“As for NATO – I don’t understand, the United States has thousands and thousands of troops deployed as part of a NATO mission. And we made it clear, I think it was very clearly stated at the summit just a few days ago or at the meeting at the level of defense ministers. We are not leaving NATO. We are not leaving.“
– Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State
“In the pursuit of a world without borders we opened our doors to a wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people… We can no longer allow those who clearly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger global stability to hide behind abstractions of international law that they themselves systematically violate. This is the path that Trump and the United States have taken. This is the path forward… We have no interest in being the polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. For us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always remain children of Europe.”
“Controlling who and how many people enter our countries is not an expression of hate or xenophobia. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. Failure to do so is not just an abdication of the basic duties owed to our people, but a threat to the survival of our civilization.”
“Radical Islam is a clear and imminent threat to the world and to the broader West, but especially to the United States, which they identify as the chief source of evil on the planet.“
– Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State
“Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense…We will continue to provide the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent. And we will also continue, in a more limited and focused fashion, to provide conventional capabilities that contribute to NATO’s defense… And we in the Department of War will continue to ready our forces to do our part under Article V with Europe taking the lead for its conventional defense.”
– Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy
“There are only two options: either the world stops Russia’s war, or Russia drags the world into it.”
– Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
“The greatest threat Russia presents right now is that it gains more at the negotiation table than it has achieved on the battlefield.”
– Kaja Kallas, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security
“There is no more important obligation of any government than the ability to protect your own people and your own nation. This is why, by the way, we talk about the importance of our partners having capabilities in NATO. Every time we say this, people, you know, they go crazy. They think, oh, that means you’re going to abandon NATO, you’re going to abandon your allies. I think the point we’re making is that the stronger our allies are, the stronger we are collectively.”
“We don’t want you to be dependent on us. We are not asking you to be a vassal of the United States. We want to be your partner.”
– Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State
“The only way in which you can redistribute effectively the wealth, is by destroying the incentives to have wealth.”
– Milton Friedman
“It is better to act and repent than not to act and regret.“
– Niccolo Machiavelli
“Everyone starts off as a lefty, and then wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realize what crap ideas they all are, and then you go right.”
– Holly Valance, Australian model and actress
Russia’s Blackmail and Terrorism Should NOT be Rewarded: It’s absurd for the West to negotiate a “peace” with Russia that includes surrender and rewards to the aggressor.
Russia attacked Ukraine after signing the Budapest Memorandum, in which they agreed not to do so.
Russia has terrorized the civilian Ukrainian population daily by bombing civilian targets.
Russia has committed numerous war crimes, most disgustingly kidnapping Ukrainian children.
Russia attempts to blackmail the West by threatening to do more, possibly starting World War III.
Appeasement didn’t work with Hilter, and appeasement isn’t going to work with Putin.
We should support Ukraine and force Russia to leave their neighboring country… they should NOT be rewarded for being the neighborhood bully… it will only encourage more bullying.
NATO Warning – “Hedgehog 2025” a Disaster: Ten Ukrainian soldiers wiped out two NATO battalions in a single day during a drone warfare simulation.
NATO conducted exercises in Estonia involving 16,000 troops. The units proved vulnerable to drones and were effectively destroyed.
The Hedgehog 2025 exercises included 12 NATO member states, along with Ukrainian frontline drone operator teams.
If for no other reason, this exercise shows why we NEED Ukraine to be part of NATO and the European Union. Strategically, Ukraine is important to us and the rest of the free world!
And there is something to be said about doing the right thing versus what is politically expedient.
Read more below and follow me on X & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Saul’s News Weekly Rewind Video
This Week: Rep Brian Fitzpatrick & Rep Don Bacon push for Russia sanctions, RNC & NRCC sue Virginia for redistricting effort, and Democrats will boycott President Trump’s state of the union address!
School choice could be Republicans’ gubernatorial gamechanger
Governor races are the overlooked elections of 2026, and school choice is their overlooked issue.
By making an election issue of the 2025 reconciliation bill’s new federal school tax credit, Republicans have a chance to seize a popular issue that could put many former or current Democratic governorships into play.
While Congress is in the foreground, governors will have a longer-term impact, since they will be in office through 2030 — and perhaps longer in cases where they can seek reelection.
With growing signs of federalism’s importance (via taxes, spending and social policy), state policy has a growing importance in Americans’ lives. States’ political impact is no less important. Simply put: No state political position is as important as the governor, and few are more so nationally.
