curated news excerpts & citations
Hans Christensen: Greenland Receives Allied Military Support
At surprisingly short notice, Denmark and Greenland has obtained military support on the ground in Greenland from European and NATO allies. The Greenlandic and Danish foreign ministers met Washington.
Heather Delaney Reese: Will anyone stop Trump from taking Greenland?
… In his view, he gets Greenland or else.
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AP: Judge hands offshore wind industry another victory against Trump in clearing way for NY project
James Eagle: The US still imports heavy crude oil
Refineries on the US Gulf Coast were built to process thick, sulphur rich oil shipped in from abroad. Those plants were not designed for the light shale oil that now dominates domestic production, and changing them is slow and costly.
Over time, imported crude has become more heavily weighted towards heavy grades even as overall imports fell. Domestic output surged at the light end, but refineries still needed heavier barrels to keep running efficiently. Imports adjusted to fill that gap rather than disappearing.
The assumption is that rising domestic production removes dependence on foreign oil. The constraint is refinery design. Energy security is not just about how much oil is produced, but whether the system can process the oil available.
What happens to US fuel markets if heavy crude supply is disrupted rather than total oil supply?
(James Eagle more…)
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Washington Post: Trump Cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution, judge says
“The Cabinet secretaries and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge William Young declared.
…While Young condemned the administration’s actions Thursday, he indicated that he would not grant the sweeping relief proposed by the plaintiffs, who had sought an injunction barring such conduct and a variety of monitoring and reporting requirements.
Young said he expected to issue a more narrowly tailored order next Thursday, one that would protect the noncitizen members of the plaintiff groups from changes to their immigration status except in certain defined circumstances.
(Washington Post more…)
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Charles H Sauer: Martin Luther King Jr. Day
[Dr. King’s birthday yesterday – CHS]
As we in the U.S. observe a holiday in honor of Rev. King, I recall the night I stood a few feet from him and listened in awe.It was about June 8, 1966. James Meredith had started his solitary March Against Fear on June 5th, and had been shot and wounded by a sniper on June 6th.
[How bold of Dylan to sing this at the March On Washington – CHS]
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Steward Beckham: Abolish ICE
Why “Abolish ICE” Is a Moral Baseline, Not a Messaging Trap
Bulwark: ICE Started the Fire
Home of the Brave: Meet the Guy in a Giraffe Costume Who ICE Arrested
LAWdork: Kristi Noem says that virtually anyone could face a Kavanaugh stop
Joyce Vance: Don’t Take the Bait
Rolling Stone: Trump says US ‘shouldn’t even have an election’ as he threatens Insurrection Act
Austin American-Statesman: U.S. apologizes for deporting Austin-raised student despite court order
… The apology rang “hollow” to Lopez Belloza’s attorney, Todd Pomerleau, who said the U.S. government is still arguing that it did nothing wrong and has shown no intention of bringing Lopez Belloza back to the United States — the remedy he is seeking.
“Now they say, ‘We actually made a mistake and we’re sorry. But we don’t want to do anything about the mistake. We don’t want to do anything about the mistake other than say: Don’t find us in contempt for it. We retrained some people on how to read emails and what to do with them,’” Pomerleau said.
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Sarah Jones: Jasmine Crockett Uses GOP’s 1/6 Revisionist Hearing to Torch Their Gaslighting
Rep. Jasmine Crockett used the GOP’s revisionist January 6th hearing to torch MAGA gaslighting by getting facts on the record about the over 1,000 convictions resulting from the deadly attack.
Jason Easley: Democrats Turn The Weaponization Of Government Tables On Jim Jordan
House Judiciary Committee Democrats are demanding that Chair Jim Jordan investigate Trump’s weaponization of government against Jerome Powell.
Steve Vladeck: Searching Reporters’ Homes
… I want to flag three different sets of concerns. The first is that the government may be using the (superficially legitimate) investigation of Perez-Lugones as a pretextual basis for trying to obtain the identities of Natanson’s sources inside the executive branch unrelated to Perez-Lugones’s alleged offenses. The second is that this is exactly why it has been so important, over the years, for the Department of Justice to have a policy limiting the circumstances in which prosecutors can seek to use compulsory legal process to obtain information from reporters—a policy Bondi rescinded in May 2025. (There’s also the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, about which more below.) And the third is to reflect a bit more broadly on why these kinds of searches—and, in extreme cases, prosecutions—of journalists raise such grave First Amendment questions.
(Steve Vladeck more…)
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NPR: Trump health care plan doesn’t help people facing skyrocketing ACA premiums
Shanley Hurt: The “Great Healthcare Plan”: Big Promises, Light Lifting
How a ‘framework’ became a fireworks show, timed for maximum misdirection
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – January 15, 2026
You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?
They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Bulwark: Hey. Remember the Epstein Files?
Congress’s legal fight with the administration is far from over.
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Borowitz: Greenland Suggests Trump Acquire Epstein’s Island Instead
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties