Welcome Back to Gotham City

Sunday, January 18, 2026

Meet the New Ambassador to Greenland

Well, technically, I'm not the ambassador to Greenland because we still don't have one. However, we have a special envoy: Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, a man most famous for his petroleum-based chicken gumbo recipe and banning same sex marriage among crawfish. However, President Trump has seen fit to make my most fervent dream come true: a job in his fabled administration (And, let's face it, everything that's come out of the White House this past year has been a fable or another).

So imagine the look on my face when I got a phone call from President Trump yesterday in my Manhattan office announcing he was creating a new position just for yours truly.

"Cyril, I've created a new office just for you: Secretary of Coercive Annexation of Minerals."

After telling the president that spelled out S.C.A.M., he said, "I know it does. That's why I love it so much. Lutnick thought of it but I'm grabbing credit for it."

So I'm writing this beside a lantern that burns whale blubber in the capital of Nuuk, which just makes President Trump love this place even more because it reminds him of the word "nuke". Not far away is my baby brother, Cecil, who's mumbling Justin Bieber lyrics and tossing and turning on a cot here in the Ambassador's residence (at least that's what the locals call it while seeming to laugh up their fur-lined sleeves), which used to serve as a weather observation shack.

Occasionally, poor Cecil murmurs, "Oh, Justin, why did you have to get married?" before falling back asleep. Poor boy. It's been an adjustment for him.

So, the president outlined for me what I needed to do as S.C.A.M., namely getting Greenland to let us have their minerals. So I said this to the Eskimos, who kept telling they aren't Eskimos, even though I know better. They insisted the extraction of the minerals was extremely difficult if not outright impossible because of the permafrost of the terrain, otherwise it would've been done already.

They also said building the infrastructure would cost billions. Perhaps I spoke out of turn when I said we could afford that because when I conveyed this to the president via satellite phone (the only way to reach America from here aside from nuclear-powered homing pigeons), the president erupted over the phone.

"Cyril," he said, "no one knows infrastructure better than me. After all, I used to talk about it all the time whenever a scandal was brewing. And, with the help of Polish laborers, I built Trump Tower for just under $1000."

"Mr. President," I said, "I think building mineral extraction infrastructure is different than adding a few stories onto an existing tower."

The conversation kind of went downhill from that point on, with the president calling my brother a boy diddler who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein at Mar a Lago.

As for our special envoy, he hasn't been to Greenland, yet, even though the governor plans on attending a dog sled race sometime in March, which Gov. Landry insists will automatically make him an expert in all matters Greenlandic. No doubt, he will make a great addition to our team.

By way of ensuring success for our mission, the president had sent his namesake, Donald Trump, Jr., to Greenland to hand out plastic tubes of his branded styling gel ("A Little Don Will Do You") that the natives use to grease the bottoms of their sleds, which seems to work quite well.

All things considered, we're making the transition to Greenlandic life quite well, even though a horny walrus keeps sneaking into the Ambassador's mansion/weather observation shack and pinning Cecil and me under its bulk.

Top 10 Items in Machado's Swag Bag

On January 15, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gave Donald Trump her Novel Peace Prize, awarded to her last year. The plaque in which the medal was encased read, "To President Donald J. Trump, In Gratitude for Your Extraordinary Leadership in Promoting Peace Through Strength, Advancing Diplomacy, and Defending Liberty and Prosperity." Ms. Machado left the White House with a swag bag with Trump's signature in gold. What were the top 10 items in Ms. Machado's swag bag?

10) The Epstein files.

9) A couple of red hats embossed with "Make Venezuela Great Again Or Else."

8) 100 shares for Trump Oil written in Sharpie.

7) A photostat of the cognitive test proving Trump correctly identified his own wife and a walrus.

6) The only gold Trump Phone in existence, with tracking software.

5) 30 year-old bags of peanuts from Trump Airlines.

4) An advance copy of Trump's autobiography, entitled, "I Won 2020 By a Lot".

3) Melania Trump's CD of Christmas songs, including, "Who Gives Fuck About Christmas?", "I Saw Daddy Kissing Karoline Leavitt" and "All I Want For Christmas is Fucking Renegotiated Prenup".

2) Aborted blueprints for the Trump Ballroom, including an underground bunker with jail cells for Ilhan Omar, AOC and Barack Obama.

1) Draft of new Venezuelan constitution that starts out with, "I Won 2020 By a Lot".

Saturday, January 17, 2026

Trump is Pimpsticking Americans

I've asked this question at least once before and I have to ask it again:

Where's the red line? Where's the fucking Rubicon? Does it even exist, anymore?

Donald Trump threatening a 10% tariff on eight of our best allies, including the UK, unless they heel to and let him grab Greenland which would be, or should be, blatantly illegal. Congress has had no input whatsoever on Trump's power grab and imposing tariffs on virtually every nation on earth. It used to be that Congress and Congress alone (and, according to the Constitution, any revenue-generating bill has to originate in the House) controlled tariffs.

But no one had taken Trump aside (at least not successfully) and explained to him how tariffs work, that raising them on foreign imports just means higher costs for American companies and consumers. Trump actually knows this. This was why, after his ridiculously high tariffs on China, Trump thought he could order Walmart to "eat the tariffs", which of course was ignored and maybe even privately ridiculed by Walmart executives.

And the tariffs are going to increase to 25% by June 1st if the European Union still won't let him have Greenland, even though it's not their call.

But according to psycho morons like Stephen Miller, who are bound and determined to give their senile king whatever he wants, might makes right and we have every right to seize Greenland because Denmark is a smaller nation and is supposedly incapable of defending it.

That's Gilded Age thinking. Because the aforementioned psycho morons like Miller and Trump seem to forget that NATO exists. And, as Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, if we try to take Greenland by force, the other 31 nations, because of Article 5, will have no choice but to defend it against the United States, which would essentially be the end of NATO. Geopolitics is always a very complex thing but that's what it boils down to.

This is essentially why several NATO nations, including the Netherlands and Germany, are in Greenland right now. They're beginning the first stages of safeguarding the island.

Trump's insistence on annexing Greenland, against its and Denmark's will, and that of every NATO country, is supposedly about "national security". But Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark and NATO already said we could put as many bases as we want there. Security is not the issue. And invading Greenland with ground troops will result in the exact opposite of safeguarding our national security. We're good but fighting 31 nations, some of them having nuclear stockpiles, is ridiculous.

Trump just wants to annex Greenland because of its untapped mineral resources just like he made no bones about invading Venezuela over its vast oil reserves. Our very stable genius is rapidly putting us in the position of being attacked by every nation in NATO, which, obviously, would be a first.

And, by using mob extortion methods to try to get his way, he's planning on making it harder for Americans to make ends meet. Because Trump doesn't care about you. Never did, never will. He plainly has imperialist ambitions and thinks he can invade, bomb, colonize or otherwise subjugate every nation that has something he wants.

This is precisely how madmen think and it's past time we do something about him.

Friday, January 16, 2026

Good Times at Pottersville

Minnesota is an Occupied War Zone

Shawn Jackson’s kids were taken by first responders to the hospital from the scene. He said he was trying to leave his relative’s house when a flash bang detonated his airbags and tear gas filled his car pic.twitter.com/clGdMl8sYu
— Max Nesterak (@maxnesterak) January 15, 2026

And if the utterly worthless wet-legged corporate cunts of the mainstream media had any interest at all in doing its job, I wouldn't be the only one saying this.

In the span of just over a week, ICE had a) shot an innocent mother in the face and killed her for doing absolutely nothing wrong, b) shot a man in the leg and c) firing tear gas canisters into and flash bang grenades under a car filled with six kids, necessitating a six month-old infant to be given CPR when it stopped breathing.

And now, in the face of resistance, the guy who refused to call out the national guard to quell his own riot, is threatening to use the Insurrection Act, something that hasn't been invoked in 34 years. After the murder of Renee Good, the DoJ completely froze Minnesota law enforcement authorities out of any investigation, including sharing any evidence whatsoever with them. But the federal government is vowing to do its usual opaque internal investigation, thank God.

But what no one seems to be asking is why ICE, an Immigration enforcement body, is supposedly investigating fraud. Sending poorly-trained ICE goons who can barely tie their jackboots into Minneapolis-St. Paul is proof right there that it was never about fraud. It's just a pretext to round up Somalis because Trump loathes Ilhan Omar and Tim Walz.

Minnesota is now afflicted with 3000 ICE agents, 1000 more that he'd originally surged into it. It's no coincidence that ICE agents have been swarming just Democratic-run cities that just happen to have Democratic governors. Now Trump and his enablers are openly floating the idea of arresting these Democratic governors and mayors, without, of course, specifying charges.

And what's going on in Minnesota is the very definition of mission creep. The world has never seen anything this since the earliest days of Nazi Germany when political dissidents were rounded up and thrown into concentration camps in which anyone not loyal to the one party allowed to exist was akin to a threat to national security.

And look what that morphed into by the 1940s.

The clusterfuck in LA was just an abortive dress rehearsal. That was Trump probing to see how much he could get away with. Like the toddler he is, he keeps pushing boundaries, tolerance until. before you know it, he's talking about annexing Greenland and Canada. Hitler didn't stop with Austria. Two years later, he moved on to France then Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands.

It was all part of the plan.

LA. Portland. Those were mere dress rehearsals for a play that never should've been written. Minnesota is Trump showing the rest of the nation how he feels about it. Blue states and cities now.

But it's only a matter of time before he starts moving on to red states.

Monday, January 12, 2026

Why Aren't We More Alarmed?

As my 67th birthday approaches in four days, I'm among that baby boomer generation that remembers what America used to be, what it used to represent, or purported to. I came of age in the late 70s, where a kid making minimum wage (In 1978, $3.05 per hour) could at least get himself a room in a rooming house and spend just 25% of his income on rent. We were told that, in the decades to come, your Social Security benefits would be there waiting for you.

We were told if we lived within our means, we'd be OK. Having a credit card was optional.and what the hell were credit ratings? If you got a job with the right company, you could retire in 20 years with a pension to supplement your Social Security. The late 70s was the turning point in US history when a sole breadwinner could support the family.

We were told in the twilight of that compact between Big Business and labor that if you worked hard and applied yourself, you'd be able to afford a mortgage, put a kid or two through college, maybe buy a new car every few years. Leave it to Beaver went off the air a long time ago, but many of us still bought into that bullshit even as it was being undermined.

Then Reagan came along and everything started going to shit.

Fast forward nearly half a century later and we baby boomers don't recognize our own country anymore, or at least what used to be our country.

Thanks to corrupt Republicans, everything is owned by corporations and they're essentially allowed to do whatever they wish to us. What few of us have or had pensions saw them evaporate on Wall Street (Remember Enron?). And when those necktied psychopaths caused a crash on Wall Street, the government acted swiftly, alright-

It rammed through Congress a bailout package rewarding said psychopaths with $700,000,000,000 of our money for their horrible behavior while their victims were left to twist in the wind. (Iceland, on the other hand, after their brief flirtation with banking deregulation, did the exact opposite: They jailed the bankers and baled out their people).

