Many of the people who have spent the last five years denouncing the killing of Ashli Babbitt for raiding the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election are celebrating the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a terrified mother killed by masked men from unmarked cars who chased her down a neighborhood street and shot her in the face.

At 9:30 on Wednesday morning, Renee Good was sitting in her Honda Pilot, with her life partner and dog, on Portland Avenue in the Central neighborhood of Minneapolis, when two unmarked cars approached her. Good waved her hand, signaling for the unmarked cars to go around her. Instead, they stopped.  Masked men got out. Good told them: “I’m pulling out.”

As two of the men advanced near her maroon Pilot, one of them told her to “Move, move, move,” while the other shouted, “Get out of the fucking car.” These contradictory instructions are a frequent tactic, since, however you respond, you violate one of the orders, and offer an excuse for escalation.

One of the masked men tried to open the passenger door and reach through the window toward Good. Meanwhile, the other agent grabbed the side door. Good put her car in reverse, backed up a little, then pulled forward slowly, turning away from the masked ICE agent who was slightly in front of her. He moves out of the way, almost casually. As the officer who would kill her seconds later stood outside the window of her Honda, Good said, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you. Then the officer dropped his cellphone, grabbed his gun, fired three shots into Good’s car, hitting her in the face, and grunted, “Fuckin’ bitch.”

As she slumped forward, her foot reflexively pressed down on the accelerator and the car lurched forward, hitting a parked car and a light pole a few yards down the street, where it came to a rest. Her partner was heard screaming, “They’ve killed my wife! “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do. They shot her in the head.”

A bystander who witnessed the shooting rushed forward to help, but was stopped by an ICE agent. The man said he was a doctor and could render medical aid to the woman who was shot. The ICE agent responded brusquely: “I don’t care,” and ordered him to stay back. Fifteen minutes passed until an ambulance pulled onto Portland Avenue. But it was blocked from coming to Good’s aid by ICE vehicles. Finally, two paramedics trekked through the snow to the scene of the shooting, where they tried to treat Good’s fatal wounds. She was later pronounced dead at Hennepin Hospital.

Before her blood was even dry, the President and his henchmen had smeared this bright young woman, this mother and poet, as a domestic terrorist, as an attempted assassin, as a leftist thug. They smeared her before knowing anything about her, what she’d done that day, how she lived her life, who she loved and cared for, what her friends and neighbors and colleagues thought of her. To Trump and his minions, she was an obstacle, someone standing in the way and, therefore, someone who deserved whatever she got, even if it was a bullet in the face.

Now the FBI is blocking Minnesota law enforcement officials from analyzing evidence from the shooting. You wonder why they bother. What is there to hide? 

The murder of Renee Good happened in plain sight. We’ve all seen it from various angles. There was no one in front of Good’s car when she pulled out. No one was run over. The shots were fired from the side, not the front of her Honda. The ICE agent shot her and he walked away. He didn’t limp. He didn’t flinch in pain. He simply walked away. He didn’t seek treatment from the paramedics on the scene. Or show any wounds to his fellow agents. He just walked away.  He walked around the scene for three minutes. Then he got in a car and left. (The Intercept identified the alleged shooter as Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent based in St. Paul.) Renee Good was denied medical care and left to bleed out in her car. There’s nothing left to cover up.

And perhaps that’s how ICE and the Trump administration want it. 

ICE’s rules of engagement are to intimidate, to terrify. And not just its targets, but entire neighborhoods, communities and cities. They brutalize the innocent not by accident but by tactic. They offer the security of fear. They want you so afraid of them that you’ll snitch your neighbor out, turn in the women who clean your toilets and take care of your kids, denounce the men who mow your lawn, rake your leaves and clean your gutters. They want you to stay inside with your doors locked when you hear a familiar voice scream, as masked men raid your block. 

Like the cascading violence of the raids themselves, the smearing of the victim is strategic. It’s meant to frighten and paralyze those who might otherwise object. Stand in the way and you will be blamed for whatever happens to you. You will be slimed and slandered beyond all recognition. If you survive, your life will be made hellish, your reputation splattered with lies and calumnies by your own government. 

ICE has killed before and will kill again.

In the last year, ICE agents have fired shots at least 15 times, killing four people. They shot at people trying to warn them of children in the area of their raids and they shot people running away from them. They shot people in a very similar way that they shot Renee Good: while they were in their cars, driving away and then blamed them for trying to run over ICE officers. On September 3, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican national, after dropping his daughter off at pre-school. ICE originally said that Villegas-Gonzalez was shot after he tried to run over an ICE agent, who DHS claimed had been severely wounded. Then, a video of the incident recorded the voice of the officer grazed by Villegas-Gonzalez’s car saying his injury was “nothing major.” Another video showed that Villegas-Gonzalez was driving away from the ICE officers, not toward them. DHS tried to smear Villegas-Gonzalez as a dangerous criminal with a “history of reckless driving.” But a new report by NBC News Chicago shows that he had never been convicted or even charged with a crime.

On October 4, an immigration agent shot Marimar Martinez five times while the 30-year-old teaching assistant and US citizen was driving around the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, warning residents of an impending ICE raid. The Border Patrol officer who shot Martinez pulled up beyond her car and shouted, “Do something, bitch!,” as he aimed his assault rifle at her. He later bragged about the shooting in a text message to fellow agents: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” The agents falsely claimed that Martinez had tried to ram them with her car and arrested the seriously wounded woman. The charges against her were later dismissed.

A day after the Minneapolis shootings, Border Patrol agents in Portland shot two people, a man and a woman, during a traffic stop in the parking of a medical center complex. Once again they claimed they had tried to use the vehicle as a weapon, although both of them couldn’t have been driving at the same time. DHS also claimed both were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, though they offered no evidence to buttress the charge. The couple, who are reportedly married, escaped on foot and were later taken by Portland to a hospital. The man was shot twice and the woman suffered a gunshot wound to the chest. Portland’s Mayor, Keith Wilson, called for ICE and Border Patrol to leave the city, saying “Portland isn’t a training ground for militarized agents.”

So in the course of two days, Trump’s immigration shock troops shot a mother of three and a married couple.

These kinds of raids, while shocking to most Americans, are familiar to many immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, countries still haunted by the death squads funded, armed and trained by the CIA. Horrors that they fled and have now reappeared like ghosts from the past here on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They know all too well that collateral damage is a feature of all paramilitaries. 

With the murder of Renee Good, ICE has now advanced from scaring the hell out of American citizens to killing them.

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+ Find one true thing in this despicable screed…

+ Trump tried to defend his slanderous comments in an interview with The New York Times…

As a slow-motion surveillance video of the shooting played on the laptop, we told him that this angle did not appear to show an ICE officer had been run over.

“Well,” Mr. Trump said. “I — the way I look at it …. ”

+ As far as I can tell, everything this ridiculous clothes-horse said about the killing is a lie, ie, I.C.E. Officers got stuck in the snow. They were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over.

+ Edward Abbey: “A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.”

+ People who sprouted from what Cockburn called the “mulch of American nutdom” are now running the country.

+ The National Catholic Reporter on JD Vance’s sliming of Renee Good: “The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.”

+ Matt Walsh only seems like he resides on the psychopathic fringe of American politics. But this garbage is basically mainstream MAGAism these days…

+ The only position one can morally take on ICE is the original position many of us advanced years ago: Disarm and Defund ICE, that’s not the Democratic position, which calls for better training and better weapons! A well-trained officer with the right gun should be able to kill an unarmed woman from five feet away with one shot, not three. Three is reckless and wasteful

+ The internal contradictions and hypocrisies of the Democratic Party elites are morally and politically crippling…

+ I guess any Minnesotan is now fair game for federal agents to kill because of the childcare “scandal” and the fact that they’ve let Somalis live in the state.

