P.M. Carpenter

More on Russia's Kyiv bombing

A Ukrainian Air Force spokesman gave a briefing to reporters on Russia's bombing of Kyiv today. He provided significant details, such as the missiles used, their delivery system, and search and rescue operations.

Russia deployed several X101 missiles, pictured here, which were launched by Russian Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers. The Tu-95, pictured here, is the equivalent of the U.S. Army's WW II B-29, dubbed the Superfortress.

The X101 missile is capable of traveling up to nearly 3,500 miles. The U.S. has denied Ukraine similar, longest-rockets for fear that it might use them to strike the Russian homeland, which Ukraine has sworn it would not do. The X101 can fly as high as 6,000 meters with a maximum cruising speed of 270 meters per second. Its altitude and velocity render it less vulnerable to air defense radars.

Each missile is propelled by its own engine and can adjust its trajectory in flight to correct its targeting. The New Voice of Ukraine also reports that Russia "most likely" launched the missiles from the Caspian Sea region, where Russia has an airbase. "Some of these missiles were intercepted by Kyiv’s air defense system, but not all," writes the NV.

The missiles struck Kyiv at about 6:30 a.m. One hit a nine-story residential building near a metro station in the city's central area. One death has been confirmed, and four persons were wounded, including a 7-year-old girl who was pulled out of the rubble. Her mother, a Russian citizen, was also rescued.

As noted here earlier and as the NV relates, "For the past several days, the Russian military has increased its usage of cruise missiles to target those Ukrainian regions that [were] considered to be relatively safe – like Kyiv, Cherkasy, or Rivne Oblasts."

Russia has established a rather unique and uniquely traumatizing pattern of warmongering — more terrorism than war, hence more dead civilians than soldiers or targeted military facilities. Vladimir Putin has violated every "civilized" rule of war known to modern man. The G7 leaders began their meeting today in Germany; they're discussing the possibility of more sanctions on Russia oil — which would kill not one Russian.

Russia escalates again. The West retaliates by holding a meeting.

Vladimir Putin let Western leaders know what he thought of their G7 meeting in Bavaria, where they're discussing "possible attempts" at further sanctions on Russian oil. He bombed Ukraine's capital city.

Putin pointedly demonstrated his opinion of international law and the West's even scanty efforts at defending freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe, although he's largely untroubled by the prospect of more sanctions. (G7 did announce a ban on imports of Russian gold.) Putin's oil exports have nosedived since its invasion of Ukraine in late February, yet his revenue from oil has increased because of skyrocketing fuel prices. Nevertheless, even Western discussions of slapping Vladimir's wrist are more than the Russian autocrat can take. And when that happens, the missiles fly.

They have now leveled Sievierodonetsk, from which Ukrainian forces have withdrawn after suffering heavy losses. Ninety percent of the city's buildings have been destroyed and only 8,000 of its once 108,000 residents remain. Once Russia captures Sievierodonetsk's twin city of Lysychansk, thus completing its occupation of the Luhansk province, its forces will move south to occupy the Donetsk province as well, giving Putin total control of Ukraine's Donbas.

Russia's warlord struck not only Kyiv this weekend (photo, NYT), but also Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine. President Zelensky said in his nightly address that 45 Russian missiles had also hit Lviv, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv, and the Zhytomyr region. Elsewhere, reports The Kyiv Independent, "Russia plans to increase the number of operational and tactical aircraft in Belarus." That, according to Ukraine's Defense Ministry's Intelligence Directorate, and one can easily imagine why the "planning."

Asked by a reporter about Russia's missile strike on Kyiv, President Biden answered, "It’s more of their barbarism." Biden is in Bavaria with his fellow G7 leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan "attempt[ing] to prepare [them] for a long slog in Ukraine." These reports raise two essential questions.

While it's true that Russia's weekend missile strikes are yet more evidence of its "barbarism," is it just as true that confronting Putin's warmongering is best achieved by oil sanctions, which have actually enhanced Putin's profits while harming Western consumers? And is Ukraine's "long slog" of a war unavoidable, as Biden insists?

The answer to both is no. Barbarism is best met in kind — there is no other kind — and Russia's war on Ukraine need not be a long one. The West has two options. It can supply the sinless defender with dozens of fighter jets and every type of weapon in its arsenals, excepting nuclear, or it can intervene directly with airpower, or ground troops, or both.

World War III is upon us, and before us is the free world's greatest threat since II. Putin started it, and the West must finish it in the same manner it finished Hitler and Tojo, stopping short of only Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   

The totalitarianism of the U.S. Supreme Court. 'Resistance is futile.'

​​​​​In his ruling, Sam Alito — no longer should the title of "Justice" be used when referring to any of the six totalitarians on the Court — wrote that "far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division."

Roe's social consequences of foment and division were merely one disingenuous argument proffered by Alito to justify the Court's cruelty. (For a fuller review of his charlantry, see Adam Serwer, The Atlantic.) The implication, of course, was that Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health would work to attenuate the abortion war's various tensions. He could not have believed this. No one believed it. And within 24 hours of the ruling, the real consequences of his disingenuity showed themselves.

"Demonstrations continued to roil cities across the country," reported The NY Times. And "in many states, residents were left to grapple with a confusing array of pronouncements as local and state officials clashed over the legalities of abortion restrictions and how they would be enforced."

In Arizona, the police used tear gas to disperse pro-choice protesters at the state Senate. Tennessee's attorney general moved to lift an injunction against a ban on abortion after six weeks, while Nashville's district attorney vowed that he would defy the new state law; he'll refuse to prosecute abortion doctors. In Mississippi, the last remaining abortion clinic predicted that MAGA "conservatives" would soon attack other rights, such as birth control and same-sex marriage.

In West Virginia, its lone abortion clinic cancelled appointments out of fear that a 19th-century abortion ban might be "suddenly enforceable again." In Wisconsin, there was no doubt; a 19th-century ban of abortion "immediately become enforceable." Michigan's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, had to warn the state's citizens that a 1931 law which criminalized abortion — with no exception for rape or incest — though on hold by a judge, might become active "at any time." (Michigan's legislature is Republican controlled.)

In Kansas, a 26-year-old man at an abortion clinic explained to a reporter his fundamental motivation for supporting Alito et al.s' invalidation of women's rights: "We don’t believe in moral compromise.” His reasoning is also the fundamental toxicity behind the Court's ruling. A moralistic minority with political and judicial power believes it can, and must, impose its repressive enforcement of what it sees as God's Word on the nation at large — essentially an Iranian ayatollah's system of governance.

This is why Sen. Barry Goldwater, who reluctantly ignited the right's "social morality" movement in 1964, came to oppose the New Right of the 1970s. He saw that its uncompromising posture rendered politics unworkable, since compromise lies at the very heart of legislation — and often, judicial rulings. "The system" either locks up in stagnation or breaks free in religious oppression. In the United States, the latter phenomenon is now embedded in the Court, with politics likely to follow in 2023 and 2025.

On one of my bookshelves is an analytical volume on the Supreme Court's most pivotal and controversial decisions throughout America's history. I might throw it away. For the totalitarians Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Barrett have instituted an entirely new judicial regime. America is back to square one.

Russia's Patriarch, a messenger from a slapstick God

This has to be the funniest tweet of the year. We can't know if Ms. Matviichuk was going for a punchline, but there it is, intended or not. "He slipped on the holy water." 

Patriarch Kirill, head of the church of the Moscow Patriarchate, fell during the worship. He slipped on the holy water. The church in Russia is completely under state control. Kirill supports Russian invasion to Ukraine. So it is likely that God is giving signs to the KGB agent pic.twitter.com/myDeIgSYJp

— Oleksandra Matviichuk (@avalaina) June 25, 2022

How Americans made the US a global outcast, just as Russians made the Federation a pariah

America's highest court has disgraced the nation in its Friday abortion ruling. Some reactions from around the world:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the decision "horrific."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson characterized it as a "big step backwards."

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: "I express my solidarity with the women whose freedoms are today challenged by the Supreme Court of the United States of America." (Women's rights were not "challenged." They were terminated.)

China's party organ, The Global Times, wrote that the Supreme Court "brutally deprives US citizens' basic human rights and dealt a huge blow to women's fundamental right." (I'm not sure why China still deplores the U.S. We're becoming more Chineselike repressive every day.)

But the Chief Justice of Mexico's Supreme Court, Arturo Zaldivar, issued the most biting remark: "Rarely have I been as proud to be part of the Mexican Supreme Court as I am today."

I also want to take a moment to thank all the people in America who made the Supreme Court's rights-crushing ruling, as well as our global disgrace, possible. They were the Democrats in 2000 who stupefyingly refused to vote for Al Gore because he was "stiff," and the progressives who stupidly voted for Ralph Nader because he wasn't Al Gore — resulting in George W. Bush's appointments of Sam Alito and John Roberts.

And of course the progressives who wouldn't budge in their 2016 antipathy toward Hillary Clinton because she was old-school establishment — resulting in a mobster's appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett.

My hat, as you can probably see, if off mainly to those bumbling progressives, who in their naive passion to make America a utopia, have instead made it a repressive hellhole, an obscene calamity, and a worldwide embarrassment.

Putin's near fate: dead or alive?

Speculation about President Putin's earthly destiny is as variable as Moscow's seasons. And there are subsets of opinion within the subsets. Some Western Russia watchers see Vladimir being visited by unhappy dissenters, inside his inner circle, ordering his retirement. Others see a bloody end to his reign. Among the Russian elite, some billionaires are severely displeased by sanctions, while others see the sufferance of sanctions as patriotic duty. Among the population, most are pro-war, yet some are antiwar; swelling lists of dead Russian soldiers may enlarge the latter.

As a historian, I tend to agree that history is hovering over Vladimir Putin. As the Daily Beast observes, "Vladimir Lenin died. Nikita Khrushchev was ousted. Leonid Brezhnev died. Mikhail Gorbachev was booted in a surprise ouster. The list goes on." This is not to say that history is preordained in a kind of Marxist way. National cultures, however, do have a way of strongly suggesting personal outcomes.

Perhaps adding to Putin's unease and anxiety is that some Russia watchers already see the Russia-Ukraine war as a long one. Although four months is not long — not for a war — it's considerably longer than what Putin & Co. anticipated. That, plus the Russian army has shown itself to be incompetent, undertrained, and rather primitive. Both phenomena have contributed to Russia's humiliation. Thus, writes the Beast, "rumors have bubbled up that Putin’s closest cronies are plotting his ouster." But how valid are those rumors?

Ronald Marks, a former CIA officer, believes that Putin is "OK as long as the siloviki [strongmen] are on his side. And he’s done a nice job of getting rid of those who aren't on his side." Daniel Hoffman, also a former CIA officer, differs with Marks. There could be silent dissent among the siloviki — until it's not. "These guys that are going to do it are going to be so secret about it so that Putin doesn’t find them and kill them first," says Hoffman. "It’ll happen all of a sudden. And he’ll be dead."

Russia's oligarchs and former billionaires — former because of the sanctions — are, on the other hand, almost entirely resigned to accepting the degraded status quo, and Putin's leadership of it. In a NY Times article, "From Russian Elites, No Sign of Broad Challenge to Putin," there reigns a consensus: powerlessness. "It's not going to work," says Aleksandr Lebedev, a former KGB agent and once a billionaire. "What, am I supposed to now go to the Kremlin with a banner?" Lebedev adds that Russia is morphing into "Iran and North Korea," and it's "an absolute illusion" that Russia's super-affluent can influence Putin's inner circle.

Yevgenia Albats, an indescribably courageous journalist still working in Moscow as the New York Times magazine's chief editor, best summarizes the mood and deflated expectations of Russia's elites: "They are drinking. They are drinking very heavily."

