January 9, 9:03
From the fresh Trump.
1. The US began unloading oil from the captured tanker Mariner.
2. Trump did not speak with Putin after the tanker was seized.
3. Trump doesn't care about the end of the New START Treaty. It will end and end.
4. The US will sign any new treaty on nuclear limitations only if China is a party to it.
5. The US will continue to put pressure on Venezuela to control its oil reserves.
6. The US will begin the fight against Mexican drug cartels.
7. The US has not set any deadlines for resolving the war in Ukraine.
8. If the war in Ukraine continues, it is not a fact that the US will even maintain its current level of support.
9. Trump supports the new anti-Russian sanctions bill, which makes it possible to put pressure on countries buying Russian oil, but "hopes that he will not have to use it."
10. The transfer of Ukrainian mineral resources to the US was the price for the US being engaged in "resolving the situation in Ukraine."
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10295061.html
Google Translator
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Lindsey Graham Puts Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens on Notice: ‘We Are Killing People Who Criticize Israel’
Sen. Lindsey Graham told donor audience that the government is “killing all the right people” who criticize Israel, dismissing concerns about dissenting voices including Tucker Carlson & Candace Owen
Dr Ignacy Nowopolski
Jan 08, 2026
Speaking at a closed-door meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Graham brushed aside anxiety among donors about the rise of anti-interventionist figures like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, assuring the room that the Republican Party remains firmly aligned with militarism, tax cuts for elites, and unconditional support for Israel.
“I feel good about the Republican Party. I feel good about where we’re going as a nation,” Graham said, according to recordings circulated online. “We’re killing all the right people and we’re cutting your taxes.”
The remark, delivered casually and to laughter, was interpreted by critics as a revealing glimpse into the mindset of Washington’s permanent war class — one that equates dissent with enemies and treats mass death abroad as a political talking point.
Graham went on to praise Donald Trump as his “favorite president,” bragging that the U.S. military has been so active in attacking foreign nations on behalf of Israel, it has finally begun to encounter limits to its global firepower.
“We’ve run out of bombs,” Graham boasted. “We didn’t run out of bombs in World War II.”
The senator also directly addressed concerns from the audience about media figures and politicians who have begun questioning Israel’s influence over U.S. policy and America’s role in foreign conflicts.
Lindsey Graham is obsessed with killing people.
Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
If Lindsey Graham gets reelected to the US Senate, there’s no reason to have a Republican Party.
“So to those who worry about these stupid interviews,” Graham said dismissively, referring to viral conversations challenging interventionism, “don’t worry. The Republican Party has figured it out.”
For critics, that reassurance was precisely the problem.
Anti-war activists argue that Graham’s comments reflect a bipartisan consensus in Washington that treats war as normal, dissent as dangerous, and civilian deaths — whether in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere — as acceptable collateral in the service of empire.
https://drignacynowopolski.substack.com ... er-carlson
('Red' for quote of the day.)
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A broken emperor in sight
The emperor has no clothes: crime as the essence of Washington
January 8, 2026 , 8:32 pm .
Deception as a criminal "cause," contempt for democracy and multilateral bodies, and pure colonialism demonstrate the imperial decline and anxieties of US policy (Photo: USA Today)
Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale " The Emperor's New Clothes " is also known as "The Naked King." It is sometimes presented as a fable, as it contains a kind of moral, which suggests that truth is not always true simply because everyone says so
After being swindled by a couple of crooks, an emperor went out into the street "dressed" in a supposed suit that had been made for him, but which was nothing of the sort. No one dared tell him this because, according to the sellers, the garment was not suitable for fools to see. After a child loudly proclaimed that he was naked, the boastful emperor decided to continue pretending until the very end so as not to appear ignorant and strode off triumphantly, while the crowd roared with laughter.
The truth is often spoken by those who have nothing to lose and are not afraid of others' opinions, sometimes out of honesty, but in the case of the ruling elite of the United States, power exercised immorally gives them every right to walk around naked.
The king walks naked, but distressed
Such is the case of the recent kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, an event from which the statements of Donald Trump and his entourage have been marked by eloquence and clarity regarding the exercise of power and an evident disregard for all the codes that support the so-called "Western democracy".
The US president, a magnate representing his country's corporate network—and that of "his" hemisphere—launched the 41st military intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean after masking the siege under the guise of the "war on drugs." A month before the event, he revealed the true motive for the military deployment, as he had done during his election campaign: it was an arbitrary appropriation of oil and minerals in Venezuelan territory.
In case there were any remaining doubts about the deception, the Justice Department officially withdrew the narrative regarding the fictitious "Cartel of the Suns," which never existed. The indictment against the Venezuelan president makes no mention of oil theft or fentanyl, topics extensively discussed by Trump.
