Congressional Cowards is a weekly series highlighting the worst Donald Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, who refuse to criticize him—no matter how disgraceful or lawless his actions.
President Donald Trump got completely owned by European leaders Wednesday, when he was convinced to backtrack on the punitive tariffs he threatened against NATO allies—even though it appears Trump got nothing in return.
President Donald Trump speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21.
Trump claimed that he worked out a "concept of a deal" with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte regarding his obsession with buying Greenland, but he gave zero details about what the alleged plan might entail.
It appears that after making threats and nearly destroying the NATO alliance, Trump’s so-called deal is basically just the status quo of the relationship the United States already has with Greenland—where the U.S. military has had bases for decades.
But, of course, to GOP lawmakers, Trump's dealmaking was nothing short of brilliant.
Rep. Carlos Giménez of Florida declared that Trump "GOT EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED,” calling it, “The Art of the Deal.”
And Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana was equally effusive during an interview on Fox Business.
"The greatest deal maker that we've ever known in the White House," he said.
Meanwhile, Rep. Greg Steube of Florida claimed that Trump's detail-free "deal" on Greenland includes building the so-called Golden Dome missile defense system that Trump is obsessed with.
"President Trump’s framework for a deal in Greenland not only guarantees our protection from China and Russia, but it lays the groundwork for completing the Golden Dome, which is essential for America’s national security and a huge step forward toward a safer world for all," Steube wrote on X.
Even before Trump's TACO on his bizarre Greenland bravado, Republicans were eager to defend his insane threats and obsession with conquering the arctic territory.
During a party at the Kennedy Center Tuesday night, sycophantic Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida cut a cake that was shaped like Greenland and frosted to look like an American flag.
She later shared a photo of the cake and tagged Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a clear act of antagonization.
An image of a Greenland-shaped cake decorated with frosting to resemble the American flag.
Days earlier, as Trump was making threats against Greenland and NATO allies, House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump's dangerous behavior, telling the BBC that he was merely "playing chess, as we say.”
Other gutless Republicans—who claimed that they didn’t support Trump's threats to invade Greenland—said that they wouldn't have done anything about it if he had followed through.
A cartoon by Clay Bennett.
"Look, I'm not going to get into that," Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told CNN when asked if he'd vote to impeach Trump if he invaded Greenland. "The bottom line here is the president is the commander in chief. He's well within his authorities when it comes to foreign policy."
Even Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has been deeply critical of Trump’s Greenland fixation, blamed Trump’s advisers for the mess—not Trump himself.
“The fact that a small handful of ‘advisors’ are actively pushing for coercive action to seize territory of an ally is beyond stupid,” he wrote on X. “It hurts the legacy of President Trump and undercuts all the work he has done to strengthen the NATO alliance over the years.”
Local leaders and Democrats across the country demanded federal immigration officers leave Minnesota after a Border Patrol agent fatally shot a man in Minneapolis and set off clashes with protesters in a city already shaken byanother shooting deathweeks earlier.
The latest shooting has sparked a legal fight over control of the investigation amid the immigration surge that has swept across Minneapolis and surrounding cities.
Video shot by bystanders and reviewed by The Associated Press appears to contradict statements by President Donald Trump’s administration, which said agents fired “defensively” againstAlex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, as he approached them Saturday morning.
Pretti can be seen with only a phone in his hand as he steps between an immigration agent and a woman on the street. No footage appears to show him with a weapon. During the scuffle, agents appear to disarm him after discovering that he was carrying a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, and then opened fire several times. Pretti was licensed to carry a concealed weapon.
In the hours after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti attacked officers, and U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” On X, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called Pretti “a would-be assassin.”
Relatives say they are heartbroken
Pretti’s family said they were “heartbroken but also very angry” at authorities, calling Pretti a kindhearted soul who wanted to make a difference in the world. Relatives were furious at federal officials’ description of the shooting.
“The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed,” the family statement said. “Please get the truth out about our son.”
This undated photo provided by Michael Pretti shows Alex Pretti, the man who was shot by a federal officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 24.
A federal judge has alreadyissued an orderblocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to the shooting, after state and county officials sued.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the lawsuit filed Saturday is meant to preserve evidence collected by federal officials that state authorities have not yet been able to inspect. A court hearing is scheduled for Monday in federal court in St. Paul.
“A full, impartial, and transparent investigation into his fatal shooting at the hands of DHS agents is nonnegotiable,” Ellison said in a statement.
Spokespersons for the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, which are named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Sunday.
Drew Evans, superintendent of the state's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which investigates police shootings, told reporters Saturday that federal officers blocked his agency from the scene of the shooting even after it obtained a signed judicial warrant.
On Sunday morning, though, bureau officers were working at the scene.
The Minnesota National Guard temporarily assisted local police at the direction of Gov. Tim Walz, officials said, with troops sent to the shooting site and a federal building where officers have squared off daily with demonstrators.
But Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Sunday morning on CBS' "Face the Nation" that “it’s back to just the Minneapolis police responding to calls.”
O'Hara said he had seen no evidence that Pretti brandished the pistol, and that the crackdown was exhausting his department.
“This is taking an enormous toll, trying to manage all this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much,” he said.
Gun groups defend right to carry weapon at protests
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem questioned during a news conference Saturday why Pretti was armed. But gun rights groups have noted it's legal to carry firearms during protests.
“Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms — including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement. “These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed.”
A person is pushed back by a federal agent working on the scene in Minneapolis on Jan. 25.
The president weighed in on social media by lashing out at Walz and the Minneapolis mayor.
He shared images of the gun that immigration officials said was recovered and said: “What is that all about? Where are the local Police? Why weren’t they allowed to protect ICE Officers?”
Trump said the Democratic governor and mayor “are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric.”
In a statement, former President Barack Obama called Pretti’s death a “heartbreaking tragedy” and warned that “many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.”
He urged the administration to work with city and state officials to “to avert more chaos and achieve legitimate law enforcement goals.”
“This has to stop,” Obama said.
x
The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was among several Democratic lawmakers demanding that federal immigration authorities leave Minnesota. She also urged Democrats to refuse to vote to fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying via social media: “We have a responsibility to protect Americans from tyranny.”
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer later said that Democrats will not vote for a spending package that includes money for DHS, which oversees ICE. Schumer’s statement increases the possibility that the government could partially shut down Jan. 30 when funding runs out.
Pretti was shot just over a mile from where an ICE officer killed37-year-old Renee Goodon Jan. 7, sparking widespread protests.
Video footage shows shooting
When the Saturday confrontation began, bystander video shows protesters blowing whistles and shouting profanities at federal officers on a commercial street in south Minneapolis.
The videos show Pretti stepping in after an immigration officer shoves a woman. Pretti appears to be holding his phone toward the officer, but there's no sign he's holding a weapon.
The officer shoves Pretti in his chest, and pepper sprays him and the woman.
Soon, at least seven officers are forcing Pretti to the ground. Several officers try to bring the man’s arms behind his back as he appears to resist. An officer holding a canister strikes him near his head several times.
A shot rings out, but with officers surrounding the man, it’s not clear where it came from. Multiple officers back off. More shots are heard. Officers back away, and the man lies motionless on the street.
Bovino, the public face of Trump’s crackdown, was repeatedly pressed on CNN’s Sunday “State of the Union” for evidence that Pretti assaulted law enforcement.
It was “very evident” that Pretti was not following the officers' orders, he said.
“It’s too bad the consequences had to be paid because he injected himself into that crime scene," he said. "He made the decision.”
Protests continue
Demonstrations broke out in several cities across the country after the shooting, including New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
In Minneapolis, protesters converged in the neighborhood where Pretti had been shot despite dangerously cold weather with temperatures around minus 6 degrees (minus 21 Celsius).
An angry crowd screamed profanities at federal officers after the shooting, calling them “cowards” and telling them to go home. Protesters dragged large garbage bins from alleyways to block streets, lighting garbage in at least one on fire.
As darkness fell, hundreds of people mourned quietly by a growing memorial at the site of the shooting. A doughnut shop and a clothing store nearby stayed open, offering protesters a warm place.
By morning, the scene was calm.
Brett Williams, 37, came from the city's suburbs to a morning vigil at the scene.
“I stand in solidarity with a brother whose life was taken too soon,” he said. “He’s standing up for immigrants. We’re all immigrants.”
With magnificent advice if your senator is a Republican:
Actually, I’m gonna disagree a smidge with OPs excellent post here.
I ALSO want those of you in red states screaming at your Senators. And I want you to pretend to be a lifelong republican when you do it. Yell about community and what-about-the-children and “this isn’t what I voted for why are spending billions on this when eggs still cost a million dollars” and yell about shooting a mom on the way from school one week and a nurse who treats veterans the next. About kidnapping a little boy right off the school bus and disappearing him across state lines. About ICE harassing police and law abiding citizens. About how they kidnap 3000 with no warrant and almost all of them are citizens. Call ICE agents every variant of “thug” and “lawless” that you can think of. Tell them you saw the videos and know ICE is lying and think you’re all too stupid to notice. Say you don’t want your government smashing peoples windows and carrying people off and saying they don’t need warrants. About gassing a minivan full of kids and an infant in the hospital.
If they tell you it’s fake you tell them your aunt lives here and is seeing it and has given up the Republican Party forever.
Tell them you didn’t want to believe what those Democrats said about Republicans and feel mad and ashamed and betrayed to see this.
Cause even Republicans here are PISSED OFF.
And every Republican elected in MN knows their party is fuuuuucked as far as MN goes. You can see even many of them posting begging for this to be over.
Your job is to put that fear into YOUR Republicans before this comes to your door.
Remember, you can call after hours to leave a message, and you can email if the phone is too much.
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 23 secrets from Secret Submission Post #994. Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ]. Current Secret Submissions Post:here. Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
The fertility rate for the United States has long been on adownward trendand iscurrently ata historic low. The price of child care, meanwhile, has been steadily rising; itgrew 29%between 2020 and 2024, easily outpacing inflation, according to Child Care Aware of America.
Could those two trends be related? New research and surveys indicate yes.
Ina recent research paper, Boston University economics Ph.D. candidate Abigail Dow finds that when child care prices increase, some American families decide to put off having more children, and many don’t have more children at all.
Dow looked at child care prices across the country in adatasetcompiled and published by the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor with data from 2010 to 2022.
She then isolated a “shock” to child care prices — an event, unrelated to something like a recession or a spike in inflation, that made the cost of care go either up or down. The shock she identified was that when states mandate smaller group sizes and/or lower child to staff ratios, child care prices rise, so she studied what happened to fertility decisions when states passed such regulations.
“My key takeaway is that child care costs are high in the U.S., and I do find they’re a barrier to having children,” Dow said. She found that a 10% increase in the price of child care for children from birth to 2 years old led to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate among women aged 20 to 44. Her research also found that the price increase leads to women delaying when they have children: a 10% increase prompts women to push back their first birth by four months and to extend the time between a first and second child by half a month. Dow found that women’s decisions about whether to have second and third children were particularly hampered by high child care prices.
The findings are strongest for women ages 30 or older. This is, Dow posits, because they have more to lose if they can’t get child care: they’ve invested more time and resources into their careers and likely earn more, making the cost of having to give up on work to care for more children in the absence of affordable child care higher. Younger women have less to lose by having a child and dropping out of the work force if child care can’t be secured.
The research is novel: while there have been studies in European countries which suggest that women rethink having children when child care prices rise, Dow knew that those situations may not be applicable to the U.S., where the government spends much less on child care, it’s a primarily private system, and there is no guarantee of paid family leave. “There wasn’t a robust empirical analysis of: How do child care prices affect fertility rates?” Dow said.
Dow noted that child care prices aren’t the only factor dampening the country’s fertility rate — other research has found that things like housing and health care prices also make an impact. But it’s clear that the cost of raising children is top of mind for American parents when they’re thinking about the sizes of their families. Ina surveyof 3,000 nationally representative respondents by YouGov, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Deseret News released in November, a record share of participants — 71% — said that raising children is unaffordable, a 13 percentage point increase over 2024.
That high cost of raising children was listed as the single most important reason survey respondents offered for why they’ve limited the children they either had or planned to have. That response was twice as prevalent as the next two reasons they gave — a lack of personal desire and a lack of a supportive partner — and for the first time in the survey’s 10-year history, it was the top reason respondents gave.
The survey also found that support for government resources aimed at parents through direct payments and better programs had increased since 2021, and opposition to such interventions was 10 percentage points lower. A majority favor universal day care, while just 18% oppose it. Survey respondents also supported increased tax credits for parents.
“If you think about, ‘What do I have to think about when I’m raising a family for those early years,’ child care is going to be front of mind,” Dow said.
The situation is poised to get worse for Americans considering whether and when to have children. Dow’s data only goes through 2022. Since then, the billions of dollars in pandemic-era federal relief for the child care sector has disappeared. In its wake, states like Arkansas and Indianahave cut backon support for the sector. Indiana stopped enrolling new children in its child care subsidy program, and the state has reduced reimbursement rates for providers, leading more than 100 providers to shutter. Arkansas has also cut provider reimbursement rates, put new subsidy applicants on a waitlist, and instituted new copays for parents who receive vouchers. More of the cost burden will now fall on parents in states that pull back.
Dow cautioned that her research shouldn’t be interpreted as an argument for relaxing regulations in order to bring child care costs down and boost births. “These regulations are really important for child health and safety,” she pointed out. “I’m absolutely not in the business of saying we should be making these regulations more lax purely to make child care more affordable for parents.” But, she said, her research makes it clear that parents, and particularly mothers, make decisions about whether to have children and how many to have based at least in part on whether they can afford child care. “Anything we can do to make child care more affordable seems important from a policy perspective,” she said.
New year, same threats against Greenland from President Donald Trump—creating tension between the United States and its NATO allies. And it’s all because he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Here are some cartoons from the week highlighting Trump’s pathetic obsession with annexing Greenland. Feel free to share more of your favorites in the comments.
What I knew before going in: this is serial-numbers-very-very-very-slightly-filed-off Sidney Crosby/Alexander Ovechkin RPF. There's a lot of sex scenes. There is a cup kiss on ice.
Today's lunch: Scottish Loch Trout Fillets, poached like so, with samphire sauce, served with Ruby Gem potatoes roated in goose fat, sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil with fennel seeds and splashed with tayberry vinegar, and padron peppers.
Nearly an hour passed before Nixon Leal joined our scheduled Zoom interview.
“Ya casi,” he texted via WhatsApp. A Spanish phrase for “almost ready,” I learned. I relayed the message to my editor, Erika Chavez, who would translate the conversation, and she told me the longstanding joke that “ya casi” really means you’re not even close to being ready. A relatable sentiment across languages.
When Leal’s camera flickered on, a growing smile squeezed between his motorbike helmet. The 36-year-old Venezuelan man had spent his day doing mobile deliveries, but he told us there was no time limit for our talk. He had all the time in the world for this conversation.
“Things were so bad that even a foreign action in our territory seemed like the only path left to achieve freedom, because we tried everything ourselves and failed,” Leal told us.
Like millions of other Venezuelanswho have fled the country, Leal had reason to celebrate Maduro’s fall. Back in Venezuela, he had worked with the opposition party, organizing and participating in protests across cities, he told us. But those protests, he said, led to two years, seven months, and 22 days as a political prisoner. (Given the difficulty of obtaining records from Venezuela, Daily Kos could not verify the details of Leal’s sentence.)
“There, I was tortured for the first time, like in books or movies,” he recalled. “They stripped me, threatened me with a stick, saying they would rape me, hung me naked from the ceiling, bent my body backward, put boots on my neck, beat me until I lost vision.”
But the torture didn’t end after his release, he said. Leal told us he was forced to go underground, into hiding to avoid ongoing threats. However, when the Chavistas—or supporters of Maduro—came for his mother and friends, he fled.
“I decided to go to the United States through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama,” he told Daily Kos, which traverses about 100 kilometers of jungle.During the four days and four nights hiking through Panama’s jungle, Leal brought only the bare essentials and had to use the environment around him to survive, he said.
Nixon Leal crossed the treacherous Darien Gap on foot while fleeing to safety in the U.S.
TheDarién Gap claims hundreds of livesper year as desperate South Americans make the journey northward. Between 2018 and 2023, over 250 deaths were reported. In 2024, at least 55 lives were reportedly given to the jungle.
“I drank from rivers until I saw corpses in the water and couldn’t anymore,” Leal told us.
In August 2021, after drifting in canoes, dealing with dodgy coyotes, and evading police, he said he arrived at the Mexico-U.S. border. Today, Leal says he obtained permanent U.S. residency.
Leal’s story is unique to him but not uncommon. As of last June, roughly 1.1 million Venezuelans had arrived in the U.S., and approximately 600,000 used the Temporary Protected Status program, which the Trump administration has since terminated for the nation.
Daily Kos spoke with six men and women who left their lives in Venezuela before the Chavista government—and the deadly environment it fostered—took all that was left. For clarity and length, we’ve included pieces of their stories to contextualize the sentiment across Venezuelans who fled. Due to the nation’s fraught political situation, Daily Kos cannot confirm the accuracy of every detail in the men and women’s stories. Still, we think it is important to share their thoughts and experiences with our audience.
After news of Maduro’s capture broke early that Saturday morning, the response was mixed. There were block parties painting the day and night with yellow, blue, and red—the colors of the Venezuela flag. But angry protesters also hit the streets in both the U.S. and Venezuela, with some demanding the return of Maduro and others opposed to the Trump administration’s incursion into a sovereign nation.
Many on the left, in Venezuela and abroad, called this a gross, illegal misuse of power—outright imperialist. Unlike Venezuelans such as Leal, who were focused on Maduro’s human rights abuses, U.S. President Donald Trump was fixated on the country’s vast oil reserves.And despite Trumpmeeting with opposition leader María Corina Machado on Jan. 15, it is unclear if the president will use U.S. resources to push for a broader change of power. As it stands, Trump has said he would not stand behindMachado, regardless of his newfound participation-trophy-coded Nobel Peace Prize.
“Venezuelans who were hoping for the end of the regime can applaud Maduro's demise, but they have to get up the next morning and realize that the same bastards are in power,” Steve Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard University, told Daily Kos.
“Right now, the Trump administration seems perfectly content with leaving the old regime intact. So Venezuela hasn't democratized. It hasn't gotten rid of the corrupt thugs,” he added. “They're all there, except for Maduro and his wife.”
Jofre Rodriguez was shot during a protest against Venezuela’s Chavista regime.
Many Venezuelans, including Jofre Rodriguez, understand this reality.
“While Chavismo remains in power—as a criminal structure that has kidnapped all state institutions and made its power public—a free election cannot be guaranteed,” he told Daily Kos in a video response to a list of written questions. “We would simply be talking about the same hell with different devils.”
In 2017, at 18 years old, Rodriguez suffered his first assassination attempt by the government-backed colectivos, groups of armed men who patrol the city streets often on motorbikes. Colectivos, once steadily funded by former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, now use drug dealing, extortion, and intimidation tactics to obtain funding and control the opposition.
During a protest, Rodriguez nearly lost his life when shot by a colectivo member, he said. The teenager suffered a fractured jaw due to a gunshot and later underwent reconstruction surgery. In photos he shared with Daily Kos, a CT scan showed metal that had been lodged into his vertebrae.
Rodriguez, now 26, is in the process of obtaining legal status in the U.S.
Despite the attempt on his life, as well as the fear of further attacks if he were to return to Venezuela, the U.S. government claims that Venezuelans are now safe to go back home.
Jofre Rodriguez was shot by a colectivo while protesting, and needed reconstructive surgery for injuries to his jaw and vertebrae.
“There are reports of groups of armed militias, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship or support for the United States,” read a Jan. 10 press release from DHS. “U.S. citizens in Venezuela should remain vigilant and exercise caution when traveling by road.”
Many Venezuelans in the U.S. are afraid of what would happen if they were shipped back.
J., a former government employee under both Chávez and Maduro, believes that only God could protect him if he were deported. We granted J. anonymity so that sharing his perspective would neither harm his ongoing asylum case in the U.S. nor impact his family still living in South America.
During the years he said he spent working for the Venezuelan government, J. believed in the socialist causes preached by the administration. However, the deeper he got, the more his hopeful belief fell apart.
“I saw how they mistreated the people, how they lied to the people,” J. told us. “Everything was given to our bosses. It never reached [the people].”
Soon, he realized that guerrillas were using the government to embezzle money as well. Later, J. resigned from his position, he said.
J.’s son was one of the more than 250 Venezuelan men whom Trumpillegally sentto El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison—a move that seemed to foreshadow the intervention to come. When J.’s sonreturned homealongside the other prisoners, the Chavista government offered him a job, J. said.
“They wanted to use him like a mascot, like a political trophy,” J. told us.
He said his son knew what kind of future that would entail, so he fled the country as well. After all, he knew his father’s story.
J. told us his government position had soured when armed guerillas pushed him to accept their partnership and he refused. They offered his municipality an ambulance and other aid, he said, in exchange for vague favors. The neighborhood desperately needed the help, but he knew what might come if he accepted: being forced to participate in illegal activities (like transporting drugs). After J. turned down the offer, threats on his and his family’s lives followed him across South American borders, he said. So he fled to the U.S.
Now, he’s worried about what would happen if Trump starts sending Venezuelans, even those previously granted Temporary Protected Status, back to their home country.
“If they deport me to Venezuela, then yes, I am afraid that they might kill me, go after my family to persecute me,” J. told us. “There, I fear both the guerrillas and the government.”
As it stands, the country’s future is uncertain. In Trump’s words, the U.S. will “run” Venezuela. And after meeting with Trump, opposition leader Machado claimed she was “profoundly confident” in Trump ensuring free elections in the future.
Past elections in Venezuela, including the highly contested 2024 presidential election, were laden with accusations of fraud.
J. participated in it, he told us.
During his time as a poll worker, he and his wife cast votes under other citizens’ names, he said, adding, “We committed fraud when we were still blind and didn’t understand what we were doing.”
Now, the hope of fairness and freedom is all that Venezuelans have.
In the end, many of the Venezuelans persecuted under the Chavista administration could care less about Trump and his desire for their country’s oil.
“Some [opposing Venezuelans] say, ‘The Americans just want our oil.’ But before that, our oil and wealth were already being stolen by Russia, China, Iran, Cuba—regimes hostile to freedom,” Leal said.
Carlos Cancines was once an eager military cadet and soldier, but grew disillusioned with Venezuela’s government under President Nicolas Maduro. His outspoken opposition made him a target for death threats and he is currently seeking asylum in the U.S.
Carlos Cancines feels similarly to Leal. Cancines, a 31-year-old Venezuelan seeking asylum in the U.S., doesn’t care about the who or how—he just wants freedom for his home country. As a matter of fact, he cheers for Trump, showing his support in the form of many AI-generated Instagram posts.
“I simply fight for the freedom of my country. And if President Trump is someone who helps our country emerge from this tragedy that has lasted more than 26 years, then he has all my recognition and gratitude,” he told Daily Kos. “I am sure that on my part and on behalf of the Venezuelan people, we will always be grateful.”
Cancines was in the Venezuelan military under Maduro before seeing the pain on the streets and choosing to leave his position, he said.
“They were sending forces to repress the people, which we did not agree with,” he said. “In the academy, they had painted one picture, but when I went out to work, it was something else.”
Cancines began denouncing the government via social media in 2018, after Maduro was elected for a second term. When the Chavista regime learned of Cancines’ views, he was added to a military most-wanted list, he said. Despite relocating to Colombia, government-affiliated gangs located him and made attempts to silence the opposing voice, he told Daily Kos.
But today, as his asylum case is still pending in the U.S., he holds out hope.
While opposing voices condemn the illegal actions of Trump’s oil-hungry power grab, many displaced Venezuelans just want one thing—for the U.S. president to hold up his end of the bargain so they can return home.
“Until the transition is secure, until the country is somewhat disarmed and safer, Venezuela could face violence, coups, or political assassinations,” Leal said. “Once real electoral conditions are created, then the opposition can return and change can finally happen. I don’t see another viable path.”
Until then, Leal said, he would be returning to nothing.
“The memories I have of my country exist only in my mind,” he lamented. “The home I left behind no longer exists.”
There's little I can say about the political landscape. The news is horrifying pretty much everyone. US friends in particular right now, especially in ICE-besieged spots, you're in my heart.
Reading: I haven't picked up a new novel since finished Inside Threat. I'm still slowly reading Braiding Sweetgrass. And for my first non-work manga read of the year, since I'd really like to get back to actually reading manga, I reread vol. 1 of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, chosen largely because a newish Bluesky friend loves it and it's been so long since I read any of the series. Before the huge lull in it being published in English*, it and Yotsuba&! were the only manga I was actively keeping up with in terms of actually reading, as opposed to a few things that I've still been buying. (Looking at you, once-a-year release of Kaze Hikaru, which I will someday actually read.) But I've basically forgotten everything, so back to the start I go.
*Publication finally--technically--resumed with omnibus editions, and am I still mildly annoyed that to get vol. 15, I had to buy the fifth omnibus, thus rebuying vol. 13-14? Yes. Has any more come out since then? Nope. Watching:scruloose and I finished season 1 of Pluribus, which got even weirder than we expected, and in ways we wouldn't have guessed. Really, really good. (Also Yona watched the season finale with us, very intently tracking everything that happened onscreen. No idea why she was suddenly so fascinated.) Playing: I put in a bit more time with I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, and it's not really clicking for me; I think this style of game (RPG? A story that unfolds differently depending on your choices, Choose Your Own Adventure-style?) may just not be my thing?
In huge-for-me game news, Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven has dropped. It's the first really major expansion (priced as a full game, which makes sense given the scope) after several smaller expansions, and I'm overwhelmed by the number of new things I suddenly need to do to keep my little cult happy and thriving, but am having fun. Weathering/Householding: It's currently very cold by local standards, esp. with the windchill, and tonight we have a lot of snow rolling in that's expected to keep falling all through tomorrow and possibly into Tuesday. Yesterday NSP (the power corporation) (*hisses*) announced that the grid is under an unusually heavy load (presumably due to people heating their homes?) and asked everyone to try to minimize power usage. It is very cold, yes, but not freakishly so, and public sentiment about NSP is...uh...very fucking negative, what with their profits and their constantly skyrocketing fees and their data breach and, oh, the rickety fucking grid that we are all paying through the nose for while fully expecting to lose power every time a breeze picks up. So we're putting off laundry, at least (one of the usual Sunday chores), and I'd had notions of actually baking something (!), but that may not happen; if it does, it'll probably involve something like mixing up cookie dough and only baking a handful in the toaster oven, or seeing about doing the actual baking with supper also in the oven (less likely; we'll probably just avoid the oven entirely).
("Please use less power" is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but the combination of garbage infrastructure and the level of energy poverty in this province makes it insult to injury.)
Saw Studio Theatre's Octet, a beautiful, baffling a cappella chamber musical by Dave Malloy of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 and Ghost Quartet fame, set at a support group for internet "addicts." (When you walked in, everyone's phones were locked away in special pouches, and there was a little table of coffee and cookies to one side that was both a set piece/prop and for the audience to take— you, too, are at this meeting.) Staged in the round with minimal set - a circle of church-basement plastic chairs on the stage; a wider circle of ultimately plot-relevant lamps outside of it - and only a few more props, and absolutely gorgeous, musically. I don't know enough about music to explain it, but the cast of eight performed almost entirely a cappella - only the occasional harmonica, tambourine, bass drum stick against plastic chair, and/or, for one song, a pair of dick-shaped maracas (look, it is a musical about the internet) as non-vocal instruments - and you could hear how their voices layered together, creating this beautiful, rich, complex music, with a classical, almost hymn-like sound meets - when not getting metaphorical with it - bluntly modern lyrics. (In one song, "Fugue State", one part features a couple of voices repeating numbers in a pattern that I recognized way too quickly as the game 2048.)
