Nothing Trump has to say about "blue cities" is true.
Jan 4, 2026
Ooky Spooky
The liberals are improving at memes. At least whoever did this is. pic.twitter.com/9ecOIe8iSm
— Invisidon (@QuantumAlteredX) January 4, 2026
Jan 3, 2026
This Fuckin' Guy
Here we go again. Shoulda seen this shit coming.
It's not a big stretch to think this will be used as amped-up pretext for DHS to start cracking down on Americans who speak out &/or protest.
And it's pretty weird, because we're already seeing "man-on-the-street" feedback showing Venezuelan immigrants praising Trump's "liberation" of their home country.
So the standard contradiction-packed "policy" seems to be "We're going to keep fucking with Hispanic immigrants even as we do you all a great favor so you'll support the Trump administration."
And, of course, the bonus is that the Epstein files problem will likely be ignored - at least for a while.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a news conference on at his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago on Saturday. “So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation as we had for the last long period of years.”
Trump had announced earlier on Saturday that the U.S. carried out a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela, capturing Maduro and his wife, who Trump said were then flown out of the South American nation on the USS Iwo Jima.
Trump did not offer details about how the U.S. will be involved in Venezuela. His administration “will be running it with a group,” he told reporters at the news conference, standing alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Dan Caine, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and CIA director John Ratcliffe. Caine said no American lives were lost.
“We’re designating various people and we’re going to let you know who those people are,” Trump continued. “It’s largely going to be, for a period of time, the people standing right behind me.”
Asked whether the U.S. military would retain a presence on the ground in Venezuela, Trump rejoined: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground…we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground…we’re going to make sure that country is run properly. We’re not doing this in vain.”
President Donald Trump
Trump said reconstructing Venezuela— a country of 31 million people that has endured decades of political, social and economic turmoil — could take some time.
“For us to just leave, who’s going to take over?” Trump said. “We have to rebuild their whole infrastructure…We’ll run it properly, we’ll run it professionally.”
Asked how the action in Venezuela comports with Trump and his political movement’s “America First” mantra, Trump said: “We want to surround ourselves with good neighbors…we want to surround ourselves with energy…we need that for ourselves, we need that for the world.”
The military operation
Trump made his first statement about the attack in a post to Truth Social at 4:21 a.m. In an interview with Fox News later that morning, Trump said the operation, which he watched from Mar-a-Lago, was “extremely complex” and involved a number of aircraft. The operation was supposed to take place four days ago but was delayed due to the weather, Trump said, adding, “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show.”
“Venezuela rejects, repudiates and denounces before the international community the extremely grave military aggression carried out by the current Government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and population,” the Venezuelan foreign minister said in a statement.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted an unsealed indictment against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, accusing them of “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns” and other charges.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi posted to X.
Two law enforcement sources told MS NOW that agents from the FBI’s hostage rescue team embedded with U.S. military special operators from Delta Force, a counterterrorism unit, for the mission. The FBI took custody of Maduro, the sources said.
A source familiar with operation told MS NOW that the CIA placed a small team on the ground in Venezuela in August that was able to provide detailed insight into Maduro’s pattern of life that made capturing him “seamless.” Miller, Rubio, Hegseth and Ratcliffe worked on the operation for months, the source said.
Caine said that the operation — which involved more than 150 aircraft across the Western region — infiltrated Maduro’s compound at 1:01 a.m. Eastern time, adding that Maduro and his wife surrendered.
Rubio stated that Maduro had several chances to prevent this result, but “acted like a wild man” and ensured this result.
Congressional reaction
The U.S. has built up significant military force in the region surrounding Venezuela, but Trump does not appear to have sought permission from or informed Congress of Saturday’s military action.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a Trump ally, acknowledged there had been no congressional approval of — or authorization for the use of military force for — prior to the U.S. action.
Lee said he spoke with Rubio, a harsh critic of the Maduro regime, who told him that Maduro had been arrested “by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States” and that the military action “was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.” Lee said such action would fall under the president’s “inherent authority” under Article II of the U.S constitution to protect American personnel
Rubio “anticipates no further action in Venezuela now that Maduro is in U.S. custody,” Lee said of Rubio.
Vice President JD Vance also defended the administration’s actions, saying Trump offered “multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.”
He also suggested the operation was not illegal, pointing to federal narcoterrorism charges against the Venezuelan leader.
“Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” Vance wrote on X. “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”
And some Republican lawmakers cheered the action.
“Today’s decisive action is this hemisphere’s equivalent to the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” said GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez, who was born in Cuba and represents a heavily Hispanic district in southern Florida. “It’s a big day in Florida, where the majority of Venezuelan, Cuban, & Nicaraguan exiles reside. This is the community I represent & we are overwhelmed with emotion and hope.”
Nonetheless, the operation had already sparked backlash in its early hours as questions swirl about the legal justification for the actions targeting Venezuela.
“No matter the outcome, we are in the wrong for starting this war in Venezuela,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., an Iraq war veteran, on X.
“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress,” posted Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J. “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.”
Sen. Jim Himes, D-Conn., Ranking Member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that he has seen “no evidence” that Maduro’s presidency “poses a threat that would justify military action without Congressional authorization, nor have I heard a strategy for the day after and how we will prevent Venezuela from descending into chaos.”
Himes added, “Secretary Rubio repeatedly denied to Congress that the Administration intended to force regime change in Venezuela. The Administration must immediately brief Congress on its plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.”
The United States has for months been building up military forces off the coast of Venezuela, and has targeted dozens of boats in the region in what the White House says is a war against illegal narco-trafficking. It has also intercepted oil tankers in the region in a bid to cut off the country’s largest economic asset.
Trump had previously warned of ground operations in Venezuela, and the CIA recently struck a dockyard in the country.
Earlier this month, the House narrowly rejected a war powers resolution that would have directed “the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.” In response to the CIA’s drone strike on the Venezuelan dockyard, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the bill’s sponsor, described the actions as “illegal hostilities” and reiterated his view that the “American People don’t want another endless war over oil.”
Similar resolutions have stalled in the Senate, where the 60-vote threshold means even steeper climb.
“The illegality of Trump’s insane war in Venezuela is out of control,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on X on Dec. 30. “Remember, this has NOTHING to do with stopping drugs from entering America. Venezuela produces cocaine bound for Europe. This is war mongering distraction.”
- and -
Trump's saber-rattling on Venezuela is reaching disturbing new highs, and any action could cause chaos in the region.
President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is escalating to disturbing new levels, and the prospect of a military intervention is looking more possible than ever. Such an intervention would not only be an unacceptable act of aggression against a nation that poses no threat to the U.S., it could also destabilize the region while undermining Trump’s own foreign policy and political agendas.
On Saturday, the U.S. military conducted its 21st known strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat, in the eastern Pacific. The next day, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization and declared that Maduro was its head — a move that Trump suggested would allow him to strike Maduro’s assets and infrastructure within Venezuela. On the same day, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, arrived in the Caribbean.
Maduro is “a convenient villain” for Rubio’s crusade against left-wing authoritarian leaders in Latin America and for Trump’s quixotic war on drugs.
All of this comes after the U.S. government doubled its reward for the arrest of Maduro to $50 million and Trump admitted that he recently authorized the CIA to take covert action in Venezuela. The president now says he is open to talking directly to Maduro but hasn’t ruled out deploying troops on the ground in Venezuela.
This evidence suggests that the Trump administration is pursuing regime change in Venezuela. The New York Times even reported in October that U.S. officials “have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.” This could take several forms; Trump appears to be creating possibilities for multiple approaches, perhaps in an attempt to apply maximum pressure on Maduro to seek a negotiated exit from power. But military action is a nontrivial possibility: Trump has deployed major U.S. assets to the Caribbean — there are now about 15,000 troops in the region, including special operations forces. A Marine expeditionary unit is conducting nighttime training this week in Trinidad and Tobago, just 7 miles from Venezuela. Right-wing commentators are already champing at the bit for military action.
Much of this saber-rattling reflects Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s growing influence over Trump’s foreign policy in the Americas. Rubio is an ultrahawk with a track record of supporting regime change via war, including in Latin America. In 2019, he encouraged Trump to back Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s unsuccessful efforts to oust Maduro from power. As George Washington University’s Alexander Downes and Boston College’s Lindsey O’Rourke point out, Rubio appears to have won a monthslong internal debate within the Trump administration about how to approach Venezuela. Key to Rubio’s victory was finding a way to reconcile military intervention-backed regime change with Trump’s right-wing nationalism.
Rubio achieved this by rendering Venezuela a threat to U.S. sovereignty by blaming it for the U.S.’s drug problems. This is both a deceptive and an absurd pretext for war. It’s deceptive because Venezuela has virtually no role in the fentanyl trade, and Drug Enforcement Administration data suggests that only about 8% of U.S.-bound cocaine gets to the country through a “Caribbean corridor” (most of that passing through Venezuela). And it’s absurd because there is no evidence in the U.S.’s decadeslong failed war on drugs that a militarized response to drug trafficking reduces demand or the flow of drugs. “Drug supply-reduction efforts, including those that deploy military assets and use of force, have no lasting impact when they leave in place the ungoverned territory and unpunished corruption that allow organized crime to thrive, fueled by the massive profits of supplying demand for prohibited substances,” wrote the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, in a recent report.
International law does not permit a state to go to war with another state because of drug trade flows from that state. A military strike on Venezuela would be a reprehensible act of aggression, and yet more proof that the “peace president” narrative was always a farce. Downes and O’Rourke, who are experts on regime change, explain that airpower alone would be unlikely to dislodge Maduro, and that the level of manpower needed for a ground deployment to achieve regime change would be huge and undermine Trump’s promises to avoid protracted foreign conflicts.
And even if U.S. military action led Maduro to step down, Downes and O’Rourke point out that “regime change instead often begets further violence — for example, it dramatically increases the likelihood of civil war in target countries.” If Trump wants to reduce the flow of Venezuelan migrants into the U.S., regime change achieved by military force could easily achieve the opposite effect.
Covert actions by the CIA — such as assisting armed dissidents, pursuing efforts to assassinate Maduro or attempting to instigate a coup against him through efforts like encouraging military defections — could also exacerbate Venezuela’s considerable problems and increase the likelihood of civil conflict. If they were to fail — all the more likely given that Trump has openly discussed them — they could also trigger new levels of repression within the country.
Maduro is a brutal and incompetent authoritarian who has ruined a once affluent and lively democracy, but that doesn’t mean ousting him by violent, nondemocratic means is prudent or just. As Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me in an interview in October, Maduro is “a convenient villain” for Rubio’s crusade against left-wing authoritarian leaders in Latin America and for Trump’s quixotic war on drugs. But the outcome of their efforts would likely do nothing to advance Trump’s stated policy agenda on drugs and migration while ushering in a new era of war and instability in the Western Hemisphere.
A few last things:
- I can imagine the MAGA rubes being led to believe they're in for another Trump Dividend Check - The Venezuelan Oil Check - to go with the $1776 check, and the DOGE Check, and the Trump Tariff Check, and the What-The-Fuck-Is-Wrong-With-You-Idiots Check.
- We've told the world that we are (again) totally down with whatever any country thinks they can get away with. Anything goes - knock yourself out - have an orgy.
- If you think there won't be pressure to put American boots on the ground, I've got a pair of breeding mules to sell you.
Jan 2, 2026
From John Fugelsang
(with a tiny bit of editing because I'm egotistical, and I need to "make things a little better")
Here’s the dirty little secret we came to understand in 2025, and it’s not as depressing as it seems:
Losing faith in institutions isn’t nihilism.
It's discernment. It's an informed response by an adult with a living thinking brain to watching dudebro arsonists assume control of the fire department.
Russian Banks
Russian official warns a banking crisis could hit from nonpayments
Russia's wartime economy is running into a problem that cannot be spun away: more households and companies are simply not paying their debts. A senior Russian official has now warned that a full-blown banking crisis could emerge from this wave of nonpayments, a rare public admission that the financial system is under real strain. The warning lands just as the costs of the war in Ukraine, slumping energy revenues, and tighter Western sanctions are converging on the country's lenders.
I see this moment as a stress test of the Kremlin's entire economic strategy since the invasion began. For years, Moscow leaned on oil and gas income and aggressive interest rate policy to keep the system afloat. Now, with borrowers falling behind and banks themselves flagging risks, the question is whether the authorities can contain the damage before it spills into a broader crisis of confidence.
The official warning and what "nonpayments" really mean
The Russian official's message was blunt: if the current pattern of missed payments continues, the country's banks could face a systemic shock. The concern is not about a handful of bad loans but about a growing share of borrowers who are no longer servicing their debts, from consumer credit cards to corporate loans. In the official's own framing, the risk is that nonpayments snowball into a wave of defaults that erodes bank capital and forces state rescues, a scenario that would test the Kremlin's ability to keep the war economy running while maintaining financial stability.
The stakes are high enough that the official linked the financial outlook directly to the trajectory of the conflict in Ukraine, saying, "I don’t want to think about a continuation of the war or an escalation," a line that underscored how intertwined the battlefield and the balance sheet have become. That comment, reported by Dec and attributed to a Kremlin insider, came as the same official acknowledged that the war is providing revenue for its military even as it strains the civilian economy, a tension captured in Dec coverage of the warning. When a senior figure close to the Kremlin publicly entertains the possibility of a banking crisis, it signals that internal stress tests are already flashing red.
