Prawnworks Archives 2022A
2021-2025
2011-2015
2016-2020
2005-2010



June


This was big on twitter yesterday. An anonymous source who, unlike Hutchinson, was not speaking publicly, under oath or after a deposition, was elevated to the same status and given the same credibility that she was.


Justice Beyer is now officially retired.

And the hand-off is made! Her name is now Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson!


Russia bravely and heroically deploys a missile against an apartment building.
President Zelenskyy discusses Russia’s goals and motivations. The West is finally realizing where things stand.
Russians used a hypersonic anti-ship missile against “an ordinary five-story building.” This was among nine other missiles, all of which hit civilian targets in just one city..
Big POW swap gets Azov defenders back.
NATO reveals new strategic concept.

Russia was initially really, really concerned about the Lithuanian port of Kalinagrad being partially cut off to them and rattled their saber about that. Russia has now pretty much just muttered and grumbled about EU sanctions on Kaliningrad.

...the sanctions don’t affect food or consumables like toilet paper. If Russia wants to ship construction equipment or other things that aren’t sold in a grocery store, they can use boats or planes.


Radio host Joe Rogan concludes Trump is hopeless and that Florida Governor DeSantis is the new Glorious Leader for the Republican Party.


Latest on Pennsylvana senatorial race.


Yikes! The statement made by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is deeply alarming! According to her, red flag laws

"will be a tool to disarm any gun owner that wants to stop abortion"

Erm, is she saying the proper answer to abortion is a loaded rifle?!?!?!?!


Cassidy Hutchinsin's testimony for Janary 6th Committee.

Yeah, for Trump to have accompanied the attackers would have been a whole new level of awful.

An extremely serious charge, that of witness tampering by Trump and associates. One that the Justice Department should look into as it’s a current, right-now problem.

Y'know, if the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee wants to testify under oath, he’s free to do so and to then take issue with what Cassidy Hutchinson had to say.

Heh! Yep, The Former Guy sure is upset with what's her name, because, hey, y'know who can recall the name of a traitor, amirite? Saw a snippet of Laura Ingraham of Fox News saying none of the Fox people who knew Hutchinson has any confidence in her. Well, obviously, no one is going to contradict their Glorious Leader, so that was predictable.


US sending Ukraine a Norwegian surface-to-air missile.
Unfortunately, the price of Finland and Sweden to eventually join NATO is to abandon the Kurds to Turkey’s tender mercies.


Good! Glad to see Ghislaine Maxwell going away for what’s probably going to be the rest of her life.


The mainstream media’s “bothsiderism” is going to kill us all. The NY Times compares the number of subpoenas issued by the January 6th Committee to those issued by the various Republican Benghazi investigations. Yeah, never mind that the two events being investigated were as differenet as could be.


Good grief! This guy actually celebrates the arrival of "Catholic Taliban" rule in the US!

As America adopts strict anti-choice laws, we might recall the unhappy experience of Ireland in that regard. I recall the long lines of women in 2018 traveling back to Ireland, specifically so they could vote against the anti-choice law that was on the books.

Ana Navarro points out that if you’re going to have anti-choice laws, you need to increase your social services budgets! If you don’t, you’re simply making life harder for people for no good reason.


"Alex Wagner to Succeed Rachel Maddow at MSNBC"
Not at all surprising. Wagner has the same "Can you believe this $%#@?" manner that Maddow does.


I was following a Russian-born pundit when Ukraine was re-invaded. She kept insisting that Putin was not a strategic genius. Here Russia has fired a missile at a shopping center that was holding 1k people when the sirens went off. The G7 is currently meeting.

President Zelenskyy discusses the missile strike on the shopping mall in Kremenchuk. Fortunately, the majority of people in the mall were able to get out in time. “The Russian state has become the largest terrorist organization in the world.

Someone looks at Russia's missile strike on a shopping mall and wonders if the missile was actually aimed at a military target, but was so inaccurate that it hit the mall instead. Problem is, the Russians knew the missile was inaccurate and used it on a target in a crowded urban area anyway. So not having aimed at a mall doesn't relieve them of any of their guilt.


Over the course of six years a UN official became convinced that “Apartheid” was an appropriate term to use concerning Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Israeli occupation fits definitions of apartheid “under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute.”


The popular belief is that Muslim women are oppressed. Compared to American women at the moment? Ehh, not so sure about that.

Representative AOC nails the hypocrisy and extremely narrow perspective of the Governor of Arkansas. How does Arkansas deal with babies born after they're born? Quite poorly.

This was something I noticed back during the late 70s. States that are fanatically anti-choice on abortion are also very stingy when it comes to helping out the already-born.


Piece starts with a video of Charlie Kirk being asked for vaccination papers and him wondering whether he was in Nazi Germany. Yeah, he’s that much of a moron! Hmm, the way he talks about educated women, did he try to date an educated woman in the past? Is he bitter because she/they turned him down? Sure seems like it.


Thinkpiece on why young people leave small towns for bigger towns.


Pop star Olivia Rodrigo (an American, but the concert is in Glastonbury, England), who has two million followers on Twitter, talks and sings to a really massive crowd about pregnancy choice. Heh! In the comments, a number of non-vagina owners try complaining. More on that.  


Heh! Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is convinced that none of the people who attacked our Capitol on January 6th were armed. Representative Jamie Raskin clearly knows something she doesn't know.


In response to January 6th hearings, Trump writes a message on his social media platform demanding equal time. Kind of a problem with that is that he's had a year and a half to present evidence for his side of the story and had presented nothing.

As far as hearing "the other side" goes, in late 2019, the House held hearings on Donald Trump's first impeachment. Each side had 45 minutes to make an opening statement for each witness. What did the Republican side have to say in defense of the-then president? Nothing.
In this instance, Trump put out a lengthy written statement with footnotes and including references to Dinesh D'Souza's movie "2000 Mules." It was pretty much just a rehash of long-debunked talking points.


Roe vs Wade overturned.

I’m on a train right now & the number of women who have tears in their eyes, including myself, is something I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.

"In concurring opinion, Clarence Thomas offers a laundry list of other rights he wants to strike down"
Hmm. Interesting that Supreme Court Justice Thomas doesn't mention Loving vs Virginia. He's married to a white woman and that wasn't legal until the Loving decision was handed down. Thing is, Loving is of a piece with the other three decisions mentioned here. It established that there's a zone of privacy where the government simply has no business being.

All sorts of hate and discontent over the Supreme Court ruling that threw out Roe.

Of course, as a president who appointed three Supreme Court Justices, Trump pats himself on the back for the reversal of Roe.


Interesting "sign of the times." Two young lovers stroll through a park in Kyiv, casually passing by an anti-tank barrier on the way.


Originalists like Judge Robert Bork and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, unfortunately get their history quite wrong and make their arguments based on incorrect understandings of history.


Just as the Senate passed sweeping gun legislation, the Supreme Court pushes the other way. New York state had required citizens to show “proper cause” to carry a concealed weapon. The court has now eliminated that requirement.


An MSNBC panel explained last night why Representative Matt Gaetz’s idea of a very broad pardon wouldn’t work. A presidential pardon has to be worded so as to pardon a very specific crime. If Trump had written a pardon to excuse people for having worked on the January 6th attack on the Capitol, then he would have had to have admitted directing that attack or at the very least, he would have had to have explicitly approved of that attack.


Ah, great work, Putin! Ukraine is now an official candidate for EU membership! President Zelenskyy thanks all of the other members in turn.


To people who ask "What does the Republican Party stand for?" Here ya go!

Hmm, we can "let children go hungry by blocking funding for school lunches unless they allow LGBTQ students to be discriminated against."


There’s a very obvious choice coming up for Texas. They can reelect Governor Abbott, who is working hard to cover up the massive incompetence of the Police Chief in Uvalde or it can elect Beto O’Rourke, a reformer who will make a clean sweep.

More on the incompetence in Uvalde.


Very happy to hear that the President is still committed to renewable energy! He may need to increase fossil fuel supplies in the short run, but renewable energy is out long-term best bet.


This is very, very good news! The gun-safety bill is nowhere near as strong it needs to be, but it’s better than anything we’ve had in quite a long while.


Donbas military force has lost over 2k soldiers, or 55% of their force.
Partisans in Kerson and kamikaze drones!
Lots of top-level replacements for Russian forces.
Lithuania is blocking Russian goods from using its port at Kaliningrad. Russia is very unhappy about that!
Russia trying hard to influence US voters. Russia is counting on donor fatigue.


President Zelenskyy is lobbying hard for Ukraine’s EU membership.

Appears that adopting the Istanbul Convention was something Ukraine considered to be necessary for ratification of EU membership.

...references to and reporting of an increase in partisan underground activity in Kherson directed at the Russian occupiers and Ukrainian collaborators…

Counter-attacks around Kherson.


Mike Pence, in an ad, says he and Trump "Delivered for the American people." Erm, delivered WHAT?!?! What on Earth did those two bozos deliver that was worth a damn?!?!?!


Those who support the rule of law are given the pejorative term "one-sided." Why does the NY Times continue to fail the nation so badly?

Gee let's see, "Team Democracy's" piece is run on Thursday, page A18, "Team Impunity's" piece is Sunday, page A1. Hmm. Gee. I wonder which team the NY Times is rooting for! And as the blogger points, the piece placed on A1 is really, truly awful.

Yeah, an example of wishful thinking. Mick Mulvaney made a really bad prediction in 2020. The WSJ was ignoring Trump’s continual drumbeat about voter fraud that he had been banging since before the 2016 election.


Problem with the current Israeli parliamentary governing coalition is that it includes Palestinian-Israelis. As neutral and apolitical as they are, they just can’t go along with colonialist apartheid policies.


Reader speaks of the cult of the “tactical” in gun culture. Yeah, I’ve seen the ads for “tactical flashlights.”


The January 6th hearings are having an effect on Republicans! The plan was to ignore the hearings and try and change the subject but they’re having an effect.


The House Minority Leader badly screwed up last year when he refused to take any part in the House January 6th investigation. Now Trump has joined the chorus of critics!


Mildly amusing how Trump and his supporters try to sound like Jan Brady with their "Russia, Russia, Russia!" But there was always quite a bit to the Russia allegations, and if the allegations were so obviously without substance, why did AG Barr try so hard to bury the Mueller Report?


Many things the former president says I don't believe. His pledge that he will never ride a bicycle? I find that completely credible! I totally believe him.


Interesting video. Because counter-battery fire is so effective, guns have to be set up, they get three shots off and then they have to scoot before the enemy can zero in on where those shots came from.


Journalist realizes that journalists in this country have gone way overboard on fairness between the two parties. Treating the two parties the same does a favor to the worse party and no one else.


Lengthy thread on whether Trump’s 12-page memo of his constitutes an actual legal defense. The NY Times seems to think so. No one else agrees.


Representative Gaetz refers specifically to “Red Flight” as Representative Greene talks about the Georgia citizens who will leave if Georgia votes in Stacey Abrams as Governor.


The Former Guy himself is putting out an energetic defense of his conduct on January 6th. Curiously, he’s pretty much doing that all by himself. Republicans aren’t joining in.


There have been rules on how to occupy enemy territory since the early 20th century. The Lutheran Church says that Israel violates those rules with their occupation of Palestinian territory.


Not that there was ever much doubt, but an image of the bullet that killed American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh makes it clear that it was shot out of an Israeli military rifle.


Hercules was a box-office dud back in 1997, but it’s had staying power, so they’re going to try a live-action remake.


Eric Trump's completely unwarranted presumption here is there's some relationship between being a Biden voter and being a CNN viewer.


EU negotiations are going well.
A woman Ukrainian medic has been returned.
Russia is becoming increasingly authoritarian.

More Ukrainians soldiers singing.


Gee, happy to see that Montana Governor Greg Gianforte takes his job so seriously [/snark]. With catastrophic flooding in the Yellowstone region this week, the governor was still in Italy, on vacation! The Lieutenant Governor was signing everything in Gianforte’s absence, but yeesh!


A bit of an equalizer between Ukrainian and Russian artillery (Russia has many more big guns than Ukraine does) is that Ukrainians are aiming their ordnance strictly and exclusively at Russian military assets. Russians are aiming their artillery just everywhere.


Excellent thread explaining how coups work and what happens when they don't.


Good interview with Noam Chomsky. He echoes a lot of my view, that the expansion of NATO wasn’t just a one-sided aggressive move, but had support from Eastern Europeans. And yes, the 2003 invasion of Iraq has a great deal in common with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year.


Makes sense for Ukraine President Zelenskyy to attend G7 meeting as his country will probably be a major topic of conversation in any event.

Four EU leaders met in Kyiv and agreed with Ukrainian goals.
Gazprom is simply pulling on the gas chain…” trying to get Europe to stop supporting Ukraine.
P
ossible EU membership for Ukraine.
Russians stuck in Sieverodonetsk.

Russia is actively colonizing captured Ukrainian territory. Yes, this is illegal under international law.


Hmm. This statement from Steve Bannon has a lot of “Thousand-year Reich” energy to it.

“You're witnessing, right now, a political realignment like 1932. And we will govern for 100 years after we win 100 seats."


The siege of Gaza is now 15 years old. Two million-plus residents caught in an “open air prison.” Israel may have security needs, but as an occupying power, they also have obligations.


Chris “Captain America” Evans comments on people and countries who are freaking out about a lesbian couple that’s briefly seen in Buzz Lightyear’s film. Evans is the voice actor for Lightyear. Lightyear has a close, but non-romantic relationship with a fellow astronaut, who is the one who sets up house  with a woman.


Rah! Rah! Hoo yah! Preach it!

Hakeem Jeffries is fucking done with Clarence & Ginni Thomas.


Representative Loudermilk was the fellow who put out a press release saying his Capitol tour just prior to January 6th was no big deal, but he wouldn't appear before the January 6th Committee and give sworn testimony. Problem is, we have video of guess taking pictures of things like stairwells and tunnel entrances, not things that guests normally take pictures of.

What I find concerning is that Loudermilk had all this time to disclose that he had led this tour. He chose to keep it quiet. A Congresswoman was interviewed on the Rachel Maddow show who says there were other tours she had witnessed, so there are still other people who have yet to speak up.

Very, very interesting! Loudermilk

sits on the Committee on House Administration, which oversees ***the Capitol Police***

I agreed with D'Souza's statement, right up until the point where he claimed that the January 6th Committee was unaware that indicting the former president could lead to civil conflict. Of course they're aware of that. Why are they proceeding anyway? Because democracy is at stake. If the government gives Trump a pass because they fear civil unrest, that's an open invitation for him to try again!


Senator Blackburn's theory has a bit of surface appeal. She suggests Biden is goosing up gas prices in order to incentivize Congress and businesses to move to green energy. But a closely-divided Senate with a Republicans who aren't going to respond to anything and two stick-in-the-mud Democratic senators who won't support their party isn't going to respond to higher gas prices with positive legislation, period.


Yeah, I've long been aware that the main problem with sex work is that it's criminalized. Take away the criminality and you take away 90% of the problems these women are dealing with.


Wow! In just a few months (late Februry to mid-June), Russia's killed in action in their war on Ukraine is pretty comparable to US KIA in Vietnam (roughly 40k vs a bit over 58k) from 1955 to 1975. 


Joe Kahn is the new Executive Editor at the NY Times. I feel after just reading a single paragraph by him that his writing is very, very heavy on buzzwords and very light on really understanding what he himself is actually saying.


Good! With exporting grain via the sea seems pretty much out of the question, the US will help Ukraine export their grain via silos in Poland.


Democracy is pretty much the only issue that Representative Cheney and liberals/Democrats agree on, but that's a really important one right now.


So there was a plan to ignore the January 6th Committee testimony. Oops! So much for that idea! The movie "2000 Mules" comes in for further trashing. Reminds me of the "Pizza Hut leads" after 9-11. The CIA tracked many demographically similar people and then found that many of them called the same phone number. Bwah-hah! They must be "soldiers" calling their "bosses," right? Erm, uh, no. They were usually just calling a delivery place for pizzas or Chinese meals or whatnot.
"2000 Mules" has the same problem. One can draw too many conclusions from electronic data.


How "legitimizing propaganda" works.


Wow! Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.s girlfriend, got paid $60k for a two-minute introduction speech! She was paid out of money collected from Trump supporters, so no, she wasn't paid out of tax money. Hey, nice work if you can get it!


Whoo-wee! Rudy Giuliani’s got some bat&$#%-crazy theories! Really? Rioter Ashli Babbitt was killed by Antifa?!?! Rudy probably doesn’t like that he was described as a drunk by the Committee.

Hmm. So Rudy Giuliani still insists, a year and a half later, when absolutely no evidence has been produced, that there was "massive cheating" in the 2020 election. Rudy also insists that he was completely sober on election night.

Hmm. So Rudy's confirming that he was indeed drunk?

Rudy Giuliani has deleted his tweets denying Jason Miller’s claim that he was drunk on election night.


President Zelenskyy looks forward to the liberation of all of Ukraine.
Sievierodonetsk under constant shelling and most of the bridges leading to it have been destroyed.
Lots of hard fighting ahead.


Former AG Bill Barr gives a good summary as to why the movie “2000 Mules” is a complete waste of time.

"Dinesh D’Souza Is Having A Meltdown Over Barr’s Dismissal Of ‘2000 Mules’"

Monica Crowley of Fox News comments on
ze plan, comrades! Bwah-hah-hah! The sinister leftist plot that we've been working on for nearly a century!


VP Harris at Capitol Pride Fest.


Yeah, “deep” thoughts from TFG’s former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Could it be that the entire January 6th operation was planned?


Details of Trump’s plan to overthrow the government and to launch an autogolpe (self-coup).


Representative Jordan repeats an old lie to Fox News that’s been repeatedly debunked because since when did Fox News ever do any fact-checking?
The Speaker is not in charge of the DC National Guard, the President is. Trump made some vague statement about making 10k troops available on the 5th. His statement was dismissed at the time as hyperbole.


Ukraine has been hit by 2606 Russian cruise missiles. Ukraine needs missile defense systems.
Sieverodonetsk is not seeing a “stalemate,” it’s seeing a “slugfest.” Lines aren’t moving much, but Russian forces are being ground down.
Blogger compares advantages/disadvantages of both sides.
Russia conducting show trials.


Another highly unlikely heroine, showing again that Mike Pence is very highly overrated by some.
How overrated is Pence?


From the cartoonist Scott Adams: "Seems you conflated the crazies with the Trump team."
Bwah-hah-hah!!!


Dramatic pictures where Ukrainian high school graduates pose in the ruins of their old high school.
These graduates pose on a destroyed Russian tank.


WaPo writes a 3k word story about Representative Liz Cheney and the January 6th Commission. Our blogger is sad that such a platform was given over to a damned horserace piece. They could have done so much more with a such a platform!


Aww! Our hero chef and prod papa Jose Andres. His daughter just graduated high school!


Hoo boy! And here's Ted Nugent with a typically stupid idea! With over 130k K-12 schools in the US, not counting private, religious, charter, and boarding schools, Nugent thinks a commando should just wander around and look for trouble!


Good! Several journalists in addition to Fox News tried to downplay and discourage viewing the January 6th Committee hearing. Public watched in very large numbers anyway.


Police Chief Arredondo is satisfied with his own performance in the Uvalde school shooting, but sounds to me as though he made a serious number of very critical errors.


The Russian group Pussy Riot left Russia and is now protesting in Texas. Are their two foes really all that different?


To all the people who feel the war in Ukraine has been a big boost for the arms industry, yep! Primarily though, as it's tough to switch over from Soviet-style arms to Western arms, the war has provided an excellent opportunity for Eastern European countries to "clean out their attics" and to send all of their older equipment to Ukraine. This mean, of course, that Western arms will be needed to restock inventories.


Russians are counting on a GOP victory in the US midterm elections.
Putin compares himself and his “mission” with Ukraine to Peter the Great (1672-1725) and Sweden.

Again, its a battle of attrition and inches right now.

Ukraine does not agree that their land is and always was Russia.

Good! The EU is firmly behind Ukraine's request to join them.


The UN has taken a clear position on the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). The US and Israel have described the UN’s position as the current obstacle to peace. Could it be that how Israel treats the oPt is actually the obstacle to peace?


Good summary of the first January 6th hearing. I especially liked the first big point, that Trump was at the center of the whole thing.

The main Fox News people ran their shows without commercial breaks. Were they concerned that their viewers might check out the committee if they allowed any breaks?


Yes, it’ s extremely useful to keep the Benghazi hearings in mind when Minority Leader McCarthy calls the

@January6thCmte … the ‘most political and least legitimate committee in congressional history.’”


It's long been clear that by far the biggest victim of misbehavior by SCOTUS is SCOTUS itself. That's now coming true with a vengeance.

Justice Clarence Thomas:

"When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I'm in, it changes the institution fundamentally"

Uh, yeah!


The blogger celebrates what he admits is very incremental progress. Republicans are now admitting that the climate crisis is real and in need of solution.


Russia’s been pursuing a low-level war against the US, EU and NATO since 2014. Christian white supremacists are his allies.
True victory consists of tossing Russia out of Ukraine entirely. All of the territories seized in 2014 must be regained. Zelenskyy is trying to make it clear that he doesn’t want anyone negotiating peace on his behalf as Trump was doing for the Afghan government. Ukraine must be at the table for any deal.
Zelenskyy is planning for the upcoming “heating season,” when Ukraine will need gas and coal to stay warm.
Part of Russia’s problem in Sievierodonetsk is that they’re using Luhansk People’s Republic militia in offensive urban ops.


Active planning for 6 January 2021 goes back at least as far as 6 December 2020.


A while ago, I used the word “genocide” to describe what Russia was doing in Ukraine. Are the Russians practicing yer “classic” Hitler-style genocide, where the people in charge seek to kill as many of the target population as possible? A look at how Russians are occupying Kherson says “Not quite.” Basically, Russians want to keep the population as quiet and as immobile/indoors as possible. They set up a whole series of checkpoints and make citizens want to go through as few times as possible. Anyone gets too loud or out of order, they’re “disappeared.”


I guess enough time has passed since the deadly energy crisis in Texas and Senator Cruz's cowardly flight to Cancun that he now feels that a revisionist history will be accepted by his followers. The Texas power grid is independent from the rest of the country. That’s why the crisis last winter with Texans freezing was a purely Texas problem and not a regional one.


Uvalde TX suffeed a school shooting. The actor Matthew McConaughey who spent part of his childhood there, made an emotional speech about it.

McConaughey spoke to several people before making his speech. The main message everyone he spoke to wanted him to convey was "Make my child's death matter!"

The Fox News “rebuttal” to McConaughey’s speech. Uh, yeah. Body armor for everyone. Yeah, that’ll work.


Gee, thanks NY Times. Your headline matches the style of Breitbart News! It’s crass and crude and reduces the motivations of the hearings to simple R vs D politics. Never mind that our democracy was actually at stake on January 6th or that the death toll was intended to be MUCH higher!


Estonian Prime Minister talks about autocracy.
Both Russians and Ukrainians have decided that Sievierodonetsk is where they’ll make a stand.
Are Russians going to try and take Odesa? Not a great idea, but who knows?
Russia pestering China to help them out more.

Yeah, when you have to move weapons all the way from Irkutsk (South-central Siberia), the war is going very badly for Russia.


Good! Biden wants to more or less double the amount of electricity produced by solar power.