Though hopelessness appears rampant among Russia's onetime movers and shakers, history still haunts — or rather, history should be haunting Vladimir Putin. Will he join the list? "Vladimir Lenin died. Nikita Khrushchev was ousted. Leonid Brezhnev died. Mikhail Gorbachev was booted in a surprise ouster." Here's to hoping Daniel Hoffman is correct. "It’ll happen all of a sudden. And he’ll be dead."

Comments, the Supreme Court and American authoritarianism

A sampling of comments I've received on the Supreme Court's betrayal of women and the nation.

I am appalled and saddened that today's young women will have it harder than my generation did — Anne

I have been pregnant three times and each time I made a different decision. If there's one thing that pisses  me off, is when right wingers glibly declare that a woman can simply give up a baby for adoption.  It is a heartbreaking and traumatic experience and even in the happiest reunions (like mine with my now 35 year old baby girl), can bring back all the pain from the experience. Maybe I was naive to think it could ever be this way. How foolish — addendum. above

I'm having a hard time understanding how we came to have so many totally stupid our nation. I mean really...how did this happen? When did we stop seeing the value of teaching critical thinking? Is it when we became so totally materialistic and driven by the quest for money and things? Was it in the 70s when everything was about "me, me, me"? — Kathy

(Please keep in mind you are welcome to email me, or comment on my Facebook or Twitter page.)

 The sociological question of how this happened would seem to be a statistical matter. Roughly a third of the American electorate has always been of an authoritarian bent. Then Trump made authoritarianism mainstream and "respectable." And authoritarians prefer not to think. They favor simple answers to immensely complex issues and problems. Plus "the state" they despise they also prefer to rule with an iron, undemocratic fist. 

President Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar in 1954 that the far right is both "negligible" in numbers and "stupid." He was of course mistaken about its sustained fringiness, but he was spot on about its stupidity, or ignorance. Yet that is what has chiefly facilitated its rise to the mainstream. Ignorance is as ignorance does, and no American politician has ever been been more ignorant, and forcefully ignorant, then Donald Trump. So ignoramuses promptly joined him en masse in extolling ignorance as a virtue.    

I have argued in both my academic work and political columns that the genesis of today's sprawling authoritarianism lay, particularly, in the demagoguery of 1964's Goldwaterism. That led to the 1970's New Right (which Sen. Goldwater came to detest, partly because of its religious fundament, but mostly because the New Right opposed compromise), then to Reaganism — which now seems nearly angelic — Gingrichism, Bushism and ultimately Trumpism. It's been a long slide. Now, it appears, we have bottomed out.     

Today made it official. America is ruled by a far-right junta. (This is not 'breaking news.')

They went and did it. Six unelected ideologues have hijacked women's rights. That this ethically bankrupt Supreme Court has overturned a human right as well as a woman's right was expected, of course, since an ethically corrupt, democratically unelected president appointed the Court's margin that was willing to defy the rule of 50-year-old law.

Today, the Supreme Court squandered whatever legitimacy it had left. In one transcendently grotesque flash, the Court ruled that its far-right, religionist and misogynistic ideology is free to trump settled law and bulldoze over every American woman's reproductive rights. The Court's Gang of Six — the Injustices Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts — decided that living women are legally subordinate to a once-dead philosophy.

That would be Stephen Douglas' antebellum philosophy. Beginning in 1854, the Illinois senator peddled the inhuman proposition that each state should decide if human slavery was to be permitted. African Americans would have no say; under the political theory of popular sovereignty, the various states would choose whether Blacks were slave or free. God- or Nature-given rights would also have no say.

Today's Supreme Court has ruled likewise. Each state — not the principle of self-evident truths — shall determine if American women are to possess sovereignty over their own bodies. In effect, the Supreme Court has revisited not 1973, but a barbarous proposition of 168 years past. Douglas' contemporary, Chief Justice Roger Taney, of the rights-stripping Dred Scott decision, would be immensely proud of our six Injustices.

The United States is now quite literally ruled by a junta, defined as "a military or political group that rules a country after taking power by force."