This November, there are 36 gubernatorial races for positions evenly split between the two parties, 18 to 18. Overall, control of the nation’s governorships is almost as even: 26 to 24 in Republicans’ favor.
Affordability Requires Supply, Not Price Controls
Supporters of price controls often justify them by invoking so-called corporate greed.
One year into President Donald J. Trump’s second term, significant progress has been made on affordability.
Gasoline prices are at historic lows, interest rates and housing costs are declining, and many grocery prices have stabilized—or begun to fall. Inflation has dropped to 2.7 percent over the past year from a peak of 9 percent under the Biden administration. At the same time, real wages have grown by 4 percent. In 2025, Americans experienced the first overall price decline since 2020.
Still, many families continue to feel squeezed. This pressure reflects the lasting damage of the Biden administration’s demand-side policies of stimulus, wealth transfers, and massive government spending—along with long-term affordability challenges driven by decades of bad policies.
With the 2026 midterms approaching, there is an understandable desire on Capitol Hill to “do something.” But lawmakers should resist the temptation to reach for easy answers such as government-imposed price controls. Price controls are not market reforms. They are administrative attempts to override prices rather than address the conditions that make goods and services unaffordable in the first place. History shows that when government tries to control prices instead of expanding supply, the results are predictable—and damaging.
Biden admin skirted rules to deliver massive contract to nonprofit run by ex-official, IG report reveals
A former Biden-Harris official was tapped to lead the nonprofit receiving the contract just months prior
A new inspector general’s report released Thursday morning accuses the former Biden administration of bypassing federal rules when issuing a more than half-a-billion dollar “sole source contract” to a nonprofit led by a former Biden official to deal with the unaccompanied minor crisis in 2021.
The Administration of Children and Families (ACF), which is under HHS and manages unaccompanied minors, awarded $529 million for a one-year contract in March 2021 to a nonprofit called Family Endeavors Inc. to help establish and manage a new emergency intake site in Texas (EIS) with 2,000 extra beds. However, according to the OIG’s new report, Biden’s ACF failed to follow federal procurement requirements for full and open competition due to their own “insufficient planning,” rather than the COVID-induced emergency the Biden administration cited.
Furthermore, the inspector general’s report found that the contract price was more than double the agency’s own cost estimate of $244 million, and indicated that the agency “subsequently modified” the award 15 times, extending the period until May 2022 and increasing the value to more than three times the original estimate from ACF.
Prosecutors zero in on CIA’s Brennan with secret request for years-old evidence from U.S. Senate
Collusion, calumny, and consequences: The request to the Senate signals a possible longer-term conspiracy case, seeking contacts with the Senate that stretch back nearly a decade.
Federal prosecutors who are probing the weaponization of intelligence and law enforcement against President Donald Trump and his allies have sent a secret and rare request for evidence from the U.S. Senate regarding former CIA Director John Brennan, signaling that they are zeroing in on his questionable testimony going back nearly a decade on his now-debunked efforts to tie Trump’s 2016 campaign to collusion with Russia.
The overtures to the U.S. Senate and its intelligence committee from U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones’ team in Miami began over the last month and were formalized in a written request for documents, transcripts and testimony last Friday, according to multiple people directly familiar with the conversations.
Senate lawyers and prosecutors are negotiating the best way to transfer the evidence, including a possible visit by the prosecution team to Washington in the coming days.
The efforts are complicated in part because much of what Brennan discussed in briefings dating to 2016 about alleged Russian interference efforts and now-debunked allegations of Trump collusion are classified, stored in secure briefing rooms and include evidence controlled by the nation’s chief spy agency, the CIA, the sources said.
Russian general promised wife a necklace of severed ears
Ukrainians obtain secret messages detailing routine torture of prisoners and slaughter of soldiers
A decorated Russian general boasted to his wife about torturing and murdering captive Ukrainians in messages revealed by journalists.
Roman Demurchiev, 49, shared graphic descriptions of abuses of Ukrainian prisoners, apparently committed by him and his subordinates, including severing their ears.
The messages, from 2022 to 2024, were obtained from a source in the Ukrainian army and verified by journalists from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Systema and Skhemy investigative units.
In texts from October 2022, Demurchiev said he had captured four Ukrainians in a three-day assault on a “stronghold” and accompanied the message with a picture of severed, blackened human ears hanging from a metal pipe.
