Charge Jonathan Ross with murder for killing Renee Good!

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump goes all-out to protect ICE killer from justice
Brian Tyler Cohen sits down with legal expert Glenn Kirschner to discuss the Trump administration's refusal to work with state prosecutors to bring Renee Good's killer to justice and the obvious decision to pre-clear him of any wrongdoing...which Kirschner believes could backfire hugely when it's time for a grand jury trial.

The only domestic terrorists on our streets are ICE officers
Alex Skopic, Current Affairs: "ICE have murdered a woman on the streets of Minneapolis, and now they’re trying to lie to you about it. By now, you’ve almost certainly seen the footage. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman driving a purple SUV, is sitting in the street, idling her car. She was a legal observer, there to keep an eye on ICE as they wage yet another series of immigration raids in Minneapolis, and report any misconduct she saw. The masked, heavily-armed troops approach her, reportedly shouting contradictory instructions: one agent tells her to drive away, another to get out of the car. One of them grabs her SUV’s door handle and yanks on it. Confused and scared, she tries to turn and drive off. So one of the agents draws a pistol, and he shoots and kills her. As soon as they killed Renee Good, they began lying about it. Whenever police of any kind make a public statement, the presumption should be that they may be lying, because lying is something police often do. But even by the usual standards of cops, immigration agents, and their defenders, the statements the Department of Homeland Security has put out about Good’s killing have been brazenly, insultingly false. On its social media feeds, the DHS has claimed Good was a 'violent rioter' who had 'weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.' This, they say, led the ICE agent to shoot in self-defense, 'fearing for his life.' But again, this is not true. Simply watching the footage is enough to disprove it. These men were wearing body armor and carrying guns. They were approaching an unarmed woman in a Honda, which was barely moving—certainly not fast enough to be much of a 'weapon.' She was not 'rioting.' If they 'feared for their lives' under those circumstances, they had only their own cowardice to blame. This was bound to happen sooner or later. ICE agents are swarming our cities, given heavy weaponry, anonymity, and impunity. They are the largest law enforcement agency in the country, thanks to the monster budget Congress has given them. Virtually anybody can become an ICE agent with minimal training or background checks, including teenagers as young as 18, and there have been multiple cases of ICE officials with ties to neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups that were only discovered after years on the job. Good isn’t the first person they’ve shot; there have already been nine others since last September. One fact that defenders of ICE’s actions are reluctant to discuss is that they didn’t just shoot an unarmed mother; they also refused to let a doctor treat her. There’s video of this, too. The man in question asks if he can 'go check a pulse'; he identifies himself, politely, as a 'physician.' The responses he gets from ICE are, respectively, 'no' and 'I don’t care.' They wanted her to die. They made sure she died. Even those who ludicrously argue self-defense do not mention this fact, because it’s totally unconscionable. They actively prevented her from getting assistance. This is what truly turns it into a murder. In case after case, we’ve seen that Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and their allies have no morality. They will simply do whatever they can get away with. If they’re allowed to get away with kidnapping the president of another country, as they’ve just done in Venezuela, they will probably do something similar again. Likewise, if they can get away with shooting an American in cold blood on the street, they’ll probably shoot another one tomorrow. That’s the chilling thing about all these lies: it would be easy enough to tell the truth. Trump would really lose nothing if he simply admitted that one of his ICE agents had done something wrong, and held that agent accountable. Troops are easily replaceable. But he clearly wants to find out if he can get away with it. If Democrats let him, the consequences will be horrific for everyone. Now is the time to put an end to ICE, before anyone else has to die."

Rear Admiral Eileen Laubacher aims to sink Lauren Boebert's career
Eileen for Colorado: MAGA extremist Lauren Boebert represents everything that’s wrong with the modern GOP. A Trump sycophant who rubber-stamps the worst of his excesses — when she’s not making a fool of herself in House hearings or getting thrown out of children’s theater productions — Lauren Boebert barely survived her last election, winning by only 594 votes. Her conduct in Congress has inspired former National Security Council member Rear Admiral Eileen Laubacher to run for Congress, flip her VERY winnable seat blue, and restore our congressional majority! Will you make a donation and help retake Congress? Mike Johnson's majority is down to just ONE vote!

Zohran Mamdani has quickly gotten down to business
Meagan Day, Jacobin: "Sworn in as mayor of New York just over one week ago, Zohran Mamdani is wasting no time beginning to govern. In his first week in office, his administration issued twelve executive orders, including two emergency executive orders. The previous administration took several months to hit that number. Many of the administration’s first-week executive orders pertain to the campaign’s signature issue of housing affordability. Executive Order 3 revives the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. The agency was created in 2019 but defunded and sidelined under Mayor Eric Adams. The new order charges it with coordinating tenant protection efforts across city government, cracking down on repeat-offending landlords, and advocating for renters’ interests in housing policy decisions. Two additional orders establish task forces aimed at expanding housing supply. A fourth housing order, Executive Order 8, directs multiple departments to collaboratively conduct public 'Rental Ripoff' hearings throughout the city. The hearings will collect testimony from tenants, advocacy groups, and legal service providers about illegal fees, retaliation, neglected repairs, economic discrimination, and other abusive landlord practices. Beyond housing, the Mamdani administration signed consumer protection measures that affect affordability more broadly — a direction consistent with the appointment of progressive former FTC commissioner Lina Khan, who has focused on such measures in her past work. Executive Order 9 establishes a task force to combat junk fees and hidden charges that inflate prices at checkout. Executive Order 10 targets subscription traps, the business practices that make it easy to sign up for a service and maddeningly difficult to cancel. Additional early executive orders focus on addressing health and safety issues at the city jail Riker’s Island, improving the city’s homeless shelter system, and reforming the process of appointing judges to city courts. Finally, Executive Order 7 creates the Office of Mass Engagement, intended to mobilize everyday New Yorkers and invite them into the governing process and led by longtime democratic socialist organizer Tascha Van Auken. If you believe, as I do, that there is a genuine crisis of democracy in this country, and that the muscle for bottom-up engagement in public life has withered in an era of corporate capture of our politics, you should be heartened by this intention of the order. One of Mamdani’s major campaign promises, universal childcare, was dismissed as pie-in-the-sky promises. But on Thursday, January 8, Mamdani was joined by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to announce the rollout of free childcare for two-year-olds in New York City, backed by $1.7 billion in state funds. The initial rollout will be phased in over time and is currently only funded for two years, but it’s a strong start for an expensive but desperately needed social policy that Mamdani campaigned on. If Mamdani succeeds, he will do more than improve working-class New Yorkers’ circumstances. He will lay to rest the axiomatic American belief that efficiency and innovation belong to the private sector and the governments most deferential to it."

Europe signs up for more humiliation by Trump
David Broder, The Nation: "It was a bad weekend for the Nobel Peace Prize. Hours after the US government’s violent abduction of longtime Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump told reporters that opposition leader and recent Nobel laureate María Corina Machado lacked the 'support or respect' to take a role in government. She grovelingly replied by offering to 'share' her Nobel award with the US president. Meanwhile the European Union—awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012—was blindsided by the US assault on Caracas. EU figures retreated into boilerplate statements about the importance of international law, but avoided saying frankly that this operation was illegal. 'Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be upheld,' Sunday’s communiqué by EU leaders insisted. It even said that 'members of the United Nations Security Council have a particular responsibility to uphold those principles'—but stopped there. It perhaps implied that the United States had failed to defend the rules. But what about such Security Council members as Greece—whose premier ventured hours after the attack that “now is not the time to comment on the legality of the US actions”—or France, after President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that also failed to mention this issue? Trump’s own remarks after the kidnapping of Maduro didn’t help his European allies to save face. He hadn’t advised them in advance, and didn’t bother to claim that he was acting with or for the international community. Trump instead boasted that might is right, and that this administration is putting the US national interest first. When the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, it was credited with resolving long-bitter enmities on the continent and in its immediate periphery. Yet its members’ long record of military support to Israel, inability to work effectively for a diplomatic solution in the Middle East, and kowtowing to Trump over Venezuela suggest that EU leaders’ belief in international law doesn’t extend far beyond Europe itself. US pressure on Greenland is perhaps a concern far from most citizens’ own lives, but it could be a real test of the EU’s internal solidarity. As the post–Cold War order cracks up, the fault lines don’t just run through the Atlantic but Europe itself."

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