Something to Know - 30 January

A very busy day, and way late in getting HCR to you.  You know, it is very difficult to understand the seriousness of the every day lying, corruption, unlawful behavior and plain old Trump stuff.   It is like tossing evrything and anything in a large food chopper and blender and whirling the contents into a sad pile of garbage.   We the people, and our global allies whom we have disgusted deserve better.   

Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	12:02 AM (16 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more January 29, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Jan 30   READ IN APP   Public outrage over the violence of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol has given Senate Democrats a powerful lever. Tonight they forced the Republican majority to split new funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) off from five other spending bills that must pass by Friday to keep the government funded. The Department of Homeland Security will be funded separately for just two weeks while the Democrats and Republicans negotiate the conditions of funding DHS. The funding measure passed the House before Saturday's shooting of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Seven Democrats joined the Republican majority in backing it to continue funding for other important agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), reasoning that since the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act had provided enough money to fund ICE and Border Patrol through September 30, 2029, there was no point in taking a stand against renewed extra funding. But popular anger over ICE shootings and the administration's lies about them made Democrats in the Senate take a stand against the measure. They demanded accountability and reforms to current ICE operations. Republicans initially said they would not split DHS funding from the rest of the package, then proposed handling the excesses of ICE and Border Patrol through an executive order or through a new, different piece of legislation. Such a plan would avoid the necessity of taking the measure back to the House, which is out of session until Monday. Senate Democrats refused to pass the measure as it stood. They demanded an end to "roving patrols," with federal agents required to use warrants and coordinate with local and state law enforcement officials. They wanted a uniform code of conduct for agents and independent investigations to enforce that code. And they wanted agents to use body cameras and to stop wearing masks. Senate Republicans wanted a longer period of time to consider these demands, but they settled on two weeks. The Senate did not vote on the measure tonight. NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur reported that, according to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the holdup is coming from Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham was one of those Republican lawmakers who worked to help Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, calling Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, for example, and suggesting that he should throw out some of Biden's ballots in the state. His phone records on and around January 6, 2021, were among those examined by special counsel Jack Smith's team. Now, according to Kapur, he wants the Senate to add back into the funding package necessary to prevent a government shutdown a measure that would let senators whose records were seized sue the government for $500,000. The House is out of session until Monday, and the fate of the measure in that chamber is not clear. House Democrats have said they will not support the measure without significant concessions and will leave the Republicans to pass the measure on their own. But the Republican majority has fallen to two seats and is expected to fall by another seat over the weekend as a special election in Texas is expected to add another Democrat to the House. Meanwhile, footage circulated today of a woman in Minnesota who left her home to warm the car for her kids and got taken by federal agents. The video shows her calling someone to look after her children, who were left alone in the house. In the last week, since federal agents shot Pretti, former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all spoken out to condemn his killing and the violence of federal agents as well as the administration's lies. They have warned that the nation's core values are under assault and urged Trump officials to change course, while also calling on Americans to defend those core values. The criticism of all the living Democratic presidents, along with his disastrous performance in Davos, Switzerland, last week and his plummeting numbers—as well as the fact the American people have not forgotten that the administration is continuing to break the law by refusing to release the Epstein files—appears to have sent Trump back to the comfort of older grievances. Today he hit not only his Big Lie but also his complaints about the inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, who has been strangely invisible now for months, resurfaced yesterday when the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election from a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. The role of the DNI is to coordinate information from various intelligence agencies to make sure the president has good intelligence for making national security decisions, but Josh Dawsey, Dustin Volz, and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Gabbard has been moved off of national security intelligence to chase down Trump's allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him, focusing on the idea that a foreign government was involved in such a theft. Two officials told the Wall Street Journal reporters that Gabbard's report is designed to bolster executive orders about voting before the midterm elections. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: "President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort." In reality, Trump's claims about the 2020 election have been thoroughly debunked, and dozens of court cases his followers launched have been dismissed. In contrast, a grand jury actually indicted Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election. Yesterday, Trump's account amplified a post claiming that Italian officials used military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines in an operation coordinated by China "all to install Biden as a puppet." Gabbard is also trying to prove that former president Barack Obama and his staff were behind the accusation that Trump's campaign worked with Russian operatives in 2016, although this conspiracy theory has no evidence at all and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously agreed that Russian operatives had meddled in the election to help Trump. Trump's social media account posted, under emojis of flashing red lights: "BREAKING: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has just released HUNDREDS OF BOMBSHELL RUSSIAGATE DOCUMENTS proving that Barack Obama personally ordered CIA agents to manufacture false intelligence on President Trump and was actively 'working with the enemy' to undermine and erode Americans' confidence in our democracy and President Trump's LANDSLIDE 2016 VICTORY. This was a coup attempt by Barack Hussein Obama and his cronies… As Jesse Watters said 'Whatever happens to these guys is not revenge… it's accountability. And it's time for people to pay the price.' ARREST OBAMA NOW!" Today President Donald J. Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, saying the government agency was responsible for an IRS contractor's having leaked some of Trump's tax documents to the press. Presidential candidates and presidents routinely release their tax documents to the public, but Trump has consistently refused to do so. The leaked documents showed that Trump paid no income tax to the U.S. for fifteen out of twenty years while paying almost $200,000 in taxes to China. The lawsuit says that the leak caused the Trump family "reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump." This lawsuit is different from the one seeking $230 million from the government for the FBI search of his residence at Mar-a-Lago to find retained classified documents and the investigation of the relationship between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Brad Heath, who covers crime, justice, and investigations for Reuters, explained: "President Trump has filed a lawsuit against the IRS, in which he demands that the IRS, which he as president controls, pay him $10 billion." Bluesky user Micah made the point more clearly: "the president of the united states should not be allowed to personally loot the treasury to the sum of ten billion dollars and that this is not resulting in immediate, unanimous impeachment is a dramatic indictment of what has become of our political system."