From wartime boom to sanctions squeeze
In the early phases of the invasion, Russia's economy appeared surprisingly resilient, helped by high global energy prices and redirected exports. That cushion is now thinning. Energy prices have slumped, and Europe and the United States have tightened sanctions in ways that directly hit Moscow's ability to earn hard currency. The result is a squeeze on the very revenues that once allowed the Kremlin to subsidize banks, support borrowers, and fund the war simultaneously.
Dec reporting notes that oil and gas revenue, which had been a lifeline, is now under pressure as Europe and the United States deepen restrictions and global benchmarks soften, undermining borrowers’ ability to service loans and weakening the broader economy. The shift is captured in analysis that explains how, "But more recently, energy prices have slumped while Europe and the U.S. have tightened sanctions," a combination that is now weighing on borrowers’ ability to service loans. As export income falls and financing channels narrow, banks are left more exposed to domestic risks, with fewer buffers to absorb a spike in bad debts.
Rising bad loans and early red flags from banks
The current warning did not come out of nowhere. Earlier this year, Russian banks themselves raised alarms about a potential debt crisis as high interest rates started to bite. In June, Russian lenders flagged that the combination of elevated borrowing costs and stagnant real incomes was pushing more clients toward a "pre-default" situation, language that hinted at a growing pool of loans that were technically current but at high risk of turning sour. Those internal assessments suggested that the system was already under strain before the latest deterioration in payments.
By late in the year, the picture had worsened. As a result, more consumers are having trouble servicing their loans, and the share of nonperforming credit is climbing across retail and corporate portfolios. Given the headwinds, the Russian official warning about a possible banking crisis is building on concerns that bankers had already voiced, including the June signal that high rates were weighing on borrowers’ ability to keep up with payments, as detailed in In June, Russian banks raised red flags. Independent experts have echoed that view, with Dec analysis noting that Russian bankers themselves described parts of the system as being in a "pre-default situation," a phrase that appears in assessments of Russia’s wartime economy headed for 2026 crisis.
Households under pressure and the politics of pain
Behind the technical language of "nonpayments" are Russian families juggling mortgages, car loans, and credit card balances in an economy distorted by war. As inflation erodes purchasing power and real wages lag, more households are missing payments, restructuring debts, or turning to informal lenders. I see this as a political as much as a financial risk: a banking crisis that starts with consumer defaults can quickly morph into anger at both banks and the state, especially if savers fear for their deposits or face tighter credit just as living costs rise.
Reports shared by Dec describe how, as a result of the economic headwinds, more consumers are having trouble servicing their loans, a trend that is now central to the official's warning that the banking system could be destabilized by nonpayments. Given the mounting pressure, the Russian official warning about a banking crisis is framed as a response to these household-level strains, which are documented in coverage noting that, "As a result, more consumers are having trouble servicing their loans. Given the headwinds, the Russian official warnin[g]" of systemic risk, a passage highlighted in Given the analysis. When a large share of the population is struggling with debt, the social contract that underpins the wartime economy starts to fray, and that is precisely what the Kremlin appears eager to avoid.
Global context and what comes next for Russia's banks
Russia is not facing these challenges in isolation. Its ability to manage a domestic banking shock depends heavily on external partners, especially China and India, which have become crucial buyers of Russian energy and providers of alternative financing channels. That reliance is a double-edged sword. On one hand, continued purchases of oil and gas by these countries provide vital revenue. On the other, any shift in their appetite for Russian commodities or compliance with Western sanctions could tighten the noose on Moscow's finances and, by extension, its banks.
Dec analysis notes that this warning about a banking crisis comes "as China and India" play a central role in absorbing Russian exports and shaping the country's external position, a dynamic described in coverage that highlights how the financial outlook is tied to That’s as China and India adjust to sanctions and market shifts. At home, Russian bankers have already signaled that parts of the system are in a "pre-default situation," and the Kremlin is weighing how far it can stretch state support without triggering inflation or currency instability, concerns reflected in Dec reporting on Russian official warns a banking crisis. I see the next year as a narrow path for Moscow: it must contain rising nonpayments, reassure depositors, and keep funding the war, all while its traditional revenue engines sputter under sanctions and shifting global demand.
About That 1A Thing
The 1st amendment doesn't give you protection to say anything you wanna say.
Fraud is not protected by the first amendment.
When your words are used to incite violence, your ass is not covered.
No rights are absolute or unlimited.
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