Spent a ridiculous amount of time dealing with “customer service” type issues. But here I am.
Open thread 1/5/2026
Plisetskaya:
More on Venezuela
It seems this was the culmination of months – or more? – of planning, with signals and warnings for Maduro to go into exile or else. Now we see the “or else.”
There are also rumors that it’s all staged and Maduro cooperated. I definitely don’t think that’s the case.He almost certainly could have absconded to one of his sponsor states instead. They may not be paradises, but they’re better than US prison.
Trump is now saying that we’ll be running Venezuela till the new government takes over:
We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition, and it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about.
We want peace, liberty and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela who are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country as their homeland.
We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela, that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind for decades. We’re not going to let that happen. …
We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so.
I figured they had a plan at the outset. But what is that plan, how long will it take, and will it be successful? Trump’s not a big one for lengthy neoconnish nation-building endeavors, but does this threaten to become that? There’s a president and/or VP waiting in the wings in exile, Machado and Gonzalez who actually were elected in the previous election in Venezuela, as was widely acknowledged at the time. So if anyone is the legitimate leader of Venezuela, it would be one or both of them. But how can their installation be facilitated? The regime itself, minus Maduro, will almost certainly want to hang onto power, or at least some of the cast of characters will (I listed them in my previous post on the subject).
We’re learning a bit more about the action itself, from Chairman John Daniel Caine:
“This operation, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, was discreet, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2, and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal, an operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake.”
Chairman Caine continued.
“This particular mission required every component of our joint force with soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians, working in unison with our intelligence agency partners and law enforcement teammates in an unprecedented operation, we leveraged our unmatched intelligence capabilities and our years of experience in hunting terrorists, and we could not have done this mission without the incredible work by various intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA and NGA.”
There’s a very interesting post at Althouse covering the different takes of the WaPo and NY Times on this:
I’m [Althouse, that is] reading “Trump’s bold capture of Maduro was a victory for America. What’s next?” by The Editorial Board of The Washington Post. That’s the front page headline. Inside it’s “Justice in Venezuela/The next challenge is setting the country up for long-term success.”
The editorial ends: “For years, Maduro was a symbol of the false warmth of Latin American collectivism. Now he should spend the rest of his life in a humane American prison. His downfall is good news.”
That’s astounding on two levels. The first is that it seems to contain elements of praise for Trump, and the second is the rather obvious reference to the inaugural speech of the odious Mamdani (I covered that in this post, where Mamdani is quoted as having said: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”).
The Times is not as pleased as the WaPo:
Anyway, the WaPo editors seem rather positive about Trump’s action in Venezuela. The mood at The New York Times is different: “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise.” It ends:
“We will hold out hope that the current crisis will end less badly than we expect. We fear that the result of Mr. Trump’s adventurism is increased suffering for Venezuelans, rising regional instability and lasting damage for America’s interests around the world. We know that Mr. Trump’s warmongering violates the law.”
It doesn’t violate the precedent I discussed in my earlier post, the Noriega case. Jonathan Turley also doesn’t think it violates the law; I hadn’t seen his comment when I wrote my earlier piece, but here it is:
The administration is acting within the navigational beacons of the Noriega case. And by the way, for all these Democrats objecting, the authority that Trump could cite is Barack Obama. Barack Obama vaporized a US citizen without a criminal charge. One would think that if a president could do that, and I don’t remember Democrats objecting en masse that you could arrest someone for trial with an existing indictment.
You can see some photos of Venezuelans around the world celebrating.
And it’s been announced that Maduro has landed in NY:
The aircraft believed to be carrying Nicolas Maduro has touched down at Stewart Airport in Orange County, New York, Saturday afternoon, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Maduro is now expected to take a helicopter to New York City, accompanied by the DEA. He will then head by motorcade to a location in New York City for processing before he’s held in jail, sources said.
Mamdani’s rogues gallery of appointments
Mamdani’s appointees so far are about as expected. A sampler:
On Friday, the new mayor named Ali Najmi to chair his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which picks judges for family and civil courts and interim appointees for criminal courts; Najmi is big on making the bench more “diverse.”
Mamdani outright ordered the committee to find more diversity picks and to get public defenders and other anti-prosecution types more involved in judicial selections: Expect the city’s courts to become even more eager to put criminals back on the streets.