+ Jesse Ventura was a graduate of Roosevelt HS in Minneapolis, that ICE raided, shooting students with pepper balls and handcuffing teachers, on the same day they killed Renee Good…

+ Sarah Lazare, In These Times: “If Trump’s deportation machine were an army, it would be the 13th most heavily funded on earth. This puts it above the militaries of Australia and Canada, and just below Israel’s. This force is invading US cities, yet depicting itself as the victim.”

+ ICE agents are dressing up as utility workers in Oregon to spy on and gain access to people’s houses. In response, NW Natural Gas issued a public notice about how to identify its employees and contractors in the field.

+ New detention data published by ICE this week brings the current population to a record high of 68,990, with 92% of the growth since May driven by immigrants with no criminal convictions.  A week into the new year and there’s already been a death in ICE detention.

+ Minneapolis pastor Rev. Kenny Callaghan on being detained by ICE: “I saw ICE agents circling a young woman who appeared to be Hispanic. I said to this ICE agent, ‘Take me, stop harassing her.’ The agent got in my face, pointed a gun at me, and said, ‘Are you afraid now?’ To which I said, ‘I am not afraid.’ The next thing I knew, they were putting handcuffs on me, and they put me in the back of an SUV. I asked them if I was under arrest. They said to me, ‘Well, you’re white, you won’t be any fun anyway.’”

+ Last month, I wrote about the dismaying case of Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, a young Maryland mother who was abducted by ICE while leaving a Taco Bell with her sister and detained, even after her legal team presented proof that she is a US citizen, born in the United States. ICE claimed, with no evidence, that the documents were fakes and kept her imprisoned, facing deportation. This week, ICE finally relented to reality and released her after 25 days in captivity, during which time ICE transferred her to five different detention jails in Maryland, Louisiana, Texas and New Jersey, in an apparent attempt to keep her location hidden from her family, lawyers and the courts. Just another “minor inconvenience” from racial profiling run amok, eh, Justice Kavanaugh? 

+ It’s trigger-happy ranks already swollen with illiterate, obese, and intemperate rejects from the DEA, ATF and county sheriff departments, ICE plans a “wartime recruitment” drive, according to the Washington Post, that will target gun show attendees and military fanatics, using imagery that would embarrass DW Griffith and Leni Riefensthal …

+ Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal said she would arrest ICE agents who commit crimes in the city, calling them “fake law enforcement”. She warned: “You don’t want this smoke.”

+ The Trump administration has been sending migrant teens caught up in its ICE raids to a juvenile prison in Pennsylvania run by the Abraxas Academy, a company with a history of child abuse. Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement awarded Abraxas $9 million to detain young immigrants, many of whom have no criminal record, even though (or perhaps because) the state of Pennsylvania had partially revoked its license after allegations of systemic abuse. 

+ Using federal tax dollars, the Department of Homeland Security posted this ethnic cleansing fantasy on its social media account on New Year’s Eve. Appropriately, the image is by a Japanese artist.

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+ It’s been nearly a week since Trump’s Venezuelan coup and his declaration that the US is running Venezuela. But the US still isn’t running Venezuela. 

+ Trump is doing his best to subvert his own DoJ’s case against Maduro. First, in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump accused Maduro of heading a drug cartel that his own DoJ now admits doesn’t exist. Second, in his social media post announcing Maduro’s kidnapping, he referred to Maduro as “President Nicolas Maduro,” which contradicts his DOJ’s position that Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and shouldn’t be afforded sovereign immunity. (It was for the reason that the previous Trump administration stopped referring to him as president in 2019, when they were considering a similar operation.)