Narratively, it was a bit baffling, and having read the Wikipedia pages and Genius lyrics annotations afterwards raised more questions than answers. The first two-thirds or so rather straightforwardly tackle the theme of digital dependence/the internet and what it is doing to our brains: getting #cancelled, Candy Crush, discourse, dating apps, incels, porn, conspiracies, snuff films, insomnia, fried attention spans and a lack of real-world connection. (This was originally staged in 2019, so no generative AI.) And then things get weird: ( ... )
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 295 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
I admit to a musical bias for female vocalists, and as I’m also a native New Yorker I have a predilection for homegirls. Alicia Keys is one such artist—she is not only a vocalist and a New Yorker, but also an instrumentalist, lyricist, and composer, and Sunday is her birthday. I’m wishing her a happy birthday, and hope you will join me.
Candace LaBalle and Michael Belfiore have written an extensive biography of Keys at Musician Guide:
Just three weeks after being released, Alicia Keys's debut album, Songs in A Minor, was certified triple platinum. Suddenly you couldn't open a magazine, turn on the radio, or tune into MTV without encountering the stunning biracial Keys. With her classical training on the piano, soul-stirring lyrics, and heart-stopping voice, Keys had become a bona fide superstar. Not just another pretty face singing catchy pop, Keys wrote most of the lyrics and music, played all of the instruments, and co-produced the album. Of Songs in A Minor, Keys told Worldpop.com, "[it's] a journey through my life from the time when I was 14, when I wrote the first song on the album.... All the things I went through, and experienced.... That's where the title comes from as well, A Minor is one of my favorite keys to play in, and A is the first letter of my name so it really just talks about songs from me." The album eventually won the artist five Grammy Awards. And her fame was solidified and proven real with the release of her second album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, which debuted at number one on the Billboard Top 200 Albums list and garnered the artist six more Grammy Awards.
Keys was born on January 21, 1981, in New York City to an Italian-American mother and an African-American father. Her parents did not stay together and Keys was raised by her mother, Terri Augello, a paralegal and sometimes actress. As a child, Keys didn't see much of her father, Craig Cook, however, they remained on good terms. Despite the difficult life of a single mom and the poverty in which she often struggled, Keys's mother was determined to nourish her child's budding passion for music and enrolled Keys in piano classes. Keys told Rolling Stone, "I've had a deep love for music since I was four. ... Music came before everything, everything, everything. I would risk everything for it." Despite her commitment, Keys was aware of the financial strain the lessons put on her mother's meager salary and once begged to quit. "But my mom would tell me, 'Quit what you like, but you're not quitting piano.' She didn't care what it cost," Keys told Newsweek. With her mother's support, Keys learned classical piano by the time she was seven. At eleven she began writing songs.
There are a few elements that reliably form the basis for an Alicia Keys song: heartache or infatuation, an essential tenderness and emotion made heavy with wisdom, a patiently unfurling melody and, of course, that voice, yearning and ready to break, even as it remains in control. Even though these building blocks have helped her stand apart from pop trends while forging a remarkable career, Keys says the making of a classic song is still a mystery to her.
Fifteen years after the release of her first album; 15 years after her first single, "Fallin'" went to No. 1 on the pop charts and became repertoire for televised singing competitions; 15 years after that first armful of Grammys, Alicia Keys says her songwriting has not become any more scientific. "Every time I write a song, I never know how it happens. And I kinda always wanna be like that," she tells Jason King …. "Some people are very mathematical writers, which is very intriguing. ... It's so opposite from me."
But, Keys says, "there are ingredients that make it more digestible. And for me, [that's] mostly a piano and a voice." Keys was drawn to the piano from an early age, and reaped benefits from the hours of practice she put in while friends were outside playing. "It provided me... focus, the ability to pay attention for a long enough period of time to make progress," she says. "And the actual knowledge of music, which then unlocked the ability to be able to write my own music and put my own chords and things I heard in my own head to different lyrics I felt. And I never, ever had to wait for anybody to write something for me."