Then, nearly 21 years after Reagan got elected, our nation was attacked on three fronts. Nearly 2900 humans perished and we rallied together as a nation. Other nations ran to our side. Less than 20 years after that, we railed against nonexistent vaccine mandates, refused to socially distance or wear "diapers" on our faces. Rather than take safe vaccines, we put poison into our bodies. The people that gladly turned over their liberties to a corrupt moron were enraged over non legally-binding guidelines from health professionals.

All that was, of course, caused by one man, if the word can accurately describe him. Ever since he came down that gaudy gold escalator, the United States' worst elements have come scrambling out of the woodwork. Suddenly, racism and neo Nazism were cool again. Nativism became de rigueur. We once again found our inner sadists because we got validation from one man in the Oval Office. Thousands of them attacked the Capitol and police officers and, a year ago, they were almost all pardoned by the guy who'd started the riot.

In the last year, we've played witness to a level of cruelty and corruption that has become literally cartoonish, as has what now passes for our foreign policy and military postures. In contravention of seemingly every international law, treaty and alliance, that man has already invaded a sovereign nation and kidnapped its head of state.

He's now rattling his saber at Iran, Cuba, Greenland. World leaders, including Denmark's Prime Minister and other geopolitical experts are saying that if Trump takes over Greenland, it'll be the end of NATO and they're right. Of course, that will be exactly what Putin wants because the NATO alliance and its Article 5 is the only thing keeping Putin from invading Western Europe.

But we're nominally led by a clown who's in unceasing service to Putin, a guy who'd also invaded a sovereign nation, a turn of events that would've seemed impossible just a decade ago.

Our government is now murdering unarmed mothers and threatening to do so again. Our fraudulent vice president is even now threatening door-to-door searches by immigration authorities that are straight out of the Gestapo and Orwell's 1984. Anyone with skin as brown as a paper bag are getting arrested at their jobs, in parking lots, picking their kids up from school. The government is doing their best to revoke citizenships in violation of the 14th amendment and visas.

When did this become normal, much less legal?

Why should it be?

Mass protests in the wake of murders of people like George Floyd and Renee Good are all good and well but they have a very poor track record for efficacy. We'd like to emulate that of the Arab Spring but our system isn't cut out for overthrowing dictators and tyrants like the one afflicting us now.

We keep comforting ourselves that this November's midterms will fix everything, that we'll throw the bums out. But the fact is, while Congress is saddled with approval ratings in the low double digits, every two years we wind up re-electing 85% of Congress. And what realistic hope is there for effecting change when Congress has already abdicated its Article One powers and autonomy to a rancid branch of government and its perverted Article Two powers?

I have no solutions, no influence, no power. I'm just another voice howling distantly in the wilderness. But there is something very, very wrong with this country that's acting more and more with each day like a bloated banana republic with nukes.

I realize that the late 70s aren't coming back. I realize that change is inevitable. But it's become utterly impossible to see how any of the changes we've seen just in the last year are making us great again.

Saturday, January 10, 2026

Where Goes Pittsburgh So Goes the Nation

This past week, I'd published a novel entitled Ink and Iron about a young, crusading journalist in 1919 Boston. As a historical novelist, it was right in my wheelhouse. For the fourth time, I'd written a novel about real-life historical events as the backdrop (the others being Tatterdemalion, Gods of Our Fathers and the recent The Final Bullet).

In creating Moira Delmonico, that young, crusading journalist for the post WW I Boston Globe, I was able to reacquaint myself with what I've learned about print media since getting into blogging in early 2005 (Yes, I've been doing this for 21 years, which, I guess, makes me the IF Stone of blogging). But not only is Moira an engaging character, one certainly capable of supporting a feature-length novel, but in doing so I was able to reacquaint myself with old school journalism standards that seem almost quaint today. My research into print journalism in 1919 America also reacquainted me with the importance of newspapers then and now.

In the days of the Boston Police Strike in late summer 1919, newspapers were king. Obviously, there was no radio, no television, no internet. And a cub reporter like Moira working for a large newspaper like the Boston Globe, which then had a circulation of about 115,000 was, if not sitting in the catbird seat, certainly had a bright future if their talent and ethics were up to the task.

In Ink and Iron, Moira gets several articles either shot down or is forced to rewrite them because of warnings from the legal department. This was not to show her as a reckless yellow journalist nor the Globe's legal staff as the bad guys. At the center of the book was the tension between Moira's factual stories and the lawyers' insistence that publishing her pieces could land them in court fighting a libel suit. The Supreme Court had already issued more than one decision prior to 1919 that libel was not protected under the first amendment.

Much of the book consists of external and internal dialogues with Moira wrestling with the stringent ethics of her profession. The old chestnuts of journalism were faithfully trotted out: "It's not what you know but what you can prove." "Don't become the story." "Triple source everything." "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." "Journalism is history's first draft", etc.

In 1919, people got their news from newspapers and that was it. Everything else was rumor and conjecture. There was an implicit trust between the reading public and print media. They just trusted that what they were reading was factual and not tainted by bias or agendas.

Sadly, that day has long since passed. Some of the bigger papers have been bought up by billionaires (As opposed to Adolph Ochs, who, in the 19th century, bought the New York Times with virtually no money and a pack of lies). Others, like Charles Taylor, who bought the Globe shortly after its founding and who makes two appearances in my book, were wealthy, yes, but they had an intuitive grasp of the importance and the necessity of print journalism.

As we all know, a free press is indispensable to a democratic republic. Removing an ethical and responsible Fourth Estate pollutes, warps and corrupts a media ecosystem and, without that all-important bulwark of said media, it has a deleterious ripple effect across the land. Corruption is all but inevitable.

That's why it was so alarming to me to read that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was shuttering its operations on May 3, 2026. This is alarming because the Post-Gazette is one of the oldest newspapers in America, it being founded in 1786, the year before the US Constitution was signed. It predates venerable institutions like the New York Times and Washington Post by generations.

It was by far the largest newspaper in western Pennsylvania and had survived when literally thousands of other newspapers had failed since the 18th century. Then its staff went on a three year-long strike when they demanded better wages and benefits. The Supreme Court had ruled against the paper. The paper's ownership, Block Communications, then decided that closing down for good was the only viable option. As far as I know, they never made the slightest attempt to even sell it. Just days ago, Block Communications also shut down the Pittsburgh City Paper, an alt-weekly.

These closures will obviously leave a massive media desert in western Pennsylvania.

Just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, in terms of profitability and influence, newspapers have been in serious decline for the last two or three decades. But your larger newspapers are invariably corporate entities run by executives and bean-counters, bottom-line-driven types with MBAs who have no real allegiance to or appreciation of the media. And if they feel they need to lay people off, they will do so without paying much, if any, heed to the effects on the media ecosystem. Their only focus is maintaining a certain profit margin, not in ensuring the media's role in holding peoples' feet to the fire or informing the public about they need to know.

Over the last quarter century, America has lost about 40% of its local papers and 75% of those jobs have been lost. Local news just doesn't sell, any more, and the shrinking pool is increasingly leaving us with nationally-focused outlets like the Times, the Post and USA Today.

Former House Speaker Tip O'Neil once famously observed that "all politics is local" and the same ought to apply to journalism to some degree. People ought to be interested in what's happening in their own communities for the simple reason that it often directly affects their lives.

Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack did a study in 2002 showing that back then, there were 40 journalists per 100,000 people. Today, it's down to eight.

And when large local papers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette close down, it results in fewer people voting. An uninformed populace is an incurious and disengaged one. And, as history has shown us time and again, in the absence of actual news, the corrupt and unscrupulous will move in, resulting in propaganda mills and "pink slime" sites. Often, these are online outlets and not print publications but those who still wish to stay engaged and informed will gladly flock to these sites to get what passes for news.

But, as Caleb Carr warned us 26 years ago in Killing Time, "Information is not necessarily knowledge".

I'd love to think that newspapers will endure despite current trends in reader tastes and Protean technology and business models. I'd also love to think that local news will endure but that will require a patchwork, collective effort at the local, grassroots level. And newspapers have always danced on that high wire, that balancing act that pits profitability and viability versus its very necessity in a free republic.

And there's no viable substitute for a free and independent press.

Friday, January 9, 2026

Kicking Renee Good After She's Dead

BREAKING: Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage showing perspective of federal agent at center of ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/p2wks0zew0
— Alpha News (@AlphaNews) January 9, 2026

Renee Macklin Good was not rich. She wasn't an "influencer" with a following of millions. She wasn't a powerful Democratic elected official like Jacob Frey or Tim Walz. She wasn't an "antifa terrorist". She was just a suburban mom who'd just, as with many other moms in Minneapolis that day, dropped her child off at school.

In other words, she was no threat to the Trump administration, the MAGA movement or DHS.

Not that that would've justified a death sentence under any circumstances. After all, this isn't Baghdad from 20 years ago.

The Trump administration reacted swiftly. Within the hour, Trump, Noem and JD Bowman began accusing her of "weaponizing her vehicle", that the ICE agent was "lucky to be alive" And, just hours ago, Bowman had the nerve to put this out on Twitter:

"Watch this, as hard as it is. Many of you have been told this law enforcement officer wasn't hit by a car, wasn't being harassed, and murdered an innocent woman. The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self defense."

What our so-called vice president was referring to was a leaked cell phone video taken by the same asshole, Jonathan Ross, who murdered Good. It shows a smiling Renee Good momentarily taking a stand against the goons who'd infested that neighborhood, her neighborhood, perhaps the only form of protest she'd ever engaged in in her short life.

God only knows why Jonathan Ross was filming Good on his cell phone. At best, he was supposed to be participating in an immigration raid, not filming a podcast or a Youtube video. But JD Bowman, like most Republicans and the MAGATs who worship them and their every cruelty, lives on Earth 2. We saw this during the George Floyd protests of 2020 that also started in Minneapolis. They've historically forced themselves to disbelieve the evidence shown to them on videotape and to see something completely different from the truth.

But, if anything, Ross' cell phone video only confirmed what we on Earth 1 already knew: That Renee Macklin Good was summarily executed on a city street without any legal justification whatsoever. It shows Good smiling at Ross and saying, "Don't worry, I'm not mad at you," in the final moments of her life.

Seconds later, a group of enraged ICE agents swarmed her car, screamed "Get the fuck out of the car!" and reached for her door handle. Like anyone in that predicament would do, she tried to flee the scene. Then Ross dropped his phone and fired three shots into her face through her driver side window. Then moments after she was dead, Ross could be heard muttering, "Fucking bitch."

I won't belabor the point that shooting at a moving vehicle runs counter to law enforcement training all over the country. I won't try to make hay over the incredibly unprofessional conduct of the ICE goons at the scene. This is about a criminal organization that has essentially legalized summary execution after even mild, momentary rebellion. That's what banana republics do, plain and simple.