+ In his Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump claimed that Maduro was the head of “the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison.” In fact, the term Cartel de los Soles is slang for “drug corruption in the military.” When your case crumbles before you even present it to a judge…

+ One of the Department of Justice’s key witnesses in its case against Maduro is Hugo Carvajal, a former Venezuelan general, who pleaded guilty last year to drug trafficking charges and, in December, wrote a letter asking for leniency, in which he backed the farcical claim that Venezuela had helped rig the 2020 election for Biden.

+ The big question in Venezuela remains: who was the CIA’s source inside the Maduro government? Much of the focus has been on VP, Delcy Rodriguez, who, though she has publicly denounced the raid and kidnapping, seems to be maintaining a back-channel to Rubio. But her hold on power remains tenuous, with Chauvistas to the left of her, MUD to her right and the generals watching for any false step. Jon Lee Anderson: “I guess she’s expected to keep the heads of the military and the intelligence services from doing any power grabs or displacing her. But there may be mutual suspicions there. So it’s kind of a knife-edge situation.”

+ Stephen Miller: “We’re a superpower and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our own backyard to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries but not to us. We are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.”

+ So the Pentagon has been low-balling the number of people they’ve killed in boat strikes. The latest tally they admit to: 123.

+ Does a confident “superpower,” secure in its own invincibility and awesomeness, have to boast that it’s a “superpower”?

+ CounterPunch reader A. Charles reminded me of the Haitian proverb: “Salt never has to boast about its saltiness.”

+ JD Vance: “The way that we control Venezuela is we control the purse strings, we control the energy resources. And we tell the regime, ‘You’re allowed to sell the oil so long as you serve America’s national interests.’” There’s a name for this, though it’s likely been redacted from all Smithsonian exhibits…

+Twenty years ago, one would have thought that having a president who wore drag queen-style facial make-up and a vice president who didn’t go out in public without kohl-black eyeliner would have been a sign of cultural progress. But, as Rod Stewart sang in a different context, “look how wrong you can be…” Still, every picture tells a story, don’t it?

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+ Trump has spent the last year furiously deporting as many Venezuelan immigrants in the US as he can without affording them any kind of due process. Now he has kidnapped the same nation’s President and First Lady, hauled them into the US and is putting them on trial in federal court in New York City. The irony is worthy of an O. Henry story.

+ Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities:

This sort of spectacular operation is very consistent. Trump likes to hit adversaries that can’t hit back, whether it’s small drug-smuggling boats, or Iran with no air defenses, or Venezuela, which is also weak…. And to me, that explains the more accommodating approach to Russia and China, in the sense that his view of military power is kind of go big or go home. But that model doesn’t work against Russia and China.

+ The Democratic Party position on Venezuela is beginning to congeal back into its default mode: Maduro is an evil dictator who had to go, but Trump doesn’t have a long-term plan!

+ On Tuesday, Brazil’s Health Minister, Antonio Padilha, announced that the government is sending drugs, doctors and medical equipment to Venezuela in response to the US bombing of a dialysis center there. “We can’t forget that Venezuela sent 135,000m³ of Oxygen to Manaus during the pandemic,” Padilha said.

+ The judge in the Maduro case is 92-year-old Alvin Hellerstein. Perhaps after the trial, he can run for the Senate as a Democrat. 

+ If you’re going to shamelessly exploit your brother’s death (at the hands of Big Pharma) to defend two kidnappings and the slaughter of more than 80 people by the US military, you’ve got to come with better game than this Witkoff…

+ Instead of double-tapping airstrikes to kill boat strike survivors in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the US is now simply leaving them to drown. The Intercept reports that the Coast Guard has called off its searches for people who jumped into the sea after watching the U.S. military destroy other ships.

+ Stephen Miller, declaring Venezuela as a de facto colony of Trumplandia: “The only maritime energy transport allowed will be that consistent with American law and national security. There is unlimited economic potential for the Venezuelan energy sector through legitimate and authorized commercial avenues established by the United States.”

+ The New York Times interviews Beelzebub on Venezuela, who, surprise!, wants more kidnappings and bloodshed…

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+ Chevron holds a near monopoly on oil allowed out of Venezuela under the Trump blockade. Its stock spiked on Monday after the semi-coup.

+ Matt Breunig: “These ‘American’ oil companies are these publicly-traded entities collectively owned by the global capitalist class. It’s very anachronistic to think of them as national entities.”

+ Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Venezuela: “I reject President Trump’s belief that we should be engaging in regime change wars… It sounds like a massive nation-building project with basically no plan for what comes next, other than him stealing Venezuela’s oil to enrich his friends.”

+ Sen. Rick Scott: “I’m glad the president didn’t just take Maduro and walk away. I’m glad that he’s committed to freedom and democracy in Venezuela. Now, I can’t tell you how they’re going to get there …”

+ Greg Grandin: “The promise of limitlessness combined with the idea that the US is an anticolonial power has created a syndrome: “borderline on the borderlands,” in which no socializing ego can mediate tween narcissism of superego (US good) and Id (US bad). True for politicians as for intellectuals.”

+ David J. Bier: “The dehumanization of foreigners never ends at the border. Once you consider a group to be not worthy of human rights, you don’t suddenly think, “Maybe we shouldn’t kill them and take their stuff” once they’re outside of the country.”

+ Tucker Carlson:  “Rather than manage the country on a day-to-day basis, Washington will likely attempt to pull its strings from afar, effectively ruling it with the implied threat of further military action. If that strikes you as the behavior of an empire, you are correct.”

+ A senior Pentagon official told Nick Turse of the Intercept that after the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores: “The liberal rules-based order is dead.” If so, Biden and Blinken put it on life support and the Trump Gang pulled the plug.

+ If Obama’s former ambassador to Russia is right, then the “Liberal International Order” gave us the catastrophes of Vietnam, the Chilean coup, genocide in East Timor, Central American death squads, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, to pick merely some of the highlights of the past half-century’s “rules-based order”…

+ McFaul is proof that any simpleton can become an ambassador and translate that into a career as a talking head. As Jeffrey Sommers pointed out, McFaul made the following admission in 2016, while he was regarding offering an “informed” opinion on Syria: “I’m on TV all the time where I have to use the phrase ‘moderate opposition,’ and I don’t know what it means.”

+ Doug Henwood reminded me that McFaul was a regular, if notably foolish, presence on Johnson’s Russia List back in the 1990s. Johnson’s List was a read so essential to understanding what was going on inside post-Soviet Russia that the pre-Mac Alexander Cockburn made me read every entry and forward him a summary of the “nuggets” by fax.

+++

+ Israel has now killed more than 420 Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire, causing OED editors to scramble into order to enlarge the definition of “ceasefire.”

+ Despite 969 Israeli violations over 80 days, including the killing of 420 Palestinians, the wounding of 1,141 and allowing only 40% of the aid trucks mandated by the truce into Gaza, Trump declared last week that Israel is “100% in compliance” with the ceasefire. Later, Netanyahu announced that Trump would be the first non-Israeli to receive the Israel Prize, which is the near opposite of the Nobel Peace Prize.

+ Amid reports that Israel has killed more than 700 relatives of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate cited the ghastly number of deaths as evidence that Israel is using collective punishment to crush reporting of its genocidal war in Gaza.

+ “A rough year”? Is that how AP refers to Israel killing hundreds of Palestinian journalists and their families?

+ Trump/Netanyahu ceasefire plan for Gaza: keep them houseless, starving, hypothermic and sick…until they leave or die.

+ Israel is the first country in the world to ban the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.

+ Dershowitz: Palestinians haven’t “earned” the right for statehood the way Jews have: “You can’t just create a state out of nothing!”

+ Haaretz reported last week that a month before the October 7, 2023, attacks, Israel asked Qatar to increase the funds transferred to Hamas in Gaza.