“What are you going to do with them?” his wife, Alexandra, asked when he forwarded the photo.
“I’ll string them into a garland and give them as a gift,” he responded.
“Like pig ears to go with beer,” she quipped.
Nightmare: Ukrainian drone pilots wipe out entire NATO battalions during exercise
As the respected Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports in a sensational article, NATO troops were dramatically shown their limits at the “Hedgehog 2025” in Estonia. According to the report, 16,000 NATO soldiers from 12 countries fought Ukrainian drone teams there. The sober comment of a NATO commander afterwards: “We’re screwed.”
Apparently, the alliance troops were completely overwhelmed by the nature of Ukrainian drone warfare. In one scenario, a ten-member Ukrainian drone team is said to have simulated destroyed 17 NATO armored vehicles and carried out another 30 attacks in just half a day. In a single day of exercise, the Ukrainians managed to disable two entire NATO battalions.
If the sky belongs to enemy drones, armored formations won’t get far.
The Ukrainians rely on real-time information, fast target identification, data exchange and short sensor-shooter chains. The NATO soldiers had to realize that even with half the density of drones – compared to everyday life at the front in Ukraine – there is no way to hide.
The NATO battle group did not pay attention to how transparent the battlefield is made by small drones. The Ukrainians set up their equipment and worked with different drones using the same methods they had learned in four years of war. In doing so, they also used their own battlefield management system, Delta, which collects incoming information, analyzes large amounts of data in real time with the help of AI, and coordinates attacks across command and unit boundaries on identified targets.
Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine – Massive Losses and Tiny Gains for a Declining Power
Despite claims of battlefield momentum in Ukraine, the data shows that Russia is paying an extraordinary price for minimal gains and is in decline as a major power. Since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties, more losses than any major power in any war since World War II. At current rates, combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties could reach 2 million by the spring of 2026. After seizing the initiative in 2024, Russian forces have advanced at an average rate of between 15 and 70 meters per day in their most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century. Meanwhile, Russia’s war economy is under mounting strain, with manufacturing declining, slowing growth of 0.6 percent in 2025, and no globally competitive technology firms to help drive long-term productivity.
If you listen to Russian President Vladimir Putin and even some U.S. policymakers, it sounds like Russia is marching to an inevitable battlefield victory in Ukraine. In a December 17, 2025, speech at the National Defence Control Center of the Russian Federation, President Putin remarked, “Our troops are advancing with confidence and grinding down the hostile forces, defeating enemy units, its groups forces and reserves, including so-called elite formations trained in Western centers and equipped with modern foreign weaponry.”
Two days later in his annual end-of-year question and answer session, Putin noted that “ever since our forces drove the enemy from the Kursk Region, the strategic initiative has been firmly in the hands of the Russian Armed Forces. What does this mean? It means that our forces are advancing along the entire line of contact.
Others have echoed this sentiment. As one U.S. policymaker noted, Russia has the “upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger. . . . At some point, size will win.”
Baltics, Nordics, Poland and Ukraine are ‘Europe’s shield’
Poland allocated 4.5% to defense, Lithuania – 4%, Latvia – 3.7%, Estonia and Norway – 3.4%, Denmark – 3.2%, and Finland and Sweden – just under 3%.
The threats posed by Russia and the alienation of the United States from its traditional allies have forced Europe to come together and increase its investments in security and defence, reports Latvian Radio.
In this regard, the Baltic states, the Nordic countries, and Poland are a model for the rest of Europe, which are not only increasing their military capabilities, but also effectively countering Russian hybrid threats, and continue to provide all kinds of support to Ukraine in the fight against Russian aggression.
Analysts point out that European security largely depends on the defensive shield formed by the Baltics, Nordic countries, and Poland.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago, Europe had its illusion of peaceful coexistence with Russia for the past 30 years shattered. It was therefore necessary to end its huge dependence on Russian energy resources, as well as to increase defence spending, which had long been neglected.
Previously, NATO member states had to allocate at least 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP) to their defence (though even this amount was not binding), but last year at a summit in The Hague, alliance members agreed to increase military spending to 5% of GDP within ten years.
In 2025, for the first time, all 32 NATO member states had allocated at least 2% of their GDP to their defence. Meanwhile, a vanguard of individual member states were already rapidly approaching the 5% threshold.
Final Thoughts
Fun Fact:
