Saturday Report 1/17/26 — Renee Good’s death sparks MAGA deplorables wrath: Minneapolis charter school under siege.

The Best of the Rest of the News

Sorry for the delay in sending this out this morning; I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNOW...

— While Putin attacks Europe from the outside, Trump dismantles NATO from within. Trump advances Putin’s goal of destroying the Atlantic alliance: ever since the 1980s when Trump, newly married to the Czech daughter of a KGB informant, visited Russia and returned to the US to buy large ads in major newspapers essentially calling for the end of NATO, he’s been singing Russian Intelligence’s song. This week the tune included his tariff theme, as he threatened to jack up tariffs on European and/or NATO countries that don’t support his effort to beg, buy, or steal Greenland from Denmark. NATO, in response, has moved troops and fighter jets to the island nation and is going though a top-to-bottom reevaluation of its relationship with America, now that Trump has taken Putin’s positions on pretty much everything from immigration to gay rights to Ukraine. (When asked this week who’s responsible for holding up peace talks in Ukraine, Trump said, “Zelenskyy.”) It’s delighting Russia’s military and intelligence planners and, of course, Putin, but threatening to destroy the oldest and most successful peacekeeping alliance in modern history. Will Putin finally get his way via Trump completely ruining the alliance? If that happens, will Putin then move on the Baltic states and Poland? Will it thus provoke WWIII? Stay tuned…

— Renee Good’s death sparks MAGA deplorables’ wrath: small Minneapolis charter school under siege. Southside Family Charter School, where Renee Good (murdered by a deranged ICE thug) served on the school board and where her 6-year-old son attends, was shut down this week when Trump-humping MAGA fascists overwhelmed the little facility with threats and harassment. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA), famous for his low intellect and even worse ethics when he was openly pushing opioids from his campaign donor as a pharmacist, tried to stir up the hate by posting on Facebook: “I’m calling for all federal funds to Minnesota’s Southside Family Charter School to be REVOKED. This institution radicalizes students and pushes a left-wing agenda that demonizes ICE agents. The federal government should not subsidize anti-American education.” The school has since taken down their own Facebook page and now gone to online teaching, as the racists and bigots the GOP attracts have made keeping classes open untenable. Haters gonna hate…

— Trump offers a phony “healthcare plan” that does nothing to fix our healthcare system and has virtually no details, but Fox and rightwing media lap it up as if it were real. Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee that would play a role in healthcare spending, said in a statement Thursday that, “Trump’s half-baked healthcare ‘plan’ is a con that does nothing to help Americans facing soaring costs and would raise healthcare expenses while cutting coverage.” Trump, of course, has been convicted multiple times for fraud and he and his son Eric even stole money from a children’s cancer charity, so it’s no surprise that he’d play petty political games with the healthcare of millions of Americans. “That’s no surprise from a president who is taking healthcare away from 15 million Americans to pay for tax breaks for billionaires,” Boyle added. “The American people deserve real solutions, not gimmicks.” Amen. Time for Medicare For All!

— Trump has suggested multiple times in the past few weeks that we shouldn’t have an election this November, and now it’s becoming clear why. Both Trump and the Republican Party are in the toilet when it comes to polling numbers, with basically nobody except regular viewers of the Australian billionaire family’s Fox “News” propaganda channel still supporting him. A CNN survey found 58 percent of Americans call Trump’s first year of his second term a “failure” and 64 percent said Trump was “focused on the wrong issues.” This helps explain Trump’s flailing efforts to direct attention away from the Epstein Files and his terrible economy by making absurd claims about Greenland, kidnapping the Venezuelan president, and his attacks on Minneapolis. So far it’s working to change the subject in the media, but Americans still know he’s ruining our economy at the same time he’s damaging our democracy and I don’t see any way short of an all-out war with somebody that he can change these numbers. Which may be why he keeps taking actions and making statements that increase the probability of war…

— The Minneapolis battlefield continues: an infant needed CPR after ICE flash-banged and then tear gassed the family van with 6 kids inside. The family was simply trying to drive home, but they had the bad fortune of encountering an ICE “operation” and the low-intellect goons assumed they were up to no good. So, of course, they set off an explosion under the car that literally lifted it up off its springs and then threw a tear gas canister at the vehicle with six children inside. All were panicked, screaming and choking, and the six-month-old stopped breathing and lost consciousness, necessitating CPR; three of the six kids are hospitalized. No ICE thug has been charged or even identified, of course. Welcome to Trump’s Amerikkka.

— Big baby Trump steals a Nobel like a toddler grabbing a trophy. This is what happens when a grown man with a toddler’s ego doesn’t get the trophy he thinks he deserves. Trump has whined about the Nobel Peace Prize for years, so when a real winner got it, he didn’t rise to the moment but instead grabbed at it, clutched it, and strutted around as if it was actually his. He’ll swear he doesn’t care while making sure every camera catches him fondling the medal, because his pathetic hunger for validation never shuts up. The outrage isn’t just the theft, it’s the humiliation ritual of Maria Machado that went with it, the bowing and scraping followed by Trump’s usual insult of her even after she handed it over. Even then, it still isn’t his, no matter how hard he pretends, and the Nobel Committee has had to spell it out like they’re talking to a child. The last time this sort of thing happened was when a Norwegian novelist gifted his Nobel prize to Joseph Goebbels. You can’t steal peace, and you can’t bully your way into honor, but watching Trump try is as ugly as it is revealing.

— Crazy Alert! Man trains crows to steal MAGA hats. If it weren’t so dangerous for the crows, this would be funny. A fellow named Dave has been training crows to come to his place for food for months, and thought it would be funny to add into their training an ability to identify and make off with MAGA red hats. ”I tried to be centrist for a long time,” he wrote on Threads, “but I no longer believe that is a moral option.”