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Something to Know - 29 January

Timothy Snyder presents Lawrence O'Donnell:

Timothy Snyder from "Thinking about..." <snyder@substack.com>	9:36 AM (6 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more ICE Logic and Language with Laurence O'Donnell Last Night's Conversation Timothy Snyder Jan 29   READ IN APP   Dear Friends, I was very happy to be able to speak with Laurence O'Donnell on MSNOW last night at 10:00pm. I've been interested to observe how his commentary has become ever more informed by history and ethics. His overture last night on moral thresholds for action was very powerful. The video below is our conversation that followed. We covered a couple of topics that I have been trying to explain here on substack and elsewhere: the political logic behind the ICE deployments in chosen US cities, and the dangers of the use of mendaciou language such as "terrorist" and "assassin" by members of the Trump administration. There is also the more subtle but equally important problem of using terms, such as "law enforcement," in an inverted sense — in this case, to justify lawlessness. MSNOW posted the whole conversation, so I am just going to repost it here. Hopefully this gets across some points in a concise way! Less concisely, if you would like… The argument about lawlessness and statelessness can be found at enormous length in my Holocaust history Black Earth, in which I also pointed (more than a decade ago) to some of the dangers that have since more visibly emerged. A similar case can be found within the foundational text of Holocaust studies, which is Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg. The warning about "dangerous words" is explained in lesson 17 of my little book On Tyranny. The lesson begins like this: "Be alert to use of the words 'extremism' and 'terrorism.' Be alive to the fatal notions of 'emergency' and 'exception.' Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary." But that like much of the book drew on some of the classic considerations of totalitarian language, such as Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Victor Klemperer's diaries and Language of the Third Reich, and the essays of the Polish literary scholar Michał Głowinski, some of which were collected in English in 2014 (and his childhood Holocaust memoir Black Seasons is also memorable for its reflections on language). That authoritarian regimes need us to repeat their untruths is an idea of Václav Havel, whose analysis of late communism is strikingly fitting for this moment. His "Power of the Powerless" can be found in many places; I wrote a preface to this edition (in Paul Wilson's translation). George Orwell's novel 1984 also remains very powerful — I read it myself once every decade, and each time something new strikes me. My reflections on what freedom of speech would mean as a positive right are in my new book On Freedom. We all need to do what we can — but sometimes reading can help us see what we should be doing. So today I give you the brief as well as the long. Thanks for being with me! More to come this weekend.

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Andy Borowitz

"They're eating the DOGS" - revenge

The Borowitz Report <borowitzreport@substack.com>  Unsubscribe	4:08 AM (3 hours ago)
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	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Nation's Dogs Call for Noem to be Fired Andy Borowitz Jan 29   READ IN APP   WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a scathing letter to Donald J. Trump, on Thursday the nation's dogs demanded that Kristi Noem be fired as Secretary of Homeland Security. "We were incredulous that someone as incompetent as Kristi Noem was nominated in the first place," the canines wrote. "We knew this wouldn't end well." "This is not a partisan issue," the dogs concluded. "Cats agree."

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Juan Matute

CCRC

Something to Know - 28 January

Uncle Donald has a niece by the name of Mary Trump.  And she really pissed at him and has been for a long time.    Anyway, Mary has her own newsletter and believes her uncle has pushed things too far.   He has committed so many crimes, and has not been held accountable for anything.   He has 34 felony convictions, and is not serving time because he's the president.   E. Jean Carroll has not received anything after she successfully sued him.   People are fed up that Trump has avoided being held accountable for anything.   The biggest problem is that people all over the world are losing faith and trust in our government.   Soon, Trump will be out of office, and the Republicans will get mowed down and in the Congressional minority come mid-terms.   One of the first orders of business will be to put all of those responsible for federal crimes in prison, and Trump serves his punishment  for his already convicted 34 felonies.    He can spend the rest of his time getting impeached day after day until his frail thingy-bob on his head matches his orange jump suit.  This will be one way of restoring faith in government.   Much more to follow.

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The Tipping Point The accumulation of horrors finally breaks through Mary L Trump Jan 27    READ IN APP   [Photo credit: Star Tribune via Getty Images] Subscribed We seem to have reached a tipping point and I'm trying to figure out why. The murder on Saturday of Alex Pretti by an ICE agent seems to have ushered in a sea change. An increasing number of Republicans in the Senate are calling for an investigation. Democrats are standing their ground and pledging they will refuse to pass a budget that includes funding the DHS and ICE even if it means the government will shut down, again. Even Sen. John Fetterman has roused himself out of his anti-Democratic stupor to call for the firing of Department of Homeland Security Secretary and puppy murderer Kristi Noem. In the wake of Mr. Pretti's murder, protestors have refused to back down, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has deployed the state's National Guard to protect peaceful protestors against a violent, out of control federal agency. People are openly discussing the horrors of having masked, heavily armed agents of the federal government terrorizing their cities. Even some Republicans are saying, "Enough is enough." In a stark juxtaposition to the lawless violence being perpetrated by ICE, National Guardsmen showed up in reflective vests to do what should have been done all along—protecting protestors from Federal law enforcement. Why, though, does the murder of Mr. Pretti appear to have been the last straw? Is it because he was an American citizen (although so, too, was Renee Good)? Is it because he was a white man killed while trying to protect a woman? Is it because he was carrying a gun he had a legal right to possess? Is it because he was shot in the back? Likely, it's an accumulation of horrors—the terrorizing of children; the chilling images of ICE agents shoving people to the ground, pinning them and spraying them in the face with bear spray; throwing canisters of tear gas at them; and stalking the streets of Minneapolis, wearing garb reminiscent of the SS. I was beginning to worry that such a moment would never come. For decades, we have witnessed Donald Trump, as an individual, as a private citizen, get away with every horrid transgression, every act of cruelty, every crime he's ever committed. When called to serve in Vietnam, he deferred five times. He and his father engaged in racist rental practices so egregious that they were sued by Richard Nixon's DOJ in 1973. His businesses declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he disparaged military officers who died while serving their country; mocked a disabled reporter; and insinuated that Sen. John McCain, a legitimate war hero, was a coward. In the Hollywood Access tape, he admitted to sexually harassing women. In 2023, a jury of his peers found him liable for defaming and sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. A year later, another jury found that he had "acted in malice when he denied Carroll's allegations" and awarded her $83.3 million. That same year, he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records (also by a jury of his peers) and his company was ordered to pay $450 million in damages. Share For reasons that are hard to comprehend, Donald still has never been held accountable for anything. E. Jean Carroll has not yet received a dime. A NY appeals court voided the monetary penalty against the Trump Organization and, even though the convictions stand, the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, "sentenced" Donald to an unconditional discharge—no penalties, no probation, no prison – because Donald got back into the White House. What remains unfathomable is that, over the course of his lifetime, none of this has been cumulative. The next horrible thing replaced, and seemingly erased, the horrible thing that had preceded it. Nothing was ever additive. How was that possible? But that's what happened time and time again. And none of it ever seemed to matter, as if he were constantly being granted a clean slate. This trend continued during his first term. Despite his awful policies—the Muslim ban; kicking transgender soldiers out of the military; the child separation policy—Republicans fell in line. Despite his malicious mishandling of COVID that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans; his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election which undermined the American people's faith in free and fair elections; and, the biggest blow to democracy in modern American history, his incitement of an insurrection against his own government, almost 78 million voters chose to put him back in the Oval Office. The first full year of his second term was one of the worst years we've ever lived through as a country, at least in my lifetime. Once again, every awful thing Donald did disappeared in the wake of the next awful thing. This was partially the result of the intentional chaos he created, his tendency to flood the zone and make it difficult for people to stay engaged. But the immunity granted to him by the corrupt, illegitimate, supermajority of the Supreme Court; the cravenness of the Republican Party; and the capitulations of media corporations, white-shoe law firms, and institutions of higher learning all played a bigger role. In the last few weeks—between the media's continuing to ignore Donald's cognitive and psychological decline, the continuing erosion of our institutions, and his attempts to dismantle the post-World War II order—it's begun to feel like there would be no point at which any of the crimes he or his regime continue to commit against the American people amount to anything. Donald and the thugs at ICE were never going after "the worst of the worst." They wanted to make a point by going after innocent people exercising their constitutional rights to object to this violent and corrupt regime. And yet in Minneapolis, Minnesota it feels like the tide just might be turning. While Mr. Pretti's murder was an inflection point, the images of protestors being brutalized have shaken us to our core. One of our cities has been turned into a battlefield by the federal government and its citizens treated like the enemy. It is almost entirely certain that Donald will never be held accountable in a way that will feel just or satisfying. There is no prison or poverty in his future. He is a lame duck and a shockingly weak man. At the very least, though, let's make sure that he and his party are neutered and let's make sure he knows we know it.

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Juan Matute

CCRC