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+ New study (this one by the London School of Economics), same old results: 50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down. Indeed, Julian Limberg, a co-author of the study, said the opposite is true: “Based on our research, we would argue that the economic rationale for keeping taxes on the rich low is weak. In fact, if we look back into history, the period with the highest taxes on the rich — the postwar period — was also a period with high economic growth and low unemployment.”

+ Communities across the country are rising up and beating back AI data centers. According to Data Center Watch, $98 billion in planned AI data center development was derailed in a single quarter last year alone.

+ 36 states have given tax exemptions to data centers. In 2025, Virginia lost $1.6 billion in revenue because of the tax exemptions granted to data centers.

+ Elon Musk’s wealth increased by $24 billion in 2025. That’s about $4 billion more than it would take to end homelessness in the US. 

+ Elon Musk overruled the concerns of his safety engineers and demanded electric doors in his Tesla Model 3 sedans. Now Bloomberg reports that at least 15 people have died in more than a dozen crashes where those doors refused to open…

+ Tesla sales fell by nearly 10 percent in 2025, hammered by Musk’s association with Trump and Trump pulling the plug on EV incentives. Tesla is falling further and further behind China’s cheaper and more advanced BYD.

+ Taylor Lorenz reported for Zeteo how Musk’s AI bot Grok is being used to “undress women and children” and post the images online, including disrobed images of Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji.

+ C. Wright Mills: “People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves ‘naturally’ elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

+ Mathematician Joel David: “Current AI models are basically zero help for mathematics. They produce garbage answers that are not mathematically correct, then, when you point out the exact error, they still argue that they are fine. If I were having this conversation with a person, I wouldn’t talk to that person again.”

+ Last spring, Trump abolished a Biden rule that capped overdraft fees at $5. Now, banks are back to charging as much as $35 per overdraft. Last year, he 20 biggest US banks made over $3 billion in overdraft fees alone.

+ Using the alleged Minnesota childcare scandal as a pretext, Trump suspended $10 billion in federal childcare funds to five blue states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. They really want mothers out of the workplace and back in the house.

+ Historically, first responder calls in California have been free. Now that’s changing. This year, people in the Bay Area will have to pay the fire department for paramedical services:

San Francisco: $567
Vallejo: $561
San Jose $427
Alameda: $393
Napa: $333

+ Nineteen states increased their minimum wage last year. By the end of 2026, 17 states and DC will have minimum wages over $15 an hour. In Washington state and NYC, the minimum will be over $17 an hour.

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+ Dr. Neil Stone on RFK Jr’s decision to drop the recommendation for vaccinating children against meningitis: “Meningitis can kill kids within hours.  CDC data shows meningococcal vaccines reduced U.S cases by over 75% since 2005, with effectiveness exceeding 90% in young children.”

+ RFK, Jr on the expanding measles outbreak: “Only very sick kids should die from measles.” In fact, no kid should die of measles, since vaccines almost entirely prevent the disease.

+ 2750 gigatons: amount of CO2 emitted since the Industrial Revolution from the burning of fossil fuels and land use change–more than the mass of all living things on earth and everything humans have ever built combined.

+ Despite Trump’s tantrums, threats and tariffs, Europe bought less energy from the US in 2005 than it did in the previous three years…

European Imports of oil and liquid natural gas from the US in Billions of $

2025  $66 bn
2024  $68 bn
2023  $73 bn
2022 $118 bn

+ “Vandals” makes them sound like drunken high school boys out smashing mailboxes instead of the racist goons they are, engaging in terroristic tactics to crush dissent–environmental, native or labor– that has typified the mining companies from the beginning of their assault on the American West…

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+ Here’s JD Vance’s political Svengali, Curtis Yarvin, doubling down on his admiration for Hitler, Adolf Hitler…

+ Stephen Miller: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Almost invariably, people who have lived by this “iron law” have tended to come to rather unpleasant ends…

+ Speaking of Reich fantasies, is the soundtrack for this post from Trump’s Labor Department meant to be the Horst Wessel song or Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at full-blast?

