It’s weird that Trump can stand up to allies but not Russia

Good. We need to completely purge, weaken, and dismantle the fascist regime and their Reeks. When you have power, flex it, and flex it for the people, our freedoms and democracy. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

Yes and is a massive reason why we’ve ended up where we are.

If you're following the unbuilding of CBS News: "A story with on-camera sources, legal clearance, and five rounds of vetting gets killed for not being ready. A story with anonymous sources and internal objections gets published because the editor-in-chief wanted it." www.readtpa.com/p/what-the-t...

The whole administration in one quote

NPR just referred to the Trump regime’s “willingness to push the boundaries of the law.” Trump keeps breaking laws, and the media keep saying he’s *almost* breaking laws.

The core truth of the Trump era, and the one that journalism is forbidden from stating out loud, is that Trump has gathered around him a constituency of the country's worst people. That's what most distinguishes them -- not economic status, age, where they live, anything else. It's shittiness.

Stage 5 pundit-brain is watching an innocent woman being killed by agents of the state and going, "hmm this says a lot about the urban-rural divide in America."

Fact check: true

Senate Democrats absolutely have to shut the govt down to stop this ICE insanity in the Twin Cities. This is not sustainable & cannot be normalized. Any Democratic vote to provide money to the thugs who are brutalizing this community is a grave betrayal to the people here. Accountability can't wait.

A competent opposition political party would cut together the footage of what ICE had been doing in the twin cities with Mike Johnson saying "ICE is doing what ICE is designed to do" and have it in ads all across the country

Exactly. There's no room for bipartisan, poll-tested, meet-in-the-middle common-sense compromises in the interest of the American people — because the two parties share a consensus neither about who "the American people" are nor about what serves their interests.

To Dems squeamish about the phrase "Abolish ICE" -- it's not the self-defeating rhetoric of Defund or Abolish Police. INS, Customs, Border Patrol are intact to police immigration. ICE did not exist to snatch any random brown people and shoot moms in the head until 2003. We're okay walking it back.

10000%

The Supreme Court only cleared the way for Kavanaugh Stops four months ago and ICE now openly engages in violent racial profiling, snatching anyone who looks non-white and treating them as presumptively guilty of a crime. Remarkable how quickly our liberties can be crushed when courts go along.

ive seen more articles this week about how the phrase “abolish ice” could hurt dems in the midterms than ive seen articles about how paramilitary death squads terrorizing cities will hurt republicans in the midterms

Yep. 10/10, no notes.

Murphy: The United States Congress should not fund a Department of Homeland Security that is not obeying the laws of the United States of America

We didn’t have ICE for the first 200+ years in this country. Abolishing ICE isn’t the same as abolishing all law enforcement, and Slotkin’s conflation of ICE with all police is honestly just pretty stupid.

“Even before Trump, this agency was riddled with excesses and abuses. But now that Trump has shown how ICE can be transformed into a paramilitary outfit that can pick up, beat, and kill anyone—immigrant and citizen alike—it needs to be abolished, not reformed.” open.substack.com/pub/theunpop...

Hey, @amyklobuchar.com and @smith.senate.gov: I'm not a senator, but if ICE thugs were rampaging through the major city in my state, I might try to impede Senate business as usual and try to bring everything to a halt until I could get answers or force some votes. open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

The letter from Bill and Hillary Clinton to James Comer explaining their refusal to testify in his Epstein investigation is really remarkable, not like any letter of this genre I've seen. It's signed by them, not a lawyer, and the arguments are not legal ones. Reprinted from their X account:

Frey: "You cannot drag pregnant women through the snow. You're not allowed to take teenagers out of their car and detain them when they are in fact American citizens. That is against the law in every state. That is against our US Constitution."

Someone kill me.

Every single Democratic senator, governor, and representative should be discussing this publicly as a national emergency.

Um Chalk another one up for shocking, not surprising.

One thing I’d like to see is my senators and governor every day on tv at 5pm holding a press conference with video of every documented abuse that ICE is doing. Curate all of the witnessing we’re doing and show it to the press.

Another would be to treat the objective as a real policy reform, not unfocused backlash to abuses. A third would be for Dems to earn the benefit of the doubt that they’ll fight. A fourth would be for activists to give Dems who don’t recite the slogan some leeway. www.offmessage.net/p/abolish-ic...

This piece is very well reported and written. It’s clear-eyed, precise and gives important context. And yet it’s a great illustration that there’s this fundamental, unbridgeable formal constraint that makes it essentially impossible to plainly call this what it is. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/u...

Mainstream political press in a skeet (yes I know that’s his point)

Will Bunch: "There are some members of Congress willing to meet the moment, but they are drowned out by the fear-laden paralysis of Democratic leaders and the zombie-like obedience of Republicans."

Tillis is spot on. The Senate can't confirm a Trump toady to succeed Powell at the Fed. The rest of the game is now out in the open, and it doesn't end well.

The transcript is finally out. Trump’s answers are mostly incoherent and full of lies. And rather than confront him on his lies on behalf of the American people, the NYT reporters just keep asking for more. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trump-interview-transcript.html

What’s also insane is how the courts have spent years pretending this man is putting forth novel, considered theories of constitutional authority when, as demonstrated here, he is simply making decrees as if the Constitution didn’t exist and waiting for servile judges to validate them

It really is this simple, D electeds.

We have cleaned up the crime scene and blocked a local investigation and hidden the perpetrator and invaded the state and that is how you know that we are acting in good faith and that everything was the victim’s fault. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

This is the way and every single Democrat should be on board. It won't get anywhere before the midterms, but it will make the midterms easier for Democrats to win and easier to take action on these promises once they do. Be the party of accountability. Own that space, starting now.

I have some congresspeople who follow me, so I'll just throw this out there: As a taxpayer, I would actually prefer that you *not* continue to fund the fascist military machine that is being used to kill and kidnap people from our communities.

The gop is afraid of their voter base. The Dems are afraid of the gop voter base.

This is exactly right. They haven't settled for dim brutes who blindly follow orders regardless of the law. That's what they want. That's what they got. There's no reforming or improving it now. Democrats need to investigate, defund, and ultimately disband the president's brownshirt brigade.

Why would you print this as fact and not attribute it, given DHS's near 100% record of lying?

They won't have the numbers to occupy the nation and force everyone to comply, and that's why they're engaged in such an aggressive show of force. They're hoping we all get cowed into submission and do their work of suppression ourselves. Once again, no. The mantra remains "fuck you, make me."

If you had predicted with precise accuracy any of our current top stories this week during the ‘24 election, it would have been dismissed as Trump Derangement Syndrome by most of the professional takesmiths.

The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee has been forced to make a statement, declaring that the prize cannot be transferred. It's hard even to comprehend how stupid this has become

This is the heart of it. Any press coverage that gullibly paints this partisan punitive campaign of retribution as "fighting crime" or "enforcing immigration laws" is actively complicit in a government campaign to punish dissent.

It's incredibly demoralizing to constantly see the highest institutions of government and academia and the most important and widely seen news outlets knuckle under one after another, but then to see the gulf between that and the bravery of communities and neighbors and teachers - that's something

The Kennedy Center with no more operas but with the "premiere" of "Melania: The Movie" kind of says it all.

Yep