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Ukraine Update: The heavy weapons spigot has finally opened for Ukraine
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
“I like new questions,” he said. “It’s not interesting to answer the questions you already heard.” He is frustrated, for instance, by repeated requests for his wish list of weapons systems. “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.”
Zelenskyy’s wish list isn’t a state secret.
The day after Zelenskyy released this list, President Joe Biden announced an $800 million package to Ukraine that included some of these items. Yesterday, we learned that less than a week later, the United States is close to announcing the next $800 million package, one that would boost the current American contribution to $3.2 billion in military aid since Biden took office, with no end in sight. As far as the United States is concerned, the floodgates are open, already checking off 155mm artillery (eight M777 howitzers and 40,000 shells), Armored Personnel Carriers (APC, 200 M113s), and 11 Mi-17 Russian-built helicopters that were supposed to go to the Afghan army but … you know. In addition, the United States is delivering critically important anti-battery radar, which tracks the source of incoming artillery so it can be targeted and struck by Ukraine’s own guns, as well as 500 more Javelin anti-tank missiles, 300 more suicide drones, 100 Humvees, body armor, explosives, ad small arms.
If you checked in on the peanut gallery, you’d see people claim that the shipments are “too late” (it’s not, that just dumb), that it’s “not enough” (of course it’s not, but that’s a week and a half’s worth, which is a lot), and lots of complaining that what Ukraine really needs is aircraft. Well, sure, but the United States doesn’t have the Soviet/Russian aircraft it can already fly and service. Though …
Aircraft? What aircraft?
At yesterday’s Pentagon press conference, held by Press Secretary John F. Kirby:
Q: And you said earlier that the Ukrainians have now more fighter aircraft than they had two weeks ago. Can you give us …
KIRBY: More operable fighter aircraft than they had two weeks ago.
Q: So can you give us an idea of—did they receive more? And an idea of how many? Dozens?
KIRBY: I would just say without getting into what other nations are providing that they have received additional platforms and parts to be able to increase their fleet size—their aircraft fleet size, I think I’d leave it at that.
Platforms and parts.
Q: What is a platform?
KIRBY: Platform is an airplane in this case. They have received additional aircraft and aircraft parts to help them, you know, get more aircraft in the air. Yes.
Those were very carefully chosen words to say “we’re not sending any aircraft, but, magically, they have more planes!” There have been long-aborted plans to have Poland and/or Romania send Soviet-era planes they’re phasing out, and “backfilling” those nations with shiny new American F-16s. The only way to interpret this is that Ukraine isn’t just getting some of those planes, but that they already did.
Note, Ukraine has “denied” the Pentagon’s claims, and I use the scare quotes there on purpose.
1) The use of the word “officially” is hilariously weird. Oh yeah? Officially? What about unofficially? Poland tried to pawn its Mig-29s to the United States, to transfer to Ukraine. It wanted to erase its footprints. The U.S. was like “LOL no.” So of course this transfer has to be off the books.
2) “New aircraft.” That’s some pedantic parsing, I know, but these aircraft are old.
3) They admit they have more operational aircraft, but go back to “we just got some spare parts” as a way to provide plausible deniability when Russia counts all the new MiGs Ukraine has back in the air.
A close reading shows zero inconsistency between the Pentagon and Ukraine’s statements.
Regardless, everyone agrees Ukraine has more aircraft than it did before. That’s progress on another items on Zelenskyy’s list. Now let’s start training pilots and ground crews on F-15s or F-16s, whatever is easiest to maintain. You know how there are civilian military contractors in war zones? They’re not all Blackwater mercenaries. Many are maintenance personnel. I’m now persuaded this would be a viable stopgap measure to both help maintain these modern aircraft, as well as play NCO and train Ukrainians to eventually take over the tasks themselves. I’d just want to make sure Ukraine had the hard shelters and air defense systems in place to protect these aircraft on the ground, because Russia would launch the remainder of its missiles if it had a chance to take them all out.
Artillery, and more artillery!
The current $800 million package had eight M777-towed howitzers and 40,000 shells, and people wailed, “It’s not enough!” No shit. That was the first batch. Biden said today that the U.S. was prioritizing sending more artillery, and the next $800 million package will undoubtedly expand on that order. Canada is also sending M777s, which makes things easier for Ukraine. Remember: Logistics and maintenance have to be as simplified as possible, so standardizing around fewer systems is ideal.
Furthermore, as much as I was hoping for the self-propelled M109, which essentially is an artillery gun on tracks, the U.S. must be paying attention to Russian woes in Ukraine, especially losing a great deal of their own self-propelled artillery guns to General Mud. Towed artillery is less likely to suffer from those problems. And all of NATO has loads and loads of 155mm shells. The Brits, for one, have already promised to supply Ukraine with 155mm ammunition. The Soviet-designed gear both Ukraine and Russia currently use are 152mm, and Ukraine is reportedly running low. Shifting to NATO-standard munitions should help.