It was the speed and casualness with which Trump and his top enablers vilified Renee Good, essentially kicking her not just when she was down but dead and incapable of defending herself. And this intolerance toward the most cursory opposition from even the least powerful among us is part and parcel to every authoritarian regime ever. It stems from a paranoia of the people rising up against them and openly questioning their will, their supposed mandate.

And the fact that Good was a woman seems to fuel their vitriol. Kristi Noem has already sexualized this murder, repeatedly using female pronouns as if her being a disobedient woman justified a death sentence. And all this cruelty and barbarity that we've seen for the past year is at the behest of a rapist and misogynist who'd referred to women in the past a "dogs", "pigs" and "disgusting animals".

And this murderous administration will double, triple, quadruple, quintuple down and stick by its lies and warped, mangled version of reality rather than admit they were wrong, which in itself is a form of sociopathy. We saw it during the ongoing persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the fishermen in the Caribbean who were blown out of the water during Trump's two dozen strikes. They will murder innocent people, powerless people then, when the outcry gets to be too great, Trump and his goons will then savage these dead, dismembered people and will try their best to get you to believe they were the worst people on earth.

Decency and honesty are considered weaknesses, character flaws, even heresy impeding the holy mandate.

Renee turned away from Ross just as she was putting the car in drive. Every angle of every video that's ever been released plainly shows that. It's not as if a new video from a new angle is ever going to come to light showing Good striking Ross with her Honda Pilot and trying to run him over. Ross never even got any dirt from her car on his uniform. There was no contact, no nothing.

And he shot her in the face several times when she used her fight or flight instinct. She chose flight. Ross chose fight.

That's it, Case closed. Now all that remains is for Keith Ellison, Minnesota's Attorney General, to empanel a grand jury and have this asshole indicted for murder.

The pathological alternate reality is on full display on Elon Musk's neo Nazi sewer formerly known as Twitter. Every totalitarian regime has citizens who will believe whatever their Dear Leader and his enablers will tell them. That especially goes for cop groupies and other law enforcement fetishists. Yes, these people who'd attacked DC police on January 6th 2021 back the blue as long as the right people are getting murdered and brutalized.

But I'd like to close this by reminding them that these cruel and stupid stormtroopers getting shat out by ICE's training mill won't give a shit what you wrote in support of them on social media. They wouldn't hesitate to shoot you in the face if you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in an abruptly developing and highly-fluid situation.

They will shoot you, too, in the face, the minute they perceive you to be a threat in their PTSD minds. The administration will then kick you when you're dead and accuse you of all sorts of vile things. Because protecting the mission with people like this always means more than protecting innocent civilian lives.

You're playing with a flared cobra and it will bite with frightening speed anyone who gets near its basket.

Thursday, January 8, 2026

Renee Nicole Good Is Now an Object Lesson

In a way, it's surprising that what had happened to Renee Nicole Good yesterday in Minneapolis didn't happen a lot sooner. In a way, it's as if Sensible America has been holding its collective breath and just writing for something like this to happen.

In a classic illustration of the Butterfly Effect, it all started when some little-noted right wing "influencer", who shall remain nameless, at the margins of the MAGA movement released a podcast about allegations of fraud in Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota. That was all the Trump administration needed to hear. So Trump personally dispatched 2000 ICE agents to Minnesota, even though investigating fraud isn't ICE's remit. But the fraud allegations was all the pretext that Trump and his goons at DHS needed to flood Minnesota with thousands of his Thought Police.

Renee Nicole Good was driving her SUV down what used to be a peaceful residential street in Minneapolis when she decided to briefly block traffic with her vehicle. ICE agents immediately swarmed her vehicle screaming at her to leave while simultaneously trying to open her door with the intention of pulling her out.

Good backed up a foot or two and attempted to leave. One ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, pulled out his gun and shot her three times in the face, after which she crashed into another vehicle. At no time did Good's car even brush him, no matter how many different videos from differing angles you see.

It takes a lot of hatred, fear, sociopathy or whatever to shoot another human being in the face. If he truly feared for his life, he could have shot out her tires. Instead, he shot her several times in the face.

According to one witness who saw and videotaped the whole thing, the agent who shot her was then surrounded by other ICE agents and whisked away in a vehicle. They saw to his safety while denying medical care to Renee Good for at least 15 minutes.

Yes, it's a miracle this hasn't happened already. ICE for the last year has been a drain into which the very worst elements of society find themselves. A recent Daily Mail article detailed the abysmal quality of the recruits that DHS has attracted with the lure of a ridiculous $50,000 signing bonus. They axed the training regimen from 16 to six weeks, got rid of sit ups because many of the recruits couldn't handle them. Many are barely literate, some have criminal court cases pending and several have gang tattoos (So, yes, let's talk about gangs).

And still the Trump junta is trying to extrude through its recruiting and training mill an additional 10,000 ICE agents, regardless of how woefully under qualified they are. And, when you actively recruit the stupidest and cruelest people in this country, which is exactly the kind of people a thuggish authoritarian government wants to enforce its will, a tragedy is all but inevitable.

Good was a published poet, a mother of three and was by all accounts outside of the lying psychopaths of our government the kindest person you could ever hope to meet. In the final minutes of her life, she'd just dropped her six year-old daughter off at school.

Of course, if we were to ask lying scumbags like JD Vance, Kristi Noem or Trump, they'd tell us, and have, that Good was a domestic terrorist, that Good's wife, who'd witnessed her murder, was "a professional agitator", that Good "weaponized her vehicle" to viciously run over an ICE agent.

Renee Nicole Good should serve as an object lesson in what inevitably happens when you stand up against an authoritarian regime. She ought to remind us of how monstrously intolerable this criminal regime is and how important it is to continue to stand up to them.

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

The Memory Hole

I remember everything about January 6, 2021 just as I recall everything about September 11, 2001. It was the second time within 20 years that our nation was attacked. Except, the last time, it was attacked from within by 1600 of the stupidest people who ever lived and, by proxy, a discolored, demented criminal named Donald fucking Trump.

The pawns, of course, went to trial and many were sent to prison while Trump, a bug-eyed psychopath named John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani never saw the inside of a courtroom, much less a jail cell.

Congressmen, albeit the more sensible ones, realized who'd kept them alive during a riot that wound up killing nine people. It was the DC police who fought a mob of lunatics and were handed an impossible task: Securing the Capitol. The rules of engagement handed down from the DoD were simple: Not to engage the mob.

Congress swiftly moved to give some of the officers gold medallions. Several Republicans voted against it while pretending to be outraged over the word "insurrection" (even though that's exactly what January 6 was). Then Congress commissioned a plaque to be made commemorating the police's role in guarding the Capitol building and all in it.

Then it disappeared.

Since it was commissioned by an Act of Congress, by law it was supposed to be displayed. But Mike Johnson hasn't unveiled it. Trump's law firm, formerly the DOJ, is trying to dismiss an officer's lawsuit to display the plaque. Now congressmembers are reduced to putting up crude facsimiles of it on their office doors.

It's rumored to be sitting in storage. More likely, it's sitting on a landfill somewhere in Virginia.

So, what happened? Is it really up to the majority party to put up a plaque created by an Act of Congress and mandated to be displayed? Why was the Republican Party allowed to flaunt the law? Who got rid of it? Who decreed that it never be displayed?

Why wasn't it put up during the Biden administration?

And why are the feckless cunts of the Democrat Party not raising a bigger stink about this?

Every day that goes by without that plaque displayed on a federal building is an insult to the men and women who put their lives on the line (and, in five cases, lost their lives) that day.

But the invertebrates in the worthless Republican caucus are in such lockstep with Donald Trump, the guy who'd started the riot five years ago today, that they can't bring themselves to put up a plaque reminding us all of perhaps their Dear Leader's greatest crime.

What a pack of wet-legged cunts.

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Two days ago, as he was taking a brief vacation from the front nine at Mar a Lago, the rotting corpse of Donald Trump was pulled from his casket and propped up to hold a press conference. And when a reporter asked the stubbornly semi-sentient cadaver if he'd notified oil companies about Venezuela's invasion, the waste of trace elements said,

"Before and after. They want to go in and they’re going to do a great job."

Then they installed him back in his coffin in preparation of the next chapter of Weekend at Bernie's.

So there you have it. Once again, it was never about fentanyl (which is primarily made in Mexico, not Venezuela) and it certainly wasn't about running afoul of the 1934 National Firearms Act pertaining to just two kinds of weapons. It's about the oil. It was always about the oil.

This was an admission that would be stunning if one refuses to consider Trump's naked corruption. What his admission essentially confirmed was that US Delta Force operators risked their lives and Venezuelans lost their lives so Trump could reward his wealthiest donors after all the bribes they lavished on him for his ballroom.

Since Trump bypasses Congress any and every time he thinks he doesn't absolutely need it, it shouldn't surprise any one that Trump never gave a heads-up to the Gang of Eight, much less get permission from Congress to engage in what's nothing more or less than an act of war upon a sovereign nation.

What sets Trump apart from other right wing scumbags that had illegally invaded sovereign nations is that Trump is brazenly telling everyone what the real reasons were. Whereas his predecessors hid behind mealy-mouthed rationales such as democracy and so forth, Trump is coming out and admitting it was done at the behest of oil companies. There doesn't seem to be an exit strategy in place, with little to no heed being paid to the fate of the people of Venezuela.

And, as geopolitical analysts have already conjectured, Trump's invasion of Venezuela could wind up giving a giant permission structure for other authoritarian nations to invade other countries such as Russia with Ukraine and China with Taiwan. The ripple effect could be catastrophic.

If it wasn't for the deaths and devastation in Venezuela, it would be comical watching an illegitimate president accusing someone else of being an illegitimate president and that Maduro's prosecution is literally being held right around the corner from where Trump himself was prosecuted, and convicted, of fraud.

And today, we're hearing that the DOJ is quietly backing off one of its key charges against Maduro, being the head of “Cartel de los Soles”. And the reason why they're backing off those charges is that the government is finally coming to the conclusion that the “Cartel de los Soles” doesn't exist any more than does antifa. It's more like a verbal designation to describe high-ranking Venezuelan officials who'd enriched themselves through drug shipments. The name translates to "cartel of the suns", a mocking reference to the suns that Venezuelan generals wear to denote rank.

So, just days into Maduro's and his wife's kidnapping, the federal government has to retool its charges, just as it had to with James Comey, because of Trump's "ready fire aim" bullshit.

We could be hopeful and dream of the day when Trump gets impeached for the third time over this murderous stunt. We can hope that he trades places with Maduro some day at that courthouse in the Southern District of New York.

But we've been there before, haven't we?

Monday, January 5, 2026

Ink and Iron Has Arrived

This is the unboxing of my newest novel, Ink and Iron, just arrived from the printer in Las Vegas. The formatting, indents and margins are perfect and it's a substantial read at 455 pages. Note my new editor, Midnight, in the foreground. I just rescued her last night and she's eating us out of house and home. She's also a real cuddle bug and is very comfortable with people. Anyway, Ink and Iron is available in paperback for just $12.99 or on Kindle for $4.99.

Sunday, January 4, 2026

Good Times at Pottersville

Easy Come, Easy Go

BREAKING: Trump has been officially stripped of his FIFA Peace Prize. pic.twitter.com/2lMODA5B5n
— Former Republican 🇺🇸 (@Sjacobs2020) January 3, 2026

Saturday, January 3, 2026

Tell Me If This Sounds Familiar

Another oil-rich nation invaded in the name of regime change. Another dictator with a cheesy mustache toppled. Another pack of lies to justify invading said oil-rich nation. Does any of this sound familiar?

Seven years ago almost to the day, DNI Tulsi Gabbard warned us about this. Of course, at the time, she was just winding up her presidential ambitions in preparation for crashing and burning in the 2020 Democratic primaries but one has to admit she was right.

Early this morning, America did what one would think was the unthinkable and we invaded and bombed a sovereign nation and even kidnapped its head of state. Nicholas Maduro is now in New York awaiting charges of trafficking in drugs. We even kidnapped his wife.

Let's get one thing straight- I'm no fan of Maduro. Like Trump last year and 2016, he robbed his way to power and nakedly stole Venezuela's last election. And, like Trump, he tanked his own nation's economy, not because Socialism doesn't work, but simply because he's a corrupt asshole.

But regime change spearheaded by the US government has a very, very poor history. Iran. Vietnam. Chile. El Salvador. Nicaragua. Iraq. Afghanistan. The list goes on. Since WWII, the United States, usually under Republican leadership, has done the bidding of giant corporate interests whether it be fruit companies or oil cartels. In the 80+ years since the end of WWII, we've toppled no fewer than 60 democratic nations virtually every time their leaders don''t toe the right wing corporate line.

Venezuela is the latest casualty of those interests.

As with Iraq 23 years ago and their phantom weapons of mass destruction, we, too, have invented a false rationale to bomb the capital city of a sovereign nation and capture its head of state. Now Trump is saying we're going to "run" Venezuela as if it's a distressed company under receivership. This is coming from a buffoon who can't even run the United States except as a banana republic.

It started with the US military bombing back to the Stone Age over 20 boats, probably all fishing boats, out of the water under the guise of combating drug trafficking. Keep in mind, this is being engineered by a clown who'd pardoned no fewer than four drug dealers.

And now, Trump is openly admitting it was all about capturing Venezuela's oil reserves, the largest in the world. He's not even pretending, any more. It's all about the oil, always has been, always will be.

Just like Iraq.

Did Venezuela need regime change? Absolutely, it did. But their fate, their destiny, as Gabbard said seven years ago, should've been left in their hands, not in our grasping ones.

Ink and Iron Is Out

In case you've been wondering where I've been for the past week, look at the lead image above (click on it for a high-resolution image). Not long after I wrapped up The Final Bullet, I began working on Ink and Iron, the next installment in the Scott Carson saga. The Kindle edition went live yesterday and the paperback edition hit the market this morning.

The revisions and formatting were, as usual, a nightmare, with my copy editor not sending me the edits until just before Christmas. Then, even after those were made, I had to wrestle with margins and indents with the native file and all the technical bullshit you never see in the movies. So that's why I've been MIA this past week. But, finally, all my work paid off yesterday.

The synopsis:

"In the wake of the Great Molasses Flood of January 1919, Boston faces another crisis. No sooner than the city’s North End cleans up the disaster’s devastation: The city’s police are taking steps toward a historic strike that threatens to unleash anarchy that ineffectual Mayor Andrew Peters is powerless to stop. Bad pay, long hours and inhumane working conditions are the source of their discontent.

Stepping into the storm clouds is Moira Delmonico, a young Socialist cub reporter with the Boston Globe. Moira’s not interested in making friends among Boston’s power elite, especially future president and Governor Calvin Coolidge. He’s vowed to crush the strike by any means, including deploying 5000 members of the State Guard. Moira has skin in the game: Her beau, Patrolman Tommy Donahue, is one of the 1137 police who will strike. Moira risks her new job with every article she writes.
Joined by her mother, legendary New York Times crime journalist, Kelley Delmonico, and her brother, NYC officer Angelo Delmonico, Jr., Moira confronts the corrupt Brahmins on Beacon Hill. Throwing in her lot with Boston bootleggers the Gustin Gang, she battles the governor, Commissioner and a shadowy strike-breaker named Callahan.
Fueling the chaos is a series of murders of active and retired policemen. Found on their bodies is a note warning against affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. The strike becomes a major turning point in American history, with deaths, injuries and hundreds of thousands in damage. And young Moira’s career in journalism may end barely after it’s started."

It's a substantial read, weighing in at just under 142,000 words, and it surprised me to learn that I wrote the first draft in just under five months. And it offers a different slant on the 1919 police strike than the one given by Dennis Lehane in The Given Day. It's been said that at the core of all fiction is the question, "Who am I?" This is indeed the question Moira Delmonico continually asks herself as she desperately tries to separate herself from her mother and her overwhelming legacy. It gives me a chance to introduce a new lead character as well as expand the Scott Carson saga into the early 20th century. I hope you give it a chance and leave a review.

Monday, December 29, 2025

The Weird, Improbable Evolution of Marjorie Taylor-Greene

I'm amazed that I seem to be the only one who'd noticed this and made mention of it, but Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene (GA-14) has only been in office for less than one year of either Trump administration. She was sworn into office on January 3, 2021 in the twilight of Trump's first term and will spend less than a year in Congress in the second one. She will retire after five years in service in the US House on January 5, 2026.

