Local
The ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis is the latest in a string of deaths related to ICE raids, traffic stops, and detention facilities. Last year 32 people died in ICE custody―the most in more than two decades. Border Patrol agents have also shot, wounded, and killed civilians during Trump’s mass deportation raids. ICE and Border patrol agents are bullies who intimidate, and attack people based on the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the accents they have. They’ve also shot and killed people in their cars and used deadly weapons against bystanders and people who are standing up for their neighbors.
Saturday, January 17 - noon
East North Broadway and High Streets
Watch: Medical neglect in Butler County Jail, an ICE contract facility (Spectrum News)
In early January, Geraldo Lunas Campos died in civil immigration jail in Texas, choked to death by a guard. Last year, 32 people died in immigration jail, making 2025 the deadliest year since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was founded. Despite the dangers, the Trump administration continues to rapidly grow the nation’s civil immigration system, with help from Congress and some county sheriffs.
“It’s about time,” was my first reaction when I saw the headline on Michelle Goldberg’s column saying “The Right is Furious with Liberal White Women.” This has been an uncontrollable thunderstorm steadily building in ferocity for years. Conservatives have known for a long time that this was a huge problem and have ignored it at their peril. Truthfully, it’s worse that just liberal white women, because they are losing women, one demographic at a time, on one issue after another. Let’s be honest. When you lose women, it’s just a matter of time before you lose everything.
I know something about liberal white women. I was raised by southern women, which is a whole different problem. If you combine that with politics, right or left, it’s “Katie, bar the door” and no surrender until it’s the last man standing. I’ve worked alongside women my whole career, both liberal and progressive, and there’s not much space between those poles, it just a matter of degree before something makes them explode. They never forget, and forgiving can be equally rare.
Dr. Bob Fitrakis and Dan-o Dougan play the greatest hits of Mitch Ryder.
Listen live at 11pm Fridays, January 16 and 23, and Mondays at 10am January 19 and 26, streaming at wgrn.org or on the radio at 91.9FM
and
Mondays at 2pm streaming January 19 and 26 at wcrsfm.org or on the radio at 92.7 or 98.3FM
This article first appeared on Substack.
Yesterday, I mentioned Trump being heckled as he toured the Ford Motor Company factory in Detroit, Michigan, on Tuesday before he gave an economic speech chock-full of lies.
As Trump waddled through the factory, getting his ass kissed by executive Bill Ford, an employee shouted, “pedophile protector” at Trump. Trump responded in the most presidential manner in which he could muster, which was to shout, “fuck you,” and to flip the guy his middle finger.
I looked into Tariq Ali because the Rolling Stones wrote Street Fighting Man about Tariq. I felt intrigued why a legendary Rock’n’Roll band wrote a song about a revered Pakistani British Intellectual who opposes Colonialist genocide. I wrote about You Can’t Please All, and The Extreme Center because Tariq Ali’s politics and knowledge seemed Democratic Solicialist/ Palestine and the current fascism relevant.
For this column: I accomplished a New Years ambition. I read Verso Books Tariq Ali’s Street Fighting Years, An Autobiography of the Sixties. The Hip Hop music journalist found an intersection of Rock’n’Roll and Hip Hop.
Did Rock’n’Roll history exist because Tariq Ali and Malcolm X sat together as Malcolm X debated some bloke in England? In Tariq Ali’s time with Malcolm while Malcolm left the Nation of Islam after Malcolm expanded his worldview, Tariq Ali didn’t know his exact opinion about Malcolm X until Ali built with Malcolm.
Last summer my wife and I attended an outdoor art festival in Westerville. Lots of people and there were police at all of the entry points. It felt safe.
In the evening as we were walking back to our car we heard a humming sound.
We couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I looked up. A few hundred feet above flew a Westerville Police drone. Now, Columbus has jumped on the trend to limit your privacy in public for the sake of safety.
On November 18, the Columbus Police rolled out their new drone program with 14 pilots passing the FAA required certification. Seems like a logical step to better keep us safe from hurting each other, but remember that there is a price.
Our world is moving away from privacy at an alarming pace. The use of drones is just one symptom of the end of privacy as we know it.
Google acquires clean energy developer
Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced last month it will acquire clean energy and data center infrastructure developer Intersect in a $4.75 billion deal expected to close in the first half of this year.
The portfolio Alphabet will acquire includes projects under construction in Texas and California.
The acquisition represents a new approach for Alphabet. In the past it had relied on utilities and independent energy developers to bring power generation online for its data center loads. Acquisition of Intersect indicates that Google plans to construct, own and manage its own clean energy power plants.
ERCOT's large load queue jumped almost 300 percent last year
And speaking of data centers, they are driving a rapid increase in the number and capacity of large load interconnection requests in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (or ERCOT) region, according to a December report from the grid operator.