Neat, short little memo with useful graphs:
"To: Interested Democrats
From: Senators Chris Murphy, Adam Schiff, Tina Smith, and Elizabeth Warren
Date: January 12, 2026
Re: Democrats can't run on affordability without calling out billionaires and big corporations
We write today to lay out the case for why the Democratic Party should adopt an affordability platform rooted in an economic populism that is willing to confront concentrated corporate power. Billionaires and corporate interests have captured our political system, but our party's anemic response to the rigging of our democracy and economy in favor of the ultra-wealthy has eroded our credibility with working people. Donald Trump's brazen corruption and billionaires first economic policy has exposed him as a fake populist, offering Democrats an opportunity to return to our roots as the party that values hard work and stands with working people. But that will happen only if we demonstrate a real willingness to take on corporate power and the billionaires who are making it impossible for the American people to provide for themselves and their families. A raft of recent research demonstrates that this platform is popular across the political spectrum and especially with working-class voters"
ICE are terrorists and must be stopped. Atrios called them America's Worst Murderers. "ICE Agent Kills Woman, DHS Tells Obvious, Insane Lies About It: On Wednesday in Minneapolis, masked government agents apparently representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surrounded a stationary vehicle stopped in the middle of a residential street. One of them demanded that the driver "get out of the fucking car," and yanked violently on the driver's-side door handle; another, stationed near the left headlight of the vehicle, drew his pistol. The driver, after briefly reversing, swerved away from the agents, apparently attempting to drive away. As the vehicle moved forward, the agent with the drawn pistol stepped aside while firing three shots directly at the windshield and open driver's-side window, killing the driver." Anyone can see that in the videos which went viral immediately. (The still frames in this article make it pretty clear.) But DHS told an entirely different story.
And since that happened, there have been so many stories about ICE and Border Patrol snatching kids, murdering Americans, breaking down doors and kidnapping people in their underwear, preventing parents from rushing their child to the E.R., and numerous other outrages while Bondi tries to blackmail Walz to illegally acquire voting information and the administration issuing memos of illegal instructions and trying to defend them in court that I just can't keep up.
Pareene, "You Cretins Are Going To Get Thousands Of People Killed: Here's what you have to understand about the sort of people who become anchors, nonpartisan pundits, centrist columnists, and cable news political correspondents: They didn't sign up to be the resistance. They don't want Donald Trump to fail. They want him to 'pivot' and 'act presidential.' Yeah, there are guys (and it is guys, for the most part) out there who spend their whole careers trying to be Dan Rather staring down Nixon or Cronkite turning on Vietnam—or even just Tim Russert making some elected mediocrity stammer with a patented 'tough question'—but mostly these guys want to be witnesses to Great Men Making History. They want to Respect The Office Of The Presidency. Here's another thing you should understand about these guys: The only thing the elite Washington press corps likes more than a bipartisan commission on debt reduction is a stack of flag-draped coffins."
"Venezuela Regime Change and the Theater of the Absurd" — Josh Marshall finds it interesting that though Maduro has been kidnapped by the US, and the White House seems to be claiming they now run Venezuela, Maduro's government is still standing and operating. (And that's about as far as I got with international news before my brain started to melt, so look elsewhere for that.)
Robert Kuttner reckons "Trump's Attack on Powell Backfires: Even Trump's allies are disgusted by the clumsy power grab. [...] The attack on Powell and the Fed's independence was quickly denounced by people from both parties. Former Federal Reserve chairs Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan, the latter two Republicans, as well as four former Treasury secretaries representing both parties issued a statement supporting Powell and denouncing the 'unprecedented attempt' to undermine the Fed's independence. Republicans in Congress, who have been reluctant to criticize Trump on other issues, joined in. Rep. French Hill of Arkansas, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, called the inquiry 'an unnecessary distraction,' adding that the charges 'could undermine this and future Administrations' ability to make sound monetary policy decisions.'"
Ian Welsh, "Keep Your Eyes On The Long Game of Imperial Collapse [...] But nothing has changed in the fundamentals. The US is in auto-catabolic collapse and so far there is no sign of the oligarchy losing control, which is the pre-condition for any attempts to change the trajectory. I've now seen data indicating China is leading in 89% of key tech fields, up from 80% a couple years ago. US industry is still collapsing. Research funding has been slashed. Final bastions like chips, AI, civil aviation and biotech/pharma are all under assault and will fall like dominoes over the next five to ten years. The US has no ship building capacity to speak of, is behind on drones and missiles (the key weapon systems of modern war) and can't even make key components in its military chain without Chinese help. Dollar hegemony is no more than five years out from being lost."
"Victory for Corporate Tax Dodgers as OECD Approves Watered-Down Global Minimum Tax: 'The Trump administration has chosen to prioritize maintaining rock-bottom taxes for big corporations to the detriment of ordinary Americans and our allies across the globe,' said one critic. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development is facing criticism for buckling under US demands when finalizing an update to the global minimum corporate tax agreement. As reported by Reuters on Monday, the OECD agreed to amend a 2021 deal to enforce a 15% global minimum corporate tax to include 'simplifications and carve-outs to align US minimum tax laws with global standards, accommodating earlier objections raised by the Trump administration.' Under the original framework, OECD members agreed to apply a 15% corporate tax on multinational corporations that book profits in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates. President Donald Trump objected to this, however, and insisted that some US corporations be given exemptions that have subsequently been granted by OECD states."
"Zohran Mamdani Has More Jewish Support Than You Think: While attention is on the new mayor's revocation of pro-Israel executive orders, analysis reveals age and income shaped the Jewish vote more than ethnicity, religion, or support for Israel Ask anybody about the Jewish vote for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the election, and they'll tell you he lost it badly. If they saw the news coverage, the headlines put a number on it: One-third went to Mamdani, and two-thirds went to his opponent Andrew Cuomo. To backers of Israel, the support for Mamdani was too high. To others, it was read as a sign that Mamdani was too divisive for the Democratic Party coalition—alienating large segments of New York City's Jewish electorate. [...] A closer block-by-block analysis, in fact, reveals an entirely different story. Whether a voter was Jewish or not turns out to have little to do with their preference for Mamdani or his opponent. Jewish voters, like New York City as a whole, were split between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his erstwhile opponent Andrew Cuomo based on culture, denomination, age, and income. Block-level results show that Jewish voters routinely voted in line with their neighbors. [...] Pulling Trump voters out of the analysis, it turns out that among Jewish Democrats, Mamdani performed far better than the exit-poll headlines suggested. Among Jewish voters who were genuinely up for grabs, Mamdani and Cuomo split them roughly 50-50. Among voters in Jewish surname (10%+) precincts that voted for Kamala Harris (60%+)—i.e. Jewish Democrats—Zohran Mamdani ran less than three points behind Andrew Cuomo: 47% to 49.5%."
David Dayen has "Six Important Stories for 2026' from war to party politics to the economy to Hollywood.
"Activists Fight to Salvage the 'Sistine Chapel of New Deal Art': President Trump's plans to sell a federal building housing works of art about Social Security is an attempt to erase the country's history, a new petition argues. [...] But these are unprecedented times. After tearing down the East Wing to build a new ballroom without approvals from a national planning commission or Congress and affixing his name on the Kennedy Center, President Trump is seeking to liquidate four federal buildings by auctioning them to private developers."
RIP: "R.I.P. Bob Weir: Grateful Dead co-founder dead at 78." I can't even remember how many times I saw The Grateful Dead play, and I wasn't even trying—there was a time when they seemed to be everywhere. There are so many tributes to him on the web I don't feel like there's anything I can add.
RIP: "Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, dead at 68: Adams satirized the world of cubicle-based IT and engineering in Dilbert, which at its height appeared in 2,000 daily newspapers and was later anthologized in numerous books." It wasn't just engineers who'd suffered under bosses who were more of a hindrance than a help, so I used to get a good laugh out of Dilbert, but then he turned into a public right-wing crackpot and destroyed his cartooning career. A famously outspoken atheist, his final message said he'd done the reward-risk calculation when he realized death was impending and accepted Jesus into his heart.
RIP: Thelma Beall, co-founder of Ledo's Pizza, at 101. Ledo's wasn't exactly like a proper pizza, bur it was so delicious I didn't care. It's one of the things I miss most from back home.
What is past is prologue: Rick Perlstein, January 20, 2021, "This Is Us: Why the Trump Era Ended in Violence: The Capitol insurrection was born of a violent minoritarian tradition that is as American as apple pie—and it isn't done yet. [...] Any schoolchild can recite the story's opening chapter: The Southern states refused to sign on to a new constitution absent veto power over the rest of the states that did not organize their economies around the institution of chattel slavery. The veto took the form of the Senate, the Electoral College, and the 'three-fifths compromise,' inscribing reaction into the nation's charter at the level of the human soul. With that victory, something was institutionalized within the psyche of the South itself: the region's entitlement to an equal say, or even a dominant one, in the governing of the nation, no matter its share of the population. [...] When rule by right can be achieved through legal means, they're glad to rule that way; when politics fails, they pursue the same goal through violence. In the longue durée of American history, one can predict it with nearly Newtonian precision."
Sometimes I've wished for a real life Wallace & Gromit contraption to get me up in the morning, but I didn't realize it might actually work.
The Beatles, "Any Time At All"
