Streets of Minneapolis...

 

YAY ---CCR and the ACLU

 When I find a link to the lawsuit itself I will update: 

Burnley v. U.S., No. 26-cv-10364 (D. Mass. Jan. 27), a landmark action filed by the ACLU and CCR on behalf of survivors of two Trinidanians killed in U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean---- seeking Accountability for Murder on the High Seas! 

Here is a link to a summary of the actions from CCR's website.

Note- CCR is and has been the leading organization for the Guantanamo lawsuits.

 Donate to them if you can!

my country is actually worse than a rogue state...

 as the current administration continues to kill our people I share this with you:

and  as Tom Morello so nicely put it..."Fuck you, we won’t do what you tell us."

More on Trumps mental "derangement" -From Roger Fitch and our friends down under...

 

Presidential Derangement Syndrome

ROGER FITCH ESQ    TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2026

 

The destructive force of Trump's egomania ...Narcissist on the loose ... Mob boss ... Venezuela - "it's mine" ... Real estate opportunities for Greenland ... Roger Fitch reports from Washington

 

“No president has understood less about what makes America great than Donald Trump; none has been more ignorant of the post-WWII international framework that allowed America to remain the premier superpower. In systematically weakening alliances, frittering away our moral authority, aligning himself with international dictators, trashing multilateral organizations, hollowing out the State Department and showing himself to be a feckless, corrupt bully, he has weakened America’s standing around the world to a degree no foreign enemy could have achieved. He always puts America Last” – Jennifer Rubin

 

“The finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history” – White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

 

The United States may never recover from the shame of Donald Trump: the crimes, corruption, vulgarity, the mad egomania. After a year, Americans can feel the physical weight of Trumpism.

 

They still can’t get their heads around a violent, unprincipled gang seizing their government under a deranged Capo, and the US becoming a Mafia state.

 

Signs of Trump’s narcissistic megalomania are everywhere: the Orwellian rebranding with Trump’s tainted name of the Institute for Peace and the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts; naming a new class of (redundant) battleships for himself; authorising the minting of personalised $1 commemorative coins celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with Trump on both sides; displaying Kim-il-Sung-like faces on banners on government buildings; similarly defacing National Park passes; and, fixing his face on $1 million “gold” and $5 million “platinum” visas to be forged by the Mint.

 

As the Atlantic commented, “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him”, or as Trump said of his $300 million White House ballroom, “I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will”.

 

Capping it all off, Il Capo shook-down the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner for her medallion, which he coveted and believed he should have received. She got to keep the prize money.

 

As Paul Krugman observed:

 

“It’s a Nobel medal, a symbol of the honour, not the honour itself. Only a vain, insecure fool would imagine that blackmailing someone into handing their medal over adds to his stature.”

 

Still, as the New Republic said, think of the “joy of detrumpification” that will follow the dictator’s fall. Vandalism will be rectified, pathetic graffiti, scrubbed, sham gold, gone. Buildings and agencies will be restored to their original names, and hopefully, benign purposes. Coins can be withdrawn and melted down. Not much can be done about stamps, but the Post Office will likely not survive Trump.

≈   ≈   ≈

 

“[Trump is] a stupid, domineering brute who compulsively rips off everyone he interacts with … It’s been more than a century since wars for plunder made any economic sense, but for Trump to realize that, he would have to be capable of rational thought” – Ryan Cooper, American Prospect.

 

“Trump wasn’t seeking regime change … He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take” – Paul Krugman on Trump’s Venezuelan invasion.

 

It was only a matter of time till Donald Trump cast his reptilian eyes on the rest of the world. He decided to begin with murder on the high seas of defenceless fishermen and sailors, and shipwrecked survivors, who, even if they were involved in a war (they are not) were hors de combat.

 

Trump soon added an illegal maritime blockade of Venezuela (the ostensible target of the small-boat maritime murders) to his list of international law violations.

