“As pundits transition from being experts on covid to being experts on military tactics, it might be a good time to look at the consequences of the Biden administration’s policies regarding covid on US military readiness.
To begin with, the US Navy cannot deploy a Norfolk, Va.-based warship after a federal judge ruled the service commanders are prohibited from acting against the ship’s captain for refusing the coronavirus vaccine.
The Navy commander, identified only by his rank in court papers, filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of Florida in October with several other service members seeking relief from the military’s coronavirus vaccine mandate on religious grounds.
The commander later broke off from the class-action suit, refiling in January with an unnamed Marine lieutenant colonel to challenge the military’s vaccine mandate.
Last month, District Judge Steven Merryday granted a preliminary injunction barring the Navy from requiring the commander or the lieutenant colonel to take the vaccine or issuing “any punitive or retaliatory measure against [them] pending a final judgment in the case.”
The Navy on Feb. 28 asked Merryday for an emergency stay on the injunction, arguing the order prevents the service “from removing an officer from … commanding officer billets who the military has deemed unfit for command,” according to court documents.
Given the waning vaccine effectiveness over time, the fact that covid is at its most serious among elderly people or those with comorbidities, why is there a continued insistence on vaccinations? This is especially true in the wake of covid striking vaccinated and boosted luminaries (such as former President Bararck Obama).
While conflicts around the world abound, and enhancing the readiness of the US military should be a priority, Biden’s military leaders are opting to enforce an ineffective mandate that has just cost this country the service of 1,000 Marines.
The Marine Corps has now separated more than 1,000 Marines due to refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Marine Corps separated 165 Marines over the past week due to their refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19. At 1,038, the Marine Corps leads the military branches for the most separations.
The Navy comes in second with a total of 469 separations, which includes 50 this past week. Of the separations this week, 24 had served for more than six years, while 26 served for less than six years. The highest rank was chief petty officer, said Lt. Travis Callaghan, spokesperson for chief of naval personnel, in an email.
The US Army is the only military branch that hasn’t booted out one of its service personnel because of the vaccine mandate. Lawsuits in play are preventing more of a purge.”
“However, as we know, Trump isn’t really serious about governing and wouldn’t know how to do it efficiently even if he were. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous, of course. His chaotic narcissism can do as much damage as a serious ideological authoritarian could. But he’s laid out a style template for someone who is serious, showing them exactly the attitude that appeals to the MAGA base. And nobody in GOP politics is as ready to seize the mantle as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump 2.0.
The personality and affect have been evident since DeSantis won the governor’s seat back in 2018. The Trumpian pettiness, the contempt, the reflexive hostility seem to come naturally to him. He treats the press like dirt and thinks insults are the highest form of humor. If he has any personal warmth or human compassion it’s certainly well hidden. He even gestures like Trump.
But with DeSantis, it’s more than just style. He’s got the Republicans in Florida working together like clockwork to enact the most authoritarian agenda in the country, calibrated perfectly to appeal to the base in advance of his re-election campaign — and a potential presidential run in 2024.
Florida has been at the leading edge of COVID denialism from the very beginning, but in recent days DeSantis and his hand-picked science-denying surgeon general have taken it to a new level. They had already turned masks into a battleground with the governor taking it upon himself earlier this month to scold high school kids for wearing them in his presence, declaring that it’s time to end the “COVID theatre.” This was ironic since it turned out that many of the kids had been told by their parents to wear them and DeSantis’ numerous assaults on education over the past year have been rationalized as a defense of “parental rights.” Then last week the surgeon general went even further, defying the CDC and most physicians by recommending that kids not get vaccinated for COVID-19. DeSantis and his medical henchman seem determined to keep the virus circulating as long as they can.
Meanwhile, the legislative season just coming to a close has produced such an astonishing array of right-wing culture war victories delivering on Desantis’ “anti-woke” agenda that it’s hard to know where to start. Building on last year’s education wrecking ball in which they banned Critical Race Theory from schools despite the fact that they were not teaching it, instituted a requirement that schools teach about the “evils of communism” and passed a higher education law that allows for budget cuts to colleges based on student and faculty surveys about “viewpoint diversity” (which DeSantis defines as “indoctrination”) this year they took it to a whole new level. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte offered this tart analysis of the “Stop WOKE Act” ”
The legislature also passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which bars both schools and businesses from having any training or program that supposedly causes an “individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” This has been largely covered as a ban on any kind of diversity training, but it’s even more expansive than that. As I note in Friday’s Standing Room Only newsletter, conservatives can also block anti-sexual harassment trainings by claiming it’s guilt-tripping men to tell them that ass-pinching is not allowed in the workplace.”
——–
There are oh so many things to fear when you’re a lefty. 🙂
“Nonwhite voters are more likely than white voters to say the highest inflation in four decades is triggering major financial strain in their lives and that appears to be giving Republicans an opening with a growing segment of the electorate that traditionally favors Democrats, the latest Wall Street Journal poll shows.
Eight months before the midterm election, 35% of Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and other voters who said they were something other than white expressed that level of inflationary pain, compared with 28% for white voters. Black women and Hispanic men, both at 44%, reported the highest proportions of major strain among various demographic and gender combinations.
People with the lowest incomes also were most likely to report major financial challenges from inflation. Almost half with incomes of less than $60,000 reported major financial strain, while just 13% of those making $150,000 or more did so.
Some poll participants said they blame President Biden for inflation because he has taken actions to limit oil-and-gas drilling and pipelines in the U.S.
Roger Stephens, a 62-year-old mostly retired airplane mechanic who is Black and lives in the Harbor City neighborhood of Los Angeles, said gas is running close to $6 a gallon in his area. He is troubled by prices at the pump and those at grocery stores and restaurants.
“Uncle Joe has put us on a diet,” he said in a reference to Mr. Biden. “I like to have a steak once or twice a month. I can’t do it now.”
Mr. Stephens is a registered Democrat who said he twice voted for Democrat Barack Obama for president and then for Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. He said he was more likely to back Republicans than Democrats in this year’s election. Inflation, he said, is one of the issues he is weighing.
The inflation numbers help explain why almost two-thirds of voters think the economy is headed in the wrong direction even as jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, home values are up and stock prices remain above where they were when Mr. Biden took office.
Rising energy, food and services prices pushed inflation to 7.9% last month compared with a year ago. The Consumer Price Index, which measures the cost of goods and services, hasn’t been this high since it reached 8.4% in January 1982.
Overall, 58% of poll participants said inflation was causing them major or minor financial strain, up slightly from 56% in a similar survey taken in mid-November.
In a potentially troubling sign for Democrats now running Washington, a 47% plurality of voters said they think Republicans can best tame inflation, compared with 30% who listed Democrats.
Almost 9 in 10 Republican voters think the economy is headed in the wrong direction, compared with 36% percent of Democrats.
Among independent voters—a key group in most close elections—71% say the economy is going the wrong way. Hispanic voters are even more likely to feel that way, with 78% expressing a negative view.”
——–
Welcome new voters, please leave your Dem registration card over there near the shredder.
“Time to get real. Ukraine is an equal opportunity crisis because it provides politicians of both parties a chance to be wrong, although it allows the Democrats the opportunity to do what they do best and be much, much more wrong. For the Republicans, it lets them indulge the desire of some to return to a time when America could focus its moral firepower – if not its firepower firepower – upon a readily-identifiable baddie like it did during the Cold War or the War on Terror. For the left, it allows them to create a moral panic to replace COVID, which, naturally, requires that we Americans “sacrifice” even more of our freedom and money.
From the perspective of someone who actually trained Ukrainian troops in Ukraine, commanded US forces, and attended the US Army War College – though it’s kind of the Chico State of war colleges – the whole way our elite is approaching the crisis is an epic clusterfark. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you – and certainly, sanity check whatever I’m telling you, too – most of these insta-experts on intra-Slavic conflict know absolutely squat-ski. Moreover, their remarkably dumb observations and credulous acceptance of conventional wisdom, which has proven long on conventional and short on wisdom, are being presented without any kind of strategic context. They don’t know where this crisis came from and certainly have no clear notion of where they want it to go beyond the vague and unhelpful idea that they want Putin (which they use interchangeably with Russia) to “lose” without knowing what that even means.
Biases are important, and here are mine. I sympathize with the Ukrainian people, partly because I worked with them and partly because I was an end-stage Cold Warrior who came up training to fight Russians. I understand that this mess is not merely the result of Putin being bad or Trump being insufficiently anti-Putin, like LTC Sausage and the rest of the failed foreign policy elite and regime media insist. Putin’s badness plays a part, but he’s merely exploiting thousands of years of bloody history, of ethnic hatred, and of Orthodox mysticism, as well as totally misguided and poorly-considered Western interference. The idea that we could just make Ukraine part of NATO and the Russians would just lump it is remarkable for its dumbness, but it is fully in keeping with our foreign policy elite’s unbroken track record of failure since the old-school military’s victory in the Gulf War – something I discuss in-depth in my upcoming Regnery book “We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.” My bottom line is that the Ukrainians are imperfect, and regardless of whether the Russians have some quasi-legit beefs in some cosmic sense, you don’t solve them by sending in a couple hundred thousand mechanized soldiers.
The expectation was that the Russian forces would smash through, surround the Ukrainian forces pinned down facing the Russians in the occupied regions to the east, and isolate the main cities. I did not expect them to go into the cities immediately since Russians 1) generally bypass hard defenses; 2) they have bad experiences with city fighting (Stalingrad, Grozny); and 3) that would not necessarily be necessary. It would not be necessary if the idea was to neutralize the main Ukrainian combat formations and force the government in the cities to capitulate, then have the West pressure the Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and “peace” that recognized Russian gains and ended the idea of Ukrainian allying with the West. In fact, that is pretty much what the Russian “peace plan” consists of. But that did not work for a couple of reasons.
First, the Russians did not fight as well as expected. You should always treat the enemy as if it is the best possible enemy. We did in the Gulf. We prepared to fight elite Republican Guard divisions of highly trained and motivated soldiers using top-shelf Soviet equipment and tactics. None of that was so; we crushed an entire national army in 100 hours.
The Russians are poorly-led, with very weak synchronization among maneuver forces and fires. Their plan is okay – in fact, you look at a map, and it’s obvious what they would do. But their gear is badly-maintained, and their troops are unsuited to the task of supporting a rapid advance. Look at all the evidently intact gear simply abandoned by the side of the road. Lots of it looks like it broke down (note all the flat tires). Much of it seems to have run out of gas. And, of course, lots of stuff had been blasted apart.
That’s the second part of the equation – the Ukrainians fought back hard. If you are a Lord of the Rings nerd, think of the Ukrainians as the dwarves. Not super-sophisticated but tough and ready to fight, and also often drunk.
If you want to see the future of this war, look at videos of Ukrainian infantry patrolling near the front. Every second guy has an anti-tank weapon, like a Javelin or some other system, and the rest are carrying spare missiles. Mechanized forces unprotected by infantry are vulnerable to ambush by anti-tank teams. The Russian armor outstripped its ground pounders and is getting pounded itself. Further, Ukrainians seem to have success with drones firing anti-tank weapons. The war is not going to be won by conventional battalions of Ukrainians operating with conventional aircraft. It will win with light infantry and drones armed with missiles.
This is why the whole Polish MiG thing is so silly and why Republicans are so wrong to get behind it. So, the Poles will (in return for F-16s and F-15s) give up their 30-year-old MiG-29s to the US, which will then give them to Ukraine, which will then fly them to victory. No. Let’s leave the escalation part aside – and that’s a pretty big consideration. Putin has nukes, and escalation is not in our interest. If America is using a base in Germany to assemble a bunch of fighters that will be attacking Russians, are they a target and thereby a trigger for WW3? Yeah, I know the argument that it’s not an escalation, but guess what? We don’t get a vote. Putin – who we have been told is an amalgam of crazy, stupid, and evil (the third is undeniable; the first two wishful thinking) gets to decide. He’s the guy with the finger over a button, and it doesn’t say “Reset.”
Let’s look at the practical part. Fighters are part of a conventional war, which Ukraine should not fight since Russian conventional forces are so much larger. A couple of dozen hand-me-downski fighters are going to turn the tide? If the Ukrainians’ own jets flown by their top pilots got shot down already by Russia’s formidable air defenses, which is probably true (don’t buy the “Ghost of Kyiv” stuff), what’s going to happen to a bunch of planes that – assuming they are even flyable – are being flown by the Ukrainian equivalent of Randy Quaid in “Independence Day”? It’s the Bad News Bears squadron; they might as well plaster “Sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds” on the tails. “
“What did Barack Obama and Joe Biden know about the Russiagate collusion hoax their fellow Democrats ginned up to kneecap Donald Trump – and when did they know it? How much did their chicanery contribute to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade the Ukraine?
Those questions are coming into sharp relief following a definitive report by my RealClearInvestigations colleague Paul Sperry last week that places the worst political scandal in our nation’s history and Putin’s brutal war directly inside the White House.
Drawing on a wide range of documents, many never previously reported, Sperry details how the Obama administration worked closely with the Clinton campaign and a foreign government – Ukraine – in a “sweeping and systematic effort” to interfere in the 2016 election. It turns out Democrats were guilty of every false charge they lodged against Trump.
Their maneuverings began in 2014 when Obama officials supported the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych because he was too close to Putin. Biden, then the vice president, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. Sperry reports that leaked transcripts of conversations between two high-level officials in both the Obama and Biden administrations – Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan – reveal that Biden gave his blessing to the formation of a new coalition government. Sperry writes that Nuland even “traveled to Kiev and helped organize street demonstrations against Yanukovych, even handing out sandwiches to protesters.”
A few months after the anti-Putin government took power next door to Russia, Putin marched into Crimea. Eight years later, he invaded Ukraine.
Top Obama administration officials continued to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs. Biden, for example, would later boast of threatening to withhold aid until the government fired its chief anti-corruption prosecutor – who, among other matters, was investigating the gas company Burisma that was paying his son, Hunter Biden, $83,333 a month for a largely ceremonial position for which he had no qualifications other than his family name. (In 2019, House Democrats would impeach Trump for temporarily withholding aid to Ukraine to pressure it to investigate the Biden family’s dealings there.)
During its final two years, the Obama administration’s dealing with Ukraine became increasingly focused on the 2016 election. Sperry reports that Nuland received some 120 reports on Ukraine from an outside contractor – Christopher Steele. A former British intelligence officer, Steele would soon start working for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion’s crown jewel was the so-called Steele dossier, a series of salacious and false memos allegedly cobbled together by Steele that formed the basis of the Trump/Russia collusion theory.
Steele and his Fusion colleagues weren’t the only political operatives working behind the scenes with the Obama administration. In April 2015, the Democratic National Committee hired a Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa as a $5,000-a-month consultant. Chalupa was convinced that Trump’s Achilles heel was Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who had done work for the party led by Viktor Yanukovych. Her effort to attack Trump by exposing Manafort’s alleged Russian ties was the seed of the collusion hoax. Sperry reports that the DNC operative visited the White House at least 27 times during 2015 and 2016. Among the government officials she worked closely with was Eric Ciaramella, the CIA detailee to the White House who would later be the “whistleblower” regarding Trump’s 2019 call with the Ukrainian president that led to his first impeachment.
At the same time, the Obama administration was politicizing its foreign policy for domestic goals. In one of the more damning passages in his article, Sperry reports:
The Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Manafort, shifting resources from an investigation of a corrupt Ukrainian energy oligarch who paid Biden’s son hundreds of thousands of dollars through his gas company, Burisma.
“Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort,” said a former senior NSC official who has seen notes and emails generated from the meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
As it became increasingly clear that Trump would be the GOP’s 2016 nominee, Chalupa and the administration ratcheted up the pressure on Ukrainian officials to denounce Clinton’s rival in order to sanitize their dirty tricks. (Fusion GPS did the same with Steele, having him present himself as an independent former British intelligence agent – while hiding his ties to Clinton – so that his smears would seem apolitical.)
Democrats collaborated with several Ukrainian lawmakers who supported them. This is not surprising because, Sperry reports, while Ukraine might have been a relatively small and poor nation, one of its oligarchs contributed more money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state than any other group of foreign nationals, including the Saudis.”
“Federal prosecutors on Monday asked a judge to dismiss criminal charges against a Capitol riots defendant and release him from jail, a rare admission in a court filing that the Justice Department had violated his legal right to a speedy trial.
At the same time, however, prosecutors asked permission to refile the criminal charges again, saying that apart from the Oath Keeper militia members who are facing seditious conspiracy charges, the defendant is facing “the most serious offenses charged in relation to the attack on the Capitol.”
In the filing, prosecutors said they had made a mistake by failing to secure an indictment or criminal information against Texas resident Lucas Denney within 30 days of his Dec. 13, 2021 arrest, as required by the Speedy Trial Act.
Denney was charged in a criminal complaint with assaulting or resisting police, obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder and obstructing an official proceeding, among other charges.
He spent several months in jail, until the government finally secured an indictment against him on March 7, 2022 – two days after his defense lawyers formally petitioned his release and the dismissal of the charges.
During that period, for reasons that were not completely clear, Denney never made an initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia as required, despite several failed attempts to arrange for one.
“To be sure, the government failed to comply with the Speedy Trial Act in this case,” prosecutors wrote in their Monday filing. “But there is no evidence of bad faith, a pattern of neglect or something more than an isolated incident that resulted from a number of unfortunate factors.””
———
No evidence of bad faith?
They’re doing this to numerous defendants, most are still being held, and for longer than the sentence would be for what they are accused of.
The Marines are an employer — and thus can set the rules of employment. Vaccines mandates for employment are not unusual and I’m sure the Marines who refused the Covid vaccine have taken various other vaccines as a condition of employment, including the servicemen who claim religious exemptions. How can you claim a religious exemption to the covid vaccine but take other vaccines? And what is the basis for a religious vaccine exemption? My employer mandated vaccines or weekly testing. The weekly testing was a concession to the union who argued the covid vaccine mandate was not (yet) part of the contract. The Marines aren’t unionized — so get the vaccine or find an other employer.
DeSantis amuses me. He and his supporters are everything they claim not to be. They are cancel culture. They are woke. They are afraid. They seek to cancel anything that hurts their feelings.
Tucker Carlson has no credibility left. The only question left — is he a paid promoter for Putin or is he a useful idiot? Then again a civil judge did rule he was entertainment not news and no sensible person could take him seriously.
The interesting thing about reading both sides of American politics is you get to see how corrupt are both sides. And even more interesting is the role Ukraine/Russia has in corrupting the lobbyists, consultants, etc. Steele was used by both parties. Trump tried pressure Ukraine as did Biden. American consultants were giving advice to both sides during the Maiden protests, and on and on. The only conclusion to reach — America politics has been corrupted (I blame Citizens United)
Aside from his own biases, your link at 11:37 is fairly accurate.
Conventional wisdom was Russia would take the whole of the Donbas and link the Crimea to the Donbas and then freeze the conflict, consolidating the gains. Instead they went for a greater prize, turning Ukraine into a satellite state or submissive ally (much like Belarus). And as your author mentions, it went badly wrong. And yes, the pundits are cheer leading too soon — it took the US forces over 30 days to reach Baghdad, the road to Kiev maybe shorter but the fight is longer.
The Russia’s made some mistakes, based on faulty assumptions — poor logistics for a war lasting more than 20 days, use of badly trained conscripts to escort armour, etc. Russia has a core professional army and then one year conscripts who provide lsave labor using the latter as cannon fodder does not save the armour. However, the Ukrainians did the right thing — retreat from overwhelming odds to locations which favor defense (a typical Russian tactic so its surprising the Russians didn’t plan for it). This extends narrow supply lines that Ukrainians can cut off at opportune time. The Russians didn’t plan ahead and now face the necessity of entering cities — not a welcome prospect for any invading force. The general rule of thumb is 3 offensive soldiers to 1 defensive soldiers but that’s thrown out if you enter a city.
Ukraine is notoriously corrupt but so is the Russian military. The generals live lifestyles that don’t match their incomes as they skim from the military budget to their own accounts. Money meant for maintenance and readiness is used for personal gain. And now the common soldier has no ammo, no gasoline, no spare parts, and only expired food.
All of this has led to the Ukrainians being far more optimistic than Putin imagined and hence his “peace” proposals are falling on deaf ears.
People who participated in Jan 6th are still in jail awaiting trial is to be expected. The gov’t and the judicial system always treat political disobedience harsher than criminal disobedience of the same crime. The reasoning is simple, political activists are more committed and may violate bail conditions, minor criminals aren’t that emotionally involved in their behaviour.
Putin’s (and Carlson’s) claim of bio labs has no evidence and fail simple logic. The US would not have a biolab in Ukraine right next to Russia; the US has their biolabs in far safer places — ie CDC Atlanta or in more isolated areas — some Pacific island perhaps.
The record profits of many consumer industries and oil companies indicates inflation is not from monetary expansion rather its corporate greed. The price of oil per barrel was higher in 2011 than it is today but the price at the pumps is not. This is corporate greed exploiting a crisis. Inflation is not Joe Biden’s fault, its not even the central bankers, its corporate greed making record profits.
Wandering Views 
Biden and his mandates built this.
But no mean tweets, right?
That’s what’s important…..
“Ineffective Covid Policies Badly Affecting US Military Readiness
Destroyer can’t deploy because CO won’t get COVID vaccine as 1000 Marines separated because of decision not to get covid vaccine.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/03/ineffective-covid-policies-badly-affecting-us-military-readiness/
“As pundits transition from being experts on covid to being experts on military tactics, it might be a good time to look at the consequences of the Biden administration’s policies regarding covid on US military readiness.
To begin with, the US Navy cannot deploy a Norfolk, Va.-based warship after a federal judge ruled the service commanders are prohibited from acting against the ship’s captain for refusing the coronavirus vaccine.
The Navy commander, identified only by his rank in court papers, filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of Florida in October with several other service members seeking relief from the military’s coronavirus vaccine mandate on religious grounds.
The commander later broke off from the class-action suit, refiling in January with an unnamed Marine lieutenant colonel to challenge the military’s vaccine mandate.
Last month, District Judge Steven Merryday granted a preliminary injunction barring the Navy from requiring the commander or the lieutenant colonel to take the vaccine or issuing “any punitive or retaliatory measure against [them] pending a final judgment in the case.”
The Navy on Feb. 28 asked Merryday for an emergency stay on the injunction, arguing the order prevents the service “from removing an officer from … commanding officer billets who the military has deemed unfit for command,” according to court documents.
Given the waning vaccine effectiveness over time, the fact that covid is at its most serious among elderly people or those with comorbidities, why is there a continued insistence on vaccinations? This is especially true in the wake of covid striking vaccinated and boosted luminaries (such as former President Bararck Obama).
While conflicts around the world abound, and enhancing the readiness of the US military should be a priority, Biden’s military leaders are opting to enforce an ineffective mandate that has just cost this country the service of 1,000 Marines.
The Marine Corps has now separated more than 1,000 Marines due to refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Marine Corps separated 165 Marines over the past week due to their refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19. At 1,038, the Marine Corps leads the military branches for the most separations.
The Navy comes in second with a total of 469 separations, which includes 50 this past week. Of the separations this week, 24 had served for more than six years, while 26 served for less than six years. The highest rank was chief petty officer, said Lt. Travis Callaghan, spokesperson for chief of naval personnel, in an email.
The US Army is the only military branch that hasn’t booted out one of its service personnel because of the vaccine mandate. Lawsuits in play are preventing more of a purge.”
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I’m sure the women of America are rejoicing at a man winning an award for women.
https://twitter.com/ElPatron979/status/1503498196261216261?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1503498196261216261%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fbrettt-3136%2F2022%2F03%2F14%2Fcongrats-feminists-admiral-rachel-levine-named-to-usa-todays-list-of-women-of-the-year%2F
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Let’s hope these whining pearl clutchers are right. 🙂
“Trump 2.0: Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party
From COVID denialism to right-wing culture war, Florida’s GOP governor is ready to take his radical agenda national”
https://www.salon.com/2022/03/14/20-ron-desantis-is-the-future-of-the-party/
“However, as we know, Trump isn’t really serious about governing and wouldn’t know how to do it efficiently even if he were. It doesn’t make him any less dangerous, of course. His chaotic narcissism can do as much damage as a serious ideological authoritarian could. But he’s laid out a style template for someone who is serious, showing them exactly the attitude that appeals to the MAGA base. And nobody in GOP politics is as ready to seize the mantle as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump 2.0.
The personality and affect have been evident since DeSantis won the governor’s seat back in 2018. The Trumpian pettiness, the contempt, the reflexive hostility seem to come naturally to him. He treats the press like dirt and thinks insults are the highest form of humor. If he has any personal warmth or human compassion it’s certainly well hidden. He even gestures like Trump.
But with DeSantis, it’s more than just style. He’s got the Republicans in Florida working together like clockwork to enact the most authoritarian agenda in the country, calibrated perfectly to appeal to the base in advance of his re-election campaign — and a potential presidential run in 2024.
Florida has been at the leading edge of COVID denialism from the very beginning, but in recent days DeSantis and his hand-picked science-denying surgeon general have taken it to a new level. They had already turned masks into a battleground with the governor taking it upon himself earlier this month to scold high school kids for wearing them in his presence, declaring that it’s time to end the “COVID theatre.” This was ironic since it turned out that many of the kids had been told by their parents to wear them and DeSantis’ numerous assaults on education over the past year have been rationalized as a defense of “parental rights.” Then last week the surgeon general went even further, defying the CDC and most physicians by recommending that kids not get vaccinated for COVID-19. DeSantis and his medical henchman seem determined to keep the virus circulating as long as they can.
Meanwhile, the legislative season just coming to a close has produced such an astonishing array of right-wing culture war victories delivering on Desantis’ “anti-woke” agenda that it’s hard to know where to start. Building on last year’s education wrecking ball in which they banned Critical Race Theory from schools despite the fact that they were not teaching it, instituted a requirement that schools teach about the “evils of communism” and passed a higher education law that allows for budget cuts to colleges based on student and faculty surveys about “viewpoint diversity” (which DeSantis defines as “indoctrination”) this year they took it to a whole new level. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte offered this tart analysis of the “Stop WOKE Act” ”
The legislature also passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which bars both schools and businesses from having any training or program that supposedly causes an “individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” This has been largely covered as a ban on any kind of diversity training, but it’s even more expansive than that. As I note in Friday’s Standing Room Only newsletter, conservatives can also block anti-sexual harassment trainings by claiming it’s guilt-tripping men to tell them that ass-pinching is not allowed in the workplace.”
——–
There are oh so many things to fear when you’re a lefty. 🙂
Like good leaders.
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Once again, Biden’s policies lead to the exact opposite of what he promises.
“Inflation Taking Biggest Toll on Nonwhite Voters, WSJ Poll Shows”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/inflation-taking-biggest-toll-on-nonwhite-voters-wsj-poll-shows/ar-AAV1PF2?li=BBnb7Kz
“Nonwhite voters are more likely than white voters to say the highest inflation in four decades is triggering major financial strain in their lives and that appears to be giving Republicans an opening with a growing segment of the electorate that traditionally favors Democrats, the latest Wall Street Journal poll shows.
Eight months before the midterm election, 35% of Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and other voters who said they were something other than white expressed that level of inflationary pain, compared with 28% for white voters. Black women and Hispanic men, both at 44%, reported the highest proportions of major strain among various demographic and gender combinations.
People with the lowest incomes also were most likely to report major financial challenges from inflation. Almost half with incomes of less than $60,000 reported major financial strain, while just 13% of those making $150,000 or more did so.
Some poll participants said they blame President Biden for inflation because he has taken actions to limit oil-and-gas drilling and pipelines in the U.S.
Roger Stephens, a 62-year-old mostly retired airplane mechanic who is Black and lives in the Harbor City neighborhood of Los Angeles, said gas is running close to $6 a gallon in his area. He is troubled by prices at the pump and those at grocery stores and restaurants.
“Uncle Joe has put us on a diet,” he said in a reference to Mr. Biden. “I like to have a steak once or twice a month. I can’t do it now.”
Mr. Stephens is a registered Democrat who said he twice voted for Democrat Barack Obama for president and then for Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. He said he was more likely to back Republicans than Democrats in this year’s election. Inflation, he said, is one of the issues he is weighing.
The inflation numbers help explain why almost two-thirds of voters think the economy is headed in the wrong direction even as jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, home values are up and stock prices remain above where they were when Mr. Biden took office.
Rising energy, food and services prices pushed inflation to 7.9% last month compared with a year ago. The Consumer Price Index, which measures the cost of goods and services, hasn’t been this high since it reached 8.4% in January 1982.
Overall, 58% of poll participants said inflation was causing them major or minor financial strain, up slightly from 56% in a similar survey taken in mid-November.
In a potentially troubling sign for Democrats now running Washington, a 47% plurality of voters said they think Republicans can best tame inflation, compared with 30% who listed Democrats.
Almost 9 in 10 Republican voters think the economy is headed in the wrong direction, compared with 36% percent of Democrats.
Among independent voters—a key group in most close elections—71% say the economy is going the wrong way. Hispanic voters are even more likely to feel that way, with 78% expressing a negative view.”
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Welcome new voters, please leave your Dem registration card over there near the shredder.
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Long overdue.
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The draft dodging Romney family patriarch continues to beclown himself, but at least this time he’s not attacking a woman who is an actual veteran.
I guess Mittens got tired of a girl making him look like a wuss.
The truth sucks for him.
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Doubt it.
“Can We Have Some Real Talk About Ukraine?”
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/03/14/can-we-have-some-real-talk-about-ukraine-n2604477
“Time to get real. Ukraine is an equal opportunity crisis because it provides politicians of both parties a chance to be wrong, although it allows the Democrats the opportunity to do what they do best and be much, much more wrong. For the Republicans, it lets them indulge the desire of some to return to a time when America could focus its moral firepower – if not its firepower firepower – upon a readily-identifiable baddie like it did during the Cold War or the War on Terror. For the left, it allows them to create a moral panic to replace COVID, which, naturally, requires that we Americans “sacrifice” even more of our freedom and money.
From the perspective of someone who actually trained Ukrainian troops in Ukraine, commanded US forces, and attended the US Army War College – though it’s kind of the Chico State of war colleges – the whole way our elite is approaching the crisis is an epic clusterfark. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you – and certainly, sanity check whatever I’m telling you, too – most of these insta-experts on intra-Slavic conflict know absolutely squat-ski. Moreover, their remarkably dumb observations and credulous acceptance of conventional wisdom, which has proven long on conventional and short on wisdom, are being presented without any kind of strategic context. They don’t know where this crisis came from and certainly have no clear notion of where they want it to go beyond the vague and unhelpful idea that they want Putin (which they use interchangeably with Russia) to “lose” without knowing what that even means.
Biases are important, and here are mine. I sympathize with the Ukrainian people, partly because I worked with them and partly because I was an end-stage Cold Warrior who came up training to fight Russians. I understand that this mess is not merely the result of Putin being bad or Trump being insufficiently anti-Putin, like LTC Sausage and the rest of the failed foreign policy elite and regime media insist. Putin’s badness plays a part, but he’s merely exploiting thousands of years of bloody history, of ethnic hatred, and of Orthodox mysticism, as well as totally misguided and poorly-considered Western interference. The idea that we could just make Ukraine part of NATO and the Russians would just lump it is remarkable for its dumbness, but it is fully in keeping with our foreign policy elite’s unbroken track record of failure since the old-school military’s victory in the Gulf War – something I discuss in-depth in my upcoming Regnery book “We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.” My bottom line is that the Ukrainians are imperfect, and regardless of whether the Russians have some quasi-legit beefs in some cosmic sense, you don’t solve them by sending in a couple hundred thousand mechanized soldiers.
The expectation was that the Russian forces would smash through, surround the Ukrainian forces pinned down facing the Russians in the occupied regions to the east, and isolate the main cities. I did not expect them to go into the cities immediately since Russians 1) generally bypass hard defenses; 2) they have bad experiences with city fighting (Stalingrad, Grozny); and 3) that would not necessarily be necessary. It would not be necessary if the idea was to neutralize the main Ukrainian combat formations and force the government in the cities to capitulate, then have the West pressure the Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and “peace” that recognized Russian gains and ended the idea of Ukrainian allying with the West. In fact, that is pretty much what the Russian “peace plan” consists of. But that did not work for a couple of reasons.
First, the Russians did not fight as well as expected. You should always treat the enemy as if it is the best possible enemy. We did in the Gulf. We prepared to fight elite Republican Guard divisions of highly trained and motivated soldiers using top-shelf Soviet equipment and tactics. None of that was so; we crushed an entire national army in 100 hours.
The Russians are poorly-led, with very weak synchronization among maneuver forces and fires. Their plan is okay – in fact, you look at a map, and it’s obvious what they would do. But their gear is badly-maintained, and their troops are unsuited to the task of supporting a rapid advance. Look at all the evidently intact gear simply abandoned by the side of the road. Lots of it looks like it broke down (note all the flat tires). Much of it seems to have run out of gas. And, of course, lots of stuff had been blasted apart.
That’s the second part of the equation – the Ukrainians fought back hard. If you are a Lord of the Rings nerd, think of the Ukrainians as the dwarves. Not super-sophisticated but tough and ready to fight, and also often drunk.
If you want to see the future of this war, look at videos of Ukrainian infantry patrolling near the front. Every second guy has an anti-tank weapon, like a Javelin or some other system, and the rest are carrying spare missiles. Mechanized forces unprotected by infantry are vulnerable to ambush by anti-tank teams. The Russian armor outstripped its ground pounders and is getting pounded itself. Further, Ukrainians seem to have success with drones firing anti-tank weapons. The war is not going to be won by conventional battalions of Ukrainians operating with conventional aircraft. It will win with light infantry and drones armed with missiles.
This is why the whole Polish MiG thing is so silly and why Republicans are so wrong to get behind it. So, the Poles will (in return for F-16s and F-15s) give up their 30-year-old MiG-29s to the US, which will then give them to Ukraine, which will then fly them to victory. No. Let’s leave the escalation part aside – and that’s a pretty big consideration. Putin has nukes, and escalation is not in our interest. If America is using a base in Germany to assemble a bunch of fighters that will be attacking Russians, are they a target and thereby a trigger for WW3? Yeah, I know the argument that it’s not an escalation, but guess what? We don’t get a vote. Putin – who we have been told is an amalgam of crazy, stupid, and evil (the third is undeniable; the first two wishful thinking) gets to decide. He’s the guy with the finger over a button, and it doesn’t say “Reset.”
Let’s look at the practical part. Fighters are part of a conventional war, which Ukraine should not fight since Russian conventional forces are so much larger. A couple of dozen hand-me-downski fighters are going to turn the tide? If the Ukrainians’ own jets flown by their top pilots got shot down already by Russia’s formidable air defenses, which is probably true (don’t buy the “Ghost of Kyiv” stuff), what’s going to happen to a bunch of planes that – assuming they are even flyable – are being flown by the Ukrainian equivalent of Randy Quaid in “Independence Day”? It’s the Bad News Bears squadron; they might as well plaster “Sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds” on the tails. “
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They should, but like Hillary and Bill, they won’t.
Because weak-kneed Republicans don’t have the stones for it.
“Biden and Obama Must Answer for Russiagate”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/15/biden_and_obama_must_answer_for_russiagate_147333.html
“What did Barack Obama and Joe Biden know about the Russiagate collusion hoax their fellow Democrats ginned up to kneecap Donald Trump – and when did they know it? How much did their chicanery contribute to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade the Ukraine?
Those questions are coming into sharp relief following a definitive report by my RealClearInvestigations colleague Paul Sperry last week that places the worst political scandal in our nation’s history and Putin’s brutal war directly inside the White House.
Drawing on a wide range of documents, many never previously reported, Sperry details how the Obama administration worked closely with the Clinton campaign and a foreign government – Ukraine – in a “sweeping and systematic effort” to interfere in the 2016 election. It turns out Democrats were guilty of every false charge they lodged against Trump.
Their maneuverings began in 2014 when Obama officials supported the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych because he was too close to Putin. Biden, then the vice president, was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. Sperry reports that leaked transcripts of conversations between two high-level officials in both the Obama and Biden administrations – Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan – reveal that Biden gave his blessing to the formation of a new coalition government. Sperry writes that Nuland even “traveled to Kiev and helped organize street demonstrations against Yanukovych, even handing out sandwiches to protesters.”
A few months after the anti-Putin government took power next door to Russia, Putin marched into Crimea. Eight years later, he invaded Ukraine.
Top Obama administration officials continued to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs. Biden, for example, would later boast of threatening to withhold aid until the government fired its chief anti-corruption prosecutor – who, among other matters, was investigating the gas company Burisma that was paying his son, Hunter Biden, $83,333 a month for a largely ceremonial position for which he had no qualifications other than his family name. (In 2019, House Democrats would impeach Trump for temporarily withholding aid to Ukraine to pressure it to investigate the Biden family’s dealings there.)
During its final two years, the Obama administration’s dealing with Ukraine became increasingly focused on the 2016 election. Sperry reports that Nuland received some 120 reports on Ukraine from an outside contractor – Christopher Steele. A former British intelligence officer, Steele would soon start working for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion’s crown jewel was the so-called Steele dossier, a series of salacious and false memos allegedly cobbled together by Steele that formed the basis of the Trump/Russia collusion theory.
Steele and his Fusion colleagues weren’t the only political operatives working behind the scenes with the Obama administration. In April 2015, the Democratic National Committee hired a Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa as a $5,000-a-month consultant. Chalupa was convinced that Trump’s Achilles heel was Paul Manafort, a lobbyist who had done work for the party led by Viktor Yanukovych. Her effort to attack Trump by exposing Manafort’s alleged Russian ties was the seed of the collusion hoax. Sperry reports that the DNC operative visited the White House at least 27 times during 2015 and 2016. Among the government officials she worked closely with was Eric Ciaramella, the CIA detailee to the White House who would later be the “whistleblower” regarding Trump’s 2019 call with the Ukrainian president that led to his first impeachment.
At the same time, the Obama administration was politicizing its foreign policy for domestic goals. In one of the more damning passages in his article, Sperry reports:
The Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Manafort, shifting resources from an investigation of a corrupt Ukrainian energy oligarch who paid Biden’s son hundreds of thousands of dollars through his gas company, Burisma.
“Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort,” said a former senior NSC official who has seen notes and emails generated from the meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
As it became increasingly clear that Trump would be the GOP’s 2016 nominee, Chalupa and the administration ratcheted up the pressure on Ukrainian officials to denounce Clinton’s rival in order to sanitize their dirty tricks. (Fusion GPS did the same with Steele, having him present himself as an independent former British intelligence agent – while hiding his ties to Clinton – so that his smears would seem apolitical.)
Democrats collaborated with several Ukrainian lawmakers who supported them. This is not surprising because, Sperry reports, while Ukraine might have been a relatively small and poor nation, one of its oligarchs contributed more money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state than any other group of foreign nationals, including the Saudis.”
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They’re dirty. Every one of them.
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Good.
Now release the rest of the Jan 6th political prisoners you’re holding too. You’ve been violating their rights as well.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rare-mistake-prosecutors-seek-dismissal-222222759.html
“Federal prosecutors on Monday asked a judge to dismiss criminal charges against a Capitol riots defendant and release him from jail, a rare admission in a court filing that the Justice Department had violated his legal right to a speedy trial.
At the same time, however, prosecutors asked permission to refile the criminal charges again, saying that apart from the Oath Keeper militia members who are facing seditious conspiracy charges, the defendant is facing “the most serious offenses charged in relation to the attack on the Capitol.”
In the filing, prosecutors said they had made a mistake by failing to secure an indictment or criminal information against Texas resident Lucas Denney within 30 days of his Dec. 13, 2021 arrest, as required by the Speedy Trial Act.
Denney was charged in a criminal complaint with assaulting or resisting police, obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder and obstructing an official proceeding, among other charges.
He spent several months in jail, until the government finally secured an indictment against him on March 7, 2022 – two days after his defense lawyers formally petitioned his release and the dismissal of the charges.
During that period, for reasons that were not completely clear, Denney never made an initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia as required, despite several failed attempts to arrange for one.
“To be sure, the government failed to comply with the Speedy Trial Act in this case,” prosecutors wrote in their Monday filing. “But there is no evidence of bad faith, a pattern of neglect or something more than an isolated incident that resulted from a number of unfortunate factors.””
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No evidence of bad faith?
They’re doing this to numerous defendants, most are still being held, and for longer than the sentence would be for what they are accused of.
That’s the very definition of bad faith.
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The Marines are an employer — and thus can set the rules of employment. Vaccines mandates for employment are not unusual and I’m sure the Marines who refused the Covid vaccine have taken various other vaccines as a condition of employment, including the servicemen who claim religious exemptions. How can you claim a religious exemption to the covid vaccine but take other vaccines? And what is the basis for a religious vaccine exemption? My employer mandated vaccines or weekly testing. The weekly testing was a concession to the union who argued the covid vaccine mandate was not (yet) part of the contract. The Marines aren’t unionized — so get the vaccine or find an other employer.
DeSantis amuses me. He and his supporters are everything they claim not to be. They are cancel culture. They are woke. They are afraid. They seek to cancel anything that hurts their feelings.
Tucker Carlson has no credibility left. The only question left — is he a paid promoter for Putin or is he a useful idiot? Then again a civil judge did rule he was entertainment not news and no sensible person could take him seriously.
The interesting thing about reading both sides of American politics is you get to see how corrupt are both sides. And even more interesting is the role Ukraine/Russia has in corrupting the lobbyists, consultants, etc. Steele was used by both parties. Trump tried pressure Ukraine as did Biden. American consultants were giving advice to both sides during the Maiden protests, and on and on. The only conclusion to reach — America politics has been corrupted (I blame Citizens United)
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Aside from his own biases, your link at 11:37 is fairly accurate.
Conventional wisdom was Russia would take the whole of the Donbas and link the Crimea to the Donbas and then freeze the conflict, consolidating the gains. Instead they went for a greater prize, turning Ukraine into a satellite state or submissive ally (much like Belarus). And as your author mentions, it went badly wrong. And yes, the pundits are cheer leading too soon — it took the US forces over 30 days to reach Baghdad, the road to Kiev maybe shorter but the fight is longer.
The Russia’s made some mistakes, based on faulty assumptions — poor logistics for a war lasting more than 20 days, use of badly trained conscripts to escort armour, etc. Russia has a core professional army and then one year conscripts who provide lsave labor using the latter as cannon fodder does not save the armour. However, the Ukrainians did the right thing — retreat from overwhelming odds to locations which favor defense (a typical Russian tactic so its surprising the Russians didn’t plan for it). This extends narrow supply lines that Ukrainians can cut off at opportune time. The Russians didn’t plan ahead and now face the necessity of entering cities — not a welcome prospect for any invading force. The general rule of thumb is 3 offensive soldiers to 1 defensive soldiers but that’s thrown out if you enter a city.
Ukraine is notoriously corrupt but so is the Russian military. The generals live lifestyles that don’t match their incomes as they skim from the military budget to their own accounts. Money meant for maintenance and readiness is used for personal gain. And now the common soldier has no ammo, no gasoline, no spare parts, and only expired food.
All of this has led to the Ukrainians being far more optimistic than Putin imagined and hence his “peace” proposals are falling on deaf ears.
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People who participated in Jan 6th are still in jail awaiting trial is to be expected. The gov’t and the judicial system always treat political disobedience harsher than criminal disobedience of the same crime. The reasoning is simple, political activists are more committed and may violate bail conditions, minor criminals aren’t that emotionally involved in their behaviour.
Putin’s (and Carlson’s) claim of bio labs has no evidence and fail simple logic. The US would not have a biolab in Ukraine right next to Russia; the US has their biolabs in far safer places — ie CDC Atlanta or in more isolated areas — some Pacific island perhaps.
The record profits of many consumer industries and oil companies indicates inflation is not from monetary expansion rather its corporate greed. The price of oil per barrel was higher in 2011 than it is today but the price at the pumps is not. This is corporate greed exploiting a crisis. Inflation is not Joe Biden’s fault, its not even the central bankers, its corporate greed making record profits.
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