The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Donald Trump is increasingly unhappy with Pam Bondi, describing her as weak and ineffective.

This I suppose is because she sometimes still pretends that the DOJ is at least a little constrained by laws and stuff, instead of just imprisoning and expropriating all of Donald Trump’s enemies at a speed of light.

Bondi’s replacement will probably be Nick Fuentes or Alex Jones or Pepe the Frog — in any event, someone who will make Bondi look like Clarence Darrow by comparison.

 

 

If the United States follows through on Trump’s threat to invade Greenland, we need to be crystal clear about what happens the next morning. This is not a real estate transaction or a routine military exercise. It is the geopolitical equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade in a crowded elevator. The moment American boots hit the ground in Nuuk to seize territory from a fellow NATO member, the world as we know it ends. The consequences will not be temporary sanctions or angry letters. They will be total, permanent, and devastating.

The first domino to fall is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself. NATO is built on the sacred promise of Article 5, that an attack on one is an attack on all. If the U.S. attacks Denmark, we are not just breaking the treaty; we are triggering it against ourselves. NATO dissolves instantly. The alliance that kept the peace in Europe for 75 years evaporates, leaving the continent to rearm and realign against the new aggressor across the Atlantic. We don’t just lose an ally; we create a unified enemy.

The military repercussions will be swift and humiliating. Europe will immediately demand the closure of every U.S. military base on the continent. Ramstein in Germany, Aviano in Italy, Lakenheath in the UK, all gone. Our ability to project power into the Middle East and Africa vanishes overnight. We will be evicted from the very soil we helped liberate and defended for decades, forced to retreat to our own shores as a fortress nation, isolated and friendless.
Then comes the economic nuclear option. The European Union is the largest single market in the world, and they will weaponize it. Europe will likely move to call in U.S. debt and dump their dollar reserves, sending the value of our currency into a death spiral. The U.S. economy, which relies on the dollar being the global reserve currency, will collapse. Inflation will make the post-COVID spikes look like a rounding error. Your savings will be worthless before the ink dries on the invasion orders.

Corporate America will face an extinction event. U.S. companies will be expelled from the European market. Apple, Google, McDonald’s, and Tesla will see their assets seized or their operations banned. Trillions of dollars in market capitalization will be incinerated in minutes. The stock market will not just crash; it will close. We are talking about the complete de-globalization of American industry, cutting us off from the wealthiest consumers on the planet.
The skies will go silent. European aviation authorities will almost certainly ground all Boeing jets and ban U.S. airlines from their airspace. Transatlantic travel will cease. If you are in Paris or Berlin, you are stuck there. The logistical arteries that feed our supply chains will be severed. We will be cut off from European medicine, machinery, and technology. We will be an island nation in the worst possible sense.

The cultural isolation will be just as stinging. The International Olympic Committee and FIFA will have no choice but to bar the United States from competition, just as they did with Russia. There will be no World Cup matches in New Jersey. There will be no Team USA in the Olympics. We will be treated as a pariah state, unwelcome on the global stage, forced to watch the world celebrate without us.

For individual Americans, the consequences will be personal and painful. Visa-free travel to Europe will end immediately. Americans currently living or working in Europe will lose their legal protections and residency status. They will become persona non grata, potentially facing deportation or internment. The “blue passport” that used to open every door will suddenly be a red flag at every border crossing.

This is the end of trust, and it does not reset. You cannot invade a democratic ally and then say “my bad” four years later. The psychological break will be permanent. Europe will realize that the United States is no longer a partner but a predator. They will build their own defense architecture, their own financial systems, and their own alliances that specifically exclude us. The West will continue, but the United States will no longer be part of it.

Invading Greenland is not a show of strength; it is an act of national suicide. We are trading our reputation, our economy, and our security for a frozen island and a handful of minerals we can’t even process. The price of this real estate deal is everything we built over the last century. If we cross this line, there is no going back. We will be the lonely superpower, ruling over nothing but our own decline.

 

 

Eerie Similarities Between ICE & Gestapo

Whenever anyone mentions either Hitler, Nazi Germany, the Gestapo and SS, etc., there are many people who claim to be outraged by the comparison! Some claim doing this is either dishonest, untrue, or an overreaction, while others who have horrible family memories from the Holocaust and associated events, and seem to feel any comparison, in some way, minimizes their loss! Although, one could probably do a thesis on the comparison between President Trump (and some of his closest advisors) and Hitler (and his), the purpose of this article is rather, to consider, examine, review and discuss some eerie, horrific similarities between today’s ICE (and its behavior and actions) and those of the 1930’s/early 1940’s Gestapo and so-called Brown Shirts (used in Nazi Germany to refer to the SA or Sturmabtilung, which was the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization , often referred to as “Storm Troopers” in England).  While this does not necessarily mean ICE is a Nazi group, but — if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then . . . . .

Warrantless arrests & searches: We are witnessing what certainly resembles those horrible events from 85–90 years ago! In a democracy, in most cases (unless certain specific conditions exist) a court-issued warrant is required to perform many types of searches, and many arrests. Over and over again, it has been revealed, ICE often uses masks and hoods to cover their face and identity, often not even showing any identification of proof of their authority! When this becomes widespread, no one is safe, because it means we are accepting the concept of a Police State, and accepting the diminishment of basic democratic rights, freedoms and privileges. This is exactly what the Gestapo and the Brownshirts often did, and soon, Nazi Germany and other nations where the Nazis invaded and took control, the reduction in many of these rights. It clearly violate ths concepts such as: No one above the law; equal rights and protections of/from the law/justice; legal protections regarding search and seizure, etc.; human rights; free speech; right to protest/assemble; etc.

Suspending legal rights: Basic democratic concepts and legal rights, such as the right to counsel, being read one’s Miranda rights, imprisonment without court appearance to plea, and/or be read the charges, no steps towards trial, etc., have apparently been suspended for many of those detained by ICE. In some cases, even the right to inform one’s family of where you are being detained, etc., have been eliminated. Some use as an excuse/explanation, this is being done because there is an emergency, where so-called violent, dangerous undocumented individuals, yet the reality is in Trump’s nearly 4 1/2 months im office, there have been fewer deportations than in his predecessor, Joe Biden’s similar period, last year! Dangerous criminals should be deported, but if we suspend habeas corpus and due process, we are violating the basic principles, this nation was founded on!

Concentration camps on foreign soil: If this President studied history, he might not act as he is. One of the darkest stains in US history was the detention camps, in California, where we held Japanese-Americans during World War II. Perhaps, he would have learned from the horrific crimes against humanity during the Holocaust, when anyone who potentially disagreed with the Fuhrer were arrested, and sent to those camps! Perhaps, Donald Trump would take to heart the famous poems from the German cleric, which most of us, refer to as, They came for… When ICE and the DOJ, against court orders, sent people to similar facilities, in El Salvador and other places, without any of the rights or legal protections, it sure seemed like the atrocities from the past!

No habeas corpus: Every true democracy since the Magna Carta (1215) has enshrined and protected the concept and right, referred to as habeas corpus, and its associated due process protections! In the USA, it is enshrined, and clearly state, every individual within this nation (citizen or not) was entitled to these protections. Of course, Nazi Germany did not do so, and now, ICE and Trump’s DOJ, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department seem quite willing to neglect these protections, using the false premise they are only provided to US citizens, even though, the Courts have, thus far, clearly ruled against the Trump government’s approaches.

Little to no government oversight: One of the key components and concepts of our Declaration of Independence and US Constitution is the checks and balances, created by the Balance of Powers. We keep seein what seems like executive overreach, where the President and his minions seem enabled by the SCOTUS Presidential immunity ruling, and Trump appears to feel he is above the law. Tradionally, Presidents have appointed Cabinet members and advisors, who have specific experiences and expertise, to make government agencies operate more smoothly, and in accordance with our traditions, and the greater good. Supposedly, the DOJ and the AG and FBI Director are supposed to be the people’s attorney and law enforcement overlookers, but both Bondi and Patel have been behaving more like Trump’s personal attorney that as AG, and Patel has seemed to simply follow orders without questioning. That’s how Hitler, so quickly gained power and control, and demanded outright loyalty. In our democracy, those in government take an oath to the Constitution, and NOT any President! We are not supposed to allow anything similar to the hateful, obedient, Nazi salute!

All of these behaviors and actions seem to have as a common thread, inducing fear and thus, making blind compliance mandatory!

