Source: USA Today
by Rex Huppke

“Nothing snuffs out questions about a near-octogenarian president’s health quite like that president repeatedly bragging about passing a dementia test and telling the world he ignores his doctors and doesn’t exercise. … we have a commander in chief who’s pushing 80, doesn’t sleep much and bruises ‒ if you believe the White House’s excuses ‒ when someone shakes his hand. … If Trump administration officials were smart ‒ they’re not ‒ they would be putting Vice President JD Vance front and center more often to at least reassure Americans that Trump has a competent person behind him. The fact that they’re not doing this is either a testament to Trump’s ego ‒ which bruises more easily than his flesh ‒ or an indictment of Vance’s competence and likability, or both.” (01/05/26)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/01/05/trump-health-age-health-concerns/87997190007/

Source: Foreign Policy
by Emma Ashford

“The president has been lucky. His strikes in Iran did not lead to substantial escalation, and for the moment, the seizure of Maduro does not appear to have thrown Venezuela into chaos. But that does not mean the president’s ability to avoid the consequences of future strikes of this kind — in Mexico, say, or Greenland — couldn’t easily turn into blowback against the United States. And the more that Trump engages in these displays of U.S. force, the more likely it is that one of them will go catastrophically wrong.” (01/05/26)

https://archive.is/LPShF

Source: Town Hall
by Elicia Brand

“When New York’s new mayor vowed to replace rugged individualism with collectivism, he echoed an ideology history has already tested, and buried. Ayn Rand warned us what happens when societies punish excellence. In 2026, New York chose to learn the lesson anyway. On January 1, 2026, in his inaugural address as Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani stated it plainly: ‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ This was not a flourish or a metaphor gone astray. It was a governing declaration, delivered from the seat of American commerce and offered as the philosophical blueprint for how the nation’s largest city would now be run … Socialist (cough, cough—Communist). History has heard this language before, and it has always ended the same way.” (01/05/25)

https://townhall.com/columnists/elicia-brand/2026/01/05/the-warmth-of-collectivism-is-the-cold-logic-of-ruin-n2668891

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Walter Block

“Ideally, there should be no such thing as the Federal Reserve System. The Fed should not have been created in 1913, and should be disbanded right now. End the Fed! This organization is nothing more and nothing less than a central planning bureau for interest rates, employment, and inflation (of late, it has expanded its mandate to include climate change and social equity issues as well). Evidently, we have not yet fully incorporated the lessons about central planning we should have learned as a society from the examples of East and West Germany, North and South Korea. These came as close to a controlled experiment as we are ever likely to find in all of economics, and yet we still continue our merry way in the direction of central planning.” (01/05/26)

https://fee.org/articles/fed-independence/

Source: Persuasion
by Quico Toro

“About a month ago, as America’s military presence in the Caribbean ramped up, The New York Times ran a feature on the figures that could imaginably step into the presidency in Nicolás Maduro’s absence. One heading was titled ‘The Moderate: Delcy Rodríguez, Vice President.’ … To Venezuelans who had spent over a decade seeing in her one of Nicolás Maduro’s most ardent and uncompromising acolytes, calling her a ‘moderate’ is an outrage. Here’s a woman who has held all of the most important offices of state — oil minister, minister of foreign affairs, president of the constituent assembly, vice president — and has never allowed any hint of sunlight to appear between her and Maduro.” (01/05/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-you-need-to-know-about-venezuelas

Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone

“It’s not just that they stole Venezuela’s president in order to steal its oil, it’s that they’re working to steal the whole damn country. To steal its sovereignty. Its right to conduct its own affairs on its own terms as an independent nation. Dopey right wingers who learned the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’ like ten seconds ago have been mindlessly parroting those words all day to defend Trump’s Venezuela assault, and what’s grating about it is they actually think they’re talking about a real thing. They’re like, ‘No no it was totally legit, see there’s this thing called the Monroe Doctrine which says we get to control everything that happens in the western hemisphere and treat half the planet like it’s our own personal property.'” (01/05/25)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/01/05/new-issue-of-johnstone-the-empire-stole-venezuela/