MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2026
Fellow citizens, we're just saying: We had planned to take the rare afternoon off—and yes, it felt very good. Then, the headline you see below leaped right off the screen.
Just as in the days of old, your incomparable DAILY HOWLER keeps banging out those results:
CNN Medical Analyst Calls for ‘A Bipartisan Congressional Inquiry’ Into Trump’s Mental Fitness After Letter to Norway PM
CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner urged Congress to act following President Donald Trump’s unhinged letter to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre blaming Norway for driving him to acquire Greenland.
Reiner posted to X on Monday, “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Reiner served as a cardiologist to former Vice President Dick Cheney...
Ad so on from there.
Yes, it's just a post to X, and Reiner has flirted with this general stance before. There will surely be no bipartisan congressional inquiry at this point in time.
That said, we'd regard his recommendation as a start, if we expected anyone else to follow "this Pilgrim way." But we pretty much basically don't.
As we've noted in the past, our journalists may not know how to talk about this type of topic. For starters, you have to exhibit sympathy and regret—and it helps if you actually mean it.
Also, you can't fashion discussion of such medical possibilities as some sort of insult. The problem with that leads back to Professor Brabender's great observation about our imperfect instincts as imperfect human beings:
"Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit."
There was no reason to include Brabender here.
BalasPadamTrump: I will continue killing people and invading countries until the Nobel Prize is awarded to me. Why would anyone find this disconcerting?
BalasPadamReiner's post reads "Presidential fitness" not "Mental Fitness".
BalasPadamFrom Digby:
BalasPadam“ Yesterday, ICE raided a home on St. Paul’s East Side. Their target was ChongLy Scott Thao, an elderly Hmong American man. He’s a U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Armed ICE agents broke down the door without presenting a valid warrant, entered with guns drawn, and handcuffed him in front of his 5-year-old grandson, who was left crying and traumatized.
This happened in sub-zero conditions, with wind chills near -30°F. Thao was dragged outside wearing only shorts, a blanket, and Crocs and marched through the snow. ICE then drove him around for nearly an hour, questioned and fingerprinted him, confirmed he was a citizen and not the person they were looking for… and dropped him back at home. No apology. No explanation. No accountability.
The Hmong in the U.S. were American allies during the Vietnam war. They were invited here.”
This is how ICE is treating citizens. This must stop.
We need to start writing to our congress and senate critters that any ICE funding must be contingent on them acting lawfully. Preferably, it needs to be significantly reduced. Even more preferably, ICE needs to be eliminated altogether. At least as a paramilitary organization.
PadamWe're not eliminating shit. We sill expand it.
PadamDHS has been lying about this incident. The family says:
Padam“ Thao's family released a statement on Monday, forcibly pushing back against McLaughlin's assertions.
"Mr. Thao is a United States citizen with no criminal record," the statement reads in part. "He does not live with, nor has he ever lived with, the individuals DHS claims were targets of this operation. The only people living at the residence are Mr. Thao, his daughter-in-law, and his young grandson. They do not know the individuals DHS references."
"The family strongly objects to DHS's attempt to publicly justify this conduct with false and misleading claims," the statement continued. "These statements have caused additional harm to a family already struggling to recover from a terrifying and unjustified encounter."
Citizens need Super Soakers loaded with piss!
BalasPadamYou spelled "bricks" wrong.
PadamGood point!
PadamShit is fucked up and shit. " I was astonished to learn this morning that Our Fucking President sent a letter to the Norwegian prime minister saying that he was gonna take Greenland because they didn't give him the Nobel Peace prize.
BalasPadamAs a fiction writer, I am outraged. If I wrote this in a story, readers would object that it's too stoopid to be realistic.
It isn't. It's the world we live in now."
Not even President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Comacho would pull a stunt like this.
PadamDemocrat filth invading churches now. We must and will crush this disease.
BalasPadamSqueal louder, bigot.
PadamICE drags naturalized citizen out into sub-zero weather clad in underwear and Crocs
BalasPadamImmigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the home of Chong Ly Scott Thao on Sunday and detained Thao and two other individuals with whom he lives. After they were released, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin posted a lengthy statement on X saying ICE officers had targeted two sex offenders at the residence, both of whom remain at large.
Thao's family released a statement on Monday, forcibly pushing back against McLaughlin's assertions.
"Mr. Thao is a United States citizen with no criminal record," the statement reads in part. "He does not live with, nor has he ever lived with, the individuals DHS claims were targets of this operation. The only people living at the residence are Mr. Thao, his daughter-in-law, and his young grandson. They do not know the individuals DHS references."
If I could chime in as a proxy for David: Mr. Thao's abuse is unfortunate, but it's the price I am willing to pay.
PadamAll outraged statements aside, will anything happen to these agents? Will there even be an investigation?
I doubt it. They supposedly have absolute immunity. A scary thought, one that right wingers would have put forward to show the tyranny of the federal government if Biden or Harris had stated it rather than JD fucking Vance.
PadamI doubt it.
PadamGun owners are cowards.
Quaker, this info was already commented by 7:43 above. Do you have anything to add about it?
PadamThere are enough of these abuse-of-citizen stories reported that it appears to be standard ICE policy to grab someone forcibly (i.e., breaking car windows and apt doors), drag them into the street and then an SUV, take them somewhere else and finally check them against a biometric database (ignoring all of their ID and documents) and then let them go. They do not drive them back to wherever they were picked up. A guy in his underwear wouldn't have any means to get home or call anyone, if his daughter hadn't looked for him.
PadamAs noted previously, there is a bonus if these agents meet their quotas, and no consequences if the people they pick up are later released, so there is no incentive for them to be careful to avoid grabbing actual citizens.
One thing each of us can do to protest this abuse, that will help, is to donate money to the organizations filing lawsuits on behalf of these victims. It often takes a lawyer to get someone home again, if only to locate where they were taken and get them released. Each of us can help by funding the organizations working to help immigrants in our local areas (or in MN, if you are so inclined).
I am 100% sure that Somerby is not doing that. Given his whining about the media, he would get better value by donating the cost of his NY Times subscription to the actual resistance. People for the American Way, the ACLU, any food bank or org helping immigrants. He has a lot of choices that are all better than what he does here every day.
National Immigration Law Center
Padamhttps://www.nilc.org/litigation/
American Civil Liberties Union
https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=immigrants-rights
American Immigration Council
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/our-impact/initiatives/litigation/
National Immigration Litigation Alliance
https://immigrationlitigation.org/
Seven Ways You Can Take Action for Immigrants
https://hias.org/news/seven-ways-take-action-immigrants/
Immigrant Defense Project
https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/what-we-do/advocacy/
https://www.ccijustice.org/rapid-response
You can do your own google search to find local organizations in your area.
Secretary Kristi Noem:
PadamPEACE AND PUBLIC SAFETY IN MINNEAPOLIS! We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis...
I think she means "raining terror." Huffington Post picked up this error.
Eleven strait years of propaganda against immigrants who came here to cause mayhem and to eat our cats and dogs. This has whipped the Maga cult into a frenzy from which they will never recover. They now are completely insane.
PadamInsane are those who don't know that immigrants have visas and green cards.
PadamNorm’s lies have been debunked. DHS claims arrests of individuals handed over to them by Biden and prior administrations. Meanwhile DHS claims there are over 1300 illegal immigrants in Minnesota jails, while the state counts 207. Wonder who’s telling the truth there? Numbers being fed to us at all levels of government can be assumed propaganda at this point.
PadamNoem’s
PadamFuck you troll DiCk
Padam9:55 call a whaaaaaaambulance.
PadamBob, how can you be so dense to have not learned this by now? No matter how stupid, insane, or destructive Trump's utterances are he won't lose a single vote. He does the verbal equivalent of shooting someone on 5th Ave all the time. His mob of Red cultists will never desert him.
BalasPadamGet back to us when Dems win the 67 Senate seats needed to convict Trump in an impeachment trial. FYI, the Dems haven't had that many seats since 1964.
Pshaw.
PadamTrump will lose every voter, if he gives blacks reparations for slavery.
His army of bigots put up with things like child rape, mostly because Trump's an asshole to minorities.
Several Republicans are calling for Trump's removal. He isn't going to get better (because dementia is progressive deterioration until someone loses the ability to speak at all, is immobile, incontinent, stops eating and dies). If the GOP clings to Trump it will destroy its own party. They need to join the Dems and remove him from office via Congress, if Trump's cabinet and VP won't act.
PadamTrump has forgotten who MLK Jr. was. He didn't mention him a single time today, on the holiday in his honor.
PadamI looked at the senate map and gave the Dems gave them all the seats from purple states and even states that lean Red like Ohio, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina and Iowa and I came up with 15 seats, still 5 short of what's needed.
PadamThere are Republicans who are sickened by Trump. Some of them can be expected to vote with the Dems.
PadamLook what happened when the House finally advanced the bill to release the Epstein files. The vote was nearly unanimous (only one holdout against the bill). That's because Republicans will switch rather than standing with an insane crook, once they see how the tide is turning.
Oh, btw, even if you do remove Trump through some miracle, you get Vance. What have you gained except to give the candidate you're going to face in 2028 presidential experience?
PadamPresident Donald Trump has finally made an official post in recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, after hours of railing against alleged election fraud on his Truth Social account.
PadamIn a proclamation apparently made just before 6pm Washington, D.C. time on the White House website on Monday, the President hailed King’s “extraordinary resolve” and “commitment to justice”
"Stock futures signal big losses after Trump threatens new tariffs over Greenland." CNBC
PadamGo take a flying fuck, Dickhead in Cal, you fucking fascist freak.
10:41 the more people see of Vance the more they hate the weird jaggoff.
PadamDear Bob Somerby,
BalasPadamPlease don't confuse Trump's rage about not being able to fuck his own daughter, with cognitive decline.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Donald Trump is the Charlie McCarthy of Putin's mouthpieces.
BalasPadamTrump has the best blackmailers.
Padam