In statements following the military attack, which caused hundreds of deaths and infrastructure damage in Venezuelan territory, Trump explicitly stated that "we are going to extract a huge amount of wealth from the soil" and that this wealth "would go to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damage that country has caused us."
The eloquence in figures translates into the fact that he mentioned the terms "oil", "oilman" or "oil companies" on about twenty occasions, while the word "democracy" was not uttered even once.
Other statements, such as those of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, further exposed the stark reality of the events and their causes. The Cuban-Maya native said they would continue attacking ships carrying Venezuelan oil, but that "we care about the elections, we care about democracy, we care about all of that ."
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, visibly upset and distraught, let slip in another interview that "this neoliberal framework that America's job is to go around the world demanding immediate elections everywhere, all the time, immediately, to fill those vacuums. That's not what I think."
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, told Fox News that Trump "took bold steps, and we will continue to attack that ridiculous organization called the United Nations."
Various Venezuelan spokespeople, including Commander Chávez and President Maduro, have denounced the hypocrisy of the Euro-Atlantic elite, while sectors of the opposition criminalized Chavismo and insisted on the narrative of "credible" elections and human rights. These same sectors remain silent in the face of the deaths of civilians and military personnel under fire from the aggressor power, much less in the face of the pronouncements of these power-drunk officials.
It is clear that Washington's supposed interest in democracy and human rights is a narrative used to manipulate the US for its own purposes. Many of these purposes stem from the anxiety of having a national debt of $38.5 trillion with a GDP-to-debt ratio of 120%; the depletion of the cheap mineral resources that have sustained its economy; and the slow decline in global conventional oil production since 2005.
Furthermore, faced with the multipolar advance, this elite has chosen to retreat from its attempt to impose global hegemony by promoting the "Donroe Doctrine" to appropriate both the natural resources and the existing workforce in Latin America and Europe, in principle.
Crime turned into state policy
Following the attack, the threat to the Venezuelan government has escalated, and, with the same eloquence described, Trump declared that the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, will remain in power as long as she "does what we want." With this, he establishes that in "his" hemisphere there will only be peace if there is blind obedience to American interests—or anxieties.
Appearing as a thuggish state is nothing new for the United States, but its establishment has almost always maneuvered to maintain a certain facade, with varying degrees of success. Having invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that the Islamic State has taken hold in one and heroin production has surged in the other, are crimes that can be judged more by their consequences than by any open confession, which is what the world is witnessing today.
The American political system is based on principles of separation of powers and civil liberties, but internally, it survives with a Congress riddled with lobbyists and lacking constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass laws. Last year, it sent 38 bills to Trump's desk for his signature, most of which were aimed at reversing regulations enacted during the Biden administration.
The president's omission of the word "democracy" during his remarks coincides perfectly with the 226 executive orders issued up to January 5th. This was the highest number during a first year of a presidential term since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who issued 568 executive orders in 1933. Furthermore:
The media, concentrated in corporations and oligarchs, is an echo chamber for state crimes, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, and the systemic plundering by the billionaire class.
This occurs while elections saturated with multimillion-dollar donations are a formality that points little to any political change, but rather to business realignments.
The diplomatic corps in Washington, supposedly tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war, and forging alliances, remains disjointed and unable to react.
The courts, with exceptions such as the judges who succeeded in blocking the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, are operators of corporate power and are overseen by a Justice Department whose primary function is to silence Trump's political enemies.
Externally, the orange emperor and his officials furiously issue threats against Iran , Cuba , Greenland (actually Europe, the US branch office), Colombia , Mexico , and Canada .
Permanent global state of exception
The narrative, whether or not it adheres to reality, allows us to identify the objective of each action; this applies to individuals and institutions. From this arises mythology, but also social contracts based on principles and values that each group constructs to survive... or disappear, if things go wrong. Every sector of the human species, due to its cultural makeup, has ideals, and these structure behaviors.
In this regard, French analyst Arnaud Bertrand asks : What happens when a nation stops telling itself it must be good? The answer hangs in the air of the Caribbean and the entire planet; everyone senses it. The statements by Trump, Rubio, Waltz, and Miller demonstrate that the cultural fracture of the West is exposed, and the despair is painful.
The colonialist vision, which contradicts the philosophical foundations of political self-determination and economic independence that fueled the American Revolution, is the one that prevails in the country of Trump and the super-rich who occupy the government. It is a coalition that has chosen to grow without moral roots and that could further fragment that society and the rest of the planet, but irreversibly.
The rest of the "international community" reacts tepidly, like those who saw the emperor's new clothes, not daring to take a stand against a thuggish state, lest they appear to be what they have in fact revealed themselves to be. Many voices denounce the same thing as that child in the story, but everything indicates that turning a deaf ear will not prevent the collapse of a system that continues to show warning signs.
https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/el ... washington
Google Translator
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Trump Has Changed And TDS With Him
When Trump did win his second term there were many people, including here, who were a bit in panic. Other characterized that as a ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ (TDS).