Such was the manner of two of this Court's appointments. Senate Republicans vacated by force President Obama's right to appoint, thereby producing Neil Gorsuch, and later rammed through Amy Barrett's nomination under Republicans' previously renounced presidential right. Although Gorsuch and Barrett's benefactor, Trump, ascended presidentially in a legal election, he did not win the 2016 election democratically. He lost, thus rendering his Court-appointing presidency a forced-on-the-electorate calamity.

America's rule of law has been a far-right plaything ever since. Republicans and their High Court demand the rule of law when it suits their cruel ideology, and reject it when not. If the rather consensual narrative of America in brutal decline was ever in question, today's Supreme Court decision ended all doubt.

Is the Senate's gun bill really a "true breakthrough"?

The Washington Post describes last night's passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as "an unlikely breakthrough on the emotional and polarizing question of U.S. gun laws." The NY Times writes that the Senate was "spurred to action." Politico remarks that the Senate's enactment of the bill was "a seminal moment." Nor was the Post done with its accolades. Later in its article, "an unlikely breakthrough" becomes a "true breakthrough."

Print journalists, and I assume broadcast journalists, are fooling themselves and their readers. The bipartisan act is in itself a sad impotence in reducing gun violence and mass shootings — see my post of 13 June — which is why it passed with 15 Republican votes. Print coverage concedes this pitiable truth, though not in the straightforward terms expressed here. Yet there lingers in this indistinguishable coverage the perception of a political breakthrough. It's nothing of the sort. The 15 Senate Republicans who voted yea last night were merely practicing politics-as-usual.

Perhaps credit should go to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for being shamelessly open about his and his comrades' legislative agreeability, although it's true that his openness is now but a daily feature of the modern GOP — never rhetorically hide from demagogic opportunism, just lay it out there. And McConnell did just that.

Speaking to reporters after his self-congratulatory speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said he anticipates that his partisan colleagues' support of the bill "will be viewed favorably by voters in the suburbs that we need to regain in order to hopefully be a majority next year." Which is to say, these 15 supportive Republicans are still indifferent to gun violence in America. But if a touch of do-nothing legislation will help them politically in the suburbs, then count them all for it.

McConnell also took party and personal credit for the bill and its passage. "I thought it was time to act, and if [Democrats] were willing to join with us and pass legislation that actually targeted the problem, which is school safety and mental health, why would we not want to do that?" Note that guns aren't "the problem"; the real culprits are a lack of school Rambos and that old GOP chestnut, the mentally unbalanced.

What's more, as the Senate was pretending to do something about the monstrous growth of American gun violence, the Supreme Court was abetting our peculiar institution of mass murder. One also assumes that even the impotent Bipartisan Safer Communities Act will wind up before the Court's one-man-one-gun justices.

I'll conclude with my 13 June conclusion. "Let's face it, until weapons of war and magazine loads of 100 are federally banned, mass slaughter will remain a singular feature of American life — or rather, American death."

Honestly, the West is committing a war crime against Ukraine

Now that the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War can no longer neglect the reality that Ukraine is in trouble, its latest report was obliged to pile on: "Reinforced Russian air-defense systems in eastern Ukraine are increasingly limiting the effectiveness of Ukrainian drones, undermining a key Ukrainian capability in the war."

Ukrainian forces have been forced to largely cease using Turkish Bayraktar drones, which earlier had been effective against Russian artillery bases. Since Russia's punching up of its air-defense capabilities, however, the drones have taken heavy losses. Some Ukrainian military officials are now questioning the usefulness of, possibly, U.S. Gray Eagle drones. The Biden administration is considering a supply to Ukraine — but only to be shot down, as was happening to the Turkish drones?

The ISW borrows from a Foreign Policy analysis of 21 June, titled "'It’s Not Afghanistan': Ukrainian Pilots Push Back on U.S.-Provided Drones." The headline reflects the common use of Gray Eagles in America's vastly ill-advised wars in the Middle East.

Foreign Policy quotes a Ukrainian pilot. "We are not advocating for the Gray Eagles.” Ukraine's military’s general staff is. Continued the pilot: "There’s no good Air Force mind next to our chief of staff or commander who would say, speak up and say, hey, that’s B.S. It’s very dangerous to use such expensive drones in our case, because of the enemy’s air defense."

On a closely related air-defense matter, the ISW also reports that Ukrainian forces have cut back their sorties, only 20 or 30 a day, "and are facing a deficit of available aircraft for active pilots. Russian forces are likely prioritizing deploying air defenses to eastern Ukraine to nullify Ukrainian operations and to protect the artillery systems Russian forces are reliant on to make advances."

Good grief. Just do it. Just have NATO supply Ukraine with the old Warsaw Pact's Soviet MiGs or even advanced, U.S. aircraft, such as F-16s. Ukrainians, both civilians and soldiers, have been pounded by Russian aircraft for precisely four months now — and the West has done nothing to overcome Putin's air superiority.

NATO's seeming disregard of needlessly dead Ukrainians is as shameful as it is incomprehensible. More Ukrainian aircraft would knock out more Russian artillery bases, which are also pounding civilians and soldiers — and without Ukraine's countermeasure of drones, are more terrible in numbers than ever.

Ukraine should, must have jet fighters. For Western leaders to withhold them equates to a war crime — a reckless indifference to civilian life, the same of which these leaders accuse Russia. The West is correct in alleging Vladimir Putin's crimes. And this post is correct in alleging the same, against the West.

I'm a skeptic by nature and training, but not on this issue.

'A Day In the Life of the Republican Party'

The following instances all occurred in just one day, this Tuesday. No doubt other distressing instances in Republican Wackoville took place that day, but a person can take only so much. So I give you graciously limited evidence of the GOP's frightful loss of its mental facilities, along with anything resembling a soul.

First, ​U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who undoubtedly took one too many shots to the head in pro ball, appeared on something called the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Walker was asked by a host what his thoughts were about Stacey Abrams saying that Georgia is "the worst state in the country to live." After a bit of rambling, Walker said, "If it’s the worst state, why are you here? Why don’t you leave, go to another? There’s, what, 51 more other states you can go to."

Second, congressional Democrats are hurrying to authorize $3 billion for the school meal program before its funding expires on the 30th, which, reported Politico, would "[trigger] a hunger cliff for millions of children." Enter Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said Tuesday that he's "contemplating" an objection to the legislation, and Senate rules permit one member to shut down progress on any bill. If that's not insane enough, try this: Marshall dislikes the bill because a new guideline from the Agriculture Department bans LGBTQ discrimination in programs that receive federal nutrition money, in this case, the school lunch program. Marshall favors discrimination. If you're gay and 13 years old, your proper condition is that of hunger.

Third, Rusty Bowers, the Arizona statehouse's Republican speaker who testified so cogently against Trumpian electoral crimes before the Jan 6 committee on Tuesday, said later in an Associated Press interview, "I’d vote for [Trump] again."

Yes, from kindergarten ignorance to unconcealed bigotry to stunning, premeditated tolerance of a multifaceted criminal in the White House, the Republican Party has it all. And in 138 days, it'll be running Congress. In 866 days, it most likely will be running this country.

So have a nice day — today.

Putin's disinformation war on the U.S. is no different from a material war. And America needs to step up its fight.

​​​​​Vladimir Putin is looking to intensify his propaganda war on the United States, inside the United States. He intends to be back at his old bag of atrocious disinformation tricks in America's 2022 and 2024 elections. Putin's technological sabotage is tantamount to declaring war on the U.S., for his elevation of Donald Trump or some Trumplike politician would mean America's final destruction.

Putin's strategy is that of outlasting the Biden Administration, reports the Daily Beast (paywalled). He is expected to argue, via Russian troll farms, state media outlets and other online venues — all of it embedded in, or reaching secondhand, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media sites — that President Biden's military and financial support of Ukraine has caused the Russia-Ukraine war's prolongation, thus bleeding American citizens of their own finances, as well as starving the world of food staples.

America's disaffection with Biden's vital assistance to Eastern Europe would therefore grow, predict former officials of the CIA and Department of Homeland Security. And that would result, as noted, in a Trump or Trumpian isolationist, 2025 U.S. presidency. "[Putin is] going to really, really try hard," says Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow chief for the CIA, "to exacerbate those isolationist tendencies and kind of induce us to question, 'Why are we supporting Ukraine?'" In short, added Hoffman, "He’s trying to dilute U.S. support for Zelensky."

A recent U.S. intelligence bulletin ("obtained" by the Daily Beast) suggested that "already, Russian influence operations targeting American and Western audiences appear to be weakening Americans’ support and appetite for providing aid to Ukraine." Those are the Daily Beast's words, though only partial substantiation can be found. The Washington Post (paywalled) reported on 16 June that "a new poll of European populations shows rising anxiety and impatience about the conflict and, in particular, its economic repercussions." A search of contemporaneous polling in the U.S. produced nothing. Nevertheless, reasonable it is that the U.S. will soon follow Europe's anxiety.  

The aforementioned intelligence bulletin also assessed that Putin's Russia is a "primary threat" to the U.S. through its "malicious cyber operations against federal and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments [and] election organizations." Russia's disinformation campaign has, in addition, "been zeroing in on the idea that Western security assistance to Ukraine has been escalating the war." (Emphasis mine.)

The former CIA chief in Moscow summarizes his assessment of "Putin's thinking" in this way: "I can outlast all you people. And if I get this to 2024, I might get a Republican who doesn’t feel like Joe Biden."

I would summarize Putin's thinking as an unspoken declaration of war against the United States. For if Joe Biden or another Democratic presidential nominee fails to retain the White House in November 2024 — and Trump's current labors to achieve that result, made possible by Putin's assistance in 2016, will be a big assist — then America will have seen its last days as a free, democratic nation. The U.S. will become unrecognizable to every honorable, conscientious American living in it.

As Shakespeare's Iago chillingly said, "I am not what I am." Those words shall be America's epitaph under a Trumpian administration. Is it not time — now — to fight back? To save the United States, in whatever ways possible, while we can?

A Republican presidential wanna-be is rising. This could knock him off.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is making gains in presidential polls. His gains are zero sum; Trump is slipping. 

I therefore would advise D.C. Democratic strategists to jump on opposition research against DeSantis as though that's the only game in town. I say I would do so rather than I shall do so for an exceedingly simple reason:

Mountains of Mud, true or not, thrown at Ron 'Savonarola' DeSantis — e.g. he dresses up at night in a Nazi colonel's uniform, he masturbates to Himmler's portrait, he's leaving his estate to the Proud Boys  — would only bump him up in Republican circles by 50%. 

Nothing grim or salacious can touch these guys, every one of them in the GOP wanna-be race. Democrats tried plastering Trump in 2020 with genuine, truthful dirt of the finest quality. For that noble effort, Dems got thanked by a Trumpy Electoral Vote victory.

What might work is for Democrats to allege through assorted media figures that DeSantis has spoken kind words about the Enlightenment, that he once suggested the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, that he favors educated children, and that he doesn't really masturbate to Himmler's portrait.

Yes, that just might do it. He'd be banished to the icy, Dantean depths of hell by every crypto-fascist cracker in America.       

In one swing state, Biden and Trump are both in trouble against a gubernatorial science denier and children's books censor

Released today, this University of New Hampshire poll on Biden, Trump and DeSantis, which finds that ...

"Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is now statistically tied with Former President^[?] Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican Primary. Support for DeSantis has more than doubled since October. DeSantis runs better against Biden than does Trump, a further sign of Trump’s weakening support among NH Republicans. Biden and Trump are increasingly unpopular in New Hampshire" — though Biden won the state by 8 points in 2020 — "and only about half of members of each of their own parties want them to run for President in 2024."

DeSantis' tie with Biden is particularly worrisome since Trump's support indeed appears to be weakening. Look at the spread between the Florida governor and the sitting president among those who either voted for another candidate or failed to to vote in 2020. It's huge — 31 points, in DeSantis' favor.

Partisan voters are certain to remain partisan voters. Thus voters outside the parties and undecided voters will be key in a marginal contest, which 2024 will be. Hence these are the voters that might very well decide the state's presidential election outcome, as well as in other states.

One other chart of interest is this one:

Well, I tried to insert the chart here but photo insertion is malfunctioning. This doesn't seem to be my week for technology. Anyway, the chart shows Trump's "first-choice" support among likely GOP primary voters having declined from 47%, to 43%, to 37%, from July 2021 to the present.

Trump's advisers, political consultants, Republican strategists, state and county GOP committee chairs, Jared, Ivanka, conservative 9-year-olds on the street and Trump's auto mechanic have for 17 months intelligently told him to cool it with the "stolen election" bit. Trump, being Trump, has ignored them. And the above, creeping diminution of his first-choice support tells the story of his intransigent imbecility. That Pence has jumped 5 points is but further evidence that the ignoramus Trump is only screwing himself.

About this I am deeply sorry. Trump as nominee would be of far greater benefit to the Democratic nominee than Ron DeSantis.   

Putin is now murdering Westerners. How much more abuse will the West take from this tyrant?

Vladimir Putin's incendiary government is again acutely inflaming East-West tensions and escalating its war on the free world.

Earlier this week the Russian dictator's mouthpiece, Dmitri Peskov, announced that two Americans fighting with the Ukrainian army, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, had been captured near Kharkiv and have been branded "soldiers of fortune" by the Russian government. (Photo, ABC News.) Peskov asserted that the two men fall outside the Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war.

The two fighters will be "held responsible for the crimes they have committed," said Peskov. Yet they committed no war crimes. They were acting as lawful Ukrainian soldiers when their unit suffered heavy shelling by illegally invading Russian forces. But given Peskov's contention that they lack the protection of international laws of war — POWs are due humane treatment and are free from prosecution — they'll almost certainly receive sentences of death.

Russia had already established a history of rogue justice concerning such prisoners of war. On 9 June, Putin's sham government in the Donbas — the Donetsk People's Republic — sentenced to death by firing squad three other prisoners of foreign origin: Aiden Aslin, Shaun Pinner (both British) and Brahim Saadoun (Moroccan). Each was serving with the Ukrainian army.

Russian prosecutors, however, labeled them "mercenaries and terrorists" and charged them with attempting to overthrow the People’s Republic — again, an illegitimate, Putinesque puppet unrecognized by any nation other than Russia. Britain's foreign secretary made clear her nation's displeasure with the Kremlin's illegal act.

I utterly condemn the sentencing of Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner held by Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine.

They are prisoners of war. This is a sham judgment with absolutely no legitimacy.

My thoughts are with the families. We continue to do everything we can to support them.

— Liz Truss (@trussliz) June 9, 2022

International law experts speculated at the time that "the trial appeared calculated to discourage foreign volunteers, including Americans." Although the speculation is self-evident, Russia's intention, just as obviously, has failed in effectiveness. Nevertheless, on the day of Aslin, Pinner and Saadoun's sentencing, "judicial officials in the Donetsk People’s Republic ... doubled down on their contention that the men were violent mercenaries deserving of death."

The far larger issue at hand is one of the West's tolerance of Vladimir Putin's deadly provocations and psychological debauchery. Each day he escalates both, and they come in the context of his illegal invasion and his actual war crimes. Now he is on the precipice of murdering Americans and Brits, turned valid as well as valiant defenders of Ukraine — within the Ukrainian army. Required is something more than Western tweets.

While it's true that both the U.S. and the U.K. have discouraged nationals from enlisting in Ukraine's armed forces, Putin's penalty for doing so is not only appalling, it should go unsuffered. Pity the poor captives, yet his internationally outlawed act against them is also one of violent grotesquerie toward all free peoples. The exigent and inescapable question, then, is one of how long the free West will tolerate the Russian despot's atrocities against all humanity.