But what sounds even worse is this character:
The day before, [Mamdani] picked Cea Weaver to run his Office to Protect Tenants: She’s a proud radical who has called for the city to force private landlords out of business so it can seize their buildings; that’s partly why she praises his rent-freeze plans as likely to “deepen the crises” in the housing marketplace.
She’s spent years advocating unabashed Marxism: “Elect more Communists,” ran a tweet from December 2017; “Seize private property,” another in June 2018.
Plus this one:
Ramzi Kassem will serve as City Hall’s chief counsel; he recently defended Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and before that an al Qaeda terrorist who pleaded guilty to planning a major terrorist attack on a French ship.
As a student at Columbia in 1998, Kassem wrote an article blaming “European Jews” for all the problems in the Middle East; he was a top Biden adviser on immigration, when the main policy was to let everyone in, no questions asked.
Perhaps Tucker Carlson could become press secretary. He’s already auditioned for the job:
“Is the incoming mayor a fan of Israel? Does he want America to fight its wars? Not particularly. But a Jew hater? That’s a different conversation. We’ve never seen anything to suggest he falls into that ugly camp. Because he doesn’t,” Carlson wrote.
He noted that Mamdani rejected that he was antisemitic during the campaign, but said it didn’t keep people from “slandering him as some sort of dark force plotting to install the Fourth Reich in America’s largest city.”
NOTE: Speaking of Mamdani, I was wondering what he’s said about Maduro, and I found this weaselly answer from his campaigning days:
The US captures Maduro
That’s a sentence I didn’t expect to be writing. And yet it’s true:
Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were captured by US forces during a “large-scale” nighttime military operation early Saturday, President Trump announced.
“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“This operation was done in conjunction with US Law Enforcement. Details to follow.”
You can find more information in this Instapundit post, including the fact that China didn’t seem to have anticipated this, and the following:
I’m with some Cubans right now and they’re literally crying tears of joy.
Venezuelans are celebrating all over the globe too.
If anyone thinks this military operation was a bad idea you have NO idea how many votes we just gained for the midterms.
Trump is now the absolute hero of the Latin Americans.
I have little doubt that most Venezuelans, both refugees and those still in that long-suffering country, are happy. And people of Cuban descent in the US? Likewise. Secretary of State Rubio is, of course, one of those Americans of Cuban descent, who issued this statement a while back:
Before the U.S. captured and indicted Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was “NOT the president of Venezuela.”
In a post on X from July 2025, Rubio made clear the Trump administration’s stance on Maduro’s authority in the country, adding that “his regime is NOT the legitimate government.”
“Maduro is the head of the Cartel de Los Soles, a narco-terror organization which has taken possession of a country. And he is under indictment for pushing drugs into the United States,” Rubio wrote.
Recently the reward for Maduro’s capture was upped to fifty million dollars. Will someone receive it? Intelligence had to have been very good to be able to pull this off.
The left will be very upset by this action, to say the least.
The legal precedent seems to be the capture of Noriega in 1989. To refresh your memory:
Noriega’s relationship with the U.S. deteriorated in the late 1980s after the murder of Hugo Spadafora and the forced resignation of President Nicolás Ardito Barletta. Eventually, his relationship with intelligence agencies in other countries came to light, and his involvement in drug trafficking was investigated further. In 1988, Noriega was indicted by federal grand juries in Miami and Tampa on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling, and money laundering. The U.S. launched an invasion of Panama following failed negotiations seeking his resignation, and Noriega’s annulment of the 1989 Panamanian general election. Noriega was captured and flown to the U.S., where he was tried on the Miami indictment, convicted on most of the charges, and sentenced to 40 years in prison, ultimately serving 17 years after a reduction in his sentence for good behavior. Noriega was extradited to France in 2010, where he was convicted and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for money laundering. In 2011 France extradited him to Panama, where he was incarcerated for crimes committed during his rule, for which he had been tried and convicted in absentia in the 1990s. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in March 2017, Noriega suffered complications during surgery, and died two months later.
Noriega’s dictatorship was marked by repression of the media, an expansion of the military, and the persecution of political opponents, effectively controlling the outcomes of any elections.
The parallels are not exact, but they certainly exist and include a stolen election. One big difference is that the capture of Noriega (Bush I was president) involved “27,000 soldiers, as well as 300 aircraft,” which is a far cry from what happened in Venezuela in the wee hours of this morning.
The case at bar [1990] presents the Court with a drama of international proportions, considering the status of the principal defendant and the difficult circumstances under which he was brought before this Court. …
On February 14, 1988, a federal grand jury sitting in Miami, Florida returned a twelve-count indictment charging General Manuel Antonio Noriega with participating in an international conspiracy to import cocaine and materials used in producing cocaine into and out of the United States. …
As is evident from the unusual factual background underlying this case, the Court is presented with several issues of first impression. This is the first time that a leader or de facto leader of a sovereign nation has been forcibly brought to the United States to face criminal charges. …
In sum, because Noriega’s conduct in Panama is alleged to have resulted in a direct effect within the United States, the Court concludes that extraterritorial jurisdiction is appropriate as a matter of international law. […] Jurisdiction over Defendant’s extraterritorial conduct is therefore appropriate both as a matter of international law and statutory construction. …
Rather than supporting Defendants’ overall position pressed under the Geneva Convention, this Article appears to recognize the right to prosecute asserted by the Government. The Article refers to “prisoners … prosecuted under the laws of the Detaining Power” (i.e., the United States) and for acts “committed prior to capture.” Further, the benefits of the Convention shall be afforded the POW “even if convicted.” The indictment charges the Defendants with violations of the laws of the United States allegedly committed between December 1982 and March 1986 – well before the military action and apprehension by surrender.
The mullahs must be very unhappy; Iran is a big ally of Maduro’s. I doubt they’re feeling especially safe today. I wonder whether the Venezuela strike was partly an effort to “persuade” them it might be in their interests to step down.
This not-so-surprising group of nations has condemned Maduro’s capture:
Iran, Colombia, Hezbollah, and Russia condemned the military operation performed by the United States in Venezuela on Saturday, where US special forces troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, while major US allies like Germany, Spain, and Italy said they were following the situation closely.
Iran, an ally of Venezuela, said that the military attack on Venezuela was “a blatant violation of its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Hezbollah stated that it “condemns the terrorist aggression and American thuggery against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” and “further affirms its full solidarity with Venezuela – its people, presidency, and government – in confronting this American aggression and arrogance.”
A very important question is: who will succeed Maduro? We don’t know at present:
A contender who could replace Maduro is Edmundo González, who was recognized by the U.S. as the winner of the disputed 2024 presidential election.
Maduro’s party nevertheless claimed victory and the country’s highest court upheld his re-election. An arrest warrant was later issued for González, and he fled to Spain amid concerns for his safety.
Meanwhile María Corina Machado, the true opposition leader and head of the Vente Venezuela party, could also take over. Machado overwhelmingly won a 2023 presidential primary, but was blocked from running for president by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice.
Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize and appeared in Oslo after escaping Venezuela. She had been in hiding since 2024.
There are other contenders, of course:
Diosdado Cabello emerges as the most feared and influential figure in the regime. La Nación describes him as the longtime number two of Chavismo, with sweeping control over party machinery and the propaganda apparatus. …
Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly and one of Maduro’s closest political operators, is another senior figure positioned for any succession scenario. …
Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s vice president, is described as a central political operator within the regime and part of a powerful governing duo with her brother Jorge. …
Ivan Hernández Dala heads Venezuela’s military counterintelligence service (DGCIM) and commands the presidential guard, making him one of the most feared figures in the security apparatus. His control over internal repression gives him significant leverage in any power struggle. …
Vladimir Padrino López, Venezuela’s long-serving defense minister, is portrayed by La Nación as the backbone of the military establishment and the guarantor of Maduro’s survival.
Where are they now?
Maduro didn’t have many allies among Western nations, and so it will be interesting to see what Europe ends up saying about this action against Maduro.
Open thread 1/3/2026
Speculation on Victor Davis Hanson’s health problems
I’ve been a VDH fan for a long time, and the news that he’s been facing an enormous health challenge, including a major surgery, is concerning. Many people are offering prayers and good wishes for a full recovery, and I join them.
Because the news hasn’t included many details or a diagnosis, a lot of people are speculating on what disease Hanson may have. I join in the speculation here, despite my having no medical credentials whatsoever and no information other than what I read in the media. So take what I have to say with a huge caveat: it’s just a guess.
Much if not most of the speculation concerns various forms of cancer, but I’m offering another possibility: a severe case of sarcoidosis. I knew someone once who received that diagnosis, and so I’m mildly familiar with what it is.
Sarcoidosis fits some things that were said or already known about Hanson: lung symptoms can be prominent, it is a rare disease but more common in farmers (and Scandinavians, which I believe is Hanson’s ethnic background), and it is diagnosed by biopsy in many cases. Most people do not need surgery and mild cases may not even need treatment. But severe cases – in which lungs are damaged – can require lung surgery or even a lung transplant:
Sarcoidosis surgery isn’t a cure but is used for diagnosis (biopsies), treating severe complications like fungal balls (aspergilloma) or blockages, and, in rare, end-stage cases, organ transplantation (lungs, heart, liver) for life-threatening damage, significantly improving quality of life but carrying risks like infection or rejection. Procedures range from minimally invasive camera-assisted lung biopsies (VATS) to major surgeries, aiming to relieve symptoms or prevent further deterioration, especially when medications fail or organs are failing.
Hanson is older than the typical person diagnosed, and the illness is somewhat more common in women and he’s not a woman. As I said, this diagnostic possibility is totally speculative on my part.
The MSM jumps into action … against Nick Shirley, maker of the viral video about Minnesota daycare centers
Your intrepid reporters are on the job:
… [Some in] our present liberal media … seem more concentrated on trying to debunk what Shirley was exposing than on finding out the facts.
CNN had a correspondent confront Shirley outside of one of the daycare centers, asking him about his story, as our sister site Townhall reported. Shirley said he stood by his story, but he invited them to do their “own analysis.”
“So we can make our own analysis?” Whitney Wild responded. What a concept.
They then showed their correspondent, Wild, saying they were looking into the claims. She said they “reached out” to several of the centers that Shirley had visited, “Only one answered and said they are a legitimate business.”
Well, I guess everything is cool, then. They say they’re good, so it must be true.
More at the link.
Meanwhile, as might be expected, Nick Shirley has gotten death threats:
Shirley described the threats during a Dec. 31 appearance on the PBD Podcast, and said he was warned he would be “Kirked,” a reference to the September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. …
Shirley appeared shaken as he described the toll the threats had taken, particularly the calls received by his family. …
Shirley maintained that his investigation was about financial accountability, not politics.
“I didn’t make this a right-or-left issue,” he said.
But to the left, everything is a right-or-left issue. If it reflects badly on the left, it must be “debunked” and the messenger, and his family, are fair game for threats of violence and for actual violence. The idea is not just to punish that person, but to have a chilling effect on other challenges to the leftist “narrative.”
Where is Mamdani going to get “other people’s money”?
The phrase in this post’s title comes from Margaret Thatcher:
“Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.”
[Often quoted as ‘the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’ [from an] interview, This Week Thames TV, 5 February 1976]
The socialist solution? Why, just tax the rich more; it’s simple. Except that it’s not, because rich people can leave (unless you simply take their stuff before they can do that, or kill them and take their stuff). New York has long both attracted rich people and made people wealthy, but most of them don’t want to be bled dry financially and many if not most have multiple residences already and can leave quite easily with hardly a hiccup in their lifestyles.
What’s more, they’re already paying the lion’s share of the taxes. From Mamdani’s inaugural address:
“Together, we will tell a new story of our city,” Zohran Mamdani said in his inauguration speech Thursday.
“This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the 1 percent. Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor.”
It will be a tale of the poor – or the less rich – versus the very rich.
The facts Mamdani leaves out:
The top 1% of earners pay 46% of the city’s budget — a budget, by the way, that at $116 billion equals that of the spending for the entire state of Florida.
Impressive. Is it an inexhaustible spigot, or is it almost tapped out? How much do the mega-rich love living in NYC, and how many will have reached the point of leavetaking and no return?
More from Mamdani:
We will govern expansively and audaciously …
In other words, whatever moderation Mamdani may have shown at times on the campaign trail – and he didn’t show a whole lot – that’s over. Of course, Albany might act as a check on him, but I wouldn’t count on it. The warm and fuzzy collective has arrived:
We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
His first step in doling out that warm collective embrace has been to undo all of Mayor Adams’ executive orders of the last 15 months, including those that combat anti-Semitism. But hey, “Where else [but in NY] could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday?” The answer: probably anywhere in the US or Israel or even most of Europe, if they cared to do so – although I must admit that, at least until now, New York bagels have been superior.
NOTE: Why care about Mamdani and New York? As I’ve explained before, it’s my hometown and I still know plenty of people there. But it’s also a shocking example of what may or may not become a trend in blue cities – even blue cities in red states. You might say that they’ll learn from their errors. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Open thread 1/2/2026
In the anti-theft pharmacy
Where I live, I sometimes see certain products under lock and key in pharmacies and supermarkets. But it’s not too many things, and it hasn’t really impacted my shopping much.
But visiting relatives recently in certain cities where the practice is widespread was a sobering experience. It seems to have gotten worse in recent years, to the point where at least half the products in a drugstore are displayed locked behind hard see-through plastic, with little buzzers here and there for calling the attendant to open the magic doors.
It’s a depressing environment that changes the entire shopping experience and made me think twice and three times about whether I wanted to buy anything, or just order it online. Talk about low-trust societies! And it does no good to go to another store; they’re all like that in these municipalities.
It’s also strangely random in terms of what products are chosen for this treatment. For example, in one store the vitamins and supplements and hair ornaments were mostly out in the open, despite being relatively expensive. Only one brand of vitamin was locked up, and it didn’t cost more than the others. At the same time, many low-cost items like my toothpaste (about two dollars per large tube) and those little cotton pads for removing makeup (two dollars for a package of eighty) required the attendant to be summoned to unlock the case and get out the precious commodity.
Go figure.
I think we’re morphing into a society in which brick and mortar store shopping is a thing of the past.
Roundup for the first day of 2026
(1) Mamdani is sworn in as the mayor of New York. Hard to believe, but true, with the following cast of characters and in the following setting:
The 34-year-old Queens state assemblyman was sworn in on a Quran as the city’s 112th mayor — and its second-youngest — by state Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday morning below City Hall Park in a grand, abandoned old subway stop with his wife, artist Rama Duwaji, by his side.
There will be another ceremony, too, with another setting and a slightly different cast of characters:
Mamdani’s subway station ceremony — a small event with few members of the media in attendance — will be followed later Thursday afternoon by a jubilant block-party bash, where thousands will watch outside City Hall as US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) again swears in the new mayor.
(2) More on the Iran protests, with some deaths reported:
Deaths were reported in Lordegan, Kuhdasht, and Isfahan, though casualty figures vary between state media and rights groups.
The Revolutionary Guards said one member of its Basij paramilitary unit was killed in Kuhdasht, with 13 others wounded. Rights group Hengaw identified the man as a protester, contradicting official claims.
What ultimately happens depends on how willing the protesters are to risk being killed, how many there are, and how willing the authorities are to crack down violently.
The Iranian president has this to say – too little, too late, and missing quite a bit:
If people are dissatisfied, we are to blame—not America or anyone else.
It is our responsibility to manage resources properly, improve efficiency and productivity, and solve the people’s problems.
Our failures are the result of poor management.
(3) Trump is pausing federal child care payments to all states while fraud investigations proceed. How big will the scandal be revealed to be?
Shipwreckedcrew summarizes much of the information about the Minnesota fraud cases so far.
(4) And then there are the voting laws in Minnesota, which allow an especially generous form of address “vouching”:
A controversial Minnesota election policy that allows a single registered voter to “vouch” for up to eight people seeking same-day registration is under fire amid the state’s massive fraud scandal tied to the Somali community there.
Under Minnesota law, the registered voter must go with the person or people they are vouching for to the polling place and sign an oath verifying their address, according to the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State.
“A registered voter from your precinct can go with you to the polling place to sign an oath confirming your address. This is known as ‘vouching.’ A registered voter can vouch for up to eight voters,” the website reads.
More at the link.
(5) Many are feared dead in a New Year’s Eve fire at a Swiss report. Horrible:
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, and overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of potentially one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies. …
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door.
I would think there would be better laws in Switzerland – of all places – about egress from a basement nightclub venue.
RIP.