Lithuania has sent nine of its D-30 howitzers, while Poland sent around 20 2S1 Gvozdika—but they use 122mm shells at a time when the bulk of Ukraine’s current artillery fleet uses 152mm and is likely moving to a 155mm standard. I have no idea how much additional effort it’ll take to supply these, but it certainly complicates logistics. Maybe they can be kept back, say, for Kyiv’s territorial defense forces, allowing the bigger guns (and their supply lines) to move east to the front lines.
Armored Personnel Carriers/Infantry Fighting Vehicles
The Ukrainian offensive around Kherson has stalled because it cannot penetrate a wall of Russia artillery. Unmounted, unprotected infantry are too vulnerable to blast shrapnel. As we’ve seen, the terrain is basically Kansas: wide open fields with few places to take cover. This is where armor comes in. Armored personnel carriers can rush troops forward while protecting them from the shrapnel of exploding artillery. M113s won’t stop anti-tank missiles or Russian tank hits, but they are not designed to do that. They’re designed to offer soft protection.
The U.S. opted to send old M113s rather than more modern M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which are currently being phased out. Maintenance concerns likely played a role in that decision, but it likely didn’t hurt that half the world fields the M113, once again making it possible for other nations to send their own stock without requiring Ukraine to learn to maintain and support yet another weapons system. Also, the U.S. has around 6,000 of these lying around. As long as Ukraine wants them, we can afford to pass them on.
Other countries are stepping up with their own contributions. The Netherlands promised “heavy equipment,” starting with “armored vehicles.” Given that their tanks are modern German Leopard 2s, and they only have 18 of them, we can safely assume that they’ll be sending one of the many APCs they currently field. I notice they have Bushmasters, which Ukraine just received from Australia. Would be convenient to standardize around those somewhat.
The Brits are sending 120 FV103 Spartans, the Czechs are sending 56 of their BMP-1 variant (which Ukraine already knows how to service), while the Poles are sending an undisclosed number of their own BMP-1 version.
Air defense systems
Eliminate Russia’s ability to fly aircraft over the battlefield, and the situation shifts dramatically. NATO has sent a whole buffet of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft systems, and they have been very effective at curbing Russia’s ability to deploy ground-support planes and helicopters over the battlefield. But they don’t have the altitude range to hit high-flying bombers and missiles. Those kinds of systems have incredibly heavy logistical and operational requirements. As I’ve written before, maintenance training for the U.S. Patriot system is one year, and that’s just for baseline knowledge. NCOs continue that education once new soldiers reach their units.
Thus, Ukraine has been begging Eastern European nations to part with their Soviet-era systems, which they already know how to operate and maintain. The only country to answer that call is Slovakia, which parted with a single battery of its long-range S-300PMU system, including 45 missiles. The United States has temporarily backfilled the donation with an American Patriot system, which will stick around until Slovakia learns how to operate their own. It is critical that Ukraine get more such systems, capable of shooting down incoming missiles, if it intends to seriously rebuild its air force. Ukraine needs to protect its air fields.
Bulgaria has one S-300 battery, Greece has 32 launchers and 175 missiles. And that’s it for long range systems. However, there are more options in the medium-range category, with several friendly nations fielding variants of the Buk air defense system, which Ukraine already operates. While the S-300s have a range of up to 90 kilometers, the Buk can defend out to 30 kilometers and altitudes of 14 kilometers (40,000 feet)—totally adequate for airfield and other critical infrastructure anti-missile defense. Finland has some in storage in “operable condition.” Allies also have the 9K33 Osa system, also used by Ukraine, with a similar range of 30 kilometers, and an altitude of 12 kilometers. The system is operated by Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, and Romania.
The British don’t have any Soviet-era systems, but they are stepping up with their Stormer system equipped with Starstreak missiles:
Starstreaks are particularly deadly because they don’t home in on heat signatures, so they can’t be fooled by most aircraft countermeasures (mainly, flares to distract the missiles). These will be helpful on the Donbas front lines, where Russian ground-attack aircraft dare to operate, close to friendly airspace.
Multiple Launch Rocket Systems
I’ve seen some people demand the United States give Ukraine American M270 MLRS, to which I say, NO FUCKING WAY. This is my very specific area of expertise. They were a beast to maintain and support. They were constantly broken down in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I can’t imagine what they might look like 30 years later. There are better alternatives.
The Czechs have delivered at least 20 RM-70s, which are based on the Soviet-era GRAD MLRS, which Ukraine already operates. Meanwhile, Poland has sent at least 20 of its own GRADs.
Tanks
Poland has reportedly sent over 100 T-72M(1)s, though the Poles are in no hurry to publicly confirm it. Unlike other nations, Poland seems to want to keep its major weapons transfers quiet, even if leaks are inevitable:
The Czechs have promised 12 more T-72M1s. These are old variants, and Ukraine wants more modern gear. But there is hope that they can be quickly upgraded with modern optics.
