Donald Trump and maga Republicans including Senator Susan Collins must stop illegal ICE raids in Maine- Gestapo Alert!

OPINION | Speaker Fecteau: ICE activities in Maine do not match our state’s moral values February 12, 2026 ~ Randy Seaver
By RYAN FECTEAU, Special to the Gazette

"What has been happening outside the State House, and in our own community here in Biddeford, is anything but normal.”

Augusta ME- A new legislative session is now underway in Augusta, and there are many pressing matters in front of us that impact Biddeford residents and Mainers from all over. 

Whether addressing Maine’s housing crisis to overcoming federal funding cuts to important programs like support for SNAP (supplemental nutrition) and healthcare, we have a lot of work to do to make sure Maine families can get ahead and stay ahead.

While our legislative work progresses with the normal cadence of public hearings, work sessions, and floor votes, what has been happening outside the State House, and in our own community here in Biddeford, is anything but normal.

I was dismayed by the surge of ICE agents in our state under the grotesque title of ‘Operation Catch of the Day’. 

These (evil Gestapo style) agents were shirking good policing standards in favor of warrantless, indiscriminate, and quota-driven detentions. I know their actions sowed fear in our community, especially for people of color. It was painful to hear from friends, including those who are lifelong U.S. citizens, who feared they could be profiled and detained based entirely on the color of their skin. 

So many are now carrying their “papers” (e.g., a birth certificate or passport). Is this America❓😢

Moreover, the surge of (evil) ICE agents and their actions were completely inconsistent with Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “go after criminals”. The headlines told the true story: whether restaurant workers at Kobe in Biddeford, or corrections officers at Cumberland and York Counties, or a civil engineer with a work visa, this “immigration crackdown” appears less focused on criminals and more about inciting fear and terror among people who came here to chase the promise of America: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I was horrified at the news 💢of a single mom snatched by agents after dropping her daughter off at Biddeford Primary school, and the arrest of Marcos Gaspar Da Silva, who worked on a home renovation project for me. He’s highly rated on the handyman app Thumbtack, because, as I learned, he is hardworking and diligent.

While politicians in DC may say that the “surge” or “enhanced operations” have ended, the devastation left in the wake of ICE’s actions is far from over. ICE agents are still operating in Maine. Families are still seeking information on loved ones who continue to be detained. Lawyers are still trying to connect with their clients as those clients are shuffled among detention centers outside Maine and across the country. Our neighbors in Biddeford and in Maine are still fearful of going outside, of simply being seen in our community, because they worry they could be next.

If what’s happening in Maine wasn’t enough, Mr. Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, was killed by an ICE agent just a few weeks ago, at least the fourth shooting fatality linked to immigration enforcement since Trump returned to the Oval Office. The Trump Administration hurriedly made public comments that suggested Mr. Alex Pretti was going to carry out a mass shooting against ICE. Of course, this assertion unravels when you see with your own eyes the video of Alex with his hands down on the pavement, surrounded by six or more ICE agents, while he was being shot. Alex is shot just moments after a different agent removes Alex’s gun from a holster. Alex was exercising his Second Amendment rights and had a permit to carry. It didn’t matter. He was killed. (Ms. Renee Good was also murdered😰)

These operations across our country are not making us safer. What we are seeing is inconsistent with safety. There is a reason why we are a nation of laws. There is a reason why warrants are required to conduct searches and arrests. These things demand precision and liability. The rogue, indiscriminate, inhumane, and brutish nature of these ICE operations means innocent and lawful people are being wrongfully detained. It means this agency’s credibility is now nonexistent.

In the legislature, we’ve taken action to protect the rights of Mainers. This fall, LD 1971 became law, ensuring that workers are not detained, investigated, arrested, or searched by state, county, and local law enforcement officers solely for immigration enforcement purposes. And this session, LD 2106 proposes to require a valid, judge-signed warrant for immigration enforcement in sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, daycares, and libraries.

These are uncertain and perilous times. I’ll be honest, it can feel hopeless to see such federal abuses of power and have little oversight. However, I am proud of the ways in which Mainers across our state are standing up for their neighbors, and making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome to bring their reckless tactics here to foment fear and chaos. These are the moments where we show the best of who we are. These are the moments where we conquer hate with love, fear with hope, and stand strong against a tide that seeks to weaken the pillars of our constitutional republic. 

These are the moments that define us❗

.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans enabling right wing evilism and destroying our nation's Constitutional Democracy

What Happens When a Megalomaniac* Fails❓Donald Trump is failing, but as he circles the drain he is creating a political black hole whereby our once Constitutional Democracy can be absorbed by right wing evilism.

The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Donald Trump and “autocratic backfire.” With Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos

*A person who is obsessed with their own power.

An echo opinion published in the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah, (originally in The New York Times):  A year into Donald Trump’s second term, friends who live outside of the United States continue to express shock at the news that comes from this country, often mixed with concern for my safety. 

