Thursday, January 29, 2026
National Guard deployments cost taxpayers almost half a billion dollars
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/01/28/national-guard-deployments-cost/
President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard and active-duty Marine personnel to U.S. cities cost approximately $496 million between June and December last year, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Continuing the deployment for the next year could cost the nation over $1 billion, the estimate found.
Trump has repeatedly said his deployments are necessary because local leaders have not done enough to combat crime in major cities. The deployments, however, have been repeatedly challenged in court, and legal experts have warned that Trump may be exceeding his authority.
‘Our cities are no longer safe’: GOP mayors condemn Trump immigration enforcement
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/28/republican-mayors-trump-ice-00754195
At a gathering of mayors in Washington on Wednesday, Republicans criticized the White House’s recent immigration crackdown as chaotic and damaging.
A number of Republican mayors are condemning the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota, as they call on the president to pull back from Minneapolis and worry their cities might be next.
The Republican leaders’ calls for Trump to deescalate after the fatal shootings of two Minnesotans by federal agents show the GOP’s deepening fissures over the administration’s aggressive immigration agenda, even as the mayors and Republicans broadly offered support for the president’s overall goal. And their alarm comes as ICE ramps up operations in other states, including Arizona and Maine.
I was a Marine in Afghanistan. ICE’s tactics are strategically incoherent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/28/minnesota-ice-unrest-reader-reaction/
In 2009, I was a Marine in Helmand province during the height of the shift to counterinsurgency operations. We were heavily armed and trained for violence, as Marines are expected to be.
But when we encountered local Afghans, we took off our helmets. We removed our sunglasses. We put a hand over our hearts, we looked the Afghans in the eye and said Salaam Alekum, or “peace be upon you.” If the situation allowed, we sat down. We drank tea. We talked. This wasn’t weakness or wokeness. It was strength, discipline and strategy.
We were still Marines. When it was time to fight, we did so decisively. But we also understood something essential: You cannot intimidate your way into lasting security. You cannot terrorize a population into cooperation. And you cannot claim moral authority if your posture communicates only contempt or fear.
I reflect on those lessons as I watch an anti-immigration agenda in the United States that has gone badly off course. Masked officers in military-style gear, conducting raids with theatrical dominance rather than measured authority. Communities treated as hostile terrain rather than neighborhoods. I find this not only disturbing but also strategically incoherent.
In Afghanistan, we understood that showing up as faceless, armored enforcers was a fast way to lose the population’s trust. We knew that intimidation buys compliance only temporarily, and resentment compounds faster than control.
If Marines could understand this in a war zone, we should be able to understand it in our own country.
Opposition MKs send ‘deep regret’ to Biden for PM blaming ’embargo’ for IDF deaths
Lawmakers pen letter thanking former US president for post-Oct. 7 support, say he is ‘one of Israel’s greatest friends’; senior Israeli security officials said ‘furious’ with PM’s claim
Biden has not commented on Netanyahu’s claim, though when he was in office, his administration denied the premier’s previous allegations that the US had placed an “embargo” on arms shipments to Israel, saying that it had only withheld one batch of 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs amid concerns about how they would be used in the southern Gaza city of Rafah at that time.
Why de-escalation training and communication matters when federal agents police city streets
WEXLER: Look, what would it take for both sides to ratchet it down? But I think that starts, honestly, with ICE sort of saying look, let's step back, and let's look at how we're doing these kind of cases. How can we do them differently? And if this was a local police department, they would be reaching out to the community. They would get the community involved. They would say, we need you. We need to build trust. But when you have federal agents coming into a community, they can sometimes come off as an occupying army. And in American policing, that's not what we've learned. We know, you know, communication, trust, all of those things are essential.
WEXLER: I mean, that's a good point. American police have recognized it's important for them to have their name, their ID, to be visible, to communicate. American police wear body-worn cameras. All of these efforts have been to try to regain trust and legitimacy with the community. I think when you go into these situations masked, it creates this image - somehow, whatever they're doing is not legitimate. And look, they have a difficult job. I don't envy ICE agents. I think, though, when you put them in these positions and you put masks on their face, and they're not communicating, they have no relationship with the community, it really becomes almost, you know, a recipe for disaster.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Trump says he shuts eyes in Cabinet meetings because they're 'boring as hell'
President Donald Trump explained that he closes his eyes during Cabinet meetings because he finds them extremely boring, and his aides say he is still listening. He defended his health, saying he feels as fit as 40 years ago, and White House staff described his eye‑closing as a thinking posture rather than dozing.
Trump Finally Admits Why He Was Sleeping in All Those Cabinet Meetings
https://newrepublic.com/post/205695/trump-admits-asleep-cabinet-meetings
After months of denials, President Trump has finally admitted that he has been falling asleep during Cabinet meetings.
In an interview with New York magazine published Monday, Trump said that he closed his eyes during those meetings because they were “boring as hell.”
It’s a stark admission in an article about Trump’s health that the president agreed to in an attempt to quash negative reports about his age and his visibly declining mental and physical fitness. The president previously claimed to be “resting” or “blinking” his eyes, despite having fallen asleep multiple times in full view of the press and public: in the middle of his own military parade, while meeting foreign leaders, and four different times in the month of December.
Much of the article is Trump telling doctors, staffers, and members of his Cabinet to brag to writer Ben Terris about how healthy and energetic he is. At one point during his interview, he turned to his physicians from Walter Reed hospital and asked, “Real fast. Is my health perfect?
Netanyahu’s incendiary accusation against Biden underlines need for the state inquiry he opposes
Unprompted, the PM alleges that an arms embargo instituted by the previous US administration directly caused the loss of soldiers’ lives. It’s a charge he’s never made before, and it finds no echo in the IDF’s war probes
'False and ungrateful': Biden envoy Hochstein slams Netanyahu’s claim US embargo killed IDF troops
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-884837
Former US special envoy Amos Hochstein denounced as untrue Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday remarks that IDF soldiers died in Gaza due to a partial embargo imposed by the Biden administration.
Later on Tuesday, Hochstein told Israeli reporter Barak Ravid, "Netanyahu is both not telling the truth and ungrateful to a president that literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment."
“After more than $20 Billion military support, largest in #Israel's history, 2 aircraft carriers rushed to the region, deterring a massive regional war, defeating Iran missile/drone attack x2, defending israel at most vulnerable moments, after SAVING countless lives of Israelis,” Hochstein wrote in a subsequent post to X/Twitter.
Assume this loutocracy is lying about ICE until proven otherwise
Minneapolis is today’s Birmingham. Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts. It is infuriating, yet grimly sublime, that the current national administration, which will not stop banging on about how it is restoring America’s greatness, is incessantly embarrassing (about Greenland, vaccines and much else). The administration requires an addition to the typologies of government: loutocracy.
For a glimpse of what government of, by and for louts looks like, find on the internet the video, taken by a citizen in Minneapolis, in which a participant in the excitement of a melee — tear gas and other instruments for combating citizens — exclaims: “It’s like ‘Call of Duty’! So cool huh?” “Call of Duty” is a video game, away from which some new agents were perhaps lured by the signing bonuses, some up to $50,000, that have fueled the agency’s breakneck expansion.
Policing is a hard, dangerous profession. Done well, it demands of its practitioners discipline and judgment, and deserves from society a respect approaching reverence. The current administration, by erasing the distinction between police work and military operations — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing.
This is unsurprising. In a July 2017 speech to a law enforcement audience, President Donald Trump urged police, “don’t be too nice” to suspects taken into custody. The International Association of Chiefs of Police responded tartly:
Some administration louts have said that the most recent (as of this writing) person killed in Minneapolis by a federal officer was a “would-be assassin” and, of course, a “domestic terrorist.” Because Republicans control congressional committee gavels, and because today’s president controls congressional Republicans, there will be no oversight of ICE’s rampages. The Senate, which disgraced itself by confirming Noem and others unqualified for Cabinet positions, is especially unlikely to suddenly acquire the inconvenience of a conscience.
So, expect more killings, and more political smearing of the victims. That ICE’s disgraces will continue is, in its revolting way, a promise kept: loutocracy.
Notorious NYC pedo nearly walks free — till he ‘forgets’ details of his crimes at hearing, infuriating ADA
A notorious Brooklyn Hasidic pedophile nearly walked free during a resentencing Tuesday — till he pretended to forget details of his crimes and the furious prosecutor reversed course and pushed for more time.
Nechemya Weberman ended up with a sentence slashed down from 103 years to 18 years, although with time served, that amounts to just five years left on the clock for the pedo — and with good behavior, he could be out by 2028.
Weberman, a former counselor at a Williamsburg yeshiva now in his 60s, appeared vivacious, smiling and jovial on video feed from the maximum-security Shawangunk Prison in upstate New York — despite his supporters painting an image of a feeble man at death’s door.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office — under pressure from some members of the convict’s religious community for years — was prepared to effectively push to free the convicted sicko, having sought the resentencing on the grounds his 103-year stint was excessive and that he had already served enough time.
But Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis changed course mid-hearing when Weberman claimed to forget the gory details of his misdeeds.