Just Another Day Ending in Day 😱🤡 ✡️🌻😱🤡

More Retribution: Trump and his INS goons are ramping up their attack on Minneapolis, not the response a normal president would take after the fatal shooting of a mother of three, but we are way past normal and being conciliatory is not in Trump’s playbook.  Yesterday, he threatened Minnesota with a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION” accusing the state’s Democrats of weaponizing the ICE shooting of Renee Good, kind of the pot calling the kettle black.  To that end Ice Kristi has sent more of her masked grey shirts to Minneapolis. There are now around 2000 immigration agents in Minneapolis, a number that exceeds the size of the city’s police force which includes only 570 to 600 officers.  The immigration agents aren’t “just” going after undocumented migrants, they’re detaining US citizens, some for “getting” in their way, a broad term that includes going about normal daily activities, like driving to doctor’s appointments or shopping in Target. Judging by some of individual accounts and videos that have emerged, those citizen stops involve tackling and throwing people to the ground, entering homes without warrants, and bashing car windows.  Dry runs perhaps for what’s going to happen in swing areas and blue cities during the midterms? Most Somalis who live in Minneapolis are US citizens, nevertheless their very presence in the city and the involvement of members of their community in the state’s welfare fraud scandal is being used as the justification for the ongoing raids. That’s particularly ironic, not just because most of Minneapolis’ Somalis are in the US legally and are law abiding citizens but because as a result of the Department of Justice’s decision to attack the character of shooting victim Renee Good and her surviving wife rather than engage in a legitimate investigation of the shooting, six prosecutors from  Minnesota’s US Attorney’s office who had been running the investigation into welfare fraud resigned yesterday.  They joined a similar number of prosecutors from the DC based office of Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Dhillon who was appointed to her position leading the Civil Rights decision largely because she shares Trump’s view that Civil Rights only matter when applied to white men from his MAGA base, has decided that there’s no need for her office to investigate the Minneapolis shooting  even though investigating law enforcement shootings is one of the things that her office is supposed to do. It’s not just Minneapolis and Minnesota that are in Trump’s crosshairs.  Yesterday while making a speech to the Detroit Economic Club where he danced to Macho Man and spouted his usual lies about how great the economy is while once again calling affordability a Democratic hoax, Trump announced that starting February 1 he will deny federal funding to any states that are home to local governments resisting his immigration policies, that’s an expansion of his previous threat to cut off funding to so-called sanctuary cities. The threatened states include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The lawsuits write themselves.  To date most of Trump’s efforts to  retaliate against blue states by cutting funding for essential services, things like child care, have been stymied by the courts, but having to rely on judges is no guarantee that rational policy will prevail given that an analysis by the NY Times shows that 93% of the time Appellate Court judges appointed by Trump during his first term rule in his favor.  To that end we’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on tariffs and birth right citizenship.  One more thing worth noting, despite the law mandating the release of the Epstein files, the DOJ appears to have stopped releasing files maybe at the direction of Trump who yesterday said fxck you accompanied by a middle finger salute to an autoworker who called him a pedophile protector. 

Powell Powers On: Yesterday in an editorial titled Lawsuits for Dummies, the Wall Street Journal called out the DOJ’s criminal subpoena to Fed Chair Jerome Powell as a self-defeating fiasco.  That’s a sentiment shared by many including 10 central bank governors a group that includes Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, and the chair of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde who released a signed statement supporting Powell. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, probably emboldened by his decision to retire at the end of his current term, said that he won’t support any of Trump’s Federal Reserve nominees, including the nomination of the next Federal Reserve chair if the investigation into Powell moves forward.  Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski said that she supports Tilles and will do the same. In the absence of a confirmed replacement, Powell would remain as Chair past May.  Moreover, even if Trump gets a complicit replacement confirmed, it looks increasingly likely that Powell will stick around as one of the Bank’s Governors through 2028 which would limit Trump’s ability to get those rate decreases that he so desperately wants. The importance of having an independent Federal Reserve doesn’t mean much to most people who are more focused on their day to day lives but it should because the economies of countries where autocratic leaders have taken over the control of previously independent central banks, a group that includes Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary, and Zimbabwe, generally end up with out of control inflation.  Something to look forward to if Trump gets his way.

More 💩:  Senator/Astronaut Mark Kelly is now suing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth over his attempt to lower his military rank and take away some of his retirement pay for speaking truth about following illegal orders.  Last night, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, another Democrat who signed on to the video reminding members of the military that they shouldn’t do illegal things, revealed that she is now being investigated by Washington DC US Attorney/Former Fox host Janine Pirro who together with Housing Agency head Bill Pulte is being blamed for triggering the Powell investigation which Trump claims he knew nothing about, as if. The arsonist who set the fire at Jackson Mississippi’s only synagogue admits that he set the fire because of its “Jewish ties.” Reports are that the situation in Iran is getting increasingly dire, lots of arrests and deaths with estimates ranging from 1000 to multiple thousands. In the good category, former Alaska Congresswoman Mary Peltola, who won Alaska’s only House seat in 2022 but then lost it in 2024, announced that she’s running to try to unseat Republican Senator Dan Sullivan.  Peltola’s decision to run means that the Alaska Senate seat is now in play.