Saturday Report 1/10/26 — Are We Going to Wake Up to a Bulldozed White House West Wing? Whose House Is It?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

Indivisible.org is planning anti-ICE actions all across the country today and tomorrow. Check out their website for more information.

— ICE is planning to go door-to-door just like in 1930’s Germany? On a Wednesday interview with Fox “News,” three-named notorious Dark Enlightenment fan and liar James Donald Bowman James David Hamel JD Vance said: “I think we’re going to see those deportation numbers ramp up as we get more and more people online working for ICE, going door to door, making sure if you’re an illegal alien you’ve got to get out of this country and if you want to come back, apply through the proper channels.” (emphasis added) Anne Frank, I’m guessing, would like to have a word.

— How can we stop Trump’s masked, anonymous, secret police thugs from killing us? The federal murder laws are very narrow in scope, covering only murders against federal officials, on federal property, killings committed in the commission of a federal crime like interstate bank robbery, or killings that are civil rights violations. In all other cases, state laws cover murder. So, when ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good on a Minneapolis street, about the only way he could be federally prosecuted would be as a civil rights violation, and that’s pretty unlikely. So, why did the FBI move in and block both Minnesota and Minneapolis police from investigating the crime scene? The only reasonable assumption is that Bondi, Noem, and Patel are planning to cover up the crime and let Ross get away with shooting Good and then calling Good, as her car spun away, a “fuckin’ bitch.” We have a convicted criminal in the White House and it appears that the people around and beneath him are more than enthusiastic about supporting more widespread governmental crimes. Democrats are proposing a bill in the House that would make it easier for victims of ICE violence, theft, rape, and other crimes by ICE officers to both prosecute and get damages; Eric Swalwell calls it legislation to “stop mother-murdering thugs.” Excellent name for the legislation, particularly given the two more people ICE has shot, this time in Portland.

— ICE may be monitoring your phone and those of your neighbors. Particularly if you live in a Democrat-run city whose leadership has pissed off the man-baby president, ICE has gotten around the 4th Amendment’s privacy provisions by purchasing cell phone location data from private companies that buy and sell our whereabouts without our knowledge. They recently signed on with a company that lets them basically nail every phone within a multi-block radius and learn where those phones have been for days, weeks, or even months. On top of that, they’re using so-called Stingray devices that pretend to be cell towers so everybody’s nearby phone hooks up to them allowing them to download the contents of your phone while monitoring all of your inbound and outbound internet traffic and phone calls. This should not be legal, and the ACLU is suing. But don’t hold your breath, Trump’s growing police state promises to fight it all the way to their six loyal on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.

— Mainstream news is dying but independent journalism is on the rise… This Hartmann Report Substack newsletter is part of a much larger trend, now that rightwing billionaire oligarchs are buying up America’s mainstream and social media operations like CBS, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Fox “News,” The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. and essentially censoring them or turning them into pro-Trump propaganda operations. More and more reporters and OpEd writers are moving to platforms like Substack, Ghost, and Beehive to publish their investigative reporting and opinion pieces, and it’s leading to a mini-revival in the news and OpEd business. The bottom line appears to be that Americans really don’t want their news and opinions filtered through the interests of morbidly rich oligarchs looking out for their own interests and so are signing up for these new newsletter products, which is a good sign for the continuing vibrancy of democracy in America. Support your favorite independent outlets!

— How Trump has backed himself into a terrible corner in Venezuela. The “West Point History Professor,” Terrence Goggin, writes that Trump may find it much harder to get Venezuela’s oil infrastructure rehabilitated than he thought, as most oil companies are reluctant to pour billions into nations run by unstable regimes. There’s certainly some history that contradicts this, but he also makes a great point overall. I continue to believe that when Trump held his press conference to announce the capture of President Maduro nobody up there on the stage with him was expecting him to say that he was going to “run the country” and “take the oil.” It was, I believe, Trump being the narcissist and pathological liar that he’s been his entire life and he caught them all by surprise, and now they’re peddling as fast as they can to bring his vision into reality. But, as Goggin notes, it’s not going to be easy and represents some real dangers for America, as Republicans in the Senate seemed to realize this week when a handful voted to allow debate on limits on Trump’s war powers. This probably won’t come out for years, when people start writing memoirs, but if I were a gambling man I’d put money on it…

— Is Mexico next? “We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels,” Trump told Fox personality Sean Hannity Thursday night. He seemed dead serious, adding “The cartels are running Mexico.” For some reason that historians or psychologists may be able to explain, history’s most notorious dictators were just as obsessed with stealing other people’s lands as they were with stealing the wealth of their own people while locking down civil rights and throwing dissenters in jail or killing them. Here we go again…

— If you want World War III to begin, just take down the UN. And that appears to be exactly what Trump’s up to, having just pulled the US out of over 60 UN programs and putting America over $4 billion in arrears on our UN dues, representing 80% of all the overdue dues to that body in the world. Is Trump doing this, like so many other things, because Putin recommended it?

— Is the White House’s West Wing the next to be torn down? Trump’s ballroom architect told America this week that he has big plans for the West Wing as well as replacing the now-torn-down East Wing with a gaudy, Russian-style ballroom. Between that, Trump’s picture hanging from 60-foot-tall banners all over Washington DC, and his slapping his name on the Kennedy Center and anything else he can find, it appears that we’re fully in the midst of a Saddam-like new era in America. Tell me again whose house the White House is? Throughout American history, it was often called “the People’s House” but it seems those days are over, too.

— Fascist Alert! Trump apologizes to oil titans for not having a posh ballroom to host them. Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to apologize to the oil oligarchs he met with yesterday that he couldn’t host them in a simulacrum of Putin’s St. Petersburg throne room. The new slogan for post-Trump America: “Of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs.”

— Geeky Science: Most people are still fundamentally good. Watching the crimes, lies, thefts, and violence foisted on us by the Trump administration and their captive GOP it’s easy to think that morality is collapsing here. Check out what’s happening in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, etc., etc. and it seems to be a worldwide problem. But according to new research, dictators and oligarch thieves are the exception, it turns out, not the rule, and most people don’t agree with the kinds of values we see daily displayed with Trump’s gaudy and disgusting displays in the Oval Office. This is actually encouraging…