Western tanks are problematic for several reasons, mostly dealing with logistics. It’s one thing to have civilian contractors work on aircraft in Ukraine’s west. It’s another to have them on the eastern front lines servicing complex modern battle tanks. American M1 Abrams battle tanks use jet fuel and burn 3 gallons per mile (not a typo). It’s complicated enough getting regular diesel to the front lines.
The good news is that several NATO allies have T-72s currently being phased out: Bulgaria (430), Czech Republic (around 630), and Poland (around 1,000).
Conclusion
While Ukraine hasn’t gotten everything it wants, the spigot is now open, with heavy armor (tanks and armored personnel carriers), aircraft, artillery, MLRS, and air defense systems finally flowing into the country. No one aside from the Germans and the French seem particularly worried about Russia’s reaction, and worrying about it seems quite quaint these days. Russia has watched impotently as NATO has flooded Ukraine with the very weapons that have killed or injured tens of thousands of Z invaders.
And yes, we are all eager for more, and it will never be enough, but the logistics of the operation—already impressive—are dramatically improving, reflected in the quickening pace of new American military assistance packages. Meanwhile, other allies are finally coming online, like Italy, which approved weapons shipments on Monday.
Germany approved $2 billion for Ukraine to “go shopping,” but inexplicably still won’t directly deliver weapons, and France is lagging. But with Biden pushing hard, hopefully they’ll deliver in a bigger way. They certainly seem to understand that they’ll shoulder the bulk of the burden of Ukraine’s reconstruction, but the longer this war lasts, the higher that bill will be. It will save them money in the long run to engage more actively in Ukraine’s defense.
Wednesday, Apr 20, 2022 · 6:51:19 PM +00:00
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kos
That’s a lot of spare parts, and coincidentally has nothing to do with the fact that Poland had “more than 20” MiG-29s available for transfer (28, to be exact, but not all were supposedly operable).
From 'public burnings to hangings to electric chairs': We're still looking for 'humane way to kill'
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Three attorneys wrote in an NBC News op-ed that if ever there were an inclination to sentence a person to death, it would be for Nikolas Cruz. He is the man who pleaded guilty to killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida. Though paused this week, prosecutors and defense attorneys are in the process of seating 12 jurors and eight alternates in Cruz’s trial. He faces 34 charges, including murder and attempted murder, ABC-affiliated WPBF reported. “In many ways, this case is enough to test any death penalty opponent’s resolve: Cruz is responsible for the tragic, heart-wrenching deaths of children and heroic educators,” the attorneys wrote.
The legal experts continued, though, that we must as a society still make the decision to do away with the inhumane practice of state-sanctioned executions. “We cannot continue to prop up this failed system,” Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Dan Satterberg, and Miriam Aroni Krinsky wrote. “No matter how horrific or heart-wrenching the case in front of us, we have to remember that as long as the death penalty exists, it will continue to amplify the worst parts of our justice system.”
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Dehghani-Tafti is the commonwealth’s attorney for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church in Virginia. Satterberg is King County, Washington’s prosecuting attorney, and Krinsky is a former federal prosecutor and executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a project of The Tides Center nonprofit.
Now, I’m a mother who sends her children to school every day and prays they will make it home safely. In all honesty, I wouldn’t bat an eye if Cruz was handed down the death penalty, but a society that embraces capital punishment doesn’t only put the lives of people like Cruz on the line.
RELATED STORY: There is video of Nikolas Cruz aiming gun, while wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat
It does the same for Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, Troy Davis, Carlos DeLuna, Jimmy Dennis, and Cameron Todd Willingham—all men who were sentenced to death despite evidence of their innocence, the Montana Innocence Project reported last year.
At the time, the Montana Legislature was considering a House bill that would have given the state greater power to choose drugs to perform lethal injections, but the bill died. “There are many reasons to oppose capital punishment, including the morality of its use, the relative costs associated with it, and whether it has a deterrent effect,” the Montana Innocence Project wrote. “Our focus is on the inherent risk of executing innocent people and the need to reform the system to prevent all wrongful convictions—including those in capital cases.”
There have been more than 165 innocent people sentenced to death and later exonerated since 1973, the Montana Innocence Project reported.
Davis, 42, was executed on Sept. 21, 2011. His conviction rested solely on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses, and seven of them later recanted in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying police pressured them to accuse Davis of shooting and killing a Savannah police officer trying to break up a fight in Georgia.
Carlos DeLuna, 27, was executed on Dec. 7, 1989 in the death of a Corpus Christi convenience store worker who was stabbed calling 911 in Texas. DeLuna maintained that he witnessed the attack and ran because he was convicted of a sexual assault and didn’t want any trouble. Police found him hiding and never looked into the man DeLuna said committed the murