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There are a million Iranians in the streets facing bullets and torture who don’t agree that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a poor victim of US and “Zionist” imperialism.

We should take their cue. Don’t let Trump pick our heroes for us. Trump ain’t gonna do a damn thing for the Iranian people. He’s letting them sell oil illegally because he wants the world price to come down. The Iranian people, in his view, despite his saber rattling, don’t mean a damn thing to him.

But they mean a lot to me.

The right to choose our own leaders is not an American right. Freedom is one of the “unalienable Rights” of Americans “endowed by their Creator” — and neither Trump nor Khamenei, as Destroyers, qualify.

Those who cannot choose their own leaders, who are forced by violence to bend to authority, are slaves. In America, we still have, for a moment, a choice: We can be Kings or we will be Slaves. Choose today.

For MLK Day, I will pray that Iran, Ukraine and Minnesota will be Free at Last.

And for Yolanda Renee King, MLK’s granddaughter, playing the piano for me. She is our future. If we dare to dream it.

Hanging on by a Thread of Hope

By Heide Lambert, Mayor of Waldport, Oregon

In a small coastal town of 2,000 people, you wouldn’t expect to see the forces tearing apart our democracy so clearly. And yet, Waldport, Oregon has become a case study in how power, fear, and disinformation corrode civic life—at the local level and far beyond.

Since being elected to a two-year volunteer term as mayor, our town has made national news more than once. First, when the city manager and council unconstitutionally expelled me less than three months into my term. Then, when residents united to stop ICE from housing agents in a rundown hotel. Most recently, we mourned the loss of County Commissioner Claire Hall, whose body succumbed after enduring relentless bullying tied to a recall effort.

I write because the misdirected hate in my county mirrors a much larger crisis—and it has shaken my faith in the systems meant to protect us.

While Trump fires up an oil war in Venezuela, we hear from the heroic STEVE DONZIGER of his astonishing war against Chevron and for the planet & the people of Ecuador.

Steve is a true American crusader for what’s left of American democracy and the vital genius of Greenpeace & its ilk.  NO NUKES /  NO OIL & let’s join Steve saving our only home!!!

Audio link (58 mins.): https://grassrootseporg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/253pt2grnpwrwlns.mp3

This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”

Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii where, respectively, the people were never asked, and the people had been violently taken over years earlier against the will of most of them, it’s true that straightforward conquest went out of fashion around the time of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which became law 98 years ago. But to state so simply the popular wisdom that the United States has supposedly not seized any land in 100 years, one has to pretend that military bases do not exist. Here’s a small sampling of the problems with believing that lie:

For years, I assumed the hate I received was personal. I thought it was an attempt to intimidate me simply because I am a woman. It’s the internet, it’s a cesspool, we know this. But then I started to really look at it. I tracked the repetition in my inbox. I analyzed the recurring attacks on 'liberal women.'

I asked myself why the insults felt so uniform, and why my male counterparts never received this degree of vitriol. Yes, everyone gets hate, but between myself and other leftist women we’ve had our lives threatened, rape threats, and even our families threatened on a regular basis. I needed to know, so I looked deeper.

What I discovered shattered my initial assumption. This wasn't just misogyny; it was strategy. I had stumbled onto a years-long, coordinated alt-right movement designed to break us, and I was looking right at the heart of it. I wasn't being bullied by a few angry guys in their basements. I was being targeted by a marketing campaign.

These are psuedo-clinical terms weaponized to describe a very specific condition that makes a woman a threat to society. And do you know what the symptoms of that condition are? Caring about others.

On this day, as we celebrate the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. federal agents are erasing his legacy, targeting people of color, going door-to-door, dragging people from their homes, disappearing them; randomly stopping brown and black people in cars and on the street, brandishing guns, demanding papers, arbitrarily arresting citizens, flagrantly violating long-established constitutional rights, attacking witnesses with pepper spray, toxic gas and, in the case of Renee Nicole Good, claiming impunity while murdering a US citizen witnessing ICE’s chaos and brutality.

We have gone from “I Have a Dream” to We Have a Nightmare.

On December 10, 2014, in recognition of my efforts to create a cabinet-level Department of Peace, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the King Center in Atlanta, in celebration of Dr. King’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor he accepted with the belief that “…unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

Trump aims to drop oil to $50 a barrel; Chavez offered that years ago.

The US press is confused. Nothing new there. They are confused about the Acting President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez.

The New York Times says Rodriguez “Went From Revolutionary to Trump’s Orbit”

Oh no, she didn’t.

Rodriguez still attacks Trump as an outlaw kidnapper and imperialist invader. But, at the same time, she says she’s seeking the restoration of diplomatic relations with the US and offers tens of millions of barrels of oil to Trump.

I’ve known Rodriguez for years. Is she a militant Leftist or a moderate pragmatist?

The answer is, “Yes.” I’d call Rodriguez a “radical pragmatist.”

Though geographically it lies near Qom, Jamkaran (the site associated with the hidden imam, Mahdi) exists far beyond any mosque, shrine, or well. It is a psychological architecture— a way of relating to power, history, and responsibility. Jamkaran names the belief that salvation arrives from outside human agency, that redemption descends from above rather than being constructed through collective action. It is not theology per se, but a political imagination shaped by waiting.

Karl Marx described this condition as inverted consciousness: a world turned upside down, where material relations are masked by metaphysical fantasies. Michel Foucault would recognize it as internalized power, domination reproduced within the subject rather than imposed solely from without. Antonio Gramsci named it hegemony: the absorption of ruling ideas so deeply that they appear natural, inevitable, even desirable.