I had preferred Trump over the blabbering incompetent person the Democrats had put up as their candidate. I did not like Trump’s policies but I also thought that he would do just minor damage just like during his first term in office.
At first it looked like I had been right. The Alaska meeting with President Putin went reasonably well. The war in Ukraine seemed to move towards some sane outcome. His domestic policies were a bit wild but not far off from the expected trajectory.
Things have been going downward since. Something has definitely changed. But why and how this derangement happened is yet unknown.
The late December CIA attack on Putin’s residence in the Novgorod region, which includes strategic command facilities, has broken the rules that have governed relations between nuclear powers over many decades. Those relations have now deteriorated beyond fixing.
The attack on Venezuela was likewise beyond any reasonability. There is little chance that the U.S. will ever get what it wants from the country without on the ground intervention. But any commitment of troops to Caracas would end in disaster.
The administration defense of ICE goons, who clearly broke all rules of policing when they killed an innocent women, is also beyond all reasonability. There are certainly ways to explain the incident but they decided to smear the obvious victim.
That such behavior has become and will stay the norm for the Trump administration can be concluded from two recent interviews.
The first was on January 5 at CNN with Trump aide Stephen Miller:
TAPPER: So let’s — the question about who is now running Venezuela is one that even members of Congress who are big Trump supporters say they’re not quite sure about. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN’s Manu Raju that he doesn’t know what President Trump meant by his assertion that the U.S. is running Venezuela. And he said he needs more information. Can you tell us what the President means when he says, is acting President Delcy Rodriguez in charge? Is she running Venezuela or not?
MILLER: Well, what the President said is true. The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition, that’s true. Jake, we live in a law, I’m sorry, we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. The United States —
TAPPER: But are you saying — but in terms of day-to-day operations in Venezuela, that is president, Acting President Rodriguez, right? It’s not some sort of American emissary.
MILLER: No, what I’m saying is, and we’ll keep going here, Jake. So I want to say what I’m saying, and then you’ll follow up. But what I’m saying is just one level above that, which is that, by definition, we are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.
So for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country during this transition period.
Miller really seems to believe that this is how the world works. It isn’t.
The second interview, on January 7, was by the NY Times with Trump himself:
Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’ (archived)
The relevant excerpt of craziness:
Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Mr. Trump said, “I do.” But he made clear he would be the arbiter when such constraints applied to the United States.
“It depends what your definition of international law is,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s assessment of his own freedom to use any instrument of military, economic or political power to cement American supremacy was the most blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview. At its core is the concept that national strength, rather than laws, treaties and conventions, should be the deciding factor as powers collide.
Trump’s take on domestic limits exposes a similar might-makes-right vision:
On the domestic front, Mr. Trump suggested that judges only have power to restrict his domestic policy agenda — from the deployment of the National Guard to the imposition of tariffs — “under certain circumstances.”
But he was already considering workarounds. He raised the possibility that if his tariffs issued under emergency authorities were struck down by the Supreme Court, he could repackage them as licensing fees. And Mr. Trump, who said he was elected to restore law and order, reiterated that he was willing to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military inside the United States and federalize some National Guard units if he felt it was important to do so.
So far, he said, “I haven’t really felt the need to do it.”
TDS has changed its meaning. Trump is deranged and its not just a syndrome. I have yet to make up my mind of what is most likely to follow from this.
Is the U.S. sliding down the path towards full fascism? Or is this all pure bluster that will end as soon as it experience a serious bulwark?
Posted by b on January 9, 2026 at 14:08 UTC | Permalink
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2026/01/t ... h-him.html
(All these guys who not so long ago thought the Second Coming of Donald would be an improvement....but as Uncle Joe said in a similar context, "Both are worse.")
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A Lawless Presidency
January 8, 2026
The catastrophe we all witnessed in Caracas — the result of expanding presidential power — is a body blow to the U.S. Constitution, writes Andrew P. Napolitano.
U.S. President Donald Trump, center, monitors U.S. military operations in Venezuela, from Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 3, with C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe on left, Secretary of State Marco Rubio on right. (White House /Molly Riley)
By Andrew P. Napolitano
The United States invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, the domestically recognized Venezuelan president, violated the U.S. Constitution and international law.
The Constitution makes clear that only Congress can authorize a foreign invasion. In the pre-World War II era, Congress declared war on countries that attacked the U.S. or were allied with those that did, and those declarations expired upon the surrender by legal authorities in the targeted countries.
In the post-9/11 era, Congress has chosen to authorize the use of military force, without providing for a trigger that would terminate the authorization. Indeed, just last month, Congress rescinded George W. Bush-era military authorizations that had been used by Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump to target groups not even in existence at the time of the authorizations.
But, as morally deficient as the authorizations were, they were at least constitutionally sound, as they were the product of presidential requests and congressional deliberations and authorizations.
We now know that at least two of these were fraudulent — the administration lied to Congress and to the United Nations. But, again, at least it fomented debate and recognized its obligations under the Constitution and the U.N. Charter to seek approval before invading a foreign country.
The Charter is a treaty, drafted by U.S. officials in the aftermath of World War II and ratified by the Senate. Under the Constitution, treaties are, like the Constitution itself, the supreme law of the land.
Violating His Sworn Oath
President Donald Trump violated his sworn and paramount obligations to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution when he ordered his invasion of Venezuela without congressional authorization and when he attacked a member state of the U.N. without U.N. authorization.
James Madison himself argued at the Constitutional Convention that if a president could both declare war and wage war, he’d be a prince; not unlike the British monarch from whose authority the 13 colonies had just seceded.
And the American drafters of the U.N. Charter, indeed American senators who voted to ratify it, understood that its very purpose was to prevent unlawful and morally unjustified attacks by one member nation upon another.
June, 26, 1945: U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr., signing the U.N. Charter at a ceremony at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building. At left is President Harry S. Truman. (UN Photo/Yould,CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
When he was asked after the troops had seized President Maduro why the administration had not complied with the Constitution and sought congressional approval for the invasion, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave laughable answers.
First, he said the Maduro extraction was not an invasion. OK, an armada of ships, assault helicopters, hundreds of troops, 80 deaths and two kidnappings in a foreign land is not an invasion, but the sale of cocaine to willing American buyers is?
Then he said Congress cannot be trusted. Congress is a coequal branch of the federal government — under the Constitution, the first among equals.
Then he said that the Trump administration faced an emergency. Federal law defines an emergency as a sudden and unexpected event likely to have a deleterious effect on national security or economic prosperity. There was no emergency last weekend.
Why is it wrong for the president to violate the Constitution?
For starters, he took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it. It is the source of his governmental powers. The Supreme Court has ruled that all federal power comes from the Constitution and from nowhere else. This is manifested in the 10th Amendment, which commands that governmental powers not delegated in the Constitution to the federal government do not lie dormant awaiting a federal capture, rather they remain in the people or the states. This is at least the Madisonian view of constitutional government.
The Wilsonian Legacy
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson returning to New York harbor from the Versailles Peace Conference on USS George Washington, July 8, 1919. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Its opposite is the Wilsonian view — after that pseudo-constitutional law professor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson — which holds that the federal government can address any national problem, foreign or domestic, for which it has sufficient political support, except for the express prohibitions imposed upon it in the Constitution. Sadly, every president since Wilson has been a Wilsonian.
Trump acknowledged that the events of last weekend constituted an American “attack on sovereignty.” This, of course, defies the statements of Trump’s attorney general, who has instructed her prosecutors to claim that this was a simple arrest of a fugitive from justice.
She must have a perverse view of justice, the essence of which is fairness. Is it fair for the C.I.A. to engage in drug trafficking and then help prosecute the heads of state in which the trafficking occurs when they look the other way? Is it fair for the president to claim with a straight but exhausted face that the U.S. “owns” the oil in the earth under Venezuela? Is it fair for the federal government, which can’t deliver the mail, to “run Venezuela” as Trump claimed several times last week?
These questions are couched as moral inquiries, but they all bring us back to the Constitution. In the post-9/11 years, presidential power has expanded and congressional power has shrunk. This was not achieved by amending the Constitution, rather by Congress looking the other way as presidents killed and Congress hoped for popularly approved outcomes.
The result has been the catastrophe we all witnessed in Caracas. Eighty people were murdered by U.S. troops in order to capture scapegoats for C.I.A. drug trafficking and satiate the American lust for other people’s oil.
There is simply no legal defense to this. Trump’s own director of national intelligence — no doubt the first defense witness at Maduro’s trial — stated in March of last year that Venezuela is not a supplier of fentanyl or cocaine to the United States; and the U.S. is out of the regime-change business.
And Trump’s own Drug Enforcement Administration, whose agents accompanied U.S. troops in their invasion, has said the same about Venezuela.
The American invasion of Venezuela is a body blow to the Constitution. It reveals what many of us have feared — a might-makes-right presidency, a lawless, impulsive authoritarian machine that recognizes no legal or moral limits to its powers — abroad or at home.
https://consortiumnews.com/2026/01/08/a ... residency/
As much as I dislike 'Da Judge' his take on the situation of Bourgeois Democracy does chime with the title of this thread. Of course if 'reds' were the issue he'd have no problem with any done to them.