Nevertheless, I shrug. Even those of us in the United States who oppose this administration’s illegal actions have a way of (unfortunately) normalizing them. Recently, I saw a news release in my inbox: a new filing in the legal case against the construction of the giant immigrant detention facility in Florida. I — like many other Americans, it seems — had almost forgotten about Alligator Alcatraz.

In Europe, attention has been unwavering. Journalists are writing articles and making documentaries about America building a concentration camp. On these shores, we have simply become a country that builds concentration camps. It’s only one of the changes we have absorbed in the last year.

We have become a country where people are disappeared by a paramilitary force that hunts them down in their apartments, on city streets and country roads, and even in the courts. Less than a year ago, videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests would go viral and social media posts about ICE sightings would send chills down our spines. Now even the most high-profile detentions have faded from view: Who has been released❓ Who has been deported❓ Who is still missing❓ Who can keep track❓

We are now a country where a person can be summarily executed in public for protesting that paramilitary force. After an ICE agent killed Ms. Renee Good by shooting her three times at point-blank range in Minneapolis on January 7, Trump, Vice President JD Vance (who is a Roman Catholic convert) and other federal officials said the shooting was justified 🤥as an act of self-defense (the videos show otherwise) and pointed to Good’s ostensible affiliation with left-wing groups — apparently affirming that protest is now punishable by death in America.

We have become a country whose federal government deploys military and paramilitary forces in the streets of its major cities, terrorizing the residents in the guise of protecting them. A foreign observer taking stock of the United States could describe us as a nation on the brink of civil war. But we can barely keep current the list of cities where troops have been or still are in the streets: Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans. The number of armed federal agents deployed to Minneapolis may now be five times the size of the city’s police force.

We are a country whose government is attacking its universities, defunding research, reversing scientific advances, assaulting museums and hollowing out cultural institutions. Few of those attacks — carried out in broad daylight, announced in executive orders, extolled in speeches and put on display in giant metal letters — meet meaningful resistance. We are making ourselves stupider.

Now, under Donald Trump's evilism, we are a nation that demonstratively tramples on international laws. 

Our military bombs a different nation every few weeks, commits murder on the high seas and removes foreign political leaders by force. Our government threatens the world, including our allies, with its imperial ambitions.💢❗

We are a country ruled by a megalomaniac whose views are openly hateful and proudly ignorant, whose avarice knows no bounds and whose claim to power is absolute, according to our Supreme Court. Foreign leaders try to appease him with flattery and curry his favor with gifts. It rarely works to temper his appetite or even catch his attention, but it’s seemingly all they can do.

To be sure, some elements of our current condition predate Trump. This country has long maintained the world’s largest carceral system, and one of the least humane in the Western world; it formed the foundation for the concentration camps. Police executions of Black people have long been a pattern. The origins of ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, conceived as a secret police force, go back to 9/11. The culture wars date to at least the 1980s. And disregarding international law, playing the world’s heavily armed police officer, has been a long-standing bipartisan tradition — as have increasingly hostile, restrictive immigration policies. The presidency itself has been growing less transparent and more powerful for at least a couple of decades.

I am not arguing that what we have become this year is just more of the same. Few people would make that argument anymore. But, the truth is, even though we are taught to think about history as a series of definitive turning points with specific dates — wars, revolutions, assassinations, declarations of independence and decrees announcing martial law — no transformation is instant or total. 

Horrific❗This Trumpzi administration moved at breakneck speed. And still, it hasn’t broken everything, at least, not yet.

We are still a nation with a robust civil society. Lawyers fought the administration in court. People rallied against Trump’s usurpation of power and organized to protect their neighbors from ICE. But, Trump’s attacks on universities, his assault on the judiciary, and his threats against nonprofits and philanthropies have already altered the way civil society functions. The universities and the foundations aren’t what they were a year ago, and neither is the judiciary, where so much civil society work is concentrated. And, the execution of Ms. Renee Good has surely affected every potential protester’s mental calculus.

We still (sort of) have an independent media. But taking stock of how much the media landscape has changed is sobering. Even before the 2024, election, the owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times curtailed the independence of their editorial pages. 

Soon after the election, ABC News and then the parent company of CBS News paid millions of dollars to settle what certainly appeared to be frivolous lawsuits filed by Trump. (He filed several more, including one against The New York Times, and another against 20 individual members of the Pulitzer Prize Board, which includes Times journalists.) Now, under new ownership, CBS is rapidly transforming itself into a Trump-friendly network.

Autocrats destroy the free press in at least two ways: by cracking down, as Trump has done through lawsuits and regulatory pressure, and by reapportioning access to information. In October, the Trump administration effectively kicked legacy media outlets out of the Pentagon, replacing them with loyal journalists and influencers. The media, like civil society, is much diminished compared with what it was a year ago.

We still have elections. But, how free and fair will the 2026, elections be❓ Trump doesn’t carry a grudge just against the election authorities of many states; he made that grudge a centerpiece of his 2024, campaign. Since he returned to office, his administration has taken a series of executive actions and filed a series of lawsuits aimed at restricting access to the polls, purging voter rolls, limiting the independence of local election authorities and generally laying the groundwork for the systematic intimidation of both voters and election officials.

States have joined this effort. Florida is cracking down on voter registration drives. Ohio and other states introduced restrictive voter ID laws. Georgia limited poll hours and banned providing food or water to people standing in line to vote. Texas gerrymandered a map that threatens to disenfranchise Black, and Latino voters and may wipe five Democratic congressional seats out of existence. Plus, the Supreme Court allowed this controversial new map to be used in the 2026, midterms. Add to this Trump’s threat to deploy the military to deal with the “enemy from within” during the elections on the one hand, and his promise to send Americans what amounts to a bribe — $2,000 checks “toward the end of the year” — and you have the prospect of elections that are far less free and a lot less fair than the last ones.

As for the next presidential election, Trump made his intentions clear: He is not planning to leave his throne. He may look for a pretext to cancel the vote. (When Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told him that Ukraine can’t have an election during the war, Trump visibly lit up: “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”)

Trump may find a way to invalidate the vote after the election — he is laying the groundwork for such an illegal move since his first term. Even if he doesn’t, it is foolish to think that this iteration of our national nightmare will end in three years.

One term for regimes that maintain the trappings of democracy, such as legislatures, courts and elections, but use them primarily as decoration is “electoral authoritarianism.” This is what we are becoming.

It matters what we call things — what we call ourselves. It matters for wonky reasons like reading the polls: Public opinion functions differently in democratic and nondemocratic societies. But it matters more for how we think about the future. We can’t count on change being brought about by elections when we can’t count on elections. We can’t count on the freedoms and resources we enjoy today to still be available to us tomorrow.

Ask anyone who has lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom. In Russia, mass protest used to be possible. (The first time people got prison terms for peaceful protest, in 2012, I wrote a whole book about it.) Then, mass protest became impossible, and the only option was what we called the one-person picket: a person standing alone with a sign. Then people started getting arrested for standing alone with a blank piece of paper, then for “liking” something on social media.

Russian journalists used to know that they could write freely as long as they stuck to culture and avoided politics; now a person can get arrested for performing a tune by a banned songwriter.

Of course, the United States is not Russia — or (not yet) Hungary, or Venezuela, or Israel, or any of the many other democracies that have turned or are turning themselves into autocracies. 

But, now is the time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways other countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems, limited their media freedom and built concentration camps. The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

America does not have an Attorney General she is actually a shape shifter something a cat might find to drag in- Impeach Bondi!

Echo editorial board opinion published by The New York Times:

A direct quote from the despicable Pam Bondi’s hearing. Can someone please explain the connection between the Dow being “over 50k” and getting justice for Epstein’s victims… because I’m stumped❗Christina Lorey's Post

"Blondie-Bondi" hearing in the House Judiciary Committee room this week (February 2026) offered a grim tableau of the state of American justice. Sitting in the gallery were victims of Jeffrey Epstein, women who have waited decades for clarity and accountability. Sitting before them was Attorney General Pam Bondi. When offered the opportunity to apologize to these women for the Department of Justice’s disastrous handling of the Epstein files, Ms. Bondi didn’t just decline; she sneered. Instead, she demanded that Democrats apologize to Donald Trump.💢❗

She proceeded to subject committee members from both parties to schoolyard taunts. She called the ranking member a “washed-up, loser lawyer.” She derided Thomas Massie — a Kentucky Republican who helped force the release of the Epstein documents after Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi had kept them hidden — as a “failed politician.” And at one point, in a bizarre non sequitur, she responded to a question she did not like by boasting that the Dow Jones industrial average had surpassed 50,000 points.

"Blondie-Bondi’s" performance was more than just political theater. It was a final indignity in a process that has victimized Epstein’s victims all over again. Under the guise of transparency, the Justice Department has managed to expose the victims to further humiliation while shielding the powerful behind a wall of redactions.
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The department’s release of these files has been dominated by incompetence. "Blondie-Bondi" has long had the authority to make them public, but she spent months refusing and yielded only after Congress forced her hand. 

Then, her department was tasked with a clear mandate: release the information while protecting the victims’ privacy, national security and active investigations. Instead, in a grotesque failure, the D.O.J. uploaded dozens of unredacted images to its website, including nude photographs of young women and possibly teenagers. 

As Annie Farmer, a survivor who testified against Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s evil partner and associate, noted, it is “hard to imagine a more egregious way of not protecting victims.” "Blondie-Bondi’s "department shattered the trust of women who had already been betrayed by the legal system once before.

Yet observe the Justice Department’s selective efficiency: While it was careless with the dignity of survivors, it has been more fastidious about protecting the reputations of some members of the elite. Mr. Massie and Representative Ro Khanna, the Californian who has also been central to the release of the documents, have reviewed the unredacted files, and they report that nearly 80 percent of the material remains hidden, including the identities of six wealthy, powerful men. The Justice Department has not even offered a convincing public explanation for these redactions. The Trump administration’s history of disingenuousness around the Epstein files — and its use of the Justice Department to protect political allies and investigate perceived enemies — offers ample reason to be skeptical. This appears to be a weaponized document dump disguised as a reckoning.

A close reading of the released emails suggests that what is being protected is the comfort of a class of people who believed they were untouchable. The files released reveal a merito-aristocracy that traded favors, influence and access. They depict a transactional world where Kathryn Ruemmler, a former White House counsel for Barack Obama, could joke with a registered sex offender, strategize about her career prospects and accept gifts of designer bags.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, claimed he “barely had anything to do” with Epstei,n but in fact visited his private island. We read of elites seeking entry to golf clubs, advice on dating,
introductions to celebrities and college admission for  their children.

The files reveal a barter economy of powerful people who, at best, looked the other way. As Anand Giridharadas has noted, these documents show us “how the elite behave when no one is watching.” They reveal a world where character is irrelevant and connection is everything.

Donald Trump’s role in the selective release deserves attention. While he has railed against the swamp, his administration continues to hide vast amounts of Epstein information. Donald Trump's own history with Epstein apparently included a bizarre birthday note wishing that “every day be another wonderful secret.” And some of the redactions involved Donald Trump. 

Americans cannot accept vague excuses for protecting the identities of Epstein’s associates. A two-tiered justice system that coddles the powerful and revictimizes the vulnerable is a violation of American values. The survivors in that hearing room deserved an apology. More than that, they deserve the truth about Epstein and his disgusting friends, unspun and fully exposed.

P.S. King Charles III even disowned Andrew, his own brother❗

King Charles III's brother Andrew officially no longer a prince
Andrew is the third-eldest child of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Land Fills of American United! Let's name them all after Donald Trump! Creative idea from Wisconsin should go viral!

Echo opinion letter published in CapTimes, in Madison, Wisconsin:

Dear Editor- We are failing Donald Trump. Although he is a shy human being, reluctant to generate publicity about himself, he has expressed a desire to add his name to public institutions. The Kennedy Center. Dulles Airport. He has expressed a thoughtful wish to have them named after him.

Dane County, Wisconsin, so far, is failing in its naming duty. 

We should rise to the occasion. Right now, a local site has a dull and uninspiring name: The Dane County Landfill. How boring. How jejune. By acclamation, the site should be renamed the Donald Trump Landfill. Sure, there is a chance small-minded people may call it the Trump Dump. So petty of them.🤣

If, for some obscure reason, our president objects to the naming of the landfill and sues the county for his traditional $10 billion, substitute names can replace our original request: The Donald J. Throw Away, The Orange Cheeto Trash Seato. (Can we suggest a Name That Trump Trash Site Contest❓)

It may be that other municipalities have sites for which a name change would be appropriate. Most towns have trash repositories, rendering plants or automobile cemeteries.

Dare to dream.

From Eric Schulenburg in Madison, Wisconsin 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are clearly in violation of the Constitution's Emolument's Law Article II Section 4

Echo opinion letter published in the Baltimore Sun, in Maryland:  Trump has set new record for grift

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge1X5B_51E8

It is widely reported that among Donald Trump’s family business ventures since he was reelected president in 2024 was a $500 million investment by the United Arab Emirates in the family’s crypto business (“Politics 101: Recognizing nonpartisan opportunities,” Feb. 10).

Trump is no ordinary grifter. Rather, Trump does corruption on a scale that has previously never been known in U.S. politics❗ 

But, that’s not all. 💢The UAE got something out of their generosity toward the Trump family that was very important to them and their Chinese friends — hundreds of thousands of advanced artificial intelligence computer chips that could not be purchased by non-U.S. parties prior to Trump’s 2025, inauguration.

Trump’s White House counsel does not dispute that these transactions occurred. Instead, he defends them by claiming that Trump followed “ethical principles” when he made the deals. Ethical principles❓ Trump❓

From Benjamin Rosenberg, in Baltimore

P.S. Emoluments Clause❓  

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must fire Attorney General Pam Bondi for her gross neglect towards Epstein victims

Echo Letter to the Editor of The New York Times :

Re “Combative Bondi Grilled Over Epstein Documents” (news article, Feb. 12):

Maine Writer question for Ms. Bondi, does she understand that child trafficking and😢rape of minors are criminally serious crimes❓

I made the mistake of watching Attorney General Pam Bondi testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, (February 11, 2026) . If I was concerned about the state of our union before, now I’m downright depressed.

I’m an independent, tired of the gridlock between the parties. While it is to be expected that Republicans will try to put the best face on a flawed administration (lipstick on a pig

❓🐷) , it is frightening 😨❗ to watch the head of our criminal justice system display such wildly sycophantic supplication to Donald Trump and unbridled animosity to any and all critics.

Loyalty is one thing. Lack of executive accountability is another. 

Am I wrong to fear that it heralds the unraveling of our democracy before our very eyes❓❓👀

From John Weaver in Lafayette, California.

P.S. Incompetent AG Pam Bondi is a disaster, she looks like a wrung out old rag or something the cat 🐈would find to drag in.  

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are controlling main stream media following the tyrants evil instruction manual

Dear  Friends,  Once you begin surrendering to Trump, he always wants more. You can’t appease a tyrant.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they depress.

Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the kind of work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

Echo essay published by Robert Reich in Substack.

Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to❓ Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office❓

Hastey’s criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-“woke” opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief CBS’s News, unveiled her “21st century” vision at a town hall meeting. Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn’t like it.

Since then, at least six out of CBS Evening News’s twenty producers have accepted buyouts.

At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. 

In the latest tranche of Epstein Files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including an email in which he tells Epstein that “p—y is, indeed, low carb.”

In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “We love America” should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News.

Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel’s justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that “Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas.”

Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a “60 Minutes” report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, hours before it was set to air.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, had accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

The segment later aired on January 8, drawing in over 5 million viewers.

The story CBS posted about Ms. Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis reported that “The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Ms. Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

No identifiable source was given for CBS’s assertion of “internal bleeding.” A CBS News staffer reported “huge internal concern” that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked.

Weiss doesn’t exactly report to Donald Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely-understood threat that he’ll wreak havoc if it doesn’t do what he wants.

As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.”

Perhaps CBS News didn’t edit Dokoupil’s rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “‘if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”

You see the way Trump now controls CBS News? Dokoupil is Bari Weiss’s newly-minted anchor. Bari Weiss is David Ellison’s newly-minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father’s (Larry Ellison) newly-minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump’s, who contributes to Trump’s super PAC. And Trump? He has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison.

Among David Ellison’s first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and appoint Weiss.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But, that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS’s investors.


America can survive without a “60 Minutes” it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post, that Jeff Bezos censored and whose newsroom he just gutted.

But, at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.

In contrast to Trump's suck-up of CBS News, the courageous CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow, from April 13, 1954  HERE.  https://youtu.be/z6j6iTN7Tkw

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must support legal hard working American immgrants

‘Not American Enough’😟
Trump’s immigration crackdown has Latinos wondering if they belong in his America. By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez published in The Atlantic.

Veronica was born in California, into a family with roots in Mexico. She flies the American flag outside her home on national holidays, and proudly belts out “The Star-Spangled Banner” with her hand over her heart at sporting events. 

Sitting in the bleachers at her son’s baseball game last month, Veronica started chatting with another mom in Spanish. Then she stopped and looked around, wondering if other parents might suspect that the women were undocumented and report them to immigration authorities. Is this going to get me in trouble❓ she recalled thinking.

Veronica’s concern has only deepened. Two weeks ago, after watching immigration agents arrest and murder two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, she talked with her 14-year-old son about how he should behave if law enforcement asked whether he was in the country legally. If it happened when they were together, she told him, agents would be more likely to focus on her because of her darker complexion. “I’m a U.S. citizen,” she reminded him. “You’re going to see me again.”

Similar conversations are taking place around the country in group chats, classrooms, churches, and at dinner tables among American-born Latinos who feel powerless amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They are scared of being detained or mistakenly deported, and are contending with their identity and place in a country whose highest court has given permission to agents to use a person’s race, ethnicity, or accent as a factor in immigration stops.

About two-thirds of U.S.-born Latinos told the Pew Research Center that they feel their situation has worsened over the past year; nearly half of those queried said they feel less safe in their area because of the mass-deportation blitz. Those I spoke with (all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity or allowed only their first name to be used because they fear retribution) said they are changing their habits. They carry photos of their birth certificate or passport and have saved lawyers’ numbers in their phones. They’re sharing videos of Americans being stopped by authorities and are being tipped off about immigration raids by friends and clients. School administrators are preparing for immigration-enforcement operations at pickup and drop-off. One woman told me that her son came home from school upset because he had a Spanish first name. He asked why he wasn’t given an English-sounding name, like his brother.

Many say they are offended that their legal status, and by extension, their patriotism, could be questioned. Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic state representative from Texas who was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley and is running for governor, said that everywhere she goes, Latino voters tell her they are insulted by the way the mass-deportation blitz has been carried out. “We love our country; we feel just as American as anyone, because we are,” she told me. “To be treated as not American enough, not Texan enough, is just a slap in the face.”

In Phoenix, Arizona, where I live and where 42 percent of the population identifies as Latino, people have distinct memories of the last time immigration-enforcement operations were carried out this aggressively. Then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had his deputies flood heavily Latino neighborhoods about 18 years ago, stopping and detaining people suspected of being in the country illegally. The sweeps, followed by a 2010, state law that was intended to crack down on undocumented immigrants, caused pervasive fear, not just among people who were in the country unlawfully.

Sadly, the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign has now put much of the sprawling metropolis on edge, including residents who are American citizens. When an entourage of ICE vehicles was spotted at a park where youth-sports practices take place, word quickly spread on a neighborhood social-media page and in family texts: Stay away from the park.

One 27-year-old who works in financial services told me he changed the route he drives to work to avoid ICE-marked SUVs. A small-business owner worries that her citizenship might be stripped because her mother came to the U.S. unlawfully. 

One prominent local restaurateur, whose family’s history in this country spans generations, told me he now lives with an undercurrent of anxiety, especially when his family travels through places that might have immigration checkpoints or when he gets close to the U.S.-Mexico border. “I’m the darkest one in my family,” he said. “I always turn down the music, I’m always very serious when we cross borders.” His wife and children have made fun of him. “You guys don’t understand,” he told them.

Students are particularly affected, their parents and educators told me; some have asked whether college scholarships could be rescinded because of their ethnicity, and some now prefer remote learning because of the possibility of raids. 😢
Robert is a dark-skinned 17-year-old who plays soccer, is learning Spanish, and gets good grades. His great-great-great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the late 1890s; Robert was born in Arizona. But he told me he’s started thinking that other people don’t believe he belongs in the U.S. He hears the demeaning words some classmates use when talking about politics, and said he often feels hostility from others because of the color of his skin.
He recently dug up a picture of his passport to have at the ready in case authorities demand to know where he was born.

In fact, his parents warned him to stay under the speed limit to avoid drawing attention from police. Robert said he has drifted away from friends who have said they support Trump’s immigration policies.

“All of this stuff brought me to the question of: Am I proud to be an American?” he said. If he were to leave the U.S., he wondered, where would he go?  “Do I want to be called an American? Is that a source of pride or is that a source of shame?” He isn’t sure. Recently, he dug up a picture of his passport to have at the ready in case authorities demand to know where he was born. His parents warned him to stay under the speed limit to avoid drawing attention from police. Robert said he has drifted away from friends who have said they support Trump’s immigration policies.

“All of this stuff brought me to the question of: Am I proud to be an American?” he said. If he were to leave the U.S., he wondered, where would he go? “Do I want to be called an American? Is that a source of pride or is that a source of shame?” He isn’t sure.

A man who served in the military, and whose 26-year-old daughter, born in Germany, has dual citizenship, told me she recently asked whether she could be deported. Although his family has been in the U.S. for more than 100 years, he didn’t know what to say. “They’re doing lots of crazy stuff,” he told her. “I don’t know what could happen.” She asked him for help getting a U.S. passport, and he agreed. Before hanging up the phone, he told his daughter that he should be her first call if she ever ran into trouble with immigration authorities.

His 26-year-old daughter, born in Germany, has dual citizenship, told me she recently asked whether she could be deported. Although his family has been in the U.S. for more than 100 years, he didn’t know what to say. “They’re doing lots of crazy stuff,” he told her. “I don’t know what could happen.” She asked him for help getting a U.S. passport, and he agreed.

But, before he hung up the phone, he told his daughter that he should be her first call if she ever ran into trouble with immigration authorities.

Stoking helplessness and fear may be part of the point of Trump’s crackdowns and (evil❗) rhetoric, the experts who study cultural identity and politics told me. The administration’s tactics send a message about who belongs in the country, “who is morally worthy, and who is not,” Tomás R. Jiménez, a sociology professor at Stanford University, told me.

The alienation that message creates—particularly in combination with extreme partisanship—has the potential to reshape the way Americans interact with their neighbors, schools, employers, churches, and democratic institutions. Politically, it could threaten gains made by Trump and the Republican Party among Latino voters, who helped return him to the White House. Latino voters—like most people—want to feel like they are getting ahead economically, but recent polling shows that they feel like Trump and Republicans haven’t kept their promises to lower prices. In a special election in Texas this month, a Democrat won a state-Senate seat in a deep-red district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024, a shift powered by Latino voters turned off by Trump’s immigration operations and their economic situations. Even when Arizona was reliably red, it placed limits on hard-line immigration enforcement.

The evil Arpaio’s efforts in the early 2000s, followed by the state law, activated a generation of young Latinos who helped oust Arpaio in 2016, even as Trump won Arizona.

Electoral defeat could await Republicans who don’t distance themselves from Trump’s immigration raids, Richard Herrera, a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University, told me. “When people feel betrayed or feel abandoned,” he said, “they’re more likely to look for alternatives.”

The many people I spoke with told me the scenes from Minneapolis have made them feel more civically connected, because their rightful place in their country is at stake. After a popular chain of restaurants in Maricopa County was raided by immigration agents late last month, the teenagers of several parents I spoke with joined thousands of other high schoolers in and around Phoenix to march out of school. They will soon be old enough to vote. Among them was Veronica’s son.

Americans must express anger against Donald Trump's maga evil racist rants and hideous social media messages

Letter to the Editor: Racist Imagery Threatens the Moral Core of Our Democracy published in Door County Pulse,  in Wisconsin, on February 11th, 2026.

Donald Trump posted a racially obscene image on his (fake social❗) social media platform depicting former President Barack Obama and former beautiful First Lady Michelle Obama with their faces placed on the bodies of primates. 

I am appalled and deeply disturbed that such an evil racist image was posted and that when questioned, Trump reportedly indicated he had done nothing wrong.

This is one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racial attacks in our history. When someone entrusted with immense authority amplifies such imagery, it does more than offend – it signals to the world that the erosion of human dignity is permissible.

We must ask ourselves: Who are we, as a people❓ What vision of humanity do we uphold❓ We must call Mr. Trump out. We must vote him and those who support this behavior out of office. Even more importantly, we must reclaim the moral ground on which our civic life depends. Let your friends, colleagues, and neighbors know that you stand for the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, not because it is politically convenient, but because it is ethically necessary. 

Our Declaration of Independence, which states that “all men [people] are created equal,” offers not simply a historical phrase, but rather a philosophical claim about the nature of human existence. It asserts that dignity is not granted by power, wealth, or status – it is intrinsic. It belongs to all of us or it belongs to none of us. To abandon this belief is to abandon the moral architecture of our democracy.

Let your friends and neighbors know ❗ This hideous racist (evil) behavior from Trump, about our beloved nation is simply and totally unacceptable. We must all hold fast to the values that make us human and to the ideals that make this nation worth striving for.

From Trish Black in  Sister Bay, Wisconsin

Maine high school students protest ICE on the Sagadahoc Bridge in Bath

Topsham Maine - Mt. Ararat Students Protest ICE. Maine Senator Susan Collins alert❗ She voted to fully 💲fund evil ICE. 😕😞

Reported "Local Scoop", in Topsham Dems News: 

On Monday, February 2nd, 2026, students from the Midcoast area, organized by Midcoast Youth Activists, including Morse High School, Lincoln Academy, Brunswick High School and Mt Ararat descended upon the Sagadahoc Bridge to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in Maine that has so frightened the entire immigrant community, most of whom are already citizens, legal residents, or have work authorization and live here legally.

Mt. Ararat Senior, Ashby Hayward, as a three-season athlete and Theater participant, is an all-around ride-giver at Mt. Ararat. He coordinated rides to the event, reaching out to other friends with cars and connecting them to students who needed rides. He figures he coordinated about 50 to 60 rides to the protest, only to see initial plans fall through when they could not meet at the school due to the bomb threat that day. But, not to be defeated, Mt Ararat showed up! There were many Topsham students scattered on the bridge who found a way there.

I asked Ashby what drew him to the event. He said “It’s more important than it ever has been that young people use their voice - especially with social media.”

I confessed to him that his generation is surely more literate and effective online than mine. He responded, thinking in part about the videos of ICE’s brutality, “My generation was raised with this technology. The videos make it personal. Friends will switch their beliefs.” He says his generation can see right through propaganda, and finds Trump Administration propaganda incompetent. Though, he says, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish fake videos with the advent of AI technology.  #ICEoutNOW ❗

What was Ashby’s message on the bridge? “It’s so easy nowadays to disconnect and say I don’t need to do anything. None of these problems hit them in the face. But, for others the problems really do hit them in the face. 

We need to care now and not wait until it's in our backyard. We need to love each other and not hate each other. Unlike the Trump Administration.”

On the bridge, I also found Lia, a Mt Ararat Junior. Lia’s message was clear in two words: “ICE OUT❗” Lia said, “This is about protecting our communities. It’s about letting immigrants in this country know that they are safe and that we are willing to stand up and fight for their communities and them. We desperately need to recognize the indigenous and immigrant populations. We have never, ever, been a country that is just white or English-speaking. Diversity is our greatest strength.”

What does Lia hope for the future of this country❓ “We need to change the system to keep the billionaires out of politics and keep a fair distribution of income.”

There were many, many more Mt Ararat students on that bridge,T along with several hundred students from other schools. 

If they are as sharp and centered as Ashby and Lia, there is hope for us all. Their energy and passion were tangible to all who were  there.

Americn media must not normalize Donald Trump and maga Fascist behavior! Use real words to describe the actual crimes!

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/26/the-crime-of-witness-fintan-otoole/

The Crime of Witness Fintan O’Toole

Published in The New York Review of Books:

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence. February 26, 2026 issue
This article was originally published online January 29, 2026, in slightly modified form. —The Editors

Renee Good and Alex Pretti murdered by ICE in Minneapolis

Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.

It is striking that the capital offense for which both Mr. Pretti and Ms, Renee Good, who weeks earlier was shot multiple times at close range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, were summarily executed was the crime of witness.  Ms. Good was watching ICE at work from her car. Pretti was filming Border Patrol agents on the street. Both were engaged in the task that democracies assign to citizens: that of paying close attention to the workings of power. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.

Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. 

Habit, as Samuel Beckett said, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.

First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis,❗ the (illegal) 💢 Trump regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied.

I know, by the way, that this is quite possible. For thirty years, in parts of my native island of Ireland, troops with machine guns crouching in shop doorways or skulking in the back gardens of ordinary houses were so taken for granted that one saw them, if at all, out of the corner of one’s eye. What is always there becomes barely there at all.

This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.

They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax.

The murder of Alex Pretti was in itself an obviously intentional act, but it was also politically deliberate. After the killing of Ms. Renee Good on January 7, 2026, an administration that was not bent on establishing autocracy would have called a halt to the ICE surges. Good’s death would have been treated as a disaster—not just a private calamity but a terrible governmental screwup. Trump would have made clear that it had never been meant to happen.

Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But, in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Ms. Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.

This does not mean that Pretti’s killing was specifically ordered. But the template for it was certainly prepared in advance. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” says Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Here it is a case of justification first, execution afterwards. The license to kill Pretti was issued when Good was redefined as a domestic terrorist attempting to kill an officer.

Pretti’s scarcely cold body was stuffed into this preformulated narrative. He was a thwarted mass killer. Within hours of his murder Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller posted on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Both Gregory Bovino, the then commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, and Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was about to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem used almost the exact same phrase, leaving little doubt that it had been consciously crafted.

The big lie of the threat allegedly posed by Good is here deliberately made bigger. Ms. Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism”; Miller slipped  into the plural, making Mr. Pretti merely one of “the terrorists.” (Since they are unnumbered, they could be legion.) Good was trying to kill one officer. Pretti was planning a massacre—not just of the agents present but of “law enforcement” itself. Trump’s grotesque inflation of language, his bemonstering of opposition politicians, is now fully integrated into the organized street violence of his regime. So it must always be in the authoritarian state: the existential menace can be defeated only if those who embody it can be deprived of their very existences.

It does not matter that this hyped-up story is harder to make credible than the usual kind of official lying that characterizes such killings merely as unfortunate accidents whose true cause is impossible to determine. Getting people to accept a vaguely credible account is a lesser manifestation of absolute power than getting them to accept—or even better, to just shrug their shoulders at—a wildly incredible one.

There is, in much of the American media, a learned habit of shoulder shrugging, a civilized avoidance of calling an occupation an occupation, a lie a lie, a murder a murder. As Jem Bartholomew noted in the Columbia Journalism Review soon after Mr. Pretti’s killing, “The press is still squeamish about directly calling out the administration’s lies.” But this misplaced timidity in fact adds fuel to the flames. When the incendiaries are in the White House and their targets are all legal, institutional, political, civic, and moral restraints on Trump’s ability to do, as he so openly proclaims, “whatever I want,” the deadening of language has fatal consequences.

Thus, even while The New York Times did excellent work in analyzing the video footage of Mr. Pretti’s execution, it initially resorted to the bland conclusion that “videos analyzed by The New York Times appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting.” Appear? As the paper implicitly acknowledged later, the truth is that “videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.” It is good that the instinctive resort to fuzzy circumlocution was eventually overcome, but surely, once the paper’s analysis showed definitively that the administration was brazenly lying about an official murder, that ought to have been the starkest of headlines.

Meanwhile, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal declared that although he did not deserve to be shot dead, “Mr. Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents.” His error was that he “attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents.” It is clear from the rest of the article that the Journal believes the Trump administration to be lying about its unjustified killing of an American citizen, but the import of this otherwise astounding truth is diluted by the suggestion that he was, after all, a fool. In an authoritarian state, who but a fool would try to help a woman who has been pepper-sprayed by the great leader’s shock troops?

The sin of civic “interference” is in fact the saving grace of democracy. Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti and thousands of other citizens have been getting in the way of the armed overthrow of democratic freedoms by doing what journalism is supposed to do: pay attention to the actual, on-the-ground reality. The phone that Mr. Pretti had in his hand was a connection to a communal determination to refuse the narcotic of normalization. The videos that expose the administration’s mendacity about its own use of extreme violence against peaceful dissent are themselves products of the courage to show up, to be there, to see for yourself—the impulses journalists are supposed to value above all others, aside from the use of accurate language to name what you see.

The challenge the videos present is that of uncomfortably incontrovertible evidence—proof of sanctioned executions and of a government’s systematic lying. If the evidence so bravely gathered does not lead to a profound reversal, Trump’s temporary yielding to public outrage (diluting the smear campaign against Mr. Pretti, removing Bovino from Minneapolis, and placing the two officers who shot Mr. Pretti on administrative leave) will be merely a tactical retreat—another stage in the piecemeal habituation of Americans to the arbitrary application of martial law. The name of the condition to which the US will have surrendered itself is written all over Europe’s history books. .