Shooting star analogies are certainly called for and justified. For five years in the House, and for a couple of years before that, Greene had firmly established herself as a right wing gadfly and providing endless laugh reels for late night comedians. She'd made a fool of herself next to Lauren Boebert by heckling President Joe Biden during his States of the Union addresses. Jewish space lasers. Gazpacho Police. Masks during the COVID crisis. And, before that, stalking and harassing David Hogg through the streets of DC. Shouting into AOC's congressional office mail slot. The list goes on.

Most notoriously, she was Donald Trump's cheerleader throughout his all-too-brief exile. She entered office as a fire-breathing QAnon right winger and honestly thought that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Three days after she was sworn into office, Trump sent an angry mob to attack the Capitol building to stop the certification and counting of the electoral votes. And, even as she sheltered in place, she kept insisting that the rioters were antifa and other left wing groups until a fellow Republican, Kat Cammack, had to take her by the shoulders and remind her the rioters were wearing MAGA hats.

By this time, Greene had proven to be such a troublemaker that she was expelled from the House Freedom caucus (such a drastic and dramatic departure that the caucus to this day hasn't ever admitted to doing so). She lost her committee assignments, thereby technically making her one of the least powerful and influential people in the House. Yet, she still held sway over Republican voters well beyond Georgia 14.

She'd cynically made friends with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Bided her time. Learned how things really worked on Capitol Hill and, yes, became more politically sophisticated. She realized that throwing bombs is not the way to get things done in government.

But in this, her only year as a congresswoman during a Trump regime, Greene underwent a gradual evolution. In fact, it's so eerie and improbable that one suspects it isn't genuine, yet it seems to be just that. She began breaking with Trump on a wide variety of issues, such as Trump denying states the right to impose regulations on AI companies for a decade. the lapse of the ACA subsidies at the end of the year, SNAP aid not going out during the shutdown (77.000 in Greene's district survive on SNAP benefits). Declaring the mass deaths in Gaza at the hands of Israel a "genocide". Abortion. Greene wants it outlawed and calls it "murder" whereas Trump wants to leave it up to the states.

Then there were Trump's remarks on Charlie Kirk's memorial service, in which he said, “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.” Green later told Robert Draper of the NY Times, “That was absolutely the worst statement. It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.” Which, one must admit, was a strange turnaround for someone who'd spent virtually her entire congressional career squirting vitriol at people.

Then there was the Epstein files.

For Donald Trump, that was a bridge too far. Greene was one of only four Republicans who'd put their name on the discharge petition that forced a vote on the DOJ releasing the Epstein files. Trump called Greene and Boebert and basically demanded they remove their names from the petition, thereby lowering the count to below the minimum 218 that would have forced a vote.

Then, at a closed door House Oversight committee hearing, Greene listened to and spoke to victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Greene then publicly threatened to disclose the names of the powerful men who'd also sexually abused them. Pretty soon, Trump called her office.

To quote Draper, "Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, 'My friends will get hurt.'" In other words, I will get hurt.

Now, it's important to take this in its proper context. As far as we know, Marjorie Taylor-Greene had never been sexually assaulted nor has she claimed to be. So this empathy for Epstein's victims isn't merely another case of a Republican's thoughts evolving only when it personally affected them. Green has two daughters, so she was thinking about what would happen to them.

In well under a year, Marjorie Taylor-Greene went from being Athena to Cassandra. As with the Cassandra of Greek mythology, Trump bestowed upon Greene compliments and so forth (Though never, pointedly, a government job). Then, when she stopped returning Trump's transactional praise, he doomed her, never to be believed.

If anything, this seemed to steel her resolve until the day came when she was in open warfare against Trump. He went from, “She’s loved and respected, and she’s tough and smart and kind,” to calling her "Marjorie Traitor Brown".

The very day after Trump had affixed that idiotic nickname to Greene, the congresswoman got an anonymous email threatening her son, Derek's, life. When she relayed this information to Trump, he essentially told her she had no one but herself to blame.

Even for Trump, that was especially shiftless and cold-blooded and I actually felt sorry for Greene and her family when I read that.

Draper went on to write, "When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have."

And, since this fall especially, Marjorie Taylor-Greene has been making a lot of sense. These days, I find myself nodding my head reading her words instead of shaking it. After nearly five years of hysterics, she seems to have finally found her Inner Sane Person.

This doesn't mean that she's going to turn into a banana peel-burning liberal. She still believes in America First and what passes for Trump's policies. She's groping her way toward the light but she isn't quite there, yet. She's rightfully criticized the administration for slow-walking the Epstein files' release but still can't even bring herself to suspect that Donald Trump has been doing so because he's frantically trying to protect himself, because he knows his name's all over those files and that he's been personally dictating to Pam Bondi how to go about protecting him.

In short, she still can't bring herself to believe that Trump was pals with Epstein for so long because they shared an unhealthy obsession for underage girls. But he's prompting death threats aimed at her children then shrugs his shoulders and blames her and, for any mother, that's crossing a big, red line.

But Greene has come light years from the bomb-thrower she was in the beginning of her political career. She still thinks Trump walks on water but she sees that he's doing so with feet of clay. And she's just reaching the point of fully understanding that, in MAGA World, women become invisible the minute they stop toeing the party line.

Marjorie Taylor-Greene's political evolution is finite and will stop eventually well short of her becoming a liberal. She's always going to be a conservative and that's her right, of course. She will always be a Christian and that's OK, too. But MTG now knows through a newfound sense of empowerment, some weird version of right wing feminism, that she no longer has to hitch her wagon to powerful Republican men like Kevin McCarthy or Donald Trump.

And I couldn't be happier for her.