While only time will tell if we allow ICE to become this generation’s version of the Gestapo and Brown Shirts, many of the steps and actions taken to date, are eerily similar to the horrific days of Nazi Germany! Jews and many others state, Never Again, related to those Nazi atrocities, but we all must remember and learn from what occurred at the onset, and ensure we don’t permit anything, or anyone, using similar tactics, etc.!

Wake up America, and don’t be fooled again. Resist and persist, as if our freedoms, rights and democracy may depend on doing so, because it very-possibly, may!

Jan 6, 2021 was a mob — organized, supported, and dispatched by Donald Trump — a mob that intended to overthrow an honest, accurate election that Trump lost.  The only thing the Capitol Police and the DC Police did wrong was that they did not issued automatic weapons and hose down the mob, stacking bodies about six deep.

Jan 7, 2026, was the murder of a completely innocent person by a Gestapo thug who has been in federal police service for ten years, waiting for his chance to murder someone.

---

Meanwhile, this Gestapo thug asked a woman:  “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?”  What he means is;  “If we don’t like you, we will murder you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

 

 

There was no enforcement operation happening when the Gestapo thug Jonathan Ross murdered Nicole Renee Good

Whatever operation ICE agents were there to conduct that day had ended. The only reason the ICE agents were still there is because one of the agents got his vehicle stuck in a snow bank and he called for other agents to come and help push him out. This fact is from DHS Secty Kristi Noem — she said so herself in her first statement.

So no, Renee Good was not impeding enforcement.

Just wanted to clear this up because there is so much misinformation and outright lies being told about that morning from the professional liars — Trump,  Noem, Vance and their cult.

The Gestapo thug Jonathan Ross is guilty of first degree murder.  He should get the chair, the needle, the rope, or the firing squad.  Doesn’t matter which.

---

UPDATE 1/16/2026

Three days after the ICE thug Jonathan Ross murdered Nicole Renee Good in cold blood, DHS Secretary Kristi “Dog Killer” Noem stood up in public and lied — she claimed Ross was suffering from “internal bleeding” as a result of being hit by Good’s car.

LIE.  Video from several angles clearly showed the car made no contact with Ross.

And now there is this:

Jonathan Ross, the ICE thug who murdered Renee Good, was NOT TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL according to police reports. He was taken to the Federal Building. He was NOT INJURED. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01/15/us/minneapolis-shooting-ice

According to a report from the Minneapolis Police Department, Ross was still on the scene as much a half-an-hour after he murdered God.  He WAS NEVER TAKEN TO A HOSPITAL — he was taken to a federal building.

 

From Thom Hartmann’s substack blog.

In Wednesday’s Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today’s hard right GOP. A few people replied with, “Who’s that?” and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal was a bad thing. So, here’s the backstory to what I mentioned.

I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer’s book “None Dare Call It Treason.” The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing.

Ironically, Stormer’s book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.

And it was started by morbidly rich men (it was all men back then) who wanted to use the threat of a “communist menace” to gut the union movement to increase their own corporate profits and CEO pay.

. . . MORE AT THE LINK . . . 

 

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone.

The video shows Ross getting out of a vehicle and walking toward a red SUV where Good sits in the driver’s seat. Sirens blare as he walks toward her. She smiles at him and says: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” As Ross walks alongside the car, she repeats: “I’m not mad at you.” As he reaches the back of the vehicle, another person, presumably Good’s wife, Becca, says: “Show your face.” As he begins to record the vehicle’s license plate, the same person says: “That’s okay, we don’t change our plates every morning,” referring to stories that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) switch out plates to make their vehicles hard to track. “Just so you know, it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.” Ross’s camera pans up to show the person recording him on her cell phone.

She continues: “That’s fine. U.S. citizen. Former f*cking veteran.” As she walks to the passenger-side door, she looks at him and says: “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”

Another officer approaches the driver’s side of the vehicle and says to Renee Good: “Out of the car. Get out of the f*cking car.”

As the passenger calmly reaches for the passenger-side door handle, the police officer on the driver’s side again says: “Get out of the car!” Other videos indicate that he had then put his hand into the car and was trying to open the door. Good quite clearly turns the wheel hard away from the police officers to head down the street as the passenger yells: “Drive, baby! Drive! Drive!”

Someone says “Whoa!” as the car moves down the street. Ross’s camera shows his face and then sways—remember, he has been filming all this on his phone. There are three shots and the houses on the side of the street swing back into view on Ross’s camera, indicating he did not drop it. As the car rolls up the street, Ross says, “F*cking bitch!” just before there is the sound of a smash.

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

The release of this damning video as an attempted exoneration reminds me overwhelmingly of the release of the video of the murder of Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in February 2021 in an attempt of one of the murderers to prove they had acted in self-defense.

In that case, the district attorney for that circuit told police that the video showed self-defense and declined to prosecute. When the story wouldn’t go away, one of the murderers apparently thought that everyone else would agree that the video exonerated the killers. His lawyer gave the video to a local radio station. The station took the video down within two hours, but the public outcry over the horrific video meant the killers were arrested two days later. A jury convicted them, and they are now in prison, two for life without possibility of parole, one for life with the possibility of parole after 30 years, when he will be about 82.

In the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murderers and their protectors were clearly so isolated in their own racist bubble they could not see how regular Americans would react to the video of them hunting down and shooting a jogger.

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking bitch” after he killed her.

The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.

This is the larger meaning of federal agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in U.S. cities. While they are attacking primarily people of color, the message they carry is directed at all Americans: you must do what the Trump administration and its loyalists demand.

Another recording from the past few days shows a federal agent walking toward a woman recording him. She tells him: “Shame on you.” He answers: “Listen. Have you all not learned from the past couple of days? Have you not learned?” She responds: “Learned what? What’s our lesson here? What do you want us to learn?” He begins: “Following federal agents….” and he knocks the phone out of her hand. Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”

After doubling down on their false narrative, the administration pulled 200 Customs and Border Patrol agents from a crackdown in Louisiana to send them to Minnesota, where administration officials already had deployed 2,000 federal agents—more than three times the number of police officers in Minneapolis. There they are cracking down, apparently indiscriminately. Yesterday, Gabe Whisnant of Newsweek reported that ICE has detained four members of the Oglala Lakota Nation, a federally recognized tribal nation of the Indigenous peoples who were in North America long before European settlers arrived.

In November, as Sarah Mehta of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted at the time, the administration replaced almost half of ICE leaders across the country with Border Patrol officers. Border Patrol, a subagency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is the agency responsible for acting on President Donald J. Trump’s policy of taking children from their parents during his first term, and it remains at the center of complaints of cruelty, racism, and violation of civil rights. This is the agency led by Greg Bovino, and the one behind the attack on a Chicago apartment building led by agents who rappelled into the building from a Black Hawk helicopter.

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radio shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim.

This afternoon, Kyle Cheney, Ben Johansen, and Gregory Svirnovskiy of Politico reported that the day after Good’s murder, Noem quietly restricted the ability of members of Congress to conduct oversight of ICE facilities. The policy came out in court today after ICE officers denied Democratic Minnesota Representatives Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison entry to a detention facility in Minneapolis. Last month, a federal judge rejected a similar policy.

Trump and his allies have singled out Minnesota in large part because of its large Somali-American population, represented in Congress by Omar, a lawmaker Trump has repeatedly attacked, from a population Trump has called “garbage.” As Chabeli Carrazana explained in 19th News, shortly after Christmas, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video that he claimed showed day care centers run by Somali Americans were taking money from the government without providing services.

The video has been widely debunked. In 2019, a state investigation found fraud taking place in the child care system and charged a number of people for defrauding the state. After that, the state tightened oversight, and state investigators have conducted unannounced visits to the day cares Shirley hit in his videos, where they found normal operations. Shirley claimed fraud when the centers would not let him in, but child care centers lock their doors and obscure the windows for the safety of the children, and would not let a strange man inside the facility to videotape.

But Trump used the frenzy to justify cutting $10 billion in antipoverty funding to five states led by Democrats—California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York—only to have a federal judge block his order yesterday. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins promptly announced she was withholding $129 billion in federal funding from Minnesota, alleging fraud. Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison responded: “I will not allow you to take from Minnesotans in need. I’ll see you in court.”

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Protesters took to the streets today across the United States to lament the death of Renee Good and demand an end to ICE brutality. At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris reported that ICE’s approval rating has plummeted in the past year, from +16 to -14. The day ICE agent Ross shot Renee Good, 52% of Americans disapproved of ICE while just 39% approved. In February, 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable opinion of ICE, while today 40% do. There is, Morris notes, “a growing and intense, angry opposition to [ICE] across America.”