“In what amounts to an extraordinary admission of guilt regarding their historic complicity in the US’s post-9/11 torture program, it was announced on January 11, the 24th anniversary of the opening of the ‘war on terror’ prison at Guantánamo Bay, that the British government has reached a ‘substantial’ out-of-court settlement with Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah … was the first and most notorious victim of torture in the CIA’s post-9/11 program of extraordinary rendition and torture, which involved the establishment of secret torture facilities in pliant countries around the world — Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Morocco — as well as in US facilities in Afghanistan. He was held and tortured in all of these CIA ‘black sites’ for three years and five months from April 2002 until his transfer, in September 2006, to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial.” (01/20/26)
Source: New York Post
by US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)
“Youtube and its parent company Google deserves to be sued. For the past three weeks YouTube has been hosting a video that is a calculated lie, falsely accusing me of taking money from Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. It refused to remove the video. It is, of course, a ludicrous accusation, but paid trolls are daily spreading this lie across the internet. This untruth is essentially an accusation of treason, which then leads the internet mob to call for my death. Advocating for liability for Google is no small step for me. I have long defended the private-property rights of internet companies and long defended them against overzealous, partisan abuses of antitrust law …. But I will not sit idly by and let them host a provably false defamatory video, which is now part of a widespread harassment campaign.” (01/19/25)
“James Konkin is a son, a friend, a student, a churchgoer, a weightlifter, and a vinyl collector. He’s also an anarchist. That is to say, he’s an opponent of the use of coercion in human relationships. Anarchists are people with principles, unpopular principles, but principles nonetheless. James’[s] principles include freedom, self-defense, and self-expression. He’s being punished for holding those principles. James has been targeted by the fascist regime, arrested and charged for constitutionally protected anti-ICE posts. He’s been released on bond for now, but his bail conditions preclude him from using social media so we haven’t heard from him in months.” (01/19/26)
“Three recently released polls could spell disaster for Trump’s second term – and for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. According to a Quinnipiac University Poll released last week, seven in ten Americans oppose the US use of force against Iran, including a solid majority of Republican voters. Eighty percent of the very important independent voters oppose any US attack on Iran. On President Trump’s renewed demand for control of Greenland … that same Quinnipiac poll shows that 86 percent of Americans surveyed oppose taking the territory by force. A majority of 55 percent of Americans polled do not even want President Trump to purchase the massive island. An AP/NORC poll also released last week showed President Trump’s approval rating on foreign policy has shrunk to a new low in his presidency. … Americans are clearly more interested in getting our problems solved at home than acting as policeman for the world.” (01/19/26)
“The federal government has been making recommendations on what we should eat since 1980. Since 1992, those recommendations have been visually summarized in the form of a pyramid. The problem: Ever since the Food Pyramid was published, Americans have been getting progressively fatter. Trump administration officials think they know why: We have been getting bad advice. So, the administration has produced an ‘inverted pyramid,’ making recommendations that in many cases are the exact opposite of the previous ones. For example, instead of being told to limit the consumption of fat and eat carbs, we are now told to eat fat and limit our carbs. Reporters and commentators have treated the new guidelines as a revolutionary challenge to previous expert opinion.” (01/19/26)
“The authoritarian threat in the United States no longer lurks on the horizon. It’s here, unfolding at a breakneck pace. And it appears with an American face: increasingly undemocratic rule, galvanized at the ballot box, governing through strongman tactics, bolstered not just by extralegal force but through legal mechanisms, backed by stubborn popular support. People have been fighting back. One study found the number of protests in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term well surpassed the heyday of the ’Resistance’ to Trump’s first. But disruption isn’t enough. The most effective strategy — deeply rooted in American history — is to build a broad front across class, sector and ideology to isolate and defeat authoritarian power. The contemporary protest movement is growing fast but has not yet achieved this necessary solidarity.” (01/19/25)
“It would be difficult to determine which executive agency, aside from the presidency itself, Donald Trump has most distorted or disfigured. That said, the Department of Justice has a strong case. This is a department boasting more than 40 different components and employing roughly 10,000 attorneys. Or, rather, it used to employ that many. Since the start of Trump’s second term, thousands have departed …. while the chaos has been unimaginable and the damage to personal careers immense, the real issue is that the toll on the American system of justice has been incalculable. That’s because this has not been a mere hollowing out. Trump has taken the nation’s central authority for federal law enforcement and repurposed it as a weapon for ideological combat and an instrument of presidential retribution. This is a catastrophe, not a triumph of small government.” (01/19/26)
“It’s hard to say who comes out worse in the war of words over Greenland. Is it President Trump, who has flagrantly abandoned his promise to the American people to wean Washington off its vain, destructive meddling in world affairs? Or is it the leaders of Europe, who expect us to buy that they are overnight converts to the cause of sovereignty, despite having spent years ravaging sovereignty across our continent? On one side, a president whose commitment to the ideals of sovereignty turned out to be thin indeed; on the other, leaders who never had any such commitment. … What is at risk of being lost in this global spat is the rights of the Greenlandic people themselves. Most importantly, their unshakeable sovereign right to determine the destiny of their nation as they see fit.” (01/19/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“What will be scrupulously avoided in the mainstream press today — Martin Luther King, Jr., Day — will be what King pointed out about the U.S. government — that it is ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’ Of course, that statement is as true today as it was in 1967. When it comes to violence, including killings, there is no doubt that the U.S. government has made America Number 1. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is not something to be proud of.” (01/19/26)