Good! The McCloskeys were the couple that waved guns at peaceful protesters who were simply passing by their house. By the Supreme Court refusing to take the case, their law licenses are revoked.


Very interesting piece, examining the whole "originalst" idea that was advocated by both Judge Bork and Justice Scalia.


Represenative Marjorie Taylor Greene asks David Hogg "I don’t see you on my schedule, why not?'
Which I guess means that if you're a celebrity and you're going to be protesting in her district, you should check in with her office.


Since 2011, pelagic sargassum, a bad-smelling brown seaweed (full of hydrogen sulphide gas), has plagued the Caribbean. Environmentalists have come up with a way to make the seaweed useful.


Cool! Black Adam (who will be played by Dwayne Johnson) will be joined by the DC characters Dr. Fate and Hawkman in the Black Adam movie.


Kellyanne Conway’s book is very seriously underselling. Problem is, of course, is that book sales by Mary Trump and Michelle Obama are in the millions because they're known as truth-tellers. No one knows that about Conway.


Putin is counting on the GOP winning the midterm election.

“113 churches have already been destroyed or damaged by Russian shelling.”

President Zelenskyy advocates tossing Russia out of UNESCO.

The enemy continues to block civilian shipping in the northwestern Black Sea.”

That is, Odesa is unable to send out Ukrainian exports, which are largely grains.


Ukrainian women singing. The lead singer has her own YouTube channel.


Good grief! I agree completely! If Senator Joe Manchin is willing to sacrifice the welfare of hundreds of millions of citizens because he thinks someone might have insulted him, he's clearly not mature enough to hold national office!

*Sigh!* No, it's not "Biden's fault" that Senator Manchin is completely disloyal to the Democratic Party, WaPo!!! Blame Manchin!!!


I don't know that I agree with Chris Christie that "both sides" are hardening, but it's certainly become apparent to liberals that hardening targets is a complete dead end of a strategy. What's absolutely clear is that conservatives simply don't have any other strategy that they're willing to consider.


An absolute monarchy attempts some reforms, but tries to remain an absolute monarchy. Doesn't work too well.


This is a mystery. The police in Uvalde have no credibility because they’ve so frequently and blatantly lied. So why is the NY Times citing anonymous sources among the police there?

Hmm. Except that other countries have successfully stopped school shootings without Christian nationalism and Christian nationalism has not shown itself to be effective in stopping school shootings. Yeah, other than that, she makes a great case that we need Christian nationalism in order to stop school shootings. 


British Intelligence sums up war at 100-day mark.
Russians are working hard to get all of Siverodonetsk under their control. They aren’t quite there yet.
An American’s experience as a soldier in Ukraine.


The actress Lynda Carter agrees. Wonder Woman is queer and trans.


Poor Peter Navarro! Wasn’t treated with the deference he thought he deserved! They *augh!* put him in hndcuffs!!!


MOLLIE HEMINGWAY (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR):
'We have a natural right of self-defense..."

Cool. That clears everyone to be able to own a six-round handgun.

"...and to guard against tyranny..."

Ehh, this is pretty tough to do with stockpiled weapons. One of the big lessons of the Ukraine War is that conducting modern warfare takes a lot of supplies. Just stockpiling rifles and ammo doesn't mean a whole lot.


According to Zelenskyy, Russians trying to, not just defeat Ukraine, but to erase the country.
Zelenskyy also mentions environmental damage caused by the war.
Russians justifying attacks on schools, hospitals, etc., by claiming Ukrainian troops ae using them as cover.
Morale problems among Ukrainian volunteers. Basic supplies still needed.


Not a good sign for the continued survival of the Iranian government. I read about the Revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Corruption was a major factor in causing the Iranian people to turn against the Shah.


The truly sad part of Representative Jim Jordan’s speech is when he complains that Democrats haven’t asked their Republican colleagues for their ideas on how to address gun violence. Since when have they had any ideas? It been many, many years since gun violence became a thing in the US and in that whole time, I haven’t heard a single idea from them. Most importantly, during Trump's first two years (2017-2018), Republicans could have instituted anything they wanted. 


With Saudi Arabia and Russia being our two major suppliers of oil and with prices going up, we can’t afford to be too choosy! Biden has to start making nice with Saudi Arabia, now that we shouldn't be getting oil from Russia anymore. 


Stage production that makes it very clear that Putin regrets that he was too young to take part in World War II.


When I was a young'un, I did a lot of reading in military history. A lot of my reading was about logistics. The Germans during World War II especially had a lot of trouble with that. Sure, back in the old days (up to the Medieval Era), soldiers got their food by raiding farmhouses, cut down trees and plucked birds to make arrows (though I'm sure their blacksmiths made lots of arrowheads before they took off), but things changed when soldiers started using guns. Ammunition was hard to make using field facilities. That's why logistics have gotten so hard over the past few centuries.
The piece here is about the logistical challenge of moving even four HIMARS systems (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems). What gets to me is the sheer weight of everything that has to be moved.


Fascinating and disturbing sign of the times. The Girl Scouts awards a citation of valor for brave actions taken during a school shooting.


GOP has some pretty creative reasons for why we have so many shootings, none of which include too many military-style guns being available to regular people.


Two very seriously out-of-touch Supreme Court Justices. Alito seems to have a very exaggerated idea of crime in NYC. Coney Barrett seems to think giving up babies for adoption is a very simple, no-fuss procedure.


General Native American term for gays and lesbians is "Two-Sprit People." They have both masculine and feminine spirits.


One of those “Happiness is wherever you can find it” sorts of things.


Childhood happiness is when you find your beloved cat alive in the ruins of the house you used to live in.

President Zelenskyy talks about European sanctions against Russia.
Russia still trying to encircle city of Sieverodonetsk.
Ukrainians are slowly ceding Sieverodonetsk, making Russians pay steeply for progress. Taking the city makes sense from the Russian perspective.
Russia still has plenty of artillery. Lots of fighting ahead.
Biden’s op-ed in the NY Times.


The State Secrets Privilege (SSP) has been used many times to cover up incompetence and bad faith actions. The Abu Zubaydah case makes it just a bit worse.


The Durham Special Counsel disaster. Three years and over $20 million and they got bupkis.


Town of Uvalde puts a lot of money into their police force and this is how they perform!

Uvalde Police Chief has been unresponsive to questions for two days now.

Update (9 June): The Police Chief did eventually respond and described his actions. He thought he did a great job. Very few people agree.

Laura Ingraham of Fox News tries desperately to change the subject from guns to marijuana.


"Trump just sent a third letter to the Pulitzer Prize board demanding that they strip the NYT of their award for Russiagate reporting"
On the one hand, I have zero sympathy for the former president and believe he’s wrong, OTOH, the Pulitzer Prize board needs to be straight-up with him and tell him flatly that he won’t get a correction from them. At the very least, they need to give him a progress report.


May


How do you conduct democracy with a person like this? He makes a sort-of, somewhat reasonable-sounding assertion, is proven to be way off and then just insists that he's right anyway.


"Supreme Court Investigation Demands Clerks' Cell Phone Records"
As the blogger makes clear, there is a very high probability that the perp the Supreme Court is looking for is Ginni and/or Clarence Thomas, so of course they're investigating clerks.


Looks like the 911 people did their job just fine and relayed the substance of the calls from inside the Uvalde school.


Heh! Funny, how after all this time, The Former Guy is the only person in the entire country that thought his phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State was “perfect.”


A while ago, I put out a piece that said Russia didn’t have any NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers, their Navy counterpart is Petty Officers). Turns out that Russia does indeed have NCOs, but they’re a pretty recent phenomenon.
One of the important points about Russia feeling the need to have NCOs is that I’ve been seeing an old argument on regular citizens needing access to guns so that they can overthrow the government if need be. But being a force capable of doing battle with the government requires more than simply guns. Right now, Russia is having a hard time prevailing in the war in Ukraine because their soldiers aren’t as advanced, aren’t as professionally knowledgeable as their Ukrainian counterparts, and the difference is visible in battlefield performance.


"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott loudly booed at Uvalde memorial site"
Seems to me that Trump ran into the same problem. He wanted to play the “Consoler in Chief,” but the people at the scene of the shooting accurately identified him as being part of the problem.


Very interesting. Seems Russian post-Soviet TV depended very heavily on American TV. The only series here that I watched regularly was “Married...with Children,” but I knew of all the rest.


Russian State Duma Deputy Defense Committee Chairman Vladimir Shamanov talks about long-range plans for Ukraine. Ukrainians must eject all Russian troops from all of their territory!


Basic problem with the "evidence" presented by Dinesh D'Souza in "2000 Mules" is that it's all suggestive. All of it constitutes potential leads that might lead to evidence of voter fraud. None of it would stand up in court as evidence that does prove voter fraud.


It’s far from clear what it is that US troops hope to accomplish in Syria. As ISIS is long since defeated, it’s actually kind of surprising that they haven’t been withdrawn yet.


Blogger solves the mystery as to why Ukraine was defending Severodonetsk so fiercely. It's all about propaganda.

But so long as Russia has to keep troops around Lyman hunting these guerrilla-style defenders, those are forces that can’t be moved to Severodonetsk itself. And everything in this area seems calibrated toward bleeding Russia’s war machine dry while buying time for Western weapons to arrive and reserve forces to spin up.


A 30-year Army veteran explains how guns are handled by trainees and by active-duty soldiers. So, of course, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recommends that parents take turns carrying guns to protect their schoolchildren.


That's very good news! From consumer sentiment being kind of “Meh” just a little while ago, a slight majority of consumers are now actively seeking some form of electric cars.


MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross looks into “replacement theory” and finds there’s actually quite a bit to it. Of course, she doesn't interpret it to be just an anti-white people kind of thing.


MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace cut into her broadcast to bring her audience up to date on how Texas Governor Abbott was failing to do his job. More newspeople need to do this.


"Trump Bashes Kellyanne Conway For Telling The Truth"
Kellyanne Conway claims that she was the first Trump friend to tell him that he had lost the 2020 election. Liberals criticized  Conway's claim because she and Trump both continued to claim publicly that he hadn't lost, so who cares what she told him private? Her Glorious Leader then complains that her statement makes her a disloyal subject!

Hmm. My understanding was that the former president was watching the attack on the Capitol on his tee-vee and was enthralled. Where does Kellyanne Conway get the notion that he never meant for people to attack the Capitol?


Oh. good grief! No, the shooter was not "successfully contained" but the paper just mindlessly repeats what authority figures told them! Yes, the shooter was confined to a small area, but there were students and teachers with him, meaning he posed a contnuing threat to them. Did he simply kill everyone off right away?  Many people died right away, but there were people who slowly bled out and one other who were at first playing dead and then repeatedly asked the 911 operator where the rescuers were.

"Just harden the target," people say. In this case schools. But the school in Uvalde was hardened!

First, to those who blame school shootings on mental health, the shooter “had no known criminal or mental health history.“

Police claim that everything went as it should have, but an awful lot of parents and other citizens claim that police were just standing around.


In this video clip, Senator Cruz makes it absolutely, positively crystal clear that he can't answer why the gun problem is utterly exclusive to the US.

A persistent reporter demonstrates that a politician simply has no serious answers to the question of why an 18-year old needs an AR-15.


It’s good to see that the Biden Administration is trying to revive the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, but the killing of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Colonel is complicating things.


Harris Faulkner is astonished to be described as "conservative media," but yeah. No, the world did not spontaneously confront Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, just as it didn't spontaneously confront Iraq back in 1991. Joe Biden and the elder George Bush made those two alliances happen.


Republicans like to talk about solving problems that they pretend to care about, but as usual, they're "All hat and no cattle."


Details on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. More details.

Excellent rant about the 50 Republican senators who keep filibustering gun safety measures. Of course, the two Democratic senators who insist that the filibuster cannot be swept away are also to blame, but he doesn’t mention them.

Senate Minority Leader McConnell has, of course, no reaction to the shooting.

Yep! Senator Manchin prioritizes the filibuster over pushing through gun safety legislation.

They say that madness is when you keep doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting a different result. Senator Manchin appears to be stuck in an infinite loop. He keeps wanting to find a bipartisan solution to guns that both sides can agree on. It clearly isn't happening.

So Senator Sinema, that other Democratic, but filibuster-loving senator, comes out with a really good statement that says nothing about dumping the filibuster!

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s answer to school shootings (more religion).

Note all of the people who will be issuing “thoughts and prayers” today.

I'll tell you what's really a "tired talking point!" The idea of "a good guy with a gun..." or "if we only arm teachers." It's not entirely clear what happened immediately before the gunmn entered the school, but he entereed it with a gun and lots of ammunition. Depriving him of a gun in the first place is an idea that was tried with the Brady Bill and guess what? It worked! Shootings went significantly down.

Representative AOC is responding to Representative Boebert's statement that "You cannot legislate away evil." True, but if you look at what other nations have done, it's absolutely crystal clear that we do not have to live with gun massacres.

Love it! Looks just like a Norman Rockwell painting! Teaxs Govenor candidate Beto O'Rourke confronts the sitting Texas Governor Abbot and numerous other officials that are pretending to care about gun safety.


A powerful argument. Henry #$&@ing Kissinger wants to spare his good buddy Putin the humiliation of being soundly thrashed by our true friends and allies, the Ukrainians! We must support our allies!!!
Good response to Kissinger’s proposal.


Yep! Unfortunately, once you’re out of the womb, the “pro-lifers” no longer care about you.


Huh! Interesting. Republicans want to defend their failed 2017 tax cut? Cool! Let's make a campaign issue out of it!
And yeah, Senator Manchin's criticism is only sort of, partially right


Very cool! The NY Times leaves the euphemisms aside and calls it like it is!

“Deep” thoughts from the NY Times columnist.


16 months after being inaugurated, how’s Biden doing on the Iran issue? A last-minute action taken by Trump to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group appears to be the cause of a lot of problems.


Ivanka Trump visits Ukraine. Does she have evil motives in doing so? Is she trying to conduct an image rehabilitation tour? Ehh, yeah. Probably. Hey, credit where it’s due. She appears to be doing good stuff and is spending money in useful ways. 


This is why I can’t understand how anybody can support Russia. Pretty clearly, the objective isn’t military. This is cultural genocide. Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine’s culture.


Hmm. "Ginny Thomas was paid for many years to lobby against the ACA..."
This strikes me as something that we the public should have been made aware of many years ago.


Seems pretty clear that the NY Times Editorial Board is composed of bunch of old, isolated, out of touch people who really have no idea what’s going on in the real world. Editorial Board is unduly pessimistic about Ukraine's ability to survive.

Another problem with the Russia-Ukraine war is that it diverts attention and resources away from a Central Asian problem, the Afghan Taliban.


Bishop in the US denies Speaker Pelosi communion. Pope makes it clear that that isn’t Vatican policy.

Another problem is that the Bishop is clearly a “Cafeteria Catholic,” someone who picks and chooses which parts of holy doctrine to enforce.


In 1943, a few months after the Soviet Union successfully beat Nazi Germany at the Battle of Stalingrad, the two sides faced each other again around the city of Kursk. In that, the Soviets demonstrated that they had solved the problem of blitzkrieg. The Russians are now on the other side of that. Ukrainians have done what the Soviets did in '43, they've constructed layered defenses. The enemy breaks through one line, there's another one right behind it. Russia's in some pretty deep doo-doo right now.


Francesca Albanese, the new UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, talks about her role and the role of the UN in enforcing human rights there.


No, Representative Jordan’s and Elon Musk’s statements are not true! The Steele Dossier had a source that was much later found to be without credibility and there were lurid episodes that were never considered credible, but there was no attempt to lie to anyone and a great deal of it has stood up to examination.


Pennsylvania’s Republican candidate for Governor.

"Mastriano’s Master’s Thesis Fearfully Imagines A Woke Dictator And A Civilian ‘Putsch’"
More on Mastriano.

Serious hard-luck stories from Russians in Ukraine. Blogger tells a story of a severely under-strength unit (a company is supposed to have from 120 to 160 soldiers, the fellow who’s quoted says he’s in a “company” of 13) that has to walk for six hours to the battlefield, with no tanks or trucks to carry equipment there or to carry wounded soldiers back.


The “People’s Convoy,” that group of truckers with no clear purpose, but who want to copy the truck holdup from Canada, may be going through a financial squeeze that may shut them down. They started with a fund of nearly $2 million (that’s why they always have enough diesel fuel), but that fund is quickly running out.

More hilarity on that.

Good!

BREAKING: the trucker convoy is leaving the DC area after failing to occupy anything.


The surviving family members of the Sandy Hook students have sued Alex Jones with the explicit purpose of bankrupting him. He argues that his outfit is "press" and therefore protected by the 1st Amendment. But if this is the level of "journalism" he provides…

Jones said, "Three-year-old girls are having periods. 5-year-old girls are getting pregnant because these chemicals hyper feminize females and feminized males."


"Madison Cawthorn Declares War On The GOP"
Woo hoo! Love it when bad guys fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel refers derisively to what Representative Cawthorn calls “Dark MAGA,” says it sounds like something from Star Wars.


Very interesting that Representative Loudermilk is now sharing a story that's relevant to January 6th and that he had kept to himself for almost a year and a half. Also of note is that he could have come to the committee and given testimony under oath, but instead chose to issue a written press release.


Fox Newsperson Tomi Lahren comments on Hunter Biden having "no marketable skills beyond his last name." Really? Biden actually has a pretty healthy resume. Has he benefited from being the son of a president? Yes, but so have Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric. Do any of them have skills that are independantly of being related to Donald Trump?


One reason why I'll never be a Libertarian>
Libertarians figure (words to the effect of) “Ahh, $%#@ ‘em. People will get over/learn to live with abortion rules.”


Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, the brother of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, found his promotion to full Colonel was put on hold.

Alyssa Farah, the then-White House communications director, insisted that Vindman’s allegations were "ridiculous and false.”

Well, now that The Former Guy is no longer President, Yevgeny Vindman is now a full Colonel.


Jesse Waters of Fox News feels that those who aren’t directly affected by the abortion issue should take a seat on it. I read many years ago that single women of child-bearing age tend to be overwhelmingly pro-choice. Looking at the available statistics, Guttmacher says abortions are sought mainly by women in their 20s and 30s. Pew says those below 30 tend to be pro-choice by a 75% to 25% margin. Take a seat, Jesse!


Hey y'all! Congresswoman AOC is engaged to be married!


Science fiction films guess what the future will be like. Fortunately, in most cases, they got it wrong.


The Cook Political Report believes the win of State Senator Doug Mastriano for Senate candidate puts the Pennsylvania race into a “lean Dem” category.

Rachel Maddow's evaluation.

"How Doug Mastriano promoted election lies between Election Day and Jan. 6"


Simple, foolproof way to tell if someone’s racist and/or trying to stay in the good graces of racists. Ask them what they think of the "replacement theory." If the man or woman start hemming and hawing or tries to change the subject or tries to turn the question around, they’re racist.

Case in point.

When Tucker Carlson of Fox News learned that he and the shooter in Buffalo had identical ideologies, he doubled down on “White Replacement Theory.” Since 2011, this theory has been implicated in 160 murders.


Wait! What? Didn’t Republicans just finish complaining about the baby food shortage?!?!?! They just now voted 192-12 to not do anything about that shortage! Democrats were in the majority and voted unanimosly to fund the measure anyway.

Like the pro-Russian House Caucuas, the Let 'em Starve Caucus is a small, but very real group.

Explanation of the two votes.


Ooh! Ow! Yowza! Freudian slip much? The younger George Bush makes an inadvertent admission regarding both the current war in Ukraine and the Iraq War of 2003.


The message from Elon Musk here convinces me that he's hopelessly biased and completely incapable of running Twitter effectively.


This is why we call them anti-choicers and this is what they're all about. Representative Roy talks over his witnesses, showing his complete contempt for them.


Rock star Eric Clapton's a hard-core anti-vaxxer. Guess what he's now hospitalized for? Yeah, I just really have a hard time feeling any sympathy for him.


Cool! Saw that Representative Cawthorn had lost his primary, saw some doubt later, but now its confirmed. His political career is over, having lost his first challenge. Will he have a bright media future? Probably.

Whew! We all dodged a bullet with this one! Idaho's Lieutenant Governor, Janice McGeachin is a real piece of work!


People have been kicking this idea around, that just as Native Americans can provide casinos (they’re sovereign entities), they might provide abortion services as well. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt is very sour on the idea.


Russia’s making threats that it simply can’t make good on.


The 30-year experiment of McDonald's in Russia is over.

Update (9 June): The Russian Sistema PBO company will keep all old employees and has introduced a new logo, but hasn't yet come up with a new name.


Unfortunately, Justice Clarence Thomas makes a really good argument for term limits for Supreme Court Justices. He's clearly become an Archie Bunker, sitting on his easy chair at home and yelling at the TV at the liberals while ignoring all the problems of the right wing.


Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts expresses a strong desire for a theocracy in his state. He clearly thinks the baby takes priority over the woman. Period. Full stop.


Chuck Todd regards it as a "head-scratcher" that the Build Back Better bill didn't pass. In other words, he just wasn't paying attention at the time. Senator Sanders sets him straight.


I could take about 5 minutes of the interview with Melania Trump. What really struck me was the vagueness of her comments. What did she accomplish in the White House? She doesn't say. What has she been doing since then? She doesn't say. Clearly, she has no idea why baby formula is scarce these days (The people in charge of one of the very few companies that produce it put their cash into stock buy-backs rather than keeping their factories updated) and just says the problem is "Leadership," as though her husband would have had the first clue about what to do.


Today is Nakba Day (15 May), the catastrophe of Palestinians being removed from their homes 74 years ago.


The number 3 Republican in the House casually dropped the term “usual pedo grifters” into a tweet. Accusing people of being pedophiles is a favorite tactic of QAnon and Senator Hawley resorted to it in the Supreme Court hearings for the now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “...it’s an objectively unhinged thing to allege on a public forum...”

As the press critic Dan Froomkin points out, the NY Times and WaPo should have made a really big stink about this!


The shooter in Buffalo, NY was extremely well-prepared, even had body armor. He wrote a

...106-page document that appears to be influenced by Tucker Carlson and other Fox News and right-wing personas promoting the despicable white supremacist Great Replacement Theory…

Hmm. Yeah. Gee. wonder why it is that the most prominent voices on the American far right are all quiet on the Buffalo white supremacist shooter? The entire Houe Freedom Caucus is entirely mum on him!

No, the shooter in Buffalo wasn’t suffering from mental health issues. He was an extremist who had been listening to Tucker Carlson of Fox News and other radicals.

Origin of the phrase "great replacement."

The phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi Rene Binet (1913-1957), who served during WW II in The Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French collaborators.
...
Binet fulminated after the war against "the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols," by which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure mestizo "race" (he was a biological racist).


"The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19"
I remember reading about this at the time (April 2020). Meatpacking plants were responsible for 6% to 8% of all US coronavirus cases by July 2020. The plants were actively hiding and denying cases.


DSA - Democratic Socialists of America:

Western countries are using the war in Ukraine for their own imperialist interests. If Sweden and Finland are rushed into NATO...'The people must be given a chance to say no to NATO'."

From Bloomberg News, "According to a recent survey, 84% of Finns think that Russia poses a significant military threat..."

Parliaments of Sweden and Finland both voted unanimously to join NATO.


Wow! According to the Trumpers, Pennsylvania’s Pet Toomey has gone all squishy on them!


President Zelenskyy addresses the problem that Ukraine supplies a significant chunk of the world’s wheat and Russians are fight to keep that wheat off of the market.
Russia loses ground around Kharkiv.
Russian leaders are significantly older than Ukrainian ones.


NY Times feels the need to soft-pedal the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. Not at all clear why.

Very happy to hear that the death and funeral of murdered American correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh has been viewed with horror by the world. People who thought Israel was a civilized country are being educated.

Again, it is an extremely bad idea for people to suggest that every criticism against the state of Israel is automatically an act of antisemitism. This is classic “crying wolf” and makes people take genuine antisemitism less seriously.

My report on Shireen Abu Akleh.


Pretty harsh. Philadelphia Inquirer can't endorse any Republicans for Governor because they don't share the same reality that most of the rest of us do.


The subpoenas to Congresspeople "shocked This Town" why? Personallt, I would have said that the January 6 Committee upheld American ideals by saying that no one is above the law!


"Mayor Pete explains the Problem with 'Originalism'
Yeah, I looked into Originalism back when Judge Bork was up for a Supreme Court nomination and was extremely unimpressed. One of the problems was that, in the late 1800s, conditions of employment were no longer what they were in the late 1700s. Back then, labor law was premised on one blacksmith employing one apprentice. A century later, a few managers would oversee hundreds of employees working 12 to 14 hour shifts. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court finally recognized the shift and interpreted labor law accordingly.


Senator Rand Paul has no idea how the US economy works or how much we can afford to do. Due to his ignorance, he’s holding up spending on Ukraine. Paul says he’s worried about the deficit, but Democrats suggesting taxing the rich more (For reasons that no one understands, Senator Sinema opposed that). I don’t recall Paul or any other Republican supporting the idea, or frankly, ANY idea for raising revenue.


Members of the band Pussy Riot have escaped from Russia.


570 Ukrainian hospitals have been hit, with 101 of them being completely destroyed.
Russians are killing people who are simply trying to evacuate.


Congressman Troy Nehls (R-TX) regards it as a matter of common sense that American babies should be prioritized before foreign babies. Texas Governor Abbott thinks so, too.
Why are we short on baby formula? There are only three such companies and with one,

The company chose to put its pandemic profits into stock buybacks, rather than replacing worn-out equipment.

More on baby formula.


This particular black hole, at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, has the mass of about 10 million of our suns.


The right to speak vs the right to be published.


President Zelenskyy comments on US “Lend-Lease” program.

“Zelensky: War will be over when Ukraine gets all of its territories back.”

Ukraine using Bayractar drones to battle over Snake Island.

Ukrainians would relieve Mariupol if they could.

The way the military constructs a pontoon bridge is that, as they place down each section, troops and tanks advance on the bridge so that as the last section is down, they can rush the other side. This works great if the other side doesn't know you're coming! Russia has about 90 Battalion Tactical Groups in Ukraine and they just lost an entire BTG!


"Republican senator’s push to arrest abortion protesters meets GOP resistance"
Since Senator Cotton's statement should have concerned everyone who cares about the Constitution and free speech rights, it's not clear whyonly the GOP demonsrated concern. A better headline might be:

“Sen. Cotton wants the abortion-rights protesters demonstrating in front of the homes of Supreme Court Justices to be arrested and prosecuted. There was no indication that he understood the damage this would do to the First Amendment.”


So all of the Republicans and one Democrat (Manchin) voted against the Women’s Health Protection Act. Senator Manchin complained that the bill went further than just to codify Roe v Wade. I thought all of the additions were necessary.
Saw later that Democrats made a cost-benefit analysis between trying to get through a watered-down bill vs using a better bill in the midterm campaign. As our two rogue Democrats (Manchin & Sinema) are unlikely to vote to override the filibuster, this sounds like a better strategy.


When you have to move your forces around in reaction to what the other guy is doing, you're losing.
The video clips at the end remind me of the clips produced by Iraqi opposition forces in the 2005-2008 period. These are a bit slicker and more sophisticated, but not by much.


Sounds more like an execution than an accidental killing.

It would really help if the AP, y'know, followed its own style guide when reporting on the death of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

Jewish Voice for Peace has a template by which we can protest the NY Times coverage of the murder of a prominent and respected journalist.

Background on her murder

Very cool! Tribute to the Al Jazeera reporter who was killed.


Very sensible strategy on the part of the Biden Administration. Republicans, that is Senator Scott, has published a plan, a lot of people have said they’re in favor of it, so as far as Biden is concerned, that’s the official plan he’s running against.

Senator Scott, in reacting to President Biden's criticism of his far-right-wing, 11-point plan, appears to be agreeing with both Biden and Senate Minority Leader McConnell that his plan is a really bad one.


Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss were very badly hurt by false accusations of ballot fraud after the 2020 election. They were falsely accused of ballot manipulation. One America News has now apologized.


People have asked how they can affect the Supreme Court in its presently gerrymandered state, with a majority of five hard-line right-wingers doing pretty much as they please. My answer has been that the Court is shooting itself in the foot with its excessive partisanship. The piece here confirms that the public sees the Court as hopelessly biased and therefore unreliable at delivering justice.


The young woman seen on video singing in the tunnels and warrens of Mariupol is Kateryna. She was reported dead, but is alive! She's still in good spirits, too!

A buddy of mine suggested Ukraine was selling all sorts of weapons on the black market. A search showed that, yes indeed, there is a very healthy market there for weapons of all descriptions. With many nations contributing weapons and President Zelenskyy’s early call for the population to arm itself, this make sense that some weapons would be diverted to private profit. Is the black market detracting from the war effort? That’s not at all clear. As Ukraine is doing well on the battlefield, it’s hard to say.


For anyone worried about the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v Wade becoming real and worried that we might approach a Brave New World/1984/Handmaid's Tale kind of dystopia, 'fraid to say those fears might have a basis in fact. If women were to escape a state like Texas and go to California to have an abortion, Republicans are looking at legal ways to prevent/discourage that.

A somewhat close call. A building-sized asteroid came within 14 times the distance between Earth and its moon.


A Ukrainian military doctor tried to evacuate Mariupol with her 4-year old daughter. The daughter got out, but the doctor was kept behind in a “filtration camp.”
No big victory speech from President Putin and the Ukrainian flag still flies above a small corner of Mariupol. US figures about two Battalion Tactical Group (1400-1600 people) out of around 100 are committed to Mariupol.
Russia appears to have far fewer precision-guided bombs and missiles, meaning most strikes today are by “dumb,” less accurate munitions.
Still muddy up in Donbas area, so Russia units pretty much confined to paved roads.


A look at the demonstrators outside Justice Alito’s home. Not really clear on what the problem is. The rule on protests, which the protesters have followed, is that you must be peaceful and must restrict your presence to public ares, streets, sidewalks, etc.

I think Senate Minority Leader McConnell is overstating the danger to Justices ju-u-u-ust a bit!

It is an attempt to replace the rule of law with the rule of mobs.

"Men Admonish Women To Be Dainty About Their Protests"
Yep! ‘Cause them thar wimmin is just too darn mean and nasty for our delicate Supreme Court Justices!

The blogger gives a breakdown of how different American religions feel about the abortion issue. Evangelicals are the number one opponent of it, followed by Roman Catholics. Everyone else is okay with it.


This is extremely serious environmental news and the war in Ukraine has caused to be vastly worse than it had to be. Russia’s military is heavily concentrated in Ukraine right now,

So the aerial tankers that we would use, say to drop water or fire retardant, in the U.S., those are civilian. And in Canada, they're civilian planes. In Russia, they're almost exclusively military.


Republican Senator Rick Scott came up with an 11-point plan for what his party should do in the event they win the midterms. Amazingly enough, all 11 points are wildly unpopular! Who'd a thunk it?


Mohammed Bin Salman may be trying to indirectly invest in Israel via Jared Kushner’s $2 billion investment fund.


Aww! George Perez was an awesome comics artist! Very sad to hear that’s he’s passed.


Two former president's send out Mother's Day messages. Obama and Trump are nothing alike!


Steve Schmidt was the campaign manager for Senator McCain in 2008. McCain's then-24 year old daughter Meghan comes across as the biggest, whiniest brat here!!!
This piece is partially in response to Meghan's latest book selling less than 300 copies.

Schmidt wasn't thrilled about Sarah Palin, either.


This is for anyone who thinks that right-wingers will stop after abortion is no longer legal. The Griswold case essentially established that whether or not someone uses birth control isn't any business of the state.


Yep! Being denied an abortion has predictable financial effects on women.


The brave, brave Russians, in their great courage, destroyed a museum. They also bombed a school where 90 people were sheltering. 30 known survivors. $%#@&$%!!!!
Russia is losing ground in some areas.
100 T-90M tanks introduced to the battlefield. One destroyed so far.
CIA knew Russia would open up offensive back in early Fall of 2021.
Woo hoo! “All women, children and elderly people have been evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol”
Russia hasn’t really changed since the 1470s.


"Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"
Cool stuff! They introduce a number of little-known and alternative-universe characters to aid the two heroes in their quest. Lengthy at two hours, but doesn’t feel padded at all, they pretty much need every scene in order to tell the story.


Kids make use of subway walls to hang their art.

President Zelenskyy warns of mines left in forests of areas that were occupied.

Russian troops fire at evacuation vehicle near Azovstal [metal production facility in Mariupol], kill Ukrainian soldier.


Which brings up the problem of “aging out” of the adoption system. Yes, there’s a strong consumer demand for a certain kind of adoptee, but not much demand for many other kinds. That’s why many children in the adoption system get to the age of 18 and are then released into society to get along as best they can. For many, they can lead reasonably happy lives, but the odds are a bit stacked against the group as a whole.


Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas bemoans the lack of faith in the Court, apparently not being aware that he’s a major part of the problem!

There was one person with both the means and the motivation to leak the Alito memo.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is deeply concerned about people being unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with.” This of course presumes that the outcomes were fairly and justly arrived at.

In what appears to be a competition for the dumbest possible response to the Alito-Roe leak, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat comes up with a worthy entry by saying that men's unemployment is a major reason for abortions.
Remember: “Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”

There's also the idea that Roe has caused polarization, so if we eliminate abortions, everybody will be happy!


I saw this.

There’s actually people out there that think Donald Trump is the second coming of Jesus Christ.

After which I read this.

"The flaw(s) in Trump’s idea about launching missiles into Mexico "

Oh, good grief! Don Jr. is unclear as to why firing a few missiles into a country that we're formally at peace with would be a bad idea!


Staff member at the Azovstal steel plant allowed Russians access to plant’s tunnels.
President Zelenskyy:

Russian troops have destroyed or damaged almost 400 health facilities. These are hospitals, maternity hospitals, outpatient clinics.

Russia attacking unsuccessfully.
US claims that it does not provide precise locations of Russian general to Ukrainian armed forces. A dozen Russian generals have been killed since the war started.
“Inside the 'filtration camps' Russia has been sending forcibly deported Ukrainian citizens to.” 1.1 million at this point.
Status of NCO component of Ukrainian forces.


TFG (The Former Guy) feels that he had a “winning” message on racism, which is curious because actually, most Americans actually felt he was pretty racist.


Supreme Court Justice Alito wrote the draft decision repealing Roe vs Wade, the right to an abortion. Whoo-wee! The fellow that Justice Alito references is not only a burner of witches, but approved of marital rape and wife beating!

More on that fellow, Sir Matthew Hale. He was appointed the Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671. The Salem Witch Trials took inspiration directly from him.

Examining the effects of Sir Matthew Hale’s theories concerning women on the US legal system.


May 9 is Victory Day, when the Soviet Union and The Allies (who were, plus West Germany, later called NATO) defeated Nazi Germany. Russian forces are trying hard to wipe out the defenders of Mariupol by then. Here are some Ukrainians singing in the bunkers of Azovstal, a factory in Mariupol, just yesterday.


UNRWA, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees, has been under political pressure for a long time! Both Palestinians and Arabs in general are apparently re-thinking the future of UNRWA.


Dolly Parton has now been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


There’s not a single state in which support for an abortion ban exceeds 30%. The news on the Supreme Court leak does not help Republicans!

A preview of what border stops in the future will look like.

Someone asked how the five Justices lied by saying during their confirmation hearings that they'd support keeping Roe intact. Nothing on the issue of abortion has fundamentally changed since 1973. “Viability,” when can the child-to-be live outside the womb? In ‘73 and today, the answer is 22 weeks. Politically, there’s not a single state in which desire to overturn Roe is over 30%. One might argue that Thomas and Alito have had a change of heart, due just to the passage of time, but the three Trump appointees? Nu-uh.
Very frequently, anti-choicers bring up the Dred Scott decision as an example of a case that was wrongly decided. But public sentiment on slavery dramatically shifted against continuing it from 1840 to 1860. There has been no such sea change in sentiment on abortion.

Pathetic headline from the WaPo. "New spotlight on confirmation hearings." Froomkin comes up with a better one: “Draft abortion ruling show Trump Supreme Court nominees deceived senators under oath.”


Hmm, so just as Ukraine negotiates getting some civilians out of Mariupol, Russia doubles down on its offensive, trying to overwhelm the defenders by the time Putin makes a speech on May 9 to commemorate Victory Day.
Russians hitting Ukrainians unevenly, but all along the front. Fortunately, they’re running into stiff Ukrainian resistance.
Kharkiv’s Central Park gets bombed. I have no idea what’s that‘s supposed to accomplish!
Hundreds of thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain destroyed.


Senator Sinema made a very nice statement about women's reproductive rights. Question was though, was she willing to dump the filibuster in order to secure abortion rights? Nah.

Sinema said that while she opposed overturning Roe v. Wade, the filibuster had in the past served to block efforts to restrict abortion rights.

Fascinating look into the minds of right-wingers. They see their opponents as sexually frustrated spinsters.


Very interesting. There's clearly very strong support for seriously reforming the Supreme Court.


From the piece on abortion laws around the country:

The new Texas law resembles those in 18 Muslim-majority countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon, which only allow this exception [of danger to the life or health of the mother].


Ukrainian troops repel 12 Russian attacks in Donbas on May 3. Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation reported that Russian losses in the fighting in Donbas include six tanks, two artillery systems, three MLRS, 15 units of armored combat vehicles and nine cars.

Russian losses in a single day. Remember, Russia has no reserves at this point. What they’ve got in the field right now is what they’ve got.


Zelenskyy discusses Israels reaction to the Russian ambassador’s antisemitic comments, noting that Israel had a hard time rousing itself to comment before this.
British intelligence assess that Russia has effectively lost a quarter of their 120 BTNs (Battalion Tactical Groups, about 700 to 800 personnel, US battalions range from 300 to 1k personnel) Press conference asks for US assessment of that conclusion.
US assessment of how Russia intends to administer an occupied Ukraine.

Russian losses in a single day. Remember, Russia has no reserves at this point. What they’ve got in the field right now is what they’ve got.


Pretty gobsmacking, both that a 90-page draft Supreme Court decision would be leaked and that the majority would just completely overturn Roe.

Supreme Court draft decision on Roe.

Are things like gay marriage and birth control also on the chopping block? Yup, absolutely! This doctrine can be used to overturn anything that wasn’t considered an issue in the 1790s (Abortion didn’t become a political issue until the 1880s).

Kate is a senior official at Planned Parenthood.

This is indeed a very serious problem. Why bother with confirmation hearings if nominees are just going to lie in order to get through them?

Good comments from Biden and oh yes, Senator Collins (who was assured that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would respect Roe) is "concerned."

Very interesting that Republicans aren't celebrating the end of Roe. Could it be that it was all about getting the rubes upset and energized around election time?

An examination of the leak of the Supreme Court decision, even though it's by no means the most important part of the story.

Yep! "Saving the babies" is not and never was the point.


"Joe Manchin Endorses A Republican In West Virginia House Race"
*Sigh!* This is why we call Senator Manchin a sort-of, kind-of, wobbly, uncertain Democrat and why we need more Democratic senators!


Very cool news! An enzyme that can degrade commercial plastic at reasonable temperatures!


Woo hoo! Very cool! Ukrainians evacuated from Mariupol without getting shot at by Russians!

Radio Free Europe reports on Russian filtration (processing) camps in and around Mariupol.

It is increasingly difficult to see Russia being able to mobilise a large reserve much within a year. So its troops in the Donbas are what it has.

Ethnic makeup of the Russian army.


Aww, man-n-n-n! I was watching both Legends of Tomorrow and Batwoman and they're now both canceled! Still, for Legends to get to 110 shows over seven seasons is not a bad record at all.

Cool! Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson) will be out in October. Doom Patrol and Titans will both get fourth seasons. Many others.


Excerpts from a Time Magazine profile of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.


As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, Chief of General Staff of RAF Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov is second only to the Russian head of state, Putin. He was wounded when his headquarters was bombed. Many officers in the same HQ didn’t survive.

In comparing Putin to past Russian rulers, the author concludes Putin is more of a Tsarist than a Communist.


Now that the very highly theatrical Trump has been replaced by the steady competence of Biden, the press corps is bored!


Awww! Very sorry to hear this! Neal Adams was a major artist in comic books when I was a young'un. He did the socially relevant Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics and lots of great stuff on Batman, Avengers and X-Men.


President Zelenskyy asks why the average Russian soldier is doing this. What does he have to gain by his actions in Ukraine?

Russians increasing their air defense system.
Russians trying hard to bomb the defenders of Mariupol into submission. Why Mariupol residents won’t surrender.


April


Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC makes an extremely good point. Elon Musk equated the extremes of both the political left and right. But Hasan points out that the "far left" and "far right" are not equivalent at all!


An anonymou donor gives $1 million in Bitcoin to Alex Jones. Jones very promptly cashes it and removes the "wallet" from his site. As of 21 May, no one has any idea wh the donor was.


Russian tank destroying a five-story residential apartment building.


This is pretty cool! Queen of Spain includes note to Ukrainian troops in weapons shipment.


Texas women seeking abortions were using Oklahoma for that purpose. Now Oklahoma has shut that down.


President Zelenskyy: “In the temporarily occupied areas of the Kherson region, collaborators say that they are allegedly preparing for the transition to the ‘ruble zone’.“ Essentially, Russia is annexing parts of Ukraine. This is of course illegal under international law.
Russians appear to be running low on precision-guided missiles.
Pentagon is discouraging Americans from traveling to the “active war zone” that is Ukraine right now.
Russian elites are beginning to show signs of discomfort.
Pope tries to get civilians evacuated from Mariupol.


Like the younger George Bush 2005-2008, Russia can’t order a general mobilization. Their forces are getting absolutely hammered as it is “but ‘we’re losing, send me your sons’ will be a tough sell.“


Sounds as though TFG (The Former Guy) has an awesome strategy for the midterms! I endorse this strategy wholeheartedly!


In trying to find proof that voting machines were tampered with in the 2020 election, Republicans are “investigating” in such a way as to compromise the integrity of those machines.


Russia makes a gangster-style diplomatic approach to the UN Secretary General. After he visits Moscow, he goes to Kyiv, which gets bombarded by cruise missiles!
President Zelenskyy: “
Moscow claimed they had allegedly ceased fire in Mariupol. But the bombing of the defenders of the city continues.”
Democratic political problems in aid for Ukraine vs other domestic priorities.
Turkey is not permitting Russia to reinforce its Black Sea fleet by bringing other ships from anywhere else.
A brand new primary health care center in Makariv, near Kyiv, gets bombed.
Russia requisitions food from Ukrainian farmers.


I agree with Lauren Windsor, former AG Barr knew a lot more than he's told anyone.


The drones and the tanks may be the rilly kewl weapons of the day, but the real workhorse of the Army was the Jeep and is now the Humvee.


Pamela Moses in Tennessee was charged with voter fraud and sentenced to six years in jail. The charge has been dropped.


Russia cuts off oil and gas to Poland and Bulgaria. Not exactly a surprise to European Union nations.

...the decision to cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria came the day after the United States and its allies gathered in Germany to pledge more heavy weapons for Ukraine...


Very affecting! Russian war widows clutching their government compensation. They’d really rather just have their husbands back.


Right-wing woman claims that the comedian Jim Carrey is actually playing President Biden. Carrey responds.


President Zelenskyy discusses the Russia occupation of Chornobyl (Chernobyl in English).
Ukrainian position in the South-East of the country form a salient, a position that’s surrounded on three sides. Russians have been trying to cut it off for a while.
Secretary of Defense reports on successful and productive meeting with Ukrainians. Important comments on weakening Russia. Sanctions make it difficult for them to replace a lot of their equipment.
Mariupol is still being bombarded.


Russia and Ukraine together account for 30% of the world’s wheat exports. The war there plus human-caused climate change both mean hunger for poorer nations next year as food reserves are used up.


New editor of the NY Times, Joe Kahn, willfully misunderstands what liberals think his mission should be. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!”


Very sad! Kids playing a baseball game hear gunshots and scatter. I mean, they're extremely smart to do that, but it's sad that they recognized the sound of gunfire and knew just what to do. 


Yeah, Elon Musk is in favor of free speech, that is, unless he considers someone or a group a political enemy.


The war against Ukraine is not going well for Russia. Seems that a smart leader would resist the temptation to expand it.


On Elon Musk "daring" the UN to give him a plan to end world hunger with just 2% of his wealth or $6 billion. Ther plan actually worked out to $6.6 billion. Musk never forked over the money.

Spoiler alert: $6 billion wouldn't end world hunger, but it would go a long way towards mitigating the worst of the world hunger problem.


American Evangelicals and the hard-liners of Saudi Arabia have a great deal in common. Both are book-banners. Because the not-yet-released Dr. Strange movie has a character who refers to having “’two moms’ and there is a scene where an LGBT+ rainbow flag is displayed,” Saudi Arabia has banned the movie there.

Update: Having seen the movie, I noticed the "two dads" kid , but completey missed the rainbow flag. The first was not really an important plot point, the second was clearly even more minor.


In 2009, when the US was in the “Great Recession,” President Obama told several companies they were going to have to accept some losses. “The right was apoplectic” and deemed Obama as running a “gangster government.” Today, Florida Governor DeSantis bullies Disney and they’re “meh.”


Horribly brutal weapon used on Ukrainian civilians in Bucha and Irpin. Fléchettes, tiny darts released by the thousands by artillery or tank shells, are meant to be used against entrenched infantry, but were used instead against civilians.

Russians make ransom demand for hostage taken in Mariupol.
The blogger doubts Russia will use nuclear weapons. He thinks the threat is more just to constrain NATO. He does, however, expect chemical and biological weapons to be used.
Ukrainian grain production down by 20%. This will have a severe impact on food prices.
The meaning of “Z” to Russia.


Examining the growth of the influence of QAnon over just the past two months.


"Sen. Roy Blunt Blew Off Trump Impeachment Because It's 'Not My Job'"
All of Senator Blunt's arguments were dealt with at the time. None of them are valid. Of course it was his job to hold a president accountable! His position here is utterly irresponsible!


Disney is allegedly indoctrinating our children as they’re a “woke” corporation.

Hmm. Could it be that right-wingers are upset that Disney princesses are no longer ready to marry older men on a moments notice?


Putin ordered an airstrike on Odesa that killed a three month old and her mother and then he went to Church for Holy Saturday services.

Intelligence says Russians will take advantage of Easter services to shell Ukrainians who are out in the open.
Russians requisitioning Ukrainian people for their army and civilian trucks to move their supplies.

Russians have deported more than 300 Mariupol residents to Nakhodka, a port town in Siberia, on the coast of Pacific Ocean.

They were moved about 10k km away.


Anti-vaxxer dies of Covid. Which I suppose is kinda sad, but her death was sort of like diving off an 80-foot cliff when it was low tide and you could see rocks above the surface of the water. Death was a pretty predictable outcome. 


In no way, shape or form are Minority Leaders McConnell or McCarthy leaders in any real sense. A true leader goes against the crowd once in a while. Neither man showed the slightest bit of courage or independence after January 6th.

Of course, being principled, but spineless isn't any better.


Rep. Greene's evidentiary hearing is to determine if she should be removed from the 2022 ballot because she supported the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Representative Greene had a bad case of CRS (Can't Remember %$#@) when it came to incriminating statements she made. She quibbles with the details (highly unlikely that any media source would have gotten her statement sort-of right) but essentially agrees that yes, she said those things.

More on that.

Further exploration of Representative Greene’s “very poor memory” defense.

Greene’s "very poor memory" defense could fall under the definition of perjury.


A Ukrainian asks for the etymology of rain (for instance - drizzling, sprinkling, raining, pouring, a deluge, etc.). Lots of cool answers!


People from the NY Times are putting out information in their books that the public should have known about back when Trump was in office. This is a very defensive response to thoroughly justified criticism. The NY Times needs to restore their Public Editor position, ASAP!

The NY Times is defensive about stories like this. The story gives a clear villain the “hero treatment.” There is a way to cover people in depth without covering them sympathetically. Why, for instance, in a story about someone exploiting “L.G.B.T.Q. issues” do we not have a single such person to comment on the morality of the protagonist?


Senator Lindsay Graham is confident that if the midterms are about policy "we'll kick their ass." Erm, okay. Trump accomplished a tax cut and appointed a lot of right-wing judges and Justices (though, to be fair, both were more Senator McConnell's achievements rather than Trumps). That’s it. Those were his only accomplishment in his four years.

What does The Former Guy brag about after spending four years in the presidency? He successfully passed a test designed to detect dementia!


Captured Ukrainians being moved far away from Ukraine.
Our blogger explains why and how he’s doing his daily updates on the Ukrainian situation.
And yet again, evacuees from Mariopul are hit with artillery fire while trying to evacuate, even though Russia keepa promising them safe passage.

So apparently, the Russian strategy for the besieged city of Mariupol is to lock it up tight and let the remaining inhabitants starve to death.

Spoke with someone a few days ago who felt Ukraine’s position was hopeless and they might as well just surrender now. Not so sure about that. 1. President Zelenskyy has been banging the drum for awhile now, asking for more equipment. He’s now happy with what’s there and on the way. 2. We’ve now got 30 nations chipping in! Including, apparently, the Taliban (!) and India (!). 3. The US is really, really good at logistics. 4. The former Minister of Defense of the Russian-aligned Donetsk People's Republic says Ukraine is at a very advanced stage of mobilization. Russia, on the other hand, is in the same position that the US was in 2005. How do you double down and institute a draft when you're losing a war of aggression that you started? 


Ukraine was a major source to Palestinians of wheat. The war has caused the price of wheat to skyrocket. West Bank isn’t doing much better than Gaza.


Looking at the new editor of the NY Times. Deeply unimpressive sentence: “After Abramson, Dean Baquet took over in 2014 and became one of the most popular executive editors in the paper’s modern history.”
I thought Baquet seriously sucked.
Baquet: “[Liberals] sometimes want us to pretend that [Trump] wasn’t elected, but he was elected.”
No, it’s that you bear some of the blame for Trump being elected!


The last bridgehead in Mariupol.
Zelenskyy: If

“the leaders of the democratic world...have the weapons that Ukraine needs here, needs now, if they have the ammunition that we need here and now, it is their moral duty first of all to help protect freedom.”

Germany is delivering weapons, but isn’t quite ready to cut off Russian fossil fuels to Germany.
Czechs and Netherlands are both stepping up weapons shipments.
A Chefs For Ukraine kitchen was hit yesterday by a missile. It’s back up and running.


All you need to know about James O’Keefe of Project Veritas:

The fact that some of the people who threw money at Sydney Powell found O’Keefe too sketchy to bankroll might’ve given a brighter dude pause, but not our Jimmy.


Remember that accusing political opponents of pedophilia was a favorite go-to tactic of Putin's. I do not think it's a coincidence that QAnon is also really attached to that particular tactic.


Hamas launches rockets into Israel as a response to the Israeli attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The rockets are shot down with the Iron Dome system, Israel launches attack on Gaza with warplanes, Hamas responds with missiles. Egypt and Jordan condemned Israel.


The palace intrigue in the Saudi royal family and what Jared Kushner allegedly did for that $2 billion.


Former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer claims that the “liberal, mainstream media” got several stories wrong. 1. The COVID-19 lab leak theory – My recollection is that liberal sources didn’t rule it out, but that it’s hardly a proven theory.
2. “Hunter Biden’s laptop” – The hard drive that was produced by Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani has a number of files on it that appear to have been Biden’s but there’s no way to tell if incriminating-looking files were added at a later date.
3. Steele Dossier – Liberal sources were clear from the start that the dossier was unverified. Yes, a major source for it was discredited, but many other accusations have not been disproven.

Ari Fleischer claims that the press corps would have locked arms and denounced the Trump Administration if any of his people had treated reporters the way Press Secretary Jen Psaki has. But she’s never threatened anyone nor even called anyone names. She just asks questions that make her questioners look like idiots.


One of the problems with the Republican Party in the 21st Century is that they appear to be spending an awful lot of time and energy trying to solve nonexistent problems. CRT in Florida K-12 schools certainly falls under that.

The Democrat Nikki Fried who wants to replace Governor DeSantis in Florida, pledges to run a campaign about substantve issues!


Jesse Watters boasting about how he let the air out of his intern’s tires to get her in his car for a date

Erm, sorry to be a humorless grump here, but PoliticsGirl is 100% correct. What the Fox News guy describes is no laughing matter.


The blogger does not agree that Putin is innocent, nor that he was just responding to NATO aggression.
Zelenkyy’s Easter address.
The Mariupol situation.
Chef Jose Andres and World Central Kitchn is becoming a semi-regular feature of these posts.


The real significance of the texts in question is that even die-hard supporters of Trump's attempted coup were asking for, y'know, facts to back up Trump's conspiracy theories!


Gay people think the ad for Tucker Carlson’s documentary is so gay!

Megham McCain agrees that the ad looks really gay!


When simply cooking meals for others becomes an act of bravery.


Masha Gessen from the New Yorker says let’s please not cover the war in Ukraine as though it were a football game. Journalism has certain strengths and saying who’s up and who’s down gets away from how war is impacting people on the ground.


Very interesting thread on Jared Kushner's $2 billion. Important context: "Kushner was denied a top-secret security clearance by the CIA."


Russian actions after a Ukranian surrender in 2014 are informing Zelenskyy’s response to a Russian surrender offer for the besieged city of Mariupol.
Russians hitting Ukrainian roads and other infrastructure. They’re even targeting World Central Kitchen’s (Chef Jose Andres) operations in Kharkiv!


Good! Democrats are seeking to remove Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s status as “First in the nation” primary votes. Biggest problem is that results in those states aren't very predictive. They just don’t tell you how the rest of the race is going to go.


Wow! Math books are now considered evidence of teachers trying to teach Critical Race Theory to young’uns!

Update (21 Apr): The math books teach students how to think, incorporate kindness and mention Black mathameticians.

Update (13 May): "When the Florida Department of Education announced it was rejecting 54 math textbooks, it pointed to a 'thorough review' process," but a review conducted by the Miami Herald showed that the process was anything but and was seriously unsatisfactory.


Elon Musk says he wishes to buy Twitter. He is being presented here as a free-speech hero. Kind of a problem with that is that he champions lying and misrepresenting and propaganda, not just "another point of view." He also doesn't permit the "free speech" of people who would like to unionize his workplaces.

Very interesting piece on Elon Musk and his intention to take over Twitter. Unfortunately, neither he nor his interviewer really have any deep understanding of free speech issues. Musk thinks that as long as the platform follows 1st Amendment guidelines, everything's okay. But porno falls under free speech, spam falls under free speech, suggesting that an ethnic group needs to be exterminated falls under free speech. So no, speech on a platform like Twitter is a bit more complicated than that.


Movie: "Everything Everywhere All at Once"
Interesting stuff. Looks at one woman’s life through several alternate histories. It’d make for a cool party video, showing in a corner where people wander in and out.


Texas Governor Greg Abbott's slowdown of commerce across the border has everything to do with inflation!

Whew! Finally! A seriously destructive policy has ended, at least for now. Trucks from Mexico were being delayed up to 30 hours for no discernable reason.


President Zelenskyy says all Russian troops must be forcibly ejected from Ukraine.
Genocidal talk on Russian state TV.

This is a very, very long – 31 tweets – thread on Alexei Navalny’s Twitter feed about how to combat Putin’s Information Warfare campaign.

Generally, Ukraine hasn't needed or wanted foreign personnel to help them fight. However, they can use people for rescue and rebuilding operations, so nation's have been happy to send people for that purpose.


I made the case in an essay in prawnworks that wartime atrocities occur when soldiers are far from home and feel that their friends and relations will never be aware of the awful things they've done to foreign civilians. In this piece here, we have the other problem! That people at home are fully aware but just don't want to hear about it!


That seems a rather important detail, that Senator Lee was aware of January 6 details a month earlier than he claimed.


"Kremlin TV Freaks Out Over Sinking Of The Moskva"
Hmm. So after the horrible atrocities of Bucha and the tens of thousands of civilians butchered in Mariupol the sinking of the Black Sea Flagship Moskva (Moscow) is now an "outrage." Uh-huh.


Israeli forces storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It’s ridiculous to describe the violence at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as “clashes” when all of the violence was on one side, that of Israeli police. “Sometimes journalists’ desire for even-handedness obscures the truth.”


President Zelenskyy makes the good case that buying Russian oil is hurting his country. Very true, but buying any fossil fuels from anywhere damages the planet.


Maggie Haberman of the NY Times quotes Trump about “Putin doesn’t dare move on Ukraine” during Trump's term in office because Trump would have  forbidden it, without explaining that there was a low-level war going on in the Donbas from the beginning to the end of Trump’s term in office. Would have been nice to have had that context.


Republican National Committee (RNC – the campaign arm of the Republican Party) throws in the towel, admitting that as it can’t win debates with Democrats, so they’d just as soon chuck the whole debating thing.


Russia’s Black Sea flagship suffers severe damage from two Ukrainian missiles.
Roughly the size of the ship I served on 1996-1998, but with many more weapons.

Ukrainin soldier giving finger to the Moskva, which was sunk by Ukrainian missiles.
Situation on Ukrainian troops in Mariupol.

...efforts to resupply the remaining Ukrainian troops in Mariupol were difficult but continuing.

Report on Biden’s talk with Zelenskyy. Helicopters will be in arms package.
Demographics of Russian soldiers.

About the sinking of the Russian Black Sea flagship, the Moskva.


$#%&#@$#!!!!!
Trucks backed up thanks to Texas Governor Abbott’s new policy to sabotage our supply lines.


Press Secretary Jen Psaki is asked if President Biden had to clear his remarks about Russian President Putin committing genocide through anyone. Psaki replied that yes, Biden is the President and no, he doesn’t have to clear his remarks through anyone. Biden is the final authority on what he says.
Also, interesting stuff about totem poles and where to place the primary character.


The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, gave a lot of money to support democracy for the 2020 election. Republicans have spread conspiracy theories about “Zuckerbucks” since then.


Truly pathetic! Constituent rattles off what right-wing media fills his head with. Senator Grassley doesn’t dare to contradict him.
Also, Democrats are becoming increasingly irrelevant in Iowa politics, making Iowa less likely to remain their choice for first state to get their votes in primaries.


This is pretty amazing.

Asked what made him vote against a measure that he had co-sponsored, Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., was brief and blunt.
"I don’t know," he said.

Uuh. Wait. What?!?! You "don't know" why you voted against the measure?!?!?! And yeah, the reason's a racist one.


Well over a year since the 2020 election and Trump has proven zippo concerning how he was cheated out of a second term. Fortunately, even his loyal followers are getting tired of his schtick.


Yeah, there's a problem with saying your long-range weapons (bombs, missiles, drones) are super-duper accurate. That means you have no excuse when hospitals and apartment buildings are hit.


Serious questions about the motivation for Saudi Arabia to invest so much money with the Trump son-in-law. ”...this appears awfully corrupt.”


Saudi Arabia maintains very tight censorship, so this is clearly endorsed by the very top people.
Interestingly, “VP Harris” is played by a fellow in drag.


Don Jr. hunting with a rifle. It has a telescopic sight and a tripod. At least a bow and arrow would be something of a challenge! Problem with hunting since World War I is that it's about as challenging as playing a video game in your living room.


This is really quite sad. Granted, Hunter Biden is President Biden’s son, but both he and his wife are private citizens. It is absolutely not the business of Fox News if she goes to an expensive restaurant.


House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy shot himself in the foot by taking all of his preferred members off of the January 6 Committee. He has absolutely no idea what the committee will present.


Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is the Belarusian opposition leader, trying to unseat Aleksandr Lukashenko, 67, who’s been in power since 1994.
Lithuania will train Ukrainian troops on Western weapons.
Ha, ha, ha! Y’all didn’t think Elon Musk was providing Starlink terminals for FREE, now did you?
Quickie updates on various cities.


Nothing mysterious about The Former Guy endorsing Dr. Oz.

...Oz backed up [Trump’s] claims of being in "extraordinary health," which apparently made the former president "like him even more…”

Trump supporters heads explode!


Classic stuff! Someone make a controversial assertion. Someone else makes the reasonable demand “Prove it!” People then do so. “Well, er, um, it doesn’t really count!”


We saw a study a while ago about Fox News viewers being paid to watch CNN for a month. This a follow-up thinkpiece on that.


Blogger discusses the verification of stories. Lots of "chaff among the wheat," have to watch for confirmation bias (if its really good news, double-check it) and remember that even good sources sometimes get it wrong.


We really have no idea what the WaPo thought it was accomplishing by examining what alleges to be "Hunter Biden's laptop." Why they even bothered trying to verify any of it is a mystery as there are far too many questions about whether other parties added files to what are most likely stolen files from Hunter's computer.


British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, paid a visit to President Zelenskyy in Kyiv.
Johnson promises only defensive weapons, but that includes “Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles, and another 800 anti-tank missiles.” That also includes Harpoon anti-ship missiles. So what exactly constitutes “defensive” weaponry? Ehh, no one’s really sure.
Ukrainians have set up a website to document war crimes.
Looking at Ukrainian appeals, they don’t need troops. They have plenty of able and willing troops. They just need weapons.


Former Congressman Devin Nunes tries desperately to defend Trump’s new media platform that suffers from low readership in addition to being buggy as %^$#.


Killings of Ukrainians in Bucha and elsewhere.

Latest Russian offensive is probably overextended. Again, there’s no “schwerpunkt” (area of focus).

Russians consolidate their chain of command under one general.
Russians committing horrible brutalities and stealing children.
How the war in the Donbas started. And yes, Qanon figures into Russian narratives.
Heartbreaking! Young boys remember their deceased mothers.


Senate Minority Leader McConnell simply has no "moral red lines." The question to him had to be repeated as he clearly wasn't prepared to answer that. There's simply nothing that takes precedence over winning more power for his party.


Woo hoo! Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed!

Aww! Senator Cruz is just trying to make us liberals feel good.

"KBJ will be ‘way, way, way’ to the left of any Supreme Court justice in history."

Michelle Obama’s take on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson being confirmed.

Group photo.


A Republican in Missouri sponsored a bill to outlaw marriages to a child under 14. And 48 republicans voted against it.

Still think Republicans and QAnon are anti-pedophilia? Nope!


Seems Denver's experience with unarmed first responders has been a smashing success!


The two sides are rushing to redeploy forces from around Kyiv to the Eastern front.
Intercepted phone call from Russian soldier to his home tells of chasing little Ukrainian girl and then “shooting her in the legs – just for fun.” Plenty of testimony as to the barbarity of Russian occupiers.
FBI disrupts network of Russian hackers.


Interesting. Liberals believe in a wide variety of sources. The conservative list of trustworthy sources is very, very short.


Women fleeing repressive Texas abortion law go to Oklahoma. Unfortunately, that state’s just as hostile to a woman’s right to choose.


Very sad to hear this! I followed Eric's work closely for many years. Eric Boehlert died in a bicycle accient.


Ah, here we go! I was wondering what the QAnon position on the Tennessee bill (allows dirty old men to marry children) was.


This is very, very bad news and an example of what we mean by "shadow docket."


President Zelenskyy addresses the UN. Blogger reproduces complete speech, both in video and in print.
Now that Kyiv s secure, Ukraine is relocating units to their Eastern front.

When the Russians arrived, they killed all the men below 50. He’s 53. He told us this shaking with the trauma of it.

Reactions to being liberated from besieged cities.


Would Russians prefer to deal with Biden or The Former Guy? They make it pretty clear they much prefer TFG.


Russia appears to have thought that Ukraine was a thin layer of Westernized elites atop of an essentially pro-Russian population. Now, the battle for Ukrainehas turned out to be a showdown with the Ukrainian people as a whole.”


It's not at all clear that Senator Cotton understands what a defense attorney does.
Would Cotton have defended the Central Park Five, who later turned out to be innocent? Because it sounds as though he would have joined the mob.


Senator Graham makes it quite clear that, for a Democratic President to get a Supreme Court nominee approved by a Republican-run Senate, the candidate must not be simply moderate, they must be indistinguishable from what a right-wing Republican President would appoint.


Okay, VP Harris’s weekends are a mystery. Erm, what did VP Pence spend his weeks doing?!?!?! We know that the President during that time did as much golf in four years that Obama did in eight.


Yeah, I like Senator Durbin as well, but agree he’s just too nice a guy for the job he tried to do. To conduct the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing correctly, they needed someone mean to fill that role.

Senator Lindsey Graham was permitted to go on past his time, to ask improper questions of Judge Jackson, and for what? Graham vote against her anyway.

This is a new low in American politics.While FactCheck.org has shown that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has sentenced child porn cases in accordance with federal guidelines, the hysterical charges of Senator Hawley have convinced Representative Greene that anyone who supports Jackson is a supporter of child porn. As the blog post points out, Tennessee has now legalized child marriage!


Russia steps up the pace of bombing.
Group of 93 civilians tries to escape from the siege of Mariupol, Russia summarily executes them. Ukrainian propaganda? No, this was reported in RT, the Russian news service.
NY Times distinguishes itself by doing excellent confirmation work concerning killings in Bucha.
Why Germany keeps buying Russian oil and gas.
Russian state propaganda outlet calls for the complete destruction of Ukrainian “Nazis,” claiming “Ukronazism poses a much bigger threat to the world and Russia than the Hitler version of German Nazism.”
A genocide researcher says that yes, Russia’s behavior is “as genocide as it gets.”


Senator Lindsey Graham argues that, because of the way Judge Janice Rogers Brown was treated, he's going to hold a grudge (Her nomination was opposed in 2003 and several times since then) and oppose Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court.

Occasional Philly Inquirer columnist agrees with Senator Graham that Judge Brown would have been a fine Supreme Court Justice. Notice that he never says specifically why Democrats opposed her.

NAACP says "Nope!" Judge Brown would have made an awful Supreme Court Justice and they agreed with the then-Senator Biden having blocked her nominations.


Senator Rick Scott, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, uses alarming language to describe liberal opponents. This is the sort of language that comes before civil wars.


School shooting survivor David Hogg challenges Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to a debate on guns. Greene loses badly. The problem with the theory of a "Good guy with a gun" is that, in hundreds of studied cases, that guy pretty much never shows up.


President Zelensky articulates how Ukrainians feel about the horrific war crimes committed in Bucha, near Kyiv, and what Ukraine intends to do about them.
Pregnant woman who was photographed at bombed Mariupol hospital is kidnapped and placed in a “hostage video” to “clarify” the bombing.
Ordinary Russians were convinced before the war of the rightness of their cause.


The Communist Party of Russia, the Bolsheviks, used to understand that intangible factors such as morale, can be more decisive than numbers of military assets. The blogger claims that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan did indeed encourage Russia’s adventurism, but that was a miscalculation on it’s part.


Best as I can tell, the WaPo is trying to disprove right-wing charges of cover-up. But as far as credible charges against Hunter Biden go, the most damning thing that can be said is that he’s traded in on a famous name, something that is legal and that many, many other people have done.
The Hunter Biden debacle.


Senator Chuck Grassley tries to escape accountability for how Republicans treated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.


Cool! Usagi Yojimbo is a comic book series that began in the late 80s and is still going strong. This is a cartoon version that takes place in the far future. Begins late April.


Because Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently believes in what has been called a “Living Constitution,” as opposed to the conservative philosophy of “Originalism,” Senator Blunt can’t support her. He believes Justice Thomas has followed the philosophy of Originalism and so, despite his obvious conflict of interest in having a activist, radical, extremist wife, Thomas is okay.


Representative Jamie Raskin looks into why we have a seven-hour gap in Trump’s phone records.


Just an utterly meaningless, pointless atrocity in the recently-reacquired city in Ukraine.
"A civilian was killed by a shot in his head while [bicycling] in Bucha."

Russians are rapidly abandoning areas around Kyiv, but in their wake is massive evidence of atrocities. Yes, bad things happen in war and the US has also done terrible things, but that’s

no excuse for accepting them in the present. That bad things have been done in our name doesn’t absolve us of the need to seek justice.

Ah yes, the ol’ “crisis actors” line.

Thefts.

Short thread of American/British rapes of German women in World War II compared to Russia’s. (Can scroll up to see previous comments).


Heh! Fox News and Tucker Carlson just two months ago.

Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin? Has Putin shipped every middle class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?


Horrendous, heartbreaking story of the siege of Mariupol.
It is typical for Russians who occupy cities to commit murders on their way out. We saw that back during World War II and during the Chechnya battles.


From the piece:

What Ingraham is describing here with her trademark lock-jawed, menacing smugness isn’t "choosing where your dollars go," and it sure as hell isn’t legitimate regulation of industry. It’s fascism.


"Media Uses Hunter Biden As Excuse To Ignore Real Scandals"
Truly sad! As with Whitewater and "but her emails," we're seeing yet another pointless obsession!


Ukrainian grain is under continuous attack. This impacts global grain markets. Blogger figures Russia is deliberately trying to create food crisis to use as propaganda tool.

Good Heavens! Russians have opened up an open-air market in Belarus in order to sell what they've looted from Ukraine!


White House call logs have a seven-hour gap in them covering the January 6th attack CNN is vastly too credulous here! They give far too much credence to Trump White House sources.


"Why the GOP's push to ‘expunge’ Trump’s first impeachment matters"
We’re still dealing with fall-out from Trump’s using Javelin missiles as leverage to force President Zelenskyy to deliver dirt on Joe Biden, so no, we can’t just forget Trump’s 2019 impeachment.


The judge is so annoyed at Florida’s abuse of voting systems, he takes direct aim of the Shelby County Supreme Court decision that said “...that we live in a post-racial society.”


Representative Jamie Raskin finds Representative Madison Cawthorn’s sex and drugs story about his colleagues to make a very good talking point about Republicans and hypocrisy.


Woo hoo! The first Amazon workplace to be unionized!


"Bannon Goes Ballistic Over Likely Confirmation Of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson"
Seems Steve Bannon has concluded that any Supreme Court Justice appointed by a Democrat, no matter how qualified, is in no way good enough.


The Ukrainian Air Force would like a word about how important it is to dominate the airspace.
Also: Russians moving around are not withdrawing, but doing tactical repositioning.
Russia TV (RT) publishes video of one of their tanks shooting at residential houses.
Details on how Putin is delivering for Trump. This is active collusion.


The US immigration system is broken. We're doing the bare minimum by accepting just 100k refugees from Ukraine, but we still haven't settled all of the Afghanistan refugees yet.


Wow! Why do Republicans hate America?  A bill to lower the price of insulin to $35 a month – all Democrats voted yes. 12 Republicans joined them, 193 Republicans voted no


Truly amazing how after four years of giving Trump a pass on pretty every garbled or undisciplined utterance, the press is now frantic to exploit Biden’s “gaffe.”


March


Whooo-weee!!! Anti-choicer caught with five fetuses in her house! Was she planning to give them a burial? Nah, she's been holding them for over a year. Yes, they're considered a biohazard and were removed by people in hazmat suits.


Good! Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has strong support among even Republicans. The "ankle-biters" didn't cause any harm.


President Zelensky doubts that Putin is negotiating in good faith.
Add the Red Cross to the Russian targets that are hit in Ukraine.

Russian forces in Ukraine have forcibly deported the staff and patients of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, sending more than 70 people to Russia, the city council said. It’s at least the second hospital to undergo that fate, with more than 20,000 people now sent to Russia against their will, the officials said.

Fascism has a very specific description developed after scholars studied regimes of the mid-20th Century. Putin's Russia meets those definitions.

Ukrainian Mayor of Melitopol was captured for a few days, says Russian soldiers have NO idea why they invaded!


Tweet of a WaPo story about "Hunter Biden's laptop." Comments beneath the tweet are well worth reading. The question of "Why was this story even written?" is a very highly pertinent and relevant one.


Senator Ted Cruz says:

“So, Biden’s been president what, 15 months? In that entire time, I haven’t spoken to him once.”

Okay, but the question is why on Earth would Senator Cruz have spoken with President Biden? When has Cruz had any useful or productive ideas that he could have presented to Biden? When has Cruz shown the slightest interest in governing as opposed to being a far-right partisan?


I've had a bit of respect for the former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham because she demonstrated remorse and regret. She openly recognized she had been on the wrong side. Former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has done absolutely nothing to warrant rehabilitation. It's far from clear what value he brings to his new gig as an analyst at CBS News.


Comment on federal judge who stated very clearly that the then-President committed a crime.


50-item thread on Clarence/Ginni Thomas. Piece has thread reader to make reading easier.


Very interesting!

The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol...

That's a bit over seven hours that we don't have any official record of Trump's phone calls. Lawyers call that "consciousness of guilt," when you take care to see to it that there's no record of your activities during a particular time. BTW, Trump says he has no idea what a 'burner phone" is.

Yeah, I found Trump’s statement that he had never even heard of a “burner phone” to be very highly implausible! Sure enough, he knows full well what they are.

Ah, okay. Trump had several personal phones in addition to his official presidential phone, so he probably just used one that was “off the grid” for White House operators.
Other items in the same post:
Explainer that the recent “deescalation” is, ehh, not really.
Latest of the idea of relieving Mariupal.
Thread on “The Human Face of Putin’s War…”


I don't usually like Meghan McCain much, but she's spot-on here. Representative Cawthorn is very specific that he's talking about people he respects and that these people invited him personally to drug-fueled orgies, meaning he's clearly talking about right-wing Republicans. McCain is urging him to get specific about who he meant.


Russia’s pulling in personnel from Syria in order to fight in Ukraine.
Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich delivered a letter from Zelensky to Putin and was poisoned for his troubles.
The liberation of the town of Irpin, very close to Kyiv, is a pretty big deal.
Anders Aslund writes a thread about how much Russians know about Ukraine (not much).


Newswoman Lara Logan feels that Charles Darwin must have been financed by the Rothschilds. I did a few quick look-ups. Darwin was born into a wealthy British family in the early 1800s and was attached to the crew of the HMS Beagle (HMS stands for His Majesty’s Ship, meaning Darwin worked for the government), he then stopped in at his father’s house, then found a place of his own. He soon published the first of numerous books about his time on the Beagle. So he needed a bit of support at times, but it’s far from clear that he needed substantive financial help from anyone.


Credit where it's due! Very cool! Ivanka Trump contributes meals to Ukraine.


With the founding of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin developed "agitprop." This was propaganda that was designed to make listeners angry. Fox News gives us an example of people who make vague comments about what President Biden said and then proceed to work themselves into a frenzy over...well, over comments that would have been appropriate at any Fourth of July picnic.


Senator Lindsey Graham confirms that if there is a Supeme Court vacancy while Biden (or any Democrat) is president and there is a Republican-run Senate, no Supreme Court Justice will be approved.


A pissed-off Will Smith at the Oscars! He got angry because comedian Chris Rock told a joke that Smith's wife, Jada Pinkette Smith, was made very sad by. It was about the movie GI Jane, where Demi Moore had really close-cropped hair. Jada Smith also has really close-cropped hair due to cancer. Basically, Will Smith blew up several decades of carefully building an image by slapping Chris Rock.

Generally, Jeanine Pirro's comment isn't bad, but yeah "the Oscars are not the hood" suggests that for Smith to have smacked Rock in a Black neighborhood would have been completely normal and unexceptional.


Yeah, the trucker protest is still going on! I just have a really hard time working up any sympathy for this guy!

The American convoy has a sort of amorphous anti-federal government smell, but very little in the way of meaningful policy demands.

Yee hah! About $%#@ing time! The truckers were staying at a speedway and racing season’s about to begin, so their hosts began shooing them out.


Very true. Nobody speaks of the late Rush Limbaugh because he contributed nothing of value to the culture.

Update (10 Apr): Limbaugh's "sad, forgotten legacy."

Rush Limbaugh left nothing behind. No one quotes him, no one references him, his vast fortune didn't go to support any of the causes he supposedly believed in.

Problem with US position on the Israel-Palestinians dispute is that it’s all tied up in knots and can’t be reconciled with international law.


Wow! Ukrainian figure skaters performed rehearsals for this while their homes were under siege. They had no time to assemble costumes.


Interesting comment from President Zelensky:

..says that he is "99.9% certain" that Russian leadership was told by pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine that Ukrainian people were awaiting Russian forces with "flowers and smiles" and that Zelensky’s government was widely unpopular.

Family describe escape from Mariupol.

Examining how Russia and Putin are “victims” of the US.


Who’s defying Russia sanctions? Why, it’s our old buddy Charles Koch and all of his brought-and-paid-for Congressional allies!


There's very little that the Democrats can and/or will do about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife. The Chief Justice can do much more and what's really at stake is the legitimacy of the court's decisions.


Laura Ingraham and her guest overlook what makes an alliance like NATO work, if one country slacks off and refuses the burden that everyone else is carrying, that makes for hate and discontent on the part of those who are sacrificing.


An ice shelf of about 460 square miles (about the size of New York City) has collapsed.


Russia gets dramatic about the possible consequences of the war. “Russia's very existence is at stake today"
And no, Russians are simply not negotiating in good faith. It is incredibly naive for people to think that the US needs to get serious on negotiations.

Good Heavens! What a horrible, horrible experience the Russian army is for many conscripts!

At the end of this post comes very bad news for Russia. Their clear weakness in Ukraine has inspired rebellions elsewhere.


"LOL: Pence Lies, Says Trump Was Tough On North Korea"
In diplomacy, it's very important to define your terms. Trump never managed to get North Korea to define "denuclearization." It seems to have a pretty clear meaning and the US offered its own definition, but Kim Jong Un never responded with a definition of his own. No, the diplomacy of Trump's was a complete failure.


Ukraine doesn't need troops. They've got plenty of motivated, fit and ready people. What they need is equipment, helmets, body armor, etc. They need to be able to send people to Poland to train on the equipment.

Piece also addresses need to change over our energy to renewables.


Woo hoo!

BREAKING: U.S. unemployment claims just hit their LOWEST level since 1969.


James Bond perished in the Faroe Islands (in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and the Shetland Islands) in his last film, so inhabitants of one of the islands built a tombstone for him.


400k Ukrainian citizens removed to distant lands within Russia.

Good! The now-month old crisis in Ukraine could accelerate the world-wide move towards renewables and away from fossil fuels.

Woman was escaping Mariupal with her own child and acquires three more on the way, because so many other parents have died.


So, one out of three cheers to the NY Times for finally acknowledging that Amnesty International had accused Israel of practicing apartheid two months ago.


The Alabama AG refuses to testify that Biden was legimately elected. So much for his credibiliy as a witness against Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.


NYT's @adamliptak scolds both sides for failing to engage the nominee. I know he knows better, so why did he write it that way? There is something terribly wrong and warping about the culture there.

This is a case where blame can be affixed to just one side! There's only one side that's trying to turn the hearing over the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Supreme Court nomination into a circus! Why is the NY Times trying to make it appear to be a "BothSides" issue?


The US and Russian militaries are structured very differently from one another. The US has a Petty Officer/Non-Commissioned Officer set of ranks that carry out tasks between officers and single (4 year) term "grunts." Russians have officers and one-year conscripts, with no in-between professional class. This is fine if you're dealing with folks like the Chechens and the Georgians, but when you're dealing with the more professionalized Ukrainians, nuh-uh.


This is disturbing.

Pomerantz even made the point that the crimes allegedly committed occurred before Trump was President...

Bill Clinton was deposed during his presidency over the Paula Jones accusation, the Monica Lewinsky case grew directly out of the Jones case. Did we, as a society, make the decision that presidents shouldn't be pestered with pre-presidential crimes? 'Cause I sure as hell wasn't consulted on that!


As happened during the Iraq War, US domestic reaction against foreigners goes too far.


Leader of Poland recommends international peace-keeping mission.

Update (17 Apr): There has been no international peace-keeping mission.


Madeline Albright has passed away.

Albright does not discuss Donald Trump in her book Fascism, but it’s pretty clear that she wants us to reach certain conclusions about him and fascism.


Yeesh! Dr. Freeman is right. Technically, so is Senator Blackburn. The Constitution said nothing about abortion because abortion didn’t become a political issue until the 1880s. That doesn’t mean that laws concerning freedom of choice came out of nowhere though.


The “People’s Convoy” continues, even though nobody seems to know what the point of it all is.


Heh! Ana identifies "The Look" for us with several examples. It happens when a woman of color has to listen to "mansplaining" and to not respond by throwing things or bursting out laughing.


The US has now officially charged Russia with war crimes.


"GOP leaders pleaded w/ GOP senators..." There. Fixed it for you. To say just "senators" makes it sound "BothSides" and it's very much a one-sided dispute/issue.


We had an opportunity back in the 70s to stop producing greenhouse gases and to make the transition over to a renewables economy. We can still do that, but time is running short. For instance, we must stop burning coal by 2030.


More complaits that Democrats permanently changed Supreme Court hearings by rejecting Robert Bork. I followed the Bork hearings. He was properly and justifiably rejected for a seat on the Supreme Court.


The stupidity!

...truckers haven't been able to "go to the bathroom" while circling the Beltway, which has left "people hav[ing] actually pissed their pants!"

Erm, why would this be the fault of anyone besides the trucker?!?!?! They are perfectly free to pull over to a rest stop anytime they please. More on the trucker protest


Someone mentioned that Ukrainians never fired rockets at Russia, nor does Ukraine have a covenant that is dedicated to destroying Russia. True. Hamas was founded in 1988, a full 40 years after what Palestinians call the Nakba (the catastrophe). There were no rockets to provoke the Nakba, nor was there any desire to boot out the Jewish people who lived within the borders of what is today called Israel.


Good grief!

Kid Rock says former President Trump once turned to him for help crafting a tweet about the Islamic State terror group—before also seeking his guidance about North Korea

As I've said concerning the younger George Bush, if you're not smart, you aren't going to seek out smart advisers.


What are the aims of the Russian war against Ukraine?


Back in the early 80s, the Pentagon conducted all sorts of war games. Every single solitary time a nuclear weapon was used, it always led to Armageddon!


Erm, Representative Jordan, if the Trump Administration had been confident that Brett Kavanaugh had not done what he was accused of, the FBI would have done a careful and thorough investigation. As it is, they did a rushed and sloppy job.


Yeah. Gee. Because it’s not like anyone ever chose a Vice-President because the VP choice checked off certain political boxes!


Cheerful stuff! Palestinians dancing!


Problem with Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) is that they can’t apply to illegal activities. If you sexually harass someone after that person signs an NDA, that person can still sue you.


Senator Josh Hawley wrote an extensive twitter thread that purported to show that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson skewed her rulings to favor pedophiles. Hawley’s colleagues are condemning his theory.

Facts was that in seven named cases, Judge Jackson's sentences were largely in line with the probation officer's recommendations. In five cases, she met or exceeded those recommendations. In only two cases did Jackson hand out a substantially reduced sentence.   


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell insists that the "Putin wing" of the Republican Party is just a small minority. Nothing to see here, folks! Move along quietly now! Everything is under control!


A lengthy thread that examines the question of just what “cancel culture” is and of how serious a problem it really is.


Very powerful! every anti-choicer should listen to this! The speaker is both the only medical doctor and only woman in the Kentucky legislative body that just passed a law on abortion. Clearly, the men legislators have no idea what they're legislating about


Some parts of the Roger Stone plan make sense. Republicans win the House this November. Yes, that could happen. Republican House members install Donald Trump as Speaker. Again, likely. Biden’s people would remove him due to incompetence? Nah. Impeach the then-President Harris over not permitting the horse medicine Ivermectin to be used as a cure for Covid? Ha, ha, ha! Nah, they’ll get extremist Republican votes, but that’s it.


Wow! What an utter and absolute mess! Russian citizens are being dragged off to jail for expressing the slightest opposition to the war in Ukraine, right-wingers are actually banning books, & the NY Times begs for us to sympathize with people who are being "shunned" for saying stupid and bigoted things!

Interesting statement by the NY Times Editorial Board:

This editorial board plans to identify a wide range of threats to freedom of speech in the coming months, and to offer possible solutions.

Problem is, as the blogger documents, is that the board is utterly incompetent to examine the issue and to offer any sensible answers. More commentary on that.

Fox News and the NY Times are in agreement. Neither one really understands what free speech actually means.


I’ve thought this for quite awhile, that “Hunter Biden’s laptop” was a disinformation program.

The story was debunked back in October 2020.

The writer figures, on a scale of 1 to 10, that if the three eldest Trump kids (Ivanka, Junior and Eric) were all 10s in terms of corruption, that Hunter Biden is around a 2. Did Hunter take advantage of his position? Sure, but no more than Chelsea Clinton, Amy Carter or Meghan McCain.

Ah, okay. That’s what’s up with all of this “Hunter Biden’s laptop proven!” nonsense. Some of the emails have been verified. I thought that was obvious from the very start. The real question has always been how those real emails and photos of Hunter Biden made their way from Biden’s custody to the laptop. It’s always been pretty obvious they were hacked, probably from his phone.


Like the race between heavy armored cavalry and the crossbow, the introduction of the Switchblade drone changes the balance between tanks and hand-carried weapons. The Switchblade drone is a “loitering” weapon. It can fly above the battlefield and, as soon as a threat appears, can take out the threat.

Various comments on Finland vs Russia, on China and the city of Mariupol.


Heh! Stacey Abrams makes a quick appearance on Star Trek as the President o Earth! Right-wingers lose ther $%#@ over the show!


80% of the housing in Mariupol is destroyed. The city has 350k civilian residents that are not being permitted to evacuate. Apparently, Russia intends to simply kill them all.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is recommending that we simply abandon Ukraine to the tender mercies of Russia. 

In response to Representative Greene claiming that the US should simply abandon Ukraine as Ukraine “cannot possibly win” against Russia, Representative Liz Cheney revives the old Cold War term “useful idiot.”


As a comparison, Al Franken was an extremely good and effective senator. When Democrats booted him out for sexual harassment, this put them in a very strong position on the issue. On the other hand, yeah, the US is in a very weak position when it comes to war crimes.


The bombing of Mariupol’s Drama House was clearly intentional.

The Russians knew damn well what they were targeting! And the reason I know the Russians knew exactly what they were targeting is because the citizens of Mariupol had marked the ground with the Russian word for children in front of and behind the Drama House.


China makes a clear and unambiguous choice to support Ukraine and not Russia.

Meanwhile Koch Industries makes it very clear that it values profits above patriotism.


Mike Pence's suggestion for arming Ukrainians: "First, I would do it the way we did it in the Trump-Pence administration." Nice idea, but Ukraine was essentially at peace back then. There was some fighting in the Donbas, but getting weapons in was very easy. With Mariupol under siege, Pence makes it clear he's utterly without suggestions.


If Ukraine can be successfully defended without NATO’s official involvement, then NATO membership might be superfluous.
There appears to be a very serious drain on Russian manpower, which is forcing Moscow to search far and wide for replacement troops.
Section on the possible introduction of drones, unmanned aircraft, into the fight.


See, here’s the problem with CNN trying to create drama by counting down how long it will be before Kyiv falls. Kyiv isn’t falling. It’s just not happening. CNN needs to focus on what’s actually happening and not try to fit everything into a pre-planned framework. President Zelensky met with leaders from Poland, Czechia and Slovenia in Kyiv, meaning no one’s worried about Kyiv falling anytime soon.


The problem with Republican saying they have a better way to conduct nuclear negotiations with Iran is that they had four years to do that under Trump. He achieved absolutely zippo. Iranians never even approached the negotiating table because there was nothing in it for them. They saw zero benefit in talking.

Ironically, Iran developed ways to blunt the impact of US sanctions that Moscow may now try to emulate. These methods of evading sanctions are a big reason why, the longer the sanctions continued under Trump, the less likely he'd have been able to achieve any successes


Very sad!

Raskin’s cardinal sin in the eyes of Republicans and Manchin amounted to suggesting that regulators puzzle out how to incentivize shifts to renewable energy…

Ehh, so the planet is burning up. Whatevuh. Raskin was threatening fossil fuel profits.


The siege of Mariupol, where "hundreds of thousands are besieged without water, food, medicines, under constant bombardment."


"Team Trump’s fundraising tactics face difficult questions (again)"
There aren’t that many rules for political fundraising, but at the very least, you have to do what you say you’re going to do. If you say you're going to hold a contest, you have to hold a contest.


Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard and the scary biolabs. More on those.


Look, The Former Guy is a wannabe fascist dictator. Why is CNN describing his lines as "wild" ?


Our blogger examines the question of exactly how many troops, people who actually shoot rifles and cannons and send off missiles, does Russia really have in the field? He comes up with an answer of about 15%. If you have an offensive force of 10k people, then 1.5k will actually shoot weapons. 


Tucker Carlson of Fox News is very highly popular on Russian TV these days.

Hmm, so in addition to Tulsi Gabbard and Tucker Carlson, we can list Candace Owens as a Russian asset.


Aww! William Hurt has passed away.


People wonder why Ukrainians are so insistent on resisting. Here’s why.

Pundits on Russian state TV advocate implementing public hangings in Ukraine once Russia's dominance is established.


The illustration for this blog post is Ukrainian folk art. Their version of a Valkyrie.
Odessa’s a target. Taking that city will cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea. But we must keep in mind that Kyiv is the “center of gravity.”
Will Ukraine win? Ehh, let’s be cautious here.


Confirmed. The new Texas voter ID law did exactly what it was designed to do, to disenfranchise voters by kicking out thousands of legitimate ballots.


I support getting rid of no-knock search warrants. I can see them being useful under very specific, limited circumstances, but the Breonna Taylor case makes It clear that the warrants are guaranteed to be abused.


Aw man! I am SO glad this guy is not our president today! It's clear from this extended interview he's really not all that bright. People in Ukraine are hungry. Okay. How do you intend to get food to people that are behind the battle lines? Russia has refused to keep any cease-fires. Sending in US jets would escalate the conflict. Trump doesn't seem to have any clue about any of that.


The Russian people haven't felt the full weight of the sanctions, yet! Putin's corruption has made Russia a bad investment in any case. Now US companies are just plain fleeing it.


Zelensky focuses on what a C-in-C should be doing, seeing to the fighting spirit of the country.


A closer look at recently-rising costs. Are they really a matter of inflation?

Cool! The 1985 movie Back to the Future has been made into a musical!


Ex football coach Lou Holtz gave three reasons for supporting Trump. Wow! This guy is seriously delusional!
Trump himself isn't much more gounded in reality. He thinks Biden is internationally unpopular.  


Russian occupation forces are trying to repeat what was done in the Donbas, the Eastern edge of Ukraine. They want to establish “people’s republics” run by local politicians.


Dear NPR, I agree with Madeline Marsanne, who tweeted about the situation in your Texas abortion law piece. You needed to follow up on your interview with anti-choice activist John Seago. You needed to ask him if he was comfortable sacrificing the life of Anna to “rescue” her clearly-doomed baby.


"Democrats move closer to cutting Iowa’s first-in-the nation status for 2024 presidential calendar"
Good to hear this. Iowa is 1. much too homogeneous, it's pretty much all white and rural and 2. caucuses get different results than regular elections do. Winning Iowa doesn't mean as much as it seems. Democrats also work on messaging.


The right-wing group Project Veritas is following the Scientology playbook of launching attacks involving extreme harassment on critics.


In a show of weakness, Russia is looking to import infantry from Syria to battle against Ukraine. That’s how radical Arab movements like al Qaeda have gotten started.


Among other things, Biden’s delivering on deficit reduction.


Ehh, The Batman was okay, but like the Matrix a few months back, some of these movies are so long! Now, the recent Spider-Man was almost 2½ hours, but it had a sufficiently complex storyline, it needed to be that long! Not true for either Batman or Matrix.

Update:  Death on the Nile was again, kinda bloated. Could have trimmed a fair amount of time


Jennifer Griffin is a Fox News reporter who’s been covering the Pentagon for quite some time and really knows her stuff. Tucker Carlson doesn’t like that. Wonder how much longer she’ll be at Fox.

Update (12 Apr): Griffin is still working at Fox News, but she's been pretty quiet in the last month.


"Ukraine update: The price of 'we need to do more' is much higher than most people realize"
Totally sympathetic with Ukrainians and the feeling of "we must do more," but here's a good splash of cold water for that idea.


What does it mean to say civiians are being "indisiminately bombed" if bombing civilians is the point? Isn't that a vague and imprecise use of language?


There is a small, but very real, "Putin wing" of the Republican Party and Representative Cawthorn is clearly a member of it.


Fashion model makes statement about Ukraine vs Palestine, provoking backlash. My response.


A Russian asset (Representative Cawthorn) calls President Zelensky a "thug."


Russian news consumers appear to have a lot in common with American news consumers, especially in their demographics. If you're urban and educated, you're not likely to fall for propaganda. If you're older and rural, you're likely to support the people in power.


Yeah yeah, yeah, according to Don Jr., the elder Don Trump gets up at 5:00 in the morning and works all day until 11:00pm or so, he plays eleventy-dimensional chess, yada, yada. Dude, this stuff was unbelievable back during TFG's time in office!


Back in 2019, Missouri passed a law to limit the ability of women to get an abortion eight weeks after pregnancy commenced. Since then, over 10k women have gone to a Planned Parenthood clinic right on the Missouri-Illinois border, so Missouri wants to copy the Texas snitch law to put a stop to that.


We need to move to green transportation, now! Our dependence on oil is killing us and keeping us tied to the Middle East.


A dissent from a minority of the court that does not promise good things. The theory of the dissenters would eliminate any role for state courts in overseeing elections. Overseeing elections would be solely up to the state legislature. What would prevent the legislature from making self-interested decisions that would keep that party in power indefinitely? Nothing.


Yes, the truckers are still at it! Hard to say what they think they're accomplishing by driving around the DC Beltway time and again.
Bwah-hah-hah! What an absolute and utter snowflake!!!


Yeah, why bother fact-checking such a "great" quote?


Brother of writer James Fallows is a Russia expert. Delivers some soundly-considered ideas, though they’re not always expected or welcome.


The entries at 8:26:42 and 9:02:09 explain what’s up with gas prices. No, the oil companies aren’t ripping us off, they’re pricing their produce n the expected way.


Woo hoo! Woman goes off on the “All lives matter” people! Warning: NSFW language.


This is nice that the bill on USPS sailed past the filibuster margin so easily, but good grief! At 74-17, the bill was essentially non-controversial! Why did the Senate have to waste time overcoming a filibuster?!?!?!


The NY Times has a serious bias problem in the types of pieces that they print. If it's a young person, she can write about being opposed to "woke-ness," but that's about the only viewpoint that such a person can write about and make it into the Times.


A persuasive reason as to why Putin didn’t invade anywhere while TFG was in office.


See now, here's a smart guy! A multi-billionaire is planning to spend $5 million to rent three hotels to house Ukrainian refugees. Pocket change for him, good PR, happy refugees, win-win all the way around!


Ukraine's first Foreign Legion is up and running!


"Senate Republicans threaten a government shutdown and delay in aid to Ukraine"
Of course they are. Because blocking and delaying is pretty all the Republican Party has been doing for about the past 15 years.


So how exactly is it that "Joe Biden is responsible for allowing [the Russian invasion of Ukraine] to happen"? Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't say. She just knows that her audience is primed and ready to believe the worst of Biden, who after all, "stole" the 2020 election!


Very extensive live-blogging of the report on former AG Bill Barr. Yeah, Barr’s a lying sack of #$@%!


Russians observe cease-fires for a little while, then resume shelling, so refugees trying to escape get bombarded

Because privately-owned corporations have taken the initiative to break off ties with Russia, Russia is hurting far more than was anticipated. This action goes far beyond the official sanctions.


Cool Ukrainian folk tune, other ways to help Ukraine.

Obama Foundation has links to help Ukraine.


Hmm, the trucker convoy of about 1k trucks is worried that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to see to it that they’re framed, so they’re cautious about advancing. Ha, works for me!

Grimly hilarious! Truckers who drove a far as 4k miles didn’t have a plan as to what to do when they got to Washington DC.


Senator Manchin's idea on energy is "all of the above." That's a terrible idea! We need to zero out funding for any fossil fuels and put all of the government's money into renewables!


The Ukrainian strategy of focusing their fire on military vehicles is proving to be highly effective as vehicle replacements are now really old and run-down.


One of the big problems with TFG's conduct after the election of 2020 is that so many people told him that he lost fair and square, he simply can't convince the January 6 Committee that he was convinced he hadn't lost.


Now this is the sort of thing that makes it impossible to feel that maybe Russia has some case for what it's doing that we haven't heard yet. If your case is so compelling, why are you shutting down other sources of information?

Twitter is blocked, too.

Heard on a Zoom call yesterday that Ukraine actually had troops posted to attack before the Russian invasion. Located a Reuters piece that said Ukraine had 125k troops lined up at Donbas, where Russian-sympathizing Ukrainians had occupied a chunk of Ukraine for the past seven years. So, as with Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor, Putin appears to have been willing to take the PR hit in order to strike first.

The effects of way too much corruption on the Russian army.


If we were to travel at light speed, it would take a bit over 18 hours to get to where Voyager 2 is now.


Apparently, the fire in the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Enerhodar, did not touch anything vital, but it’s still quite worrisome that there was any heavy arms fire around a nuclear plant.
Long-range problem here is that Ukraine traded its nuclear arms for guarantees of security. Non-nuclear powers are taking note of he fact that Russia is now ignoring that agreement.

Putin appears to be a lone-wolf kinda guy. He apparently spent seven years, from the time he took Crimea in 2014, preparing to take the rest of Ukraine. For his own part, things he could do by himself, he was well-prepared. Things that required other people, preparing his military, ehh, not so much.


An examination of Putin’s speech.


Looks like Russians were planning to invade Ukraine a few weeks before they actually did. Heh! They were planning to overrun the country in just two weeks! Bit behind schedule on that!


Yeah, it’s far from clear why Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s academic scores matter. I heard that your choice of college matters for about ten years. After that, it depends on what you did with that academic preparation.


Yeah, Senator Manchin appears to have a very cramped and narrow view of how spending money works. His statement that “I’ve never found out that you can lower costs by spending more,” sounds good as a quip on TV, but seriously fails once you think about it.


How a captured Russian soldier is treated by Ukrainians. More and more indiscriminate air strikes, even as Russian ground forces suffer from lack of food and fuel.

On the Ukrainian puppet government Russia plans to set up.


No! Sorry! Wrong answer! The NY Times cannot possibly know, for a fact, that Biden's job growth claim wasn't true. They're calling his claim "partially true" because they're guessing his claim might not be true! This completely missese the point of fact-checking!

The press, quite rightly, questioned Biden's claims of having intelligence about Russia and Ukraine. Problem is, they had just as many justified questions to pose to TFG, but didn't.


Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar attended a far-right white nationalist conference. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that was “unacceptable.” Which is nice, but no other consequences followed.


People pulling Russian liquor off of the shelves, but keeping wines produced by Israelis in the West Bank available.

More hypocrisy and double standards! In what we call soccer, but in what the rest of the world calls football, a player wore a t-shirt “Sympathise with Gaza” and was punished for it. Two English football teams wore Ukraine colors and that was okay, meaning it’s not “politics” that football regulators are against, it’s certain varieties of politics!


Assessing SOTU address.

Details on how the 1% was boosted at everyone else’s expense.

Quite sad to see the increasing degradation of our politics get even coarser.


Exactly! Governor DeSantis has a new motto for Florida - “Let Us Alone,” will last right up until the next time they need federal help.


Seems the great and fearsome 17 or 40 mile-long convoy or caravan that was headed for Kyiv is now immobile! Lots of reasons, including lack of fuel.

These sanctions are vastly more effective than the 2014 ones were and are having a real and serious impact on Russians, from the oligarchs to regular folks.


Putin is deeply concerned about Ukraine receiving aid from other countries and is rattling his saber. That’s be a lot more impressive if the Russian Army wasn’t just wildly and indiscriminately blasting away at civilian targets, which is, BTW, a war crime.

Serious doubts arising about inevitability of Russian victory.


Russian oligarchs sailing their yachts to safe harbor to prevent them from being confiscated.

FIFA had a serious bribery and corruption scandal in 2015, so if FIFA thinks you’re toxic...


With modern technology, you don’t even need real women to seduce young soldiers into giving away military information, just a couple of pictures and “she” can sweet-talk the lonely young men on the other side!


Ukrainians have some pretty darned high-level psyops running.


February


A 2016 piece that's important context for Trump's bragging that Putin didn't invade anyone while Trump was our president.


So according to Senator Ron Johnson, we should never, ever punish a rogue president, because that leads to consequences that are worse than having an out-of-control chief executive. Mm-hm!

Interesting because the guy seems perfectly willing to sacrifice the citizens of Afghanistan, Ukraine and Taiwan, all to hurt the Biden Administration. No sure whether he’s a racist who considers all of these people to be easily expendable or whether he hates Biden that much. Probably a combination of both.

*Sigh!* Senator Manchin returns to the 80s with the ol' "Culture of Poverty" debate.


Two pro-Russia pundits confess that they called it wrong.

Hmm, anti-motorized vehicle strikes seem to be a big part of Ukrainian strategy.


The problem with tanks is that shoulder-fired rockets are now much more effective than the bazooka of World War II was. This may be the last war in which heavy main battle tanks are featured.

The fact that the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv have held out for as long as they have has put the attempted blitzkrieg of Ukraine way behind schedule This is causing serious international and domestic problems for Putin. By upping his nuclear posture, Putin is trying to flip the script and convince people that Russia is the one being attacked.
BTW, Ukrainians feel the negotiations are just for show, but no one wants to appear to be anti-peace.

Update (11 Mar): On the 24th of February, the headline from Newsweek was "U.S. Expects Kyiv to Fall in Days as Ukraine Source Warns of Encirclement," but the feared 40-mile column is just now getting into position to try and overcome the hardened target of Kyiv.
Citizens of Kharkiv occupy the city's subway system as the city above them is flattened. But Kharkiv is still in Ukrainian hands.


Never understood all of the fluffing for Governor DeSantis. He’s done an absolutely awful job with the problems of Florida!


Militarily, Ukraine is doing quite well. Several days in and Kyiv is still held by Ukraine!

Very heartening! TFG appears to be realizing he backed the wrong horse and that supporting Putin maybe isn’t such a great idea after all!

Ukraine establishes foreign legion for non-Ukrainians willing to go there and fight Russians.

History of Nazis and Jewish people in Ukraine.


Cool! Tony Stark/Iron Man, as we all know, perished in Avengers: Endgame. Riri Williams/Ironheart will take his place as the armored character in the Marvel Movie Universe.


"Black Woman Sentenced To 6 Yrs For Trying To Register To Vote Gets New Trial"
A true and blatant miscarriage of justice. Happy to hear there will be a new trial.


Biggest news is that Russia has committed over half of their total forces so far and that Westerners are making open, overt weapons deliveries.


Very heartwarming. The father was of military age, so he couldn't leave Ukraine. The mother was on her way. They had to trust a stranger to take care of their two children in the meantime.


Very happy to see this! I mean, seriously? A truck convoy was going to complain about the "tyranny" of vaccine mandates while Russia is attacking Ukraine?

Update (7 Mar): Yeesh! This "Freedom Convoy" is still doing loops around the Washington DC Beltway, arousing lots of hate and discontent and middle fingers being flashed at them!


Among the papers taken by TFG to Mar-a-Lago are some that are so top-secret, they can't even be described!


Louisiana State University was asked by reporters whether they had any Russian experts who could comment on today's news. Unfortunately, LSU has a very well-funded athletics department, but they haven't had any Russian experts for quite some time.


The younger George Bush refused to share classified information on Iraq with Democratic Senators Kennedy and Byrd, allegedly because he thought they’d share that information with Saddam Hussein. The accusation that The Former Guy has actually been doing business with our adversary, for instance, by performing money laundering, is far more credible.


Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has such strong bipartisan appeal, this may not be a divisive fight.


Kyiv is still in Ukrainian hands. Several action reports.

Examining the charge that NATO inspired this war by expanding into Eastern Europe over the past three decades.


Disturbing look at media priorities. Will being pro-Putin hurt the GOP in November or do Democrats have all the liabilities?


Stunning! The measure condemning Russia for its aggression against Ukraine by the UN Security Council failed as single members can veto any measure. What's amazing is that the vote by all of the other members was either a vote in favor or an abstention. No one voted on Russia's side!

Update (2 Mar): Another vote by whole UN body (similarly toothless in terms of legal consequences) went against Russia 141-5. Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea were the only pro-Russian votes.  .


Wow! Does this woman think that Poland and the Baltic States will be left on their own, the way Ukraine is on its own now? Ukraine is on its own for a reason. We're wary about starting World War III. Poland and the states are full NATO members. An attack on them absolutely will provoke a full-scale response!


What I found most amusing about the Cruz speech was how he attempts to sound like some raging Marxist. If you listen closely though, he makes very highly specific complaints about specific companies that have done things he doesn't like.


Good harbinger! Russian forces not able to cleanly roll over Ukrainian ones.


The younger George Bush decries “Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine,” which is nice, but Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq kind of established a precedent that Putin is merely following.


Republican-run state senate in Florida unanimously confirms grossly unfit doctor to be Florida’s Surgeon General. Democrats all opposed but were outnumbered.


Ukrainians singing their national anthem.
(Oblast means province)

Hey, remember Steve Bannon, that sloppy, unshaven guy who wears outsides shirts as though they were undershirts, who was prominent early on during the Former Guy's administration? Yeah, he likes Putin, and Russia generally, because they're anti-gay.

Good to hear about strong Russian citizen anti-war sentiment!

Plenty of risks with the war in Ukraine.


February 2021, the Texas power grid collapsed. Due to Texas power regulations, power providers were able to bill customers thousands of times their usual bills. One of the power companies instead went bankrupt and took the Governor to court. We're now getting their testimony.


By signing onto a European Citizen’s Initiative, Human Rights Watch affirms that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal and that no products can be exported to them or imported from them.

No country should be enabling the trade in goods produced as a result of land theft, displacement, and discrimination.


It’s war!

A whole set of takes on Russia-Ukraine. I like numbers 1 and 8. Biden essentially took the correct approach and what Putin really fears is a flourishing, well-functioning democracy right on his Southern border.

The above NY Mag piece figures TFG is about the only person in the US who enthusiastically supports the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Now that it’s broken out, yep, he’s loving it!

Biden denounces the attack by Russia on Ukraine.

This is not a limited incursion. Putin intends to take the whole country.

Marco Rubio, the Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wasn't asked about TFG's comment about the invasion being "genius." In other words, the interviewer Jake Tapper is useless.

Putin’s ultimate objective appears to be “invasion, occupation, pacification, regime change, and installation of a puppet government.”


"Tucker Carlson Defends Putin: 'Putin Never Called Me Racist'"
Tucker Carlson begins his list of grievances by echoing Muhammad Ali's famous quote:

"I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong...No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger."

But Carlson makes an interesting complaint: "Has [Putin] shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?"

Well, let's see, what does the Senator Rick Scott Plan for America say about shipping jobs overseas? Theoretically, Scott is opposed to globalism, but neither his comment on our economic relationship with China, nor the 11th point in his Plan meaningfully address how exactly he wants to shift jobs back to the US.

Republican senator Mitch McConnell didn’t want to present any sort of blueprint as to how the party would govern in the event that they succeeded in taking over the House, the Senate or both. Senator Scott presented a plan anyway. Now Scott has given Democrats a nice, juicy target to aim at!


According to Michael McFaul, former Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, Putin didn’t have a problem with countries in the vicinity of Russia joining NATO back during 2001 and 2002.

Lots of economic strains and stresses being caused by conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Not only does Russia supply lots of natural gas, but Ukraine supplies a lot of wheat.

Former Secretary of State under TFG announces his admiration for Putin. BTW, he's hard to recognize as he's lost a lot of weight.


Took part in Zoom call and chat by UNAC concerning Russia-Ukraine war. Interesting points, but not really convincing.


A month ago, the Supreme Court rejected TFG's emergency attempt to shield his presidential records from scrutiny. Now that they've had a chance to review his request on substantive grounds, they've reaffirmed a statement made by the first judicial review of his request: "Presidents are not kings."


On Senator Scott's Plan to Rescue America, point 6 is interesting.

"We will eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress."

But if things could have been done locally, they would have been. Why would the country have bothered to give the government a job that was being done well locally? An example would be the ACA/Obamacare. US capitalism had from the Truman Administration until Obama was president to solve the problem of preexisting conditions. Capitalism simply couldn't do it.


Very interesting backdrop to Russia-Ukraine conflict. When Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine, Ukrainians greatly reduced Crimea's fresh water supply.

Sounds like Putin is formalizing a state of war over Ukraine.

I understand what Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson are both saying about wanting Ukraine to serve as a buffer state between Russia and the West. But how do Ukrainians feel about that? Why should they agree to subordinate their own national aspirations to just doing what Russia wants? Remember, about 60-65% of Ukrainians want to join NATO.


At first, the WaPo ran a Putin-friendly headline. Looks like someone hollered at them, so they corrected it.


Putin’s justification for war against Ukraine is very highly similar to Israel’s justification for war on the Palestinian people. That, well, they aren’t really a state in the first place.


Linguistic analysis shows that the fellow in the cowboy hat is Q of QAnon. The other fellow is Paul Gosar, who was reprimanded by Congress for publishing a short cartoon where he battles Biden and kills Representative AOC.


The Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard goes on Fox News to defend Putin.


Yeah, the idea that Putin didn’t want to confront Trump ‘cuz Trump was so formidable an antagonist is so laughable!


Not a very good answer to why Trump took so many documents home and as to why it took so long to return items that obviously did not belong to him.


Griswold v Connecticut is an extremely important building block for Roe v Wade. Of course right-wingers would go after that next. Basically, it holds that certain areas of life are simply none of the government’s business.


Diplomacy time is over (21 Feb). By announcing the annexation of part of the Donbas region, Putin has essentially declared war on Ukraine.
Getting sanctions ready.


Prediction: If war breaks out between Russia and Ukraine, the Serbians, Croatians and other Balkan peoples are expected to line up with Russia while “Belgrade and Zagreb will have to openly side with Kiev.”

Update (2 Mar): UN General Assembly votes for Russia to stop offensive into Ukraine. Voting with Russia are Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea. Everyone else either voted against Russia or abstained.


The NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd has her finger om the pulse of...hmm...something or other. Not sure how she justifies the Build Beck Better bill as “pro-corporate" when Senator Manchin and the Republicans oppose it, but ehh, okay.


Marge Greene says she is misunderstood: “It just bothers me so much. They treat me as if I’m some kind of crazy person..."

1. She’s telling us that she’s not crazy, in front of an Info Wars sign! 😆

2. Yeah, when your “rebuttal” is that the other guys are really the crazy ones...nah, that’s not much of a defense!


Huh! Sounds fun! George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) will team up with Marvel Comics to produce the Wild Card series as comic books!


"Sidney Powell Sues Verizon To Block Phone Records From Jan. 6 Committee"
Y’know, at this point, with Trump and all of his co-conspirators trying to shield their “privacy,” it’s pretty clear they’re all guilty as $%#@!


The editor of Talking Points Memo has established a list of people who tweet about the Russia-Ukraine crisis, to be regularly updated.


People have been asking for proof of Russia’s malign intent. Well here’s at least proof that Russian troops have been stationed in Belarus in very large numbers. Their being stationed there is causing all kinds of problems for local residents.


Melania Trump is very upset that people accuse her of money-grubbing. Y'know, it wouldn’t have been difficult for a former First Lady to have done something, anything other than something that was just purely profitable. Anything other than a money-making venture would have a least provided something that supporters could have pointed to.


No new policy pronouncements, but good speech summing up Biden policy regarding Moscow and Kyiv.


Jennifer Griffin, who’s actually reported from Russia from 1996 to 1999 and has been a foreign corespondent for, get this, Fox News(!!!), corrects her colleagues who claim Biden is launching a “false flag” attack.


Seriously, Texas just needs to drop its new voter law. Obviously, the whole point of the law is to deny minorities the chance to make their voices heard.


When it comes to Russia vs Ukraine, the West is unified.

Good summary of Moscow-Kyiv situation.

The conflict between Moscow and Kyiv is driven partly by fears of decline by both Russia and the US. One of the problems with the idea that NATO has expanded East is that Poland demonstrated in the 80s with Solidarność that it was not a willing ally of the Soviet Union. Poland’s move to join NATO is hardly just the result of Western manipulation.


The fellow who oversaw the Hillary Clinton "But Her Email" stories by the NY Times doesn't appear to recognize how badly America suffered due in part to his negligence.

In its coverage of the outgoing NY Times' Executive Editor Dean Baquet, the New Yorker ran a photo of a happy and relaxed Baquet. Our blogger explains why -

There was zero pushback or follow-up to Banquet’s proud boast that he has no regrets about the emails fiasco, or that the paper was right to treat Trump and Clinton equally.

Essenetially, Baquet went "forum-shopping." He looked for, and got, soft, gentle coverage of the But Her Emails fiasco.

The Publisher of the NY Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., eliminated the position of Public Editor with the idea that the public, using social media forums like Twitter, would take over from the Public Editor.
But Executive Editor Dean Baquet said “I could care less about the unnuanced voices on Twitter." He then drew a ridiculous distinction between readers and Twitter. As a result, NY Times reporters "respond to any criticism with condescension, defensiveness and open hostility."


I understand the argument that skater Kamila Valieva was young and didn't know what she was doing, but if we give Valieva a pass, that will tell all team owners that they can juice up under-age athletes and get away with that. That sounds to me like an extremely bad precedent to set. Nah, Lipinski and Sha'carri Richardson are right. Fairness demands no exceptions.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for this young woman. She should have been sent home when she failed her drug test. That would have been the best thing for all involved.


Absolutely amazing! Obama successfully concluded a nuclear agreement with Iran that did exactly what it set out to do. The Former Guy tried for four years to "re-invent the wheel" and to replace Obama's deal with something better. He failed.
Now, Republicans are vowing to, if they regain the White House in 2024, to simply repeat Trump's error.


Amnesty International put out a report that came out to 280 pages and had 1559 footnotes (nearly 600 of them Israeli sources), only to have it dismissed as “anti-Semitism.” The danger of this is that real antisemitism, the hatred of Jewish people because they are Jewish, getting lumped together with political criticism of the state of Israel, degrades the charge into meaninglessness.

In the event of war between Moscow and Kyiv (Kiev), Israel faces a straight-up lose-lose scenario. There’s no possible way for Israel to benefit from such a war.


A senator who has been holding up Biden appointees, who just happen to be Russia experts, forces to have a vote on one of the candidates and loses the vote 94 to 1!


The judge in the Letitia James v Trump family case is on the ball and has read all of the evidence! Woo hoo!

Senator Marco Rubio is fighting Representative Val Demings (@RepValDemings) for his Senate seat. It’s apparent here that he feels the need to go all-in on his support for TFG!


THIS is why we want people to read books like Maus! So people DON'T say moronically stupid $#@% like "I felt like I was in Nazi Germany because they wanted to see my vaccination papers!"


Good to see the Senate has overridden one of Senator Hawley's holds.
Very disturbing quotation from a WaPo piece, suggesting that Hawley thinks he knows better than the president on how to conduct foreign policy, so he's actively delaying nominations, specifically to make Biden's job harder.


Looks like Russians have named their "provocation" that "forces" them to commit to war against Ukraine.


Whut!?!?! "If the Fox story isn't true, it's news." Remember, CNN wants to hire this guy! Idiots!


You've got a problem, we've got a solution! Conflict over Ukraine raises the price of gas? Electric cars!


This illustrates why people who think Ayn Rand is smart are usually white, economically well-off college kids. Because skin color has never made an actual, real-life difference to this person, she doesn't think skin color matters to anyone.


I guess my only real problem with the no-fly list under the younger George Bush was that there didn’t seem to be any way to get people taken off of it. An interview on the show today showed that that concern was being taken very seriously. People are concerned that unruly passengers are being equated with terrorists? Hey, if you’re not creating a flight hazard, you’ve got nothing to worry about.


A look at the laws and rules concerning written papers that the president produces.


Q: What is one of the primary duties of the Federal Reserve?

A: To fight inflation.

Q: What are Republicans holding up?

A: Nominees for the Federal Reserve.

Yeah, somehow I don't think the opposition party is really concerned about inflation.

More on that.


Details on the Canadian trucker protest. Fox News and the rest of the US right wing are very much part of the problem. At most, the number of protesters is 8k.

Nazi and Confederate flags were seen flying, QAnon logos were emblazoned on trucks and signs, and banners were pasted to telephone poles bearing Trudeau’s face, reading: "Wanted for crimes against humanity.”

Very interesting. Anti-vaxxer Canadian truckers were paid by US millionaires.


In Texas, the 2020 election went smoothly, with virtually no problems. Turnout was high and everybody got their vote in. Then the legislature decided to “fix” things!


Woo hoo! TFG gets fired by his accounting firm. They say statements from him for the past ten years are unreliable.

Heh! Gee, for some strange reason, Fox News didn't want to say much about their Glorious Leader being fired by his accounting firm!

By coincidence, Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, is being fired by his bank. His bank appears to be trying to put some distance between his campaign to overturn the 2020 election and themselves.


Good thread on Ukraine.

Senator Chris Murphy with a really good thread on What can Putin possibly hope to gain by invading Ukraine?


Sarah Palin's defamation lawsuit against the NY Times fails. From what I read on this earlier, it sounded like she had a really weak case.


I don't see that Senator Sinema has much of a chance of surviving a Democratic primary in 2024 in any event, but it's good to see Senator Manchin try to talk some sense into her.


Very sad to see that a mainstream media piece was fundamentally, substantively wrong, but the NY Times couldn't be bothered to rewrite the piece so that it was accurate.  An interview subject claimed to be a "Hillary-Biden voter," but was actually a big Republican donor and activist. This means that the piece required major revisions but it instead, just got some light edits.

This is good! NY Times gave us a lot of mealy-mouthed excuses and justifications, but WaPo is just straight-up that TFG "...violated the records law…"


Woo hoo! Dr. Strange-Wanda Maximoff movie opens 6 May.


Aww! Super-heroes from DC Comics share Valentine's Day greetings!


As a member of the military, my country supplied me with everything I needed to do my job. Teachers shouldn't have to pay a single penny out of their own pockets for school supplies! If they spend anything on their own, they should be reimbursed promptly and 100%.


Yup! As the late columnist Molly Ivins once said “Ya dance with the one who brung ya.” If politicians are elevated by grassroots movements, they’ll vote our way.


We have three individuals who could play an important role in tackling the situation with Russia, but a single senator is preventing them from taking office!


"The costs of Trump’s Iranian mistake haunt the U.S."
Yeah, it was obvious at the time that TFG's Iranian policy was a complete cluster$%#@.


I mentioned in a photoessay that the Russian pundit Julia Ioffe is on my Twitter feed. She interviews Dr. Andrey Sushentsov.

Today, he is the Dean of the prestigious School of International Relations at MGIMO and program director at the Valdai Club, the exclusive foreign policy conference where Vladimir Putin has often made news talking to interlocutors from abroad.

Dr. Sushentsov has some interesting and worthwhile things to say.


Huh! Trump was taking classified documents to his golf club, where there is no secure way to store them. Why is Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly just teling us this now? What was he, saving this information for a book?!?!?! Why didn't the American public learn about this in real time?

Different person, but identical problem. Withholding important information that the American people should have known about. If there was any legitimate reason for reporters to hold back information like this, we should have heard some justifications by now. The story in question is that the White House has almost 30 working fireplaces and Trump was flushing government papers down the toilet! Aides knew because the toilets would get clogged up.

Good! The House Oversight Committee chair is taking vigorous action on the Trump papers in Mar-a-Lago.

Very good piece on the very sad failure of two journalists to do their jobs properly.

Just for the record, NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman claims that she didn't know Trump was regularly disposing of government documents until after he left office. Make of that what you will.

Omarosa Manigault Newman and Stephanie Grisham back up Haberman’s story about Trump's documents destruction.

Parts of Ottowa have been shut down because of trucks, deliberately parking in spots that block traffic and honking their horns all day and night. CNN, please!!! Can you please interview some people other than just the protesting truck drivers?!?!?! There are people in Ottowa who do not support the truck drivers!


Very interesting to see how the NY Times chose to report the Trump taking of government papers to Florida compared to how they covered Hillary Clinton not following proper email protocols. For Clinton, it was front-page, above the fold, for weeks!

And no, Hillary Clinton did not do anything that was even remotely, not even slightly similar! She sincerely and honestly thought that the State Department had copies of all of her emails. She deleted the emails she thought were unimportant. Everything that was historically important was preserved. Trump simply trucked off boxes and boxes of documents that he shouldn’t have taken off the premises of the White House at all, for any reason! This is not a “BothSides” story!


So apparently, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was upset because the scheme of the fake electors, people who tried to pass off forgeries of Electoral College Votes, were counted as 6 January conspirators. But it was clearly all the same plot, thought up and directed by all of the same people, for the same purpose.


Speaker Pelosi makes a very good point. Members of the Congress should divest from stocks, but so should members of the Executive and Judiciary branches. After all, if someone owns a lot of Lockheed-Martin stock when they're making decisions on war and peace, that could be a problem for the whole country.


More on the smear campaign against Dr. Fauci. What's truly ludicrous is that Democrats are at the center of the story, but the writer quotes 14 Republicans and zero Democrats!


Wow! This couple stole $4.5 billion worth of Bitcoin! Guess it was hard to launder/spend.


Will Senatr Manchin leave any sort of legacy?
Manchin, compared to another West Virginian, Senator Robert C. Byrd, is an entirely destructive, negative force. He holds up Democrats from passing important bills. For what? Manchin's "legacy" will evaporate the second the Senate goes through any personnel changes.


TFG removed lots and lots of material from the White House that should have gone straight to the National Archives.
Heh! "… Trump advisers deny any nefarious intent."

Very happy to hear that Democrats will be investigating just how 15 and maybe more boxes of papers that didn't belong to TFG ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
Hmm, if the records were taken as the result of a "hasty" exit, why not, at the absolute, rock bottom minimum, wasn't someone assigned to go through the records to determine what should and shouldn't be transmitted to the Archives?

Update (25 Feb): Some of the documents were so top-secret, their contents can't even be descibed! Obviously, we have to assume all of these documents were compromised as Trump didn't have a secure place to store them.


Good! Strong internal pressure in Iran to reinstate the 2015 nuclear deal.


Cool! Michelle Yeoh is going to be in a “genre-hopping action-comedy.” Should be fun!
BTW, I’ve gone through a lot of Star Trek – Discovery up to most of the way through Season 2. Yeoh plays a very interesting role in that.


These two mention Peter Schweizer as though he was some sort of reliable source. Nonsense. He was the author of Clinton Cash, a completely debunked and discredited book. Minority Leader McCarthy clearly has nothing, but wants to hold a series of hearings anyway.


Oh, good grief! Jonah Goldberg is joining CNN. Why CNN? What on Earth does CNN gain from employing this guy? What value does he bring to any discussion?

About the biggest thing Goldberg is known for is a book called “Liberal Fascism” that violates a liberal belief, that one can either be a liberal or one can be a fascist. Goldberg makes a very poor argument that one can be both.


Speaker Pelosi's statement to US Olympic athletes going off to compete in China:

“I would say to our athletes: You’re there to compete. Do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government, because they are ruthless.”

Mike Pompeo, being a former Secretary of State, should know that the US Constitution doesn't apply when you're in a foreign country. It only applies when you're in the US or in a fellow democracy.


Again, TFG shows us that he has the instincts of a mob boss. He's probably also very aware that Nixon kept recordings of his conversations and wants to make sure there are no such records of his statements.


"Ted Cruz Diverts Time To Canadian Truckers' Anti-Vax Campaign As Winter Storm Pounds Texas"
'Cause hey, yeah. It's not like a senator has anything better to do during a harsh winter storm when his state suffered a complete disaster during the last big storm, than to go on TV and to cheer on Canadian truckers!


Oh man, $%#@ y’all! Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon did nothing to heal the country, Biden’s pardon of TFG won’t do that either!


So even though TFG has admitted that he wants to pardon January 6 defendants, meaning "Yeah, those were my guys," we still have people claiming it was a "false flag" operation!


The battle to call Israeli apartheid what it is is being won. And Israel is very unhappy about that.


What could possibly be the attraction that the NY Times appears to have for Florida Governor DeSantis?!?!?!


Had an online conversation with a fellow who praised the “tough” Democrats of years past. The last few paragraphs here make it clear that the US sanctions against Iran had really hurt them and they would really like some relief from them. But the piece doesn’t mention a single US gain from the Trump years. Biden isn’t being called upon to “preserve the gains of Trump,” because there weren’t any.


Woman who tried to register to vote receives fantastically, amazingly harsh sentence for doing so.

Update (25 Feb): Pamela Moses is getting a new trial, thanks to public pressure.


We now know that Representative Jordan had a 10-minute conversation with TFG on 6 January.


Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is just a walking conflict of interest. By permitting Thomas to decide on his own whether or not he needs to recuse himself from cases, the court is seriously discrediting itself.


Is Senator Rand Paul attacking a “straw man” here? Ehh, close. Usually, a straw man is a totally made-up opponent who says things that no one actually says. In this case, the quote is real, but it’s from June 2020. Paul acts as if the conditions that were applicable then still apply today.


The former CEO of CNN (Who was abrutly fired under mysterious circumstances a short while ago) was in a romantic relationship that he and her both repeatedly denied. She reported directly to him in the corporate chain of commend, which raises the appearance of favoritism. Also, the couple were advising Governor Cuomo, meaning they were doing what younger brother Chris Cuomo was doing.

How did he interact with 2016 campaign?


Plenty of collateral damage, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi was among his wives & children, when the bomb fell. But yeah, the leader of ISIS is dead.


Interesting poll in here. The three groups with significant opposition to Biden's as-yet-unnamed Supreme Court pick are white voters, Republicans and Independents. Everyone else is pretty cool with the idea.


It took the 6 January Committee a little while to say this as they had to review the legal issues, but yes. on 29 January, Trump was "witness tampering." when he promised to pardon anyone who kept silent about their roles in the attack on the Capitol.


Currently, commercial aircraft are limited to around 700 mph over land due to sonic booms. NASA is trying to reduce the "boom" to more of a "thud."


Whuuh?!?!?! Tesla cars, nearly 54k of them, were programmed to perform “rolling stops?” My mom did a rolling stop once and got a ticket for that. See, for humans to do stuff like that is one thing. Can’t automate things to do that.
A few months ago, I saw an early 1900s vision of the future. A few things, like pocket telephones, were spot-on. But automated hair-cuts? Nope. It’s too complex for a machine to use sharp blades around the skull.


Ukraine’s foreign minister says he, his president and their two American counterparts are all in complete agreement as to how to deal with Russia.

US sending nearly 3,000 extra troops to Poland and Romania.


Former White House Chief of Staff:

Meadows says in Trump’s White House, they were celebrating during COVID because of unbelievable job growth

Narrator: “There was no job growth during the Covid pandemic.”


Could be fun! The dark, tormented Archie of the show Riverdale meets the happy-go-lucky redheaded guy of Archie Comics!


Sigh! Again, an anti-choice law proves fatal to the woman involved!


"Gaslighting in the news pages of the New York Times"

Republicans, who have been intent on rehabilitating themselves in the eyes of voters

and

Many Republicans say they see no need for any course correction

are two statements made in the same article!
The piece includes lots of fantasies and wishful thinking, illustrating serious problems, not just with the reporter, but with the whole newsroom.


Good thread. Lots of worthwhile back-and-forth about who's really the aggressor here, Putin and Russia or Biden and the US. As you might guess, our Russian blogger here feels Putin is the problem and that the DSA is, oddly, trying to put pressure on Biden.

Hoo boy! When you're on the same side as Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, you might want to reassess your position.


...nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that politics drives Supreme Court rulings.

Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch will speak at a partisan event that will be hosted by a partisan institution and will feature partisan guests. If the Supreme Court is seen as partisan, there's a reason for that!


How the NY Times placed Hillary Clinton's emails on their front page and how they featured Donald Trump's rally where he made threats against his prosecutors.


Now that Amnesty International has published a report “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,” Israel drags out its regular accusation of antisemitism. The accusation is getting worn and tattered and is losing credibility. Israel also engages in “whataboutism” by bringing up Syria.

Amnesty International concluded a four-year study by saying that, yes indeed, Israel was an apartheid state. There’s a military-style justice system that’s specifically for Palestinians who live in the West Bank. That same system does not apply to Israelis who live right next to them.

One of Amnesty's critics here proclaims that Israel is a "robust democracy," and so it is, for Israelis! For Palestinians? It's an apartheid state.


Many bomb threats towards HBCUs. Wonder what the motive is? Classes canceled due to bomb threats for second day in row.


It's a little less than a year until Governor Abbot's term ends. Operation Lone Star was a really, really serious cluster$%#!!!! The hardships of the Texas National Guard troops deserves to be a serious issue for the next governor's race


The founder of Daily Kos explains why he continues to produce a series about people who deny that Covid is a serious problem or who refuse to recognize that we have a cheap and effective preventive measure that's available for free.


Democracy is dying, and the media shares a good chunk of the blame. Mehdi Hasan says what needs saying, that the listless, anodyne, vague headlines really don't rise to the moment!


Putin appears to be suspicious of democracy and appears to think that the West did in the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian desire for independence goes back quite a ways.


"'Maus' Sales Skyrocket Following Tennessee School Board Book Ban"
I got and read this book many years ago. It’s still on my bookshelf. Good stuff! Very happy to see it become popular.


January


So, the Spotify CEO says they'll be really careful about Covid misinformation. Cool. Let's see how they handle the next segment by Joe Rogan, a serial mis-informer.

Update (1 Feb): A band complains about Spotify's "draconian royalty calculation which essentially gives artists a microscopic fraction of the money being generated by their music on the platform."

And Spotify went through Rogan's old shows (23 Feb) and found that over 100 of them contained him freely using the N-word.

Other than these two, the issue's been pretty quiet since.


Tucker Carlson has a "parade of horribles:"

“...homelessness - close to a million people living on the street in the United States – 100,000 Americans dying of drug overdoses, inflation…”

Why yes. These are all serious concerns. But what on Earth is the Republican Party prepared to, y’know, do about any of it?!?!?!


The NY Times points out, in a news article, not an editorial, that Republicans "have been intent on rehabilitating themselves in the eyes of voters after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol."
The piece does not provide any evidence that the GOP has made the slightest attempt to rehabilitate itself.


Man, throw the book at these two! A big, heavy one! Problem is, vaccine cards aren't that hard to forge and lots and lots of people need to have them.


Omar Abdulmajeed As’ad was born in Palestine, ran a grocery store in the US for several decades and came back to Palestine to retire. Had any other country treated him the way the Israelis did, the screaming and threats and revulsion would be long and loud. Every American would know As’ad’s name. But because it was Israel, silence.


Good! Rachel Maddow has been covering the Irish fishermen who’ve said they will fish in the middle of the Russian live-fire exercises. Also, this gets the Russian fleet further away from were the trans-Atlantic cables cross.


Will TFG pardon all those who took part in the 6 January assault on the Capitol? Ha, ha, ha! Of course he will! They were carrying out his instructions!


Governor Greg Abbott of Texas deployed The Texas National Guard to their Southern border back in March 2021. It’s long since time for him to admit it’s been a failure.


Good Lord!!! How can it not fill the reporter with horror and revulsion to tell the public that Republicans are hoping that the pandemic lasts long enough for them to exploit it as an issue in the midterm?!?!?


Yeah, the Neil Young vs Spotify/Joe Rogan fight is not going well for Spotify!
Fellow elder rockers Peter Frampton and
Joni Mitchell have joined Young.


Woo-hoo! Ford and GM are making massive investments in Electric Vehicles (EVs)!


Requiring a balanced budget amendment in the Constitution has always been a very bad idea. Senator Graham ignores Trump's budget-busting 2017 tax cut in order to oppose Biden's Build Back Better bill.


A close look at the agreement that ended the last bout of fighting between Kyiv and Moscow.

Code Pink makes a strong case against getting involved in a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, but unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia is acting as an active aggressor against Ukraine.

I've followed this writer quite a bit. He's generally against unnecessary conflicts, but feels the US needs to act more strongly to deter Russia. The announcement that the US is deploying the Green Berets falls very much within deterrence strategy. It tells Russia "Yeah, you may roll through Ukrainian towns, but you'd better leave lots of troops behind to secure your supply lines, because those will come under attack."
Very interesting paragraph:

Does Putin see Biden as weak — after Afghanistan? "I don’t think so. I think people in Moscow, at least people who matter and who are influential in foreign policy debates, their thinking was rather that Biden is smart. He’s trying to limit his frontlines. He’s not fighting each and every battle. Plus, Biden is someone who can speak on behalf of the West. During the whole Trump period, there was no one like that."


Senator Wicker's presumption here is that neither government action nor social tendencies have ever acted to promote and enable the success of white guys like himself. For a white guy to be in a position of authority is just "The Way Things Are."


Senator Josh Hawley says at the 1:20 minute mark that by appointing a Black woman to the Supreme Court, nothing else matters! All that matters to Biden is that the nominee must be a Black woman. Tucker Carlson of Fox News makes much the same suggestion. No. The idea is to get a qualified Black woman to fill that position! Neither Biden nor the Democrats want to appoint just any warm body to fill that position!


Good news! The world put a little short of $1 trillion into low-carbon technology in 2021!


Extremist anti-choicers.

A Polish woman reportedly died in a hospital in Częstochowa this week after she was forced to carry a dead fetus for over seven days.


Just thinking about the Clarence-Ginni Thomas case, I don't think progressives are hoping to make a big bust, but I think the case does present a serious concern for the credibility of the Supreme Court. The court has made it clear that it wants to overturn Roe v Wade. Neither the medical evidence nor public opinion has changed sufficiently since 1973 to justify doing that.
Ginni Thomas is very, very clearly close to the people who conducted the 6 January attack on the Capitol and Justice Thomas was the sole vote in favor of keeping the former president's papers around that time secret.
The usual test is whether someone "appears" to have a conflict of interest. Yes, Justice Thomas does appear to have such a conflict and needs to recuse himself from any case involving The Former Guy. It is very much in the self-interest of the Supreme Court to take action!


This is just an awful example of the NY Times bending over backwards to make a straightforward matter of lies told by Joe Rogan a matter of “BothSides!” and blame that’s evenly doled out. What’s lost in here is the truth!!!!

A detail that the media overlooked in the Neil Young vs Joe Rogan and Spotify fight.

Spotify is a really large audio service. They carried both Joe Rogan (Who's considered the replacement for the late Rush Limbaugh) and ol' hippie rocker Neil Young. Young demanded that either he or Rogan had to go, so Spotify said "See ya!" That decision is costing Spotify dearly There are perils in being too big.

Woo hoo! Neil Young's Greatest Hits is way up on iTunes!


"Florida Dems walk out on Gov. DeSantis’ surgeon general after he can’t answer simple COVID questions"
Absolutely insane! Dr. Joseph Ladapo is clearly, absolutely and utterly unqualified to be the Surgeon General of Florida! As the blogger says

...he’s not intelligent and informed enough to handle the job of being the doctor of my daughter’s dolls, let alone human folks.


"Supreme Court Justice Breyer Announces Retirement"
This is very good news for Democrats! There was the possibility that Justice Breyer could pass away during a time when Republicans dominated the Senate. If that happened, we'd have to wait until there was both a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate or vice-versa with Republicans to get a new Justice on the court.


Back when the 6 January Committee was formed, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was given the opportunity to appoint some members to it. One of his appointments, Representative Jim Jordan, was very highly controversial and, in fact, has been identified as a witness in the attack on our Capitol. Speaker Pelosi told McCarthy that Jordan and one other had to be withdrawn, but she would accept the rest. In a huff, McCarthy withdrew all of his appointments.
Now, Republicans are saying that because there are no Republican members on the 6 January Committee who were appointed by McCarthy, that the committee is somehow illegitimate. That view was firmly slapped down by a federal judge.


So sportsball player Aaron Rodgers realizes that his refusal to be vaccinated is an albatross around the neck of his team. He’s singlehandedly causing his team to look like a bunch of idiots.


Senator Manchin is convinced that the courts will throw out badly gerrymandered districts like this all the time. If the country had passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, we wouldn’t have to wonder if the courts will do the right thing, the law would have been plainly spelled out!


Woo hoo! The Webb Space telescope is now parked into its final orbit! It is stationed a million miles from Earth* and is expected to keep making observations for up to 20 years.

*At light speed, the telescope is a little over five seconds away.


Uh, was this Banks guy asleep from 2017 to 2021?!?!?! Was he unaware that we had a president who did nothing but to "attack and malign the free press"?


Problems with one guy running the country (in this case, Turkey). It’s easier to focus on re-branding/renaming the country rather than addressing problems like inflation, "recession, job loss, unchecked violence, gender discrimination, and an Omicron surge, among others."


Wow! Haven’t seen children encouraged to snitch on parents since the early 80s.

Woo hoo!

"Youngkin's 'snitch line' on teachers is backfiring badly."

Good! As someone said, this was throwback to the Stasi/KGB days.


Piece looks at the actual mechanics of 1880s dresses for an upcoming series.


Ukraine tries to play the peacemaker between Russia and the West (which is defending Ukraine).

A personal, up-close look at Ukrainians as people.


So this piece makes a very strong case that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any Trump cases, including especially 6 January. As recusals are entirely up to the justice, there's no likelihood Thomas will oblige. This further diminishes the court's moral authority, to have one of its justices thumb his nose at decency and propriety.

More on the Clarence/Ginni Thomas case.

Big excerpts from the Clarence/Ginni Thomas New Yorker piece.

Just for the fun of it. I did a search for a piece that did not think Thomas should recuse himself. Kind of interesting that this piece focuses relentlessly on the motivations of the left and "whatabout-ism" and actually produces very few facts that would justify Thomas not recusing himself.


This strikes me as very highly questionable and both Democrats and Republicans have every business raising a stink about this. Why do the Capitol Police want to investigate visitors to Congressional offices?!?!? I can understand why they want to know about people taking tours of the Capitol immediately prior to 6 January, but not just on a routine basis.


Sarah Palin got Covid back in March. She did not learn anything from that as she's still not vaccinated. She now has to delay her libel case against the NY Times until it's clear whether she'll recover or not.


The words and actions of the anti-choicers here are just horrifying.

Rape victims, she said, do not require an exception because they closely track their menstrual cycles and therefore have more than enough time to terminate their pregnancies. As for victims of incest, Folsom assured that they’ll simply be cared for by their familial rapist.
“If they are still under the control of that aggressor, that aggressor is going to make sure that young girl or woman has an abortion before anyone finds out,” Folsom reasoned.


Republican senator Joni Ernst gave a good ol' all-American, mom an' apple pie defense of democracy as regards Russia vs Ukraine. Slight problem - she and rest of her party voted against voting rights for Americans just last week!


Elon Musk has developed a brain-machine interface. He'll be ready to begin testing it with humans soon.
Erm, isn’t this the stuff of science fiction nightmares?


"Texas says supply chain issues have limited the number of voter registration forms it can give out"
Sorry, but Texas has not earned the benefit of the doubt!


*Sigh!* Don Jr. claims that the US must not permit China to develop nuclear weapons.
Erm, China’s had nuclear weapons since 1964.


Virginia's new Attorney General fired a lawyer who was on leave so that he could work on the 6 January Committee. In other words, the firing was clearly and blatantly political!


Former Representative Devin Nunes wants Hunter Biden's laptop to be thoroughly, comprehensivley investigated. The portable computer does indeed contain emails and photos that clearly came from Biden. But these were apparently stolen from one of his devices, probably a phone. There's no chain of custody from Biden to the laptop. There is no evidence that the laptop ever belonged to him!


Newt Gingrish said words to the effect of: "people serving on the J6 Committee are going to go to jail if Republicans take over Congress after the next election."
I believe this guy entirely. If anyone thinks losing the House and/or Senate to Republicans in November won't be a big deal, please take Gingrich's words seriously! He absolutely means everthing he says!

Commentary.


The 6 January panel asks to interview Ivanka Trump as she clearly has knowledge of what her father was doing during the attack on our Capitol. Naturally, he doesn't want her to testify. In The Hill article, he really seems to be trying to make her sound as though she’s still in high school as opposed to, y'know, being 40, married, a mother of three children and once had the title of Senior Adviser to the President.


Ali Velshi of MSNBC News relates to us a very serious crime. Will that crime ever be punished? Will it ever even be seriously investigated?

Update (2 Feb): Haj Suleiman al-Hathaleen died of his wounds.


Enormously disappointing that, a year after Biden took office, Saudi Arabia is still committing war crimes against Yemen!


Republican "plans" here fall considerably short of actually being plans. "we need to tackle the issue of inflation" is an aspiration. It isn't a plan on how to tackle inflation!


According to a piece in Fox News, Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Mitch McConnell all agree that excessive partisanship is the problem with the Senate and that keeping the filibuster in place is the cure for that. Mmm, yeah. Kind of a problem with that is detailed in the Maddowblog post. The “legislative model” proposed by Senator Manchin simply doesn’t work. To date, Manchin has racked up precisely zero successes. 


Deep examination of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s statement about “African-American voters” vs “Americans.”

A number of people have posted tweets with “We ‘are’ Americans. #mitchplease”

MSNBC's Zerlina Maxwell comments.


Representative Boebert is the the Communications Chair for the House Freedom Caucus. She made what she alleges was a "joke" here, she saw a group of Jewish people who wore outfits that clearly identified them as Jewish, so she asked if they were there to conduct “reconnaissance.” I'm sorry, but if the intention in having a Communication Chair is to reach out beyond the hard-core base, I think the Freedom Caucus made a very poor choice!


A NY Times reporter finds great comfort in a Financial Times (British) piece that says "Calm down, no biggie, relax!" Problem is, he completely ignores the very real and present danger that our electoral system is likely to be subverted enough that the other side will unfairly win the 2022 midterm and will then push the nation even closer to fascism.


The Republican Governor wasn’t thrilled to hear that, as a senator, he’d simply be playing as a roadblock for two straight years. The agenda of Senate Republicans is simply to block everything until there’s a Republican president again.


Yep, she figured she’d be smart. She was an anti-vaxxer, but the Czech Republic insisted, so she used a loophole saying that if you were a Covid survivor, you didn’t have to get the shot. Oops! Slight problem, she didn’t survive getting Covid!


Annoying, but expected. Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Senate Republicans combined to sink the voting rights bill.

Senators Manchin and Sinema are now on record as preferring the filibuster over democracy.

What’s really sad is that Senators Manchin and Collins (R-ME) are still insisting that the government will still protect voting rights.

Yes, the Senate is split 50 Democrats to 50 Republicans, but the Democrats represent 34 million more people than the other side does! For all intents and purposes though, Democrats were voted down 52-48.

There's really no way that Democrats come out ahead, but we can at least take grim satisfaction in Senator Sinema's career being over. She's got three years remaining in her term, but her career is essentially "dead man walking."

"Kyrsten Sinema formally censured by Arizona Democratic Party"


Woo hoo! This is very good news! The 6 January Committee has requested a whole raft of materials from the Archives. Supreme Court was the last appeal and they say it's a go!


MSNBC's Chris Hayes:

During SCOTUS arguments on Biden's Covid rules, Sotomayor was remote because Gorsuch reportedly refused to mask up.

Sounds like a straight-up OSHA violation to me! One of the problems with this kind of utterly blatant hypocrisy, “OSHA rules don’t apply to us!” is that the Supreme Court, already under deep suspicion for its handling of Roe vs Wade and how Texas has approached that ruling, is that the public image of the Court suffers still more.


As The Who said in Won’t Get Fooled Again – “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The Taliban 2.0 is a bit better at international public relations, but is pretty much the same old Taliban 1.0.


Hmm. A comedy about an aristocrat who becomes a pirate! Could be fun!


Good! Emily’s List has dropped Senator Sinema over her staunch defense of the filibuster.


The deliberately-unvaccinated are a real problem. They're extending the pandemic, allowing for more variations to occur  and they spread the coronoavirus more easily than the vaccinated do. So why does the WaPo write sympathertic headlines about them?


Very nice, normalized piece that completely fails to note that TFG is engaged in pure demagoguery. Trump on COVID-19 treatment:

"If you're white you go right to the back of the line."

CNN says merel that Trump is looking "to rebrand his legacy."

Why is CNN determined to cover for him? Why is CNN normalizing him?


Yeah, “election integrity” is right-wing code for Voter ID and other methods for disenfranchising legitimate voters who are likely to vote for Democrats.

Several Republican senators have tried to raise the boogeyman of a “federal takeover” of voting rights. Bit of a problem is that segregationists used exactly the same argument from the 1930s to the mid-1960s.


I’m just utterly astonished that a fellow who was two years older than the woman he attacked (He was 18, she was 16) and who took advantage of someone who was clearly drunk, helpless and unable to consent to sex, thought it was appropriate to rape her. The judge in the case said: “Mr. Clinton has served almost five months in the county jail, 148 days. For what happened in this case, that is plenty of punishment.” WTF!?!?!?

Very happy to have gotten this update on the story. The judge was reassigned.


A so-called "discredited activist" writes out an extensive thread. Then she reveaals that her whole thread was quote after quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!

Various speeches by King.

Dr. King’s family is not amused by Senators Manchin and Sinema trying to pretend that they have something in common with him. King actually saw the filibuster as a tool of racial oppression.


Very sad that that this young fellow had to sneak off to get vaxxed. Very happy that there were enough sites that he was able to do so.


MSNBC's Joy Reid must have done something to have gotten all TFG all spun up!


Deep thoughts on voting from TFG:

“Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate.”

Hmm. Somehow, I think good ol' Uncle Joe would agree.

"I consider it completely unimportant who in the Party will vote, or how. But what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”
Joseph Stalin, 1923


Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the war in Vietnam.

King believed that Jim Crow segregation and the war in Vietnam were rooted in the same unjust ethic of race-based domination, and he called on the nation to change its ways.


Cool! An upcoming sequel to the Spider-Verse animated movie!


I find it very offensive that at the 1:40 minute mark, Senator Sinema blames President Biden for not sitting down to talk with Republicans. Senator Manchin criticized the “For The People” Act (HR 1) as being too broad for Republicans to vote for it, so he re-worked it to meet Republican objections. The result?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed Democrats' efforts to rewrite federal elections laws on Tuesday afternoon.“


An examination of right-wing *ahem* "humor" and Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.


Ms. Nikki says: "I think we should all ban together and demand that Twitter come up with something like 'trending,but not dead' alert for our Legends!"

Yeah, I see this all the time. An older and long-unheard from star trends on Twitter and my first thought is "Have they died?"


It's been nearly a year since Texas National Guard troops were deployed to the border. Miserable conditions there, plus the obviously-political nature of the mission, are making real trouble for the Governor.


It's understandable that people want to be done with the coronavirus, but we may be rushing things by saying it's already over.


Saw the new West Side Story. Quite good. Rather surprised at the size of the audience for a film that’s been out since early December Had to have been 10-15 people there! Worth seeing even after having seen the original, though it helps that the original was so long ago.


Just as with the Capitol Police a few weeks ago, the FBI has no credible reason not to have prepared for the attack on our Capitol on 6 January. The idea that the FBI was unable legally to monitor open-source, publicly-available information is especially ludicrous.


Byron York: "It was a LARP rebellion, a cosplay insurrection."
Uh huh. Says a guy who clearly never saw any of the footage of the 6 January attack on our nation's Capitol!


James Webb Space Telescope is now fully deployed (Hasn't quite reached its final orbit yet) and will begin delivering pictures in May.


This guy’s got some pretty serious head problems!

"And you talk about evidence," Lindell added. "We have enough evidence to put everybody in prison for life, 300 and some million people. We have that all the way back to November and December."

Erm, 300 million is most of the country. Only 158 million votes were cast. Biden won 51.3% of the vote or in excess of 81 million votes.


Unfortunately, this makes a great deal of sense. Senator Sinema doesn't care about getting reelected as a Democrat because she's going to run for president in 2024. Going to jump straight into the Oval Office. She'll likely do it as a Republican as Democrats will be after her with torches and pitchforks.Will that work, though? Recall that she voted to impeach TFG, twice and she's a bisexual pro-choicer. None of that hurts her with Democrats, but it's all a deal-breaker for Republicans. 

What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., think of Senator Sinema? We think he'd be "gravely disappointed!"


From 1905 to 2021, the Supreme Court was very consistent, vaccines are a good thing and the government does have the authority to insist on shots. That's all blown to hell now!


Fox News' Kayleigh McEnany (also former Press Secretary to the last president) seems to be suffering a serious case of amnesia:

"This is the most divisive president I have seen in the last two decades..."

Now, keep in mind, she's referring to Biden and not Trump!


Full text of Senator Sinema’s remarks on the floor on Thursday. Not at all impressed. Lots and lots of BothSides, no real understanding of why the sides are battling each other so fiercely, lots of wishful thinking, lots of very nice ideas that are clearly never going to happen. Commentary.


Very serious charge here. A militia group took part in the 6 January attack on the Capitol and acted in a highly organized and coordinated manner.


We and the Iranians both have hard-liners who feel that forcing the other is the best way forward. Four years under TFG shows, nah, that’s not the way. If the US wants a deal, it can’t be easy to cancel it.


The GOP, unable to come up with any justification for their wave of voter restrictions, have decided to simply say "What wave of voting restrictions?"


The prison at Guantanamo Bay has now been a “stain on America’s conscience” for 20 years. Long since time to close it down and move everyone elsewhere.


Democrats in the Senate have a workaround involving a NASA bill. Republicans can filibuster the final bill from passing without 60 votes, but they can’t stop debate on it.

Hoo-yah to this! Put Senator Manchin and Sinema on record! Make them either stand with Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond and other segregationists or they can stand with the Democratic Party! (Paywall, members-only piece)

Lots of close votes in the past decade. Funny, only voting rights requires a 60-vote threshold!


I haven't featured Jamie Dimon much and when I do, it's usually as a villain, but I like this statement!

To go to the office, you have to be vaxxed. And if you aren’t going to get vaxxed, you won’t be able to work in that office. And we’re not going to pay you NOT to work in the office.

When TFG goes in front of a cheering crowd at a rally, he can say "I am the Walrus! I am the Eggman!" and, well, a crowd at a rally isn't inclined to be skeptical. Making assertions to an actual reporter is, well, that's a bit different! Trump has absolutely zero evidence that he was cheated out of a second term.


Israel is finding it difficult to convince people that Emma Watson (Harry Potter movies, Beauty and the Beast) is an anti-Jewish bigot. The usual, standard charge of antisemitism is simply falling flat. To clarify:

Antisemitism - You hate the Jewish people.

If you oppose Israeli policies - You are engaged in normal political discourse.

It’s been a year since the NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) B’Tselem declare that Israel was an apartheid state, a state that copied many of the features of South Africa while under white rulers.

Israel is now really concerned. Not about the fact that it is clearly an apartheid state, but about the cracks in its narrative being exposed from within and influencing global public opinion.


There is an old adage, "take stock of the company you keep.”
As it turns out, we are more tolerant of people who have similar negative personality traits as us.
Bigthink

Some anti-choicers disapproved of the white supremacists, others gave them a thumbs-up.


Ideological neutrality is fine, up to a point. When Nazism is regarded as something teachers need to be neutral about...no...just...no!


The judge in this case appears to been extremely well-prepared and thoroughly up-to-date on the case. The defendants? Ehh, not so much. Again, a major problem with Trump’s defense is that his lawyer tries an extremely broad and comprehensive theory of presidential power, essentially arguing that the president is an absolute monarch, much like Louis XIV.


So, many months after Democrats brought up problems with the filibuster, Senator Manchin still doesn't have the first notion of how to even begin to even try to fix it!

The NY Times dropped the ball here. It's not that Senator Manchin has to make the decision in the future as to whether he'll support mine owners or workers. He's very clearly already made that choice!

Senator Manchin made an incredibly ahistorical statement about the filibuster being 232 years old. In its modern form, it’s only been around since 1975.


Again, there's a real resistance on the part of the mainstream media to get in touch with and to communicate with, Democratic sources.


Very interesting to see what Fox News considers worthy and unworthy of being compared to Pearl Harbor.


So Representative Jim Jordan, who once said "If [The January 6 Committee] called me I got nothing to hide," has apparently now changed his mind and has something to hide after all!
Again, it was really stupid for House Minority Leader McCarthy to recommend Jordan for a seat on the Commission and quite smart for Speaker Pelosi to reject that idea.


It’s completely understandable that the US would not want to support the Taliban government, but real civilians are really at risk of dying in Afghanistan’s harsh winter. US sanctions are hurting civilians more than they’re helping to shape Taliban behavior.


Very interesting, because I tend to sleep in a “biphasic” manner or in “two shifts.”


Good! Seems Stephanie Grisham (the Press Secretary for Trump who never held a press conference) gave the 6 January Commission quite a bit of useful information!


The immediate aftermath of 6 January was full of hope. There appeared to be some consensus about what the problems were.


House Minority Leader McCarthy is shocked, shocked I tell you!, that Speaker Pelosi "politicized" 6 January! BTW, he told his people not to attend the 6 January observation for, y'know, political reasons!


Good grief! Some idiot says the Harry Potter books were the first ones "where class and wealth mattered!" I read a number of novels in college that were published in the 1700s and 1800s where “class and wealth mattered.”’


Ooh! Yowza! Yeah, that'll do it! The Quebec Health Minister says no pot or liquor unless you have a vaccine passport! Yep, appointments to get first shots went through the roof!


"Retired Florida Blogger Gives Bonkers Interview To OAN"
As the blogger points out, Trump said not a single word about the attack on the Capitol being a false flag event, nothing about BLM or Antifa.In fact, he goes on and on about how large his crowd was.


The Planned Parenthood building in Tennessee burned up on New Year's Eve. Yep, as suspected, it was arson.


The Thwaite Glacier is about the size of Florida and is ice on top of water, meaning that it could collapse and water would rise by two feet worldwide.


The problem, the reason the killers of Ahmaud Arbery got such lengthy sentences is that they simply don’t feel any remorse.


Earnest pleas from two nurses to please vaccinate yourself! They're getting worn to the point of exhastion!


When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them The First Time.

I believe Representative Gaetz and Taylor Greene are absolutely dead serious about giving us a Benghazi-type circus if the GOP takes control of the House next year.


This is hilarious! Art historian looks at Renaissance paintings of a just-born Jesus and wonders "Have these artist ever seen a baby?"


Good! The Cyber Ninjas are trying to get out of their legal troubles by strategically declaring bankruptcy and dissolution. The judge is having none of that nonsense!

Update (28 Jan): Cyber Ninja CEO still defiant, outright refuses to turn over records.


The actor Sidnet Poitier dies. He did a lot of good movies.
Good answer here to Poitier's response to being regarded as just a Black man.


This piece confirms a major belief of mine,  that on-the-ground intelligence agents usually get it right. It's usually the higher-ups that get it wrong by misreading or disregarding the reports.
Apparently here, the older white guys who were in charge of protecting the Capitol were very deeply concerned about Black Lives Matter, not so much with the "good ol' boys" of the pro-Trump mob.


Biden's speech. Excellent segment (8 minutes)! I slightly disagree with Ana. I think it drives TFG (The Former Guy) crazy to not hear his name!


The vague, fuzzy, meaningless term "Congressional dysfunction" should really be stricken from this account. Nominees are being stalled by two Republican senators. Period.


Senator Graham is one of those "'reasonable people"' who essentially just covers for his more evil co-conspirators. It's also pretty hard to "'politicize"' an event that was 100% political from beginning to end.


My understanding is that TFG left Biden with grossly inadequate tools and supplies with which to fight Covid. Not “’nothing,” but very inadequate. His people also conducted very belated and rushed turnover talks.


This sub-piece on the tours that took place prior to the attack on our Capitol are something we need to learn more about.


Conservatives are going crazy over TFG, their Glorious Leader, recommending that they take the vaccine! I especially liked this guy:

"[D]on't believe it, everything [Trump] says has a double meaning...the jab is not a vaccine."

Love the idea that Trump is some sort of wise, inscrutable philosopher. And also, "the jab" is a British term that means...the vaccine!


Pretty cool! NASA figured there were 344 points at which the James Webb Telescope could fail. They’ve now completed 75% of those points successfully! At this point (9:00pm on the 5th), it’s about 600k miles out. Just 400k to go!


Ah. now we can see why Florida Governor DeSantis was missing for two weeks! His breathing here sounds pretty labored.


Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro admits, on national TV (!!!) that yes, they were conducting a coup!


The author of this review feels that "Don't Look Up" hammers away at things that people already know and that the news media is sufficiently "woke."' With the bipartisan infrastructure bill not having any climate-change solutions and with the Republican Party blocking everything, no. I don't think the media is doing anywhere near enough!


This is pretty gob-smacking amazing!

Some 30 percent of Republicans believe the events [of 6 January] were entirely peaceful.

These are people, not just in a news bubble, but in a tightly-sealed silo of information.

I agree. Trump didn’t cause the problem with Republican voters being in a news bubble, but he sure exploited the hell out of that fact!


The 6 January Committee was very careful to distinguish Sean Hannity as a journalist from Hannity as a participant in the events of 6 January. His lawyer is referring to a nonexistent privilege.


Right-wingers are trying to press “pro-life feminism,” which is, of course, a contradiction in terms.


Many reasons as to why the Republican brand is reviving.


Senate Minority Leader McConnell's a liar. Of course there have been narrow exceptions to the filibuster! The filibuster is just a Senate rule. It's not formally legislated, it's not in the Constitution. It's very easy to change it.


The highway in Northern Virginia going from Washington DC to Baltimore was seriously jammed for about a day. I suppose I might have assembled a survival package if I were regularly commuting on a lengthy stretch like this, but I certainly wouldn't have the supplies to survive it right now!

Oh, and hey, it's all the fault of liberals because they won't allow police departments to have military-grade equipment!


A newspaper columnist does two columns every years, the 10 best things thatt the current President did and the 10 worst. This is my response to his column on the 10 worst things Biden did.


"Emma Watson of Harry Potter Fame expresses Solidarity with Palestinians, is Smeared as Anti-Semite by Far-Right Likudnik"
Well, that's pretty cool! Except for the “’being smeared” part, of course. And no, being opposed to the policies of the state of Israel and being antisemitic are two different things. Emma Watson did not mention the Jewish people at all, but pointed out that Palestinians are living under an extremely harsh occupation.


"Schumer Sets MLK Day Deadline To Consider Filibuster Changes, Ties Urgency To Jan 6 Anniversary"
Good! Even if Senators Manchin and Sinema vote it down, it’ll show that hey, the Senate is trying!

Update (19 Jan): "Senate votes down filibuster change as Manchin, Sinema side with Republicans"


Seriously, Representative Jim “Benghazi” Jordan has absolutely zero business complaining about “’politicized”’ investigations!


This fellow writes about the news media for the WaPo. Wow! They are not getting their money’s worth if they’re paying more than the minimum wage you’d pay a burger-flipper or janitor!

He defends “Both siderism”:

—“Both siderism” is often a slur for “trying to present more than just one side.”

Actually, “Both siderism” is an extremely serious problem that always favors the bad actors as opposed to the good ones. When you describe both sides as being at fault, there's absolutely zero incentive to be a serious, good-faith actor.

More on this guy. The fellow presents two arguments that can very easily both be true at the same time. The NY Times screws up, badly. And it's also a popular paper.


Pondering the mystery of just where Florida Governor DeSantis has been for the past two weeks.

My sympathies to all of the people of Florida! Your Surgeon General is a total and utter quack!


Chris Matthews, formerly host of Hardball, feels the country was “headed too far left.” Yeah, problem with that is that pretty much no one agrees with Senators Manchin & Sinema. Democrats pretty universally see them as awful obstructionists.


Many mobsters make this mistake. They think if they plan a crime with a lawyer in the room, they’re covered by lawyer-client privilege. Nuh-uh! Lawyer-client privilege covers communications after the crime is alleged to have been committed! The lawyer can’t help to plan the crime, that’s not covered by privilege. Bernard Kerik is clearly talking about communications that are not privileged!


At the 2:20 mark, Representative Liz Cheney is asked, if TFG wins the 2024 election, is that the end of American democracy? Her answer was immediate and unequivocal. Yes, a Trump electoral victory would mean the end of our democracy.


Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is very upset that her personal Twitter account (her official Congressional one is still active) has been permanently suspended due to her use of it to repeatedly spread Covid disinformation. Her Congressional one will be suspended if she's found to be using it for similar purposes.


Back in late October, Israel labeled six Palestinian peace groups as “terrorists.” The author here reports that the US response has been weak and ineffective. The US is not doing a good job of representing pro-democratic forces!


Unruly airplace passenger was put down with great force. From a piece commenting n it:

Drunk, nicotine-deprived, anti-mask rage-baby picked the wrong flight crew to abuse:


Lengthy thread on “Hey, 2021 was actually a pretty good year!”


"AOC: Republicans Are 'Projecting Their Sexual Frustrations Onto My Boyfriend's Feet'"
Just absolutely astonishing how far these people have to go to say they had found a scandal of some sort! Oh, and the boyfriend had worn sandals. In Miami. So yeah, it was pretty warm down there.


Texas has requested:

...federally-supported COVID-19 testing sites, medical personnel, and increased monoclonal antibody allocations.

Which is cool, but maybe if Texas dropped its continued construction of that $%#@ing wall, they'd have more money for important things like the above!


I understand what the term "'moderate" means in the context of Senators Manchin and Sinema, but yes, it's pretty confusing. We need to find a better term for them.


"The Matrix Resurrections"
Ehh, it's okay. The latest Spider-Man needed to be the length it was in order to fully tell its story. Matrix could have lost at least a half an hour and would have still have made sense. Interesting stuff with the villains and with the whole Matrix franchise.

And speaking of Spider-Man, the blogger takes a good, long look at "restorative justice."