 

The Pentagon has also introduced the ancient war crime of perfidy into its arsenal: disguising US military planes as civilian aircraft in order to deceive both “drug-dealing” fisherman and Trump’s maritime piracy targets, foreign-flagged oil tankers.

 

All this was followed soon after by the outright invasion of Venezuela; it wasn’t the first time a corrupt US government had meddled in Venezuela.

 

Here’s the purported legal justification, an Office of Legal Counsel’s memorandum written by T Elliot Gaiser, surely a future Trump judicial appointee.

 

George H W Bush also invaded a country and captured a head of state, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, but this time the kidnap, though involving the deaths of 100 people, left the government of the overthrown leader in place. David Cole has more on this Vichy Venezuela.

 

Trump now says international law, like US law, only applies to him when it coincides with his “morality”; both domestic and treaty laws are optional. However, under the US constitution, international treaties such as those Trump is flouting, eg, UN treaties, the Torture Convention, Geneva Conventions on War, have the force of US law.

 

A US president has no authority to unilaterally withdraw from ratified treaties, although George W Bush purported to, as did Trump during his first term in office.

 

As Trump soon admitted, he seized Venezuela for the oil, but as the American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper observed, given the quality of the country’s oil, its cost of production and current demand, “Stealing Venezuela’s oil makes no sense, even – indeed, especially – from the standpoint of American oil companies”.

 

Even so, Trump stole the oil, and the oil companies can’t even recoup losses from past nationalisations: the confiscated oil is being sold at a discount to Trump megadonors and the proceeds (some $500 million so far) deposited into a foreign bank account in Trump-friendly Qatar where, presumably, only the Thief-in-Chief has access. There’s no lawful authority, except an invalid purported Executive Order.

 

Perhaps Cooper overlooked the desirability of such a fund for collateral on future real estate ventures of  the Trump Organisation and Jarrod Kushner in the Middle-East and elsewhere.

 

As for the Venezuelan caper, Mother Jones reported on another cui bono, i.e, the vulture capitalist and Trump benefactor Paul Singer. Thanks to the corrupt president’s intervention in Venezuela, Singer is poised to reap windfall billions from his bargain sale purchase of the bankrupt American arm of the Venezuelan state oil company Citgo.

 

≈   ≈   ≈

 

Trump wants Greenland, ignoring a 1917 treaty with Denmark. It’s war, if he doesn’t get his peace prize

 

Why Greenland, besides the many Trump donors investing there?

 

“I’m in real estate … I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States … It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger” – Trump, in a 2021 conversation with journalists Susan Glaser (New Yorker) and Peter Baker (NY Times).

 

 

Let's go Switzerland...

 Let us hope that Al Gore is not the last to refer to actions by the trump administration as "insane." The man has clear mental health issues. "The campaign against wind by the Trump administration is “insane,” Gore said in an interview on Tuesday in Davos with David Rubenstein."

One of many indications that the man is dangerously sick.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Racists murdered Martin Luther King Jr. 58 years ago. Some of us will celebrate his birthday tomorrow (Monday, January 19) with peaceful protests against our racist president and perform volunteer work in and for our communities. 

 Tuesday January 20 is the unfortunate anniversary of the current occupant of the white house. Students and women have vowed to walk out of schools and workplaces in another display of peaceful protests against our  corrupt regime.

Britain pays Substantial sum to man known as "Abu Zubaydah"

From The Guardian: 

Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, is a stateless Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. He was one of the first detainees in the US “war on terror” to be tortured, and was subjected to a full range of what the Bush administration at the time termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in secret prisons in Thailand, Lithuania, Poland, Afghanistan, Morocco, and then the US base at Guantánamo Bay, on Cuba’s southern coast.

Now 54, he has been held in Guantánamo Bay without charge ever since, becoming one of its “forever prisoners”.

Abu Zubaydah was first seized in a sweep of suspected militants in Pakistan in March 2002. The US initially claimed he was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida, but has since dropped that claim, and now no longer alleges that he was even a member of the organisation.

According to a US Senate investigation into the CIA’s use of torture and other inquiries into the use of torture, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, locked for more than 11 days in a coffin-sized box and left to lie in his own urine and faeces, stripped naked and beaten, suspended from hooks just above the floor, and kept awake for seven consecutive days and doused with cold water whenever he lost consciousness.

READ THE REST HERE.

I

My Country has become a Rogue Nation

 Not much else to say about what is going on. The question is, how do we put the brakes on this?

Right now I do not have the answer to that question. I think once again we are going to have to rely on our Courts to stop these madmen but that would be easier done if we had a Supreme Court that was not helping trump and his henchmen. If one or two more republican congressional representatives were to leave office then the democrats could at least take over the house of representatives. Unfortunately, in our system - with the republicans controlling the house of representatives, the senate and the Supreme Court- we are in a dark place.

stay tuned.... 

Back To work

Well music is great for the soul but we have a lot of work to do this year. 

Not just to keep the lunatic in check but to try to salvage our democracy and maybe even make it better and stronger.

So start by watching the deposition of Jack Smith. The special prosecutor who tried to hold the criminal president accountable. Take your time. Watch it in bits and pieces! Jim Jordan, the committee chair for the judiciary committee, a man who could not even pass the bar exam held off on releasing the video until new years eve- hoping people wouldn't know or watch.

But if you do not have time to watch the hole video. Here are the CLIF notes!

keep on trying....

 

waiting on 2026

 

war is over if you want it...

 

Check it out below on YouTube. It’s a very moving film, and beautifully animated. It’s only 11 minutes. Share it with friends and family over this holiday season.

Share

Sean is also using the film to raise money to help kids in conflict zones this holiday season. This has been one of the deadliest times to be a child in this century. Please join me in donating here to War Child to get these kids (in places like Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan) life-saving medical and mental health aid.

musical interlude

 

Glass Houses. continued....

THANK YOU WELLS!

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/opinion/trump-obama-drone-strikes-illegal.html

To the Editor:

Jeh C. Johnson’s condemnation of the Trump administration’s recent strikes on boats in the Caribbean appears to be either ironic or lacking in self-awareness.

While Mr. Johnson argues that Congress gave “implicit” authorization for the Obama administration’s targeted killings in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia — a claim many national security lawyers like me strongly disagree with — it is undeniable that this policy opened the door to what is playing out now off the coast of Latin America.

For the nearly quarter-century since the attacks of Sept. 11, the public has been primed and conditioned by a “global war on terror” to accept war without end or geographic limitation. The incineration of human beings outside areas of active hostilities, who have not been identified or tied to specific threats, let alone tried or convicted of crimes, has been normalized.

Secret legal opinions conjured by creative executive branch lawyers have twisted both domestic and international law beyond its breaking point in order to authorize torture and warrantless surveillance, and to make murder and assassination legal so long as, the public is told, the victims were bad guys who posed a threat to the United States.

Let’s be clear: Drug traffickers are not terrorists or combatants, the United States is not at war with any country in Latin America and the extrajudicial killing of civilians is always murder. Mr. Johnson is correct to condemn President Trump’s strikes, but his attempt to distinguish and exculpate himself and his Obama administration colleagues rings hollow.

J. Wells Dixon
New York
The writer is a senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Happy Human Rights day... support the Guantanamo survivors fund.

 

The Guantánamo survivors fund helps the men who are still living on the edge following their years of illegal detention and torture. If you can help please do.

Support the Guantanamo Survivors Fund

Whether Guantanamo torture survivors return home or are resettled elsewhere, most face significant hurdles to resuming a normal life.

Your donation helps the Guantanamo Survivors Fund provide short-term support for survivors’ most urgent needs such as medical care, rent and food, prosthetics, and other vital necessities.

Click here to make a donation.