Editorial

The country keeps trying to file these incidents as separate folders.

Minneapolis: ICE shoots and kills a woman in the street.

Portland: federal agents shoot two people during a vehicle stop.

Columbus: residents trade sightings in group chats and Facebook posts, because official channels won’t — or can’t — provide clarity.

But the folders all belong in the same cabinet.

Because the pattern isn’t random. It’s procedural.

And the question Columbus keeps avoiding isn’t “Is this happening here?”

It’s: “How close are we to it turning deadly?”

A 48-hour timeline of federal force — and public backlash

Wednesday, Jan. 7 — Minneapolis

A 37-year-old woman, Renée Nicole Macklin Good, is shot and killed by an ICE agent in south Minneapolis during a federal operation. Within hours, competing narratives harden: federal officials frame it as self-defense; local leaders say the video doesn’t support the story.

The killing happens less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered — in a city that has become global shorthand for what state violence looks like when it’s caught on camera.

The elements behind Trump’s war on Venezuela are fourfold.

They center on the theft of Venezuela’s oil; the removal of Cuba’s primary lifeline; the protection of the dollar-based petrodollar; and Trump’s desperate need to deflect attention from the deepening quagmire that is the Epstein scandal.

And the ultimate question they raise is: will his blatantly illegal violation of U.S. and international law finally result in the impeachment and removal of Trump from the White House or the 2026 mid-term elections lead to an end of his destructive control of the U.S. government.

The lethal litany of reasons for Trump’s invasion is led by the U.S. seeking Venezuela’s huge reserves of oil—it supposedly has 303 billion barrels compared to the U.S. with but 45. After Venezuela is Saudi Arabia with 267 and Iran with 208 and then the list drops by 100.

I’m not going to say that we weren’t warned. Trump has been beating the war drums about Venezuela for months. The US has been shooting small motorboats and their crews, like ducks on the water, for months, while making unverified claims about whether they were drug runners. The US had built up an intimidating flotilla of carriers and support ships in the Caribbean demanding that the country’s president, Maduro resign and leave the country.

Still, I have to admit, I held onto a last straw of hope that not even Trump would be crazy enough to invade the country illegally under international law and without Congressional approval. When we started hijacking ships on the open seas and bombing ports where they were supposedly being loaded, I knew we were going from bad to worse, but still, surely someone somewhere in Washington would tell Trump to calm down and get a grip. There was no reason that the US needed to go any farther off the grid as a rogue nation.

This article first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal

Last March during the hearings on Ohio House Bill 15, I was the only representative of an environmental organization in Ohio to testify against it.

The reason? It gave the Ohio Power Siting Board just 45 days to consider a major utility facility – defined as 50 MW or more – to serve a large energy user – often a data center – on property owned by the applicant. Usually this process takes one to three years.

Data centers use prodigious amounts of energy – often as much as an entire city. If they are to be directly served by an energy generation facility, it needs to be well over 50 MW.

It was clear from the language of H.B. 15 that any such major utility facility would be run by gas.

Wind turbines have too large of a setback requirement to go on most land next to a large energy user, and the footprint of utility scale solar projects is too large.

ICE is on the streets of Columbus arresting people. Supposedly Columbus officials and police are not cooperating with ICE, and if true, this is good news.

But you need to tell your friends and family about what else your “elected” Columbus City Council has recently done. It would make President Trump proud.

In the greatest power-grab in Columbus history your City Council took revenge on the residents of German Village over side-walk improvements by changing the City Charter. Wait a minute… Doesn’t the city already update the City Charter once every ten years with a panel of citizens who make recommendations?

Correct. That’s how the City Charter is supposed to be updated in a rational democracy, but not Columbus.

One year into Trump 2.0, he’s gaining speed on his sled down the mountain.

“A Washington Post average of national polls so far in December found that 39 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, compared with 57 percent who disapprove. On the economy in particular, the average is slightly worse for Trump, with just 36 percent approving and 58 percent disapproving.” Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s consiglieri, and columnist for the Wall Street Journal cautions that unless Trump reverses course he is heading for an epic failure in the 2026 midterms.

Pundits frequently remark on the warm and friendly relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. In explanation, some suggest that Putin possesses compromising material on Trump. Others point to their autocratic style and their rightwing agendas.

But another factor plays a role in the Putin-Trump bromance: their embrace of great power imperialism.

For example, their aggressive policies toward Ukraine and Venezuela are remarkably similar. Putin began his takeover of Ukraine by charging that its government was controlled by “fascists” and, moreover, that its closer relations with Western Europe would irreparably damage Russian national security. Similarly, Trump has sought to overturn the Venezuelan government, arguing that it is controlled by drug traffickers and represents a significant menace to U.S. national security.

Look At Me

Mobb Deep’s 2025 song with the Clipse Look At Me is the winning conversation for both DSA and the Extreme Centre:

Prodigy:

Nothing You Saying is Making Sense To Me.

I Can’t Comprehend. You Not Talking Money.

Real Nword. The Only Language I Speak.

They Gonna Die hungry.

I’m Crafty. Real Foxy.

My Reptilian Brain Will Have You Curled Up…

Remember RZA endorsed Mamdani over Eric Adams.

Eric Adams had declared Wu Tang Day in NYC November 9th.

Rest in Beats Prodigy

ICE Raids

Do y’all remember No More Prisons.

No More Prisons was a grassroots movement which denounced the prison industrial complex. No More Prisons deemed prison for profit unhealthy for a society to decide imprisioning people was lucrative.