In the earliest phases of her career, she says, artistic control was the first thing on her mind: "I would go into sessions already prepared with, 'Here's different groups of chords: I wrote this, I wrote this, I wrote this, I wrote this, I wrote this,' because they didn't believe that I could do all these things, that I could play and that I could produce and that I could actually write. I was like 15 years old, and they were like, 'I'm sure you have a cute little idea but let's get to the real music.'"
Here’s more of Keys from Keys in the trailer for “Noted”:
She was in the news in 2025 for her support of diversity, equity, and inclusion which is currently under attack from the Trump administration. Lee Moran from HuffPost wrote:
Alicia Keys appeared to call out President Donald Trump’s efforts to nix diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as she accepted the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award at the 2025 Grammys ceremony on Sunday. [...]
“This is not the time to shut down the diversity of voices,” urged Keys.
“We’ve seen on this stage, talented, hardworking people from different backgrounds with different points of view, and it changes the game. DEI is not a threat — it’s a gift,” she said.
“The more voices, the more powerful the sound,” Keys added. “When destructive forces try to burn us down, we rise from the ashes like a phoenix and as you see tonight, music is the unstoppable language that connects us all, it’s so beautiful.”
Keys is a classically trained pianist, and her talent is showcased as part of the Netflix series “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.” The show centers around women of color, so the idea was to record a brand-new version of Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You” with a full orchestra of 72 women of color, all in full hair and makeup to match the show period. That makes a particular statement, as just 3% of orchestral musicians come from diverse backgrounds.
Keys can now add Broadway producer to her resume. The Grammy-award-winning show “Hell’s Kitchen” opened in 2024 and is based on her life:
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“Hell’s Kitchen,” a coming-of-age show based on the life of Alicia Keys and featuring her music, won a Grammy Award on Sunday for best musical theater album. The musical begins a national tour this fall.
What can I do to help besides donate? I am doing my best to target specific needs in donations, as our funds are pretty severely limited. But it never seems enough.
Last night I self-comforted by rewatching Leslie Howard's impassioned anti-war and anti-Nazi film Pimpernel Smith. It's all the more poignant considering the toxic hellspew going on now, and doubly so considering that he was shot down in 1943. So he didn't get to see the end that he predicted in a memorable speech in the film's final moments: he tells the German commander about to shoot him that Germany will not prevail, that they will go down an ever darker road until the terrible end. The lighting is suitably dramatic, only one of his eyes visible.
Among the many excellent quotations tossed off during the film is one by Rupert Brooke, who wrote brilliant and impassioned anti-war sonnets and prose before dying in 1915, so he, too, did not get to see the end of that horrible war. (This elegy to Rupert Brooke is worth a listen.)
Though Howard did not live to see the end, his film inspired Raoul Wallenberg to rescue Jews in WW II, which he would have applauded; the people Pimpernel Smith is rescuing are scientists and journalists imprisoned by the Gestapo.
The film is not just anti-Nazi, which is important. But unlike so many American films made at the time, with their guns-out, let's go blast 'em all attitudes, frequently using Nazi to represent all Germans, which was just as false as today's representation of all Americans as Trumpers.
It's worth remembering the Germans who did not support Hitler's regime, and lived in fear of the next horror their government perpetrated, whether on outsiders or on themselves. Many acted, many others froze in place. Kids, bewildered, tried to survive. I knew a handful of these: my friend Margo, who died ten years ago, was a young teen during the forties. Her mother had ceased communication with the part of her family that supported Hitler. She hid the books written by Jews behind the classics in their home library, and exhorted her two girls to be kind, be kind. Until Margo was sent to music camp on a Hitler Youth activity (all kids had to join) came home to find her home rubble, her mom and sister dead somewhere in that tangle of brick and cement after an Allied bombing mission. Her existence became hand to mouth, including what amounts to slave labor. She was thirteen at the time.
Another friend's mom, a Berliner in her mid-teens, had been coopted to work in the Chancellery typing reports for the German Navy, as there were no men left for such tasks. She lived with her mother, walking to and from work in all weather until their home was bombed. They lived in the rubble, drinking rain water that sifted through the smashed walls; her mother died right there, probably from the bad water; there was no medical care available for civilians, only for the army. This friend's dad was in the army--he had been a baker's apprentice in a small town mid-Germany until the conscription. He was seventeen. He was shot up and sent back to the Russian front five times. He survived it; I remember seeing him shirtless when he mowed the lawn. He looked like a Frankenstein's monster with all the scars criss-crossing his body, corrugated from battlefield stitchwork. That pair met and married while floating about in the detritus of the war. No homes, living off handouts from the occupation until the guy was able to get work as a construction laborer. (Few bakeries, though in later life, he made exquisite seven layer cakes and other Bavarian pastries for his family.)
What can we do? Keep on resisting, without taking up arms and escalating things to that level of nightmare. I so admire Minnesotans. I believe they are doing it right.
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