ICE, and the rights of American citizens are being impacted!

A hideous, unbelievable insult to our allies, who suffered a full third of the war dead in Afghanistan. And this from a soulless swine who knows everything about using his bone spurs to stay all the way back, entirely off the front lines. Every day, he shames the United States as a nation.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of Minneapolitans putting aside their jobs, lives, their personal safety and comfort, and all their petty differences and turning up in staggering numbers, with no guarantee this nightmare will end in a week or a month or a year. They’re all heroes

Judge William Young ends his order protecting noncitizen students targeted for deportation for their activism or speech with this quotation. It’s by Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the bench four decades ago.

This is 100% FALSE. Immigration judges do NOT play any role in issuing administrative warrants. They are generated and signed by ICE officers themselves. ICE’s own training materials say they can’t be used for a search of a home! Here’s a blank warrant form. Note who signs it.

We’ve been in WHO since 1948.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar filed paperwork to run for governor of Minnesota, preparing to jump into a race that was upended after Gov. Tim Walz announced that he would drop his reelection bid in the wake of a welfare-fraud investigation.

Goldman: It’s shocking to me how much the media talked about Biden’s mental state and are not talking about Donald Trump. He can barely put a coherent sentence together. You have someone who is clearly not all there

Two Republicans joined Democrats to vote for the war powers resolution, but the motion failed in a 215-215 vote.

Important article, with Important context: X is claiming that Ashley St Clair is bound by recent tos changes because she used x to request that grok remove the sexualized images - which is apparently the only way to submit such requests.

Breaking: jury finds Chicago resident Juan Espinoza Martinez NOT GUILTY of placing a hit on Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino.

1st Cir. will not rehear en banc a case in which it determined that pro-Palestinian student statements and group activities after 11/7 did not constitute actionable racism (antisemitism) and, even if it did, the actions weren't attributable to defendant MIT. www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/fi...

I mean this sincerely, I like that they set up all the Trump administration's lawlessness in MPLS -- arresting toddlers, claiming they can enter homes, using pepper spray sadistically, etc. -- and then they close out the front page with Smith challenging Trump's lawlessness. Well done.

Less than a third of voters think the U.S. is better off than it was when President Trump returned to the White House a year ago, with a wide majority saying he has focused on the wrong issues, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...

Popok: There are many things the American public will tolerate, including an ideological divide in our politics, but a heartless president—I don’t think that’s one of them Shapiro: A heartless president that leads to hungry kids. His heartlessness is leading to a level of cruelty in our communities