Category: War and Peace

By Annie Karni / New York Times / Jan. 3, 2026, 10:46 a.m. ET

While President Trump crowed on Saturday about the dramatic capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela by U.S. authorities, Democrats in Congress sounded alarms about the legality of the action and raised questions about recent briefings in which administration officials assured them that they were not seeking regime change in the nation.

Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, accused Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of having “blatantly” lied to Congress when they said the administration’s objective in Venezuela was not about toppling Mr. Maduro. He called the move to oust the Venezuelan leader “disastrous,” arguing that it would further isolate the United States on the global stage.

“Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war,” Mr. Kim, a former national security official in the Obama administration, wrote on social media.

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat who represents a district in which Venezuelan immigrants cheered for the news, said that Mr. Maduro’s capture was “welcome” but that the way it was done raised serious questions.

Early Saturday, January 3rd, the Trump regime conducted a blatant and illegal act of war against Venezuela by bombing civilian and military sites and illegally kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

This act of aggression is a imperialistic continuation of U.S. policies against the sovereign South American country with attempts to seize and plunder Venezuela’s natural resources and threatens the sovereignty of other countries in Latin America.

The aggression goes against the will of the American people and against our Constitution. Nearly 70% of Americans oppose another war and reject the endless cycle of military interventions carried out in their name.

Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to military action in Venezuela, according to a Quinnipiac poll published in mid-December amid an escalation of U.S. pressure on President Nicolás Maduro.

Sixty-three percent of respondents told Quinnipiac they are against military action against Caracas, which President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out, with just 25 percent expressing support. And 53 percent of respondents said they opposed the administration’s use of military strikes to kill alleged drug smugglers in international waters.

As domestic and international condemnations of the attack and kidnapping mount up, there are typical sycophantic expressions of support from Trumpian Republicans.

By Alyssa Ray / Yahoo News / December 8, 2025

Jon Stewart accused the Trump administration of giving him Iraq War déjà vu over their reasoning for the looming conflict with Venezuela.

The comedian addressed the “eerie” similarities between the two separate conflicts during Monday’s monologue for “The Daily Show,” where he slammed the president and his administration for recycling old Iraq War-era justifications amid the growing conflict in South America.

“So the two dictators [Nicolás Maduro and Saddam Hussein] share a remarkably similar taste in facial hair, body shape, ceremonial sabers and headgear. It doesn’t mean that the pretext for the wars will be the same,” Stewart joked before airing news footage of MAGA supporters accusing narco-terrorists of being in possession of fentanyl, which they called “weapons of mass destruction.”

“Are you f–king kidding me right now?” Stewart sounded off. “You guys have the balls to tell us that the pretext for Iraq was bulls–t, and that war was a mistake, and we’re not like that, and also, Venezuela has weapons of mass destruction, and we have to stop them. Or is WMD just the new slang, like, ‘Yo, bro.Venezuela’s total WMD, 6-7.’”

He also fact checked the fentanyl claim, sharing “almost none of it [in the U.S.]” comes from Venezuela.

By Steve Rodriguez

First comes the sighting of a Venezuelan boat.
Just about any fishing boat will suffice.
Next, fixing the target in a missile’s
crosshairs. Followed by a dramatic
blasting of the vessel. Bright flash
of light ensues, conveniently captured
by camera for later media airing.

Every Saturday at 10:30 am. San Diego Climate Mobilization Coalition Meetings December 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th.

Every Saturday 10 am – 12 pm Peace Vigil for Palestine
The San Diego River Park Foundation has volunteer opportunities in Ocean Beach: Point Loma Native Plant Garden Club on the 2nd and 4th Sundays
Every Sunday 2 pm – 4 pm Occupy Otay Sunday Action Otay Mesa Detention Center

December 1st Monday  12 pm – 1 pm Interfaith Vigil For Earth Justice
December 1st Monday 4 pm – 6 pm The Courage to Connect:
December 1st Monday We Ain’t Buying It

December 2nd. Tuesday 6 pm – 9 pm Community Craft & Film Night Fundraiser
December 3rd. Wednesday 5 pm Santa’s Clean Air Workshop:  Holiday Crafts for a Healthy Portside
December 3rd. Wednesday 10 am- 11am Celebrate Without the Waste: Sustainable Holidays Webinar
December 3rd. Wednesday 5 pm – 8 pm Salty Cinema Fall 2025: Tides of Renewal.

December 4th Thursday 6 pm – 8 pm Protecting Southern California from Offshore Oil and Gas Drilling
December 5th Friday 6 pm Film Night “The Great Debaters”  Event by Black Panther Party of San Diego
December 6th Saturday 1 pm – 3:30 pm Party for the Planet

December 6th 12 pm – 3 pm Active Duty Coffee Talk
December 6th Saturday 11 am – 2 pm Friends and Neighbors Holiday River Celebration & Art Market
December 6th Saturday 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm Mission Beach Community Climate Conversation

December 7th Sunday 12:30 pm- 3 pm South Bay Community Climate Conversation
December 7th Sunday 9:30 am  – 10:30 am Ramona Wildlife Center Tour

Any talk of a quick invasion and easy ‘regime change’ is dangerously misleading.

By Mark Hertling / The Bulwark – Reader Supported News / Nov 13, 2025

OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS, the United States has embarked on a controversial maritime campaign in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific targeting small Venezuelan and Colombian vessels alleged to be engaged in drug smuggling. Under an asserted “narcoterrorist” deterrence operation, the United States has thus far carried out nineteen twenty lethal strikes on small boats in international waters, killing at least seventy-six people, all undertaken without the transparency, oversight, or legal foundation that normally governs the use of American force.

The Trump administration insists these are long-needed and decisive counternarcotics operations. But U.N. human-rights experts warn that the strikes may “amount[] to extrajudicial executions,” and allies with territory and citizens in the Caribbean are raising alarms about legal exposure, civilian risk, and regional instability. With the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group near to arriving on station and President Trump threatening “hundreds more” strikes, the mission looks less like enhanced interdiction and far more like the early shaping operations for regime-change in Venezuela.

The Trump administration’s murderous strikes on small boats at sea constitute unlawful extrajudicial killings.

By Marjorie Cohn / Truthout / October 30, 2025

As the Trump administration continues to murder people in small boats on the high seas and mounts the largest U.S. military buildup in decades in the Caribbean, it is moving inexorably toward an all-out, illegal attack and forcible regime change in Venezuela.

Despite Team Trump’s feeble attempts to legally justify its ocean strikes, which have now killed 57 people since early September, those extrajudicial killings are also unlawful.

Donald Trump’s murderous campaign came into focus on February 20, when the State Department designated eight drug trafficking organizations, including Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations. Although the administration has attempted — so far unsuccessfully — to use that designation to justify sending immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, Trump is now invoking it in an effort to validate his illegal strikes at sea.

Moreover, on March 15, Trump issued “A Proclamation,” alleging that Tren de Aragua has been engaged, in association with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in “irregular warfare” in the United States, with no explanation of what is meant by irregular warfare. But on February 26, most U.S. intelligence agencies had made a finding that Tren de Aragua was neither controlled by the Venezuelan government, nor was it committing crimes in the United States on its orders.

While watching a trio of thirty-something progressive podcast pundits discussing protests of the upcoming “No Kings Day”, they mentioned how they really appreciated the boomers, those gray-haired people with chapsticks and NPB tote bags who continue to dominate in numbers all the anti-Trump protests over these last 9 months.

Wow! I said to myself, that’s it. Our democracy will be saved by the boomers, all those gray and bald headed folks who have been attending all those demonstrations since Donald Trump came back into power. Our country will be prevented from being ravaged by the policies and whims of the Trump White House, not by Senate Democrats, not by the thirty-somethings, not by college kids — but by those of us who have survived these past decades since the 60s and 70s.

We survived and ousted Richard Nixon, we protested Jimmie Carter’s draft, we resisted and survived Ronald Reagan’s “Counter-Revolution” and nuclear war mongering, we helped to bring the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan to a close, we helped to end apartheid in South Africa, we tried to get the US from supporting dictators in Central America.

In the fall of 1964, over 60 years ago, the young students on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley found themselves in an untenable situation. Campus activists had set up information tables in Sproul Plaza on campus and had solicited donations for causes connected to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of them had traveled with the Freedom Riders and had worked to register African American voters in Mississippi that previous summer.  At the time, however, existing rules for fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs.

In mid-September, a school dean announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment and fundraising by student organizations would be “strictly enforced.” Two weeks later, a graduate student sitting at one of the civil rights tables refused to show his identification to campus police and was immediately arrested and placed inside a campus police car on Sproul.

Suddenly and spontaneously hundreds of students who witnessed the arrest, surrounded the police car, sat down and refused to budge. While the graduate student sat in the backseat, student activist leaders mounted the car and began to give speeches on free speech and against political restrictions. Students remained around the car for 32 hours and at one point, there were an estimated 3,000 students blocking its movement. People used the car as a speaker’s podium and held a continuous public discussion on rights, free speech and student liberties. This continued until charges against the graduate student were dropped.

It was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s and was the birth of the Free Speech Movement.

by Ernie McCray

Today there’s a move,
spearheaded
by a dictator-like-president,
to hide truths
in our schools,
an idea beyond ridiculous
since truths
are basic
to learning,
something made clear to me
when I began teaching sixth grade
in the 60’s,
at a school
where many of the students
lived in naval housing,
their dads off fighting in Vietnam,
leaving them to wonder what was really going on,

ALL DETAILS ARE INSIDE

Come Labor Day in San Diego County, September 1, there are 6 planned protests against the Trump regime, titled “Workers Over Billionaires.”

They’re in downtown San Diego, Chula Vista, La Jolla, Mira Mesa, Carlsbad and Escondido. (All details are herein.)

Downtown San Diego

It begins at 10am and runs to 12 noon at the Waterfront Park at 1600 Pacific Hwy. (That’s San Diego CA 92101)

About this event (Each event — except Escondido — starts at the same time, 10am, has the same demands and script, so we’re running just the downtown San Diego details, but with more info about each of the events.)

There are actually two events, one sponsored by the coalition that organized the No Kings event at Waterfront Park. The other, at the same place and time, is sponsored by San Diego & Imperial Counties Labor Council, No Kings and a host of other groups we list below.

Here’s their script:

This Labor Day we will continue to stand strong, fighting for public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, shared prosperity over corporate politics.

Working people built this nation and we know how to take care of each other. We won’t back down—we will never stop fighting for our families and the rights and freedoms that ensure access to opportunity and a better life for all Americans. The billionaire’s time is up.

On September 1st we will continue the movement we launched together on May 1st, standing in solidarity with all our communities under attack and fighting for real wins for all our people.

Only 32% Approve of Israel military action in Gaza — Americans’ support for Israel in Gaza plummets to record low, new Gallup poll finds

Americans’ approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023. Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%.

These findings are from a July 7-21, 2025, Gallup poll, as Israel’s campaign against Hamas stretched into its 21st month. Americans supported Israel’s actions in Gaza in its initial reading in 2023, taken several weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Since then, disapproval has outpaced approval in each survey, peaking at 55% in March 2024 before dipping to 48% in two readings later in the year. Gallup Poll

Immigration — Support for Deporting All Undocumented Migrants Dropped to 38%

Americans’ views of immigration have swung drastically upward in the past year, with a new poll showing record-high support for immigration amid President Donald Trump’s controversial mass deportation campaign. A record 79 percent of American adults think immigration is good for the country,