+ Looking forward to the ADL’s defense of this…

+ Of course, there was something deeply wrong with this country long before Donald Trump came to power. Imagine playing a New Year’s Day football game just down the road from Ground Zero in Nagasaki, as a celebration of an atomic blast that killed 70,000 people only five months earlier?

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+ Citing “dangerous times,” Trump said this week that the US needs to increase the Pentagon’s budget by 50 percent, which, when combined with his tax cuts, will balloon the deficit. These “dangers,” of course, are almost entirely of his own making.

+ Newly released UK government files suggest that former Prime Minister Tony Blair pressured officials to ensure British soldiers accused of mistreating Iraqi civilians during the war would not be tried in civil courts.

+ Trump’s ICE agents have been tear-gassing, body-slamming, clubbing and shooting “rubber” bullets at peaceful protesters for the last 12 months…

+ 500: Number of bombing raids by the Trump administration in 2025, according to ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data).

+ Trump wants to sanction the judges who found French fascist Marine Le Pen guilty of corruption and embezzlement of funds from the European Union…

+ Trump ranting about the media at an event Republican celebrating the Jan. 6 riots: “They have the worst policy. How do we have to even run against these people. Now I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news with say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ Nobody is worse than Obama.”

+ Newly released emails showed that the Trump/Bondi Justice Department misled a federal judge when they told him that local prosecutors had acted alone in charging Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

+ Over the last five years, Baltimore has reduced its homicide rate by nearly 60 percent.

+ NYT on the Brown and MIT shooter’s videos: “What he does not do is explain an explicit motive for the two shootings, though threaded through his disturbing, meandering and occasionally nonsensical monologue is a profound sense of grievance about unspecified things he has had to endure.” Sounds familiar…

+ Engagé! Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander on Dan Goldman’s re-election campaign launch: “Goldman literally chummed it up with Don Jr. on vacation in the Bahamas, praising Trump’s Israel policy.”

+ Nancy Pelosi to Lander on his plans to challenge Goldman: “I’m a Dan Goldman Democrat. [Of course, she is.] Democrats don’t run against Democrats.” Isn’t that what primaries are all about?

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+ Who needs Fox News? (The problem for Bari Weiss and the Ellisons will be that Fox News does this stuff better and the people who watch CBS News won’t want to watch Fox News Lite.)

+ We all know there’s no crying in baseball, but there is at the new Bari Weiss-run CBS News…

+ Bari Weiss is the elite working for a company owned by the 2nd or 3rd richest man in the world, depending on the daily vagaries of the market, who decides which “Average American” gets to give CBS viewers their “analysis” of what’s going on…

+ Spencer Ackerman: “We don’t have to be naive about the failures of elite journalism before the Ellisons bought CBS and installed the unqualified Weiss to recognize that this is no alternative to those failures but instead their logical result.”

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+ Matt Taibbi sinks lower and lower into a quagmire of his own making. He is now suing an excellent journalist, Eoin Higgins, over his portrait of Taibbi in Owned, Higgins’ scathing account of how tech billionaires bought off a group of once “enterprising” young journalists. As if to prove Higgins’s thesis, Taibbi’s defense of his censorious libel action is printed in Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Weiss, of course, was his partner in the Elon Musk-funded escapade to prove how Twitter allegedly censored rightwing voices. (Higgins was a regular contributor to CounterPunch for several years.)

+ James Marriott: “Democracy is the creation of a print culture. I’m very skeptical you can have democracy without print. It’s basically never been tried.” This seems more and more evident every day…

+ I watched Jafar Pahani’s No Bears again on New Year’s Day. And it makes almost everything coming out of Hollywood, even the so-called independent films, seem puerile by comparison. Set aside the extraordinary circumstances under which it was made (the director banned from making films or leaving Iran, the film secretly made on relatively cheap digital cameras in a remote village and, like Bresson, using mainly non-actors, then smuggled out of Iran on hard-drives inside a cake, with the director jailed upon its release), No Bears is tense, funny, stylistically inventive, introspective, politically subversive and beautifully shot and composed with Pahani playing a slightly fictionalized version of himself. I don’t know how long it will be on Criterion, but if you haven’t seen it, check it out. Few film-makers have ever risked so much, under an unforgiving and repressive regime, and achieved such a morally complex and aesthetically moving, and I rarely use this term for film, work of art. The ending, or endings, since there are two–one of the film No Bears and the other for the film inside the film–leave you suspended, not in a gimmicky Hitchcock fashion, but suspended as Pahani himself is, as well as Iran itself. Panahi’s latest film, It Was Just an Accident, is one of the best films of 2025.

+ Sometimes hope comes in the strangest places, like the hacker who deleted “Tinder for Nazis” and leaked thousands of its profiles online:

Livestreaming the moment while dressed as a pink Power Ranger, the German web activist – styling herself as “Martha Root” – said the site’s security was so weak it ‘would make even your grandma’s AOL account blush’. She has since extracted 8,000 profiles and posted them online – though the total number of profiles in the leaked data is believed to be much higher…

+ Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård:

My father told me something when I was very small to instill confidence in me: ‘Nobody in the world is worth more than you, but nobody’s worth less.’ It is an egalitarian view that I’ve carried around in my life. That’s why I am for free schools, free universities, free health care, and free babysitting. Because our society could afford it. In America, people think social democracy is some kind of communism. They think capitalism is freedom. It’s not. It’s only freedom to exploit people.

+ A few years after Alexander Cockburn died, the novelist (Zone of the Interior) and screenwriter (Frida) Clancy Sigal, who had been Doris Lessing’s lover and was the model for the Saul Green character in The Golden Notebook, told me that he and Cockburn went on “double dates” with Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton in London in the mid-60s, arranged by their mutual friend the photographer David Bailey, switching partners each outing. Alex never boasted to me about these revolving excursions and he certainly wasn’t shy when it came to recounting his flirtations with beautiful women, including playing “footsie” with Norris Church, while her husband, Norman Mailer, pontificated at length across the dinner table in Martha’s Vineyard one night…So who knows the veracity of the tale?

She had hair just like Jean Shrimpton back in 1965
She had legs that never ended
I was halfway hypnotized

+ Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies was one of several novels to enter the public domain last week. It’s a slashing, funny and acerbic portrait of a vacuous class of people and a better read than Brideshead, IMHO.

+ I was never bewitched by the “genius” of Duane Allman (I thought Dickie Betts was the driving creative force of the Allman Bros, a better songwriter and guitar player), so I was pleased to have my heterodox views confirmed by the great Bobby Whitlock’s appraisal of Duane’s “famous” collaboration with Derek and the Dominoes during the recording of Layla and Other Love Songs:

Duane was a hired gun. He played with us twice, and it was not good both times he played, because he was not a fluid player … He could play parts, but he couldn’t sing with his guitar.

Whitlock’s contributions to that record and the short-lived band’s live recordings were equal to Clapton’s, though he had to fight to get songwriting credits, most egregiously for “Bell Bottom Blues.” (As for Slowhand, he was always a demigod, not God.) Whitlock, child of Memphis and a Stax original, died last summer. But here he is, a few years back, still in fine form, playing in Austin with his wife, the sax player Coco Carmel…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain
Nicholas Wright
(St. Martin’s)

The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media
Nathan Jurgenson
(Verso)

Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left
Eoin Higgins
(Bold Type)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Marchin’ On
The Heath Brothers
(Strata East)

Golden Flower: Live in Sweden
Yusef Lateef
(Elemental Music)

Fuzz’s Fourth Dream
Fuzz
(In the Red)

When Moral Indignation Goes Extinct

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.”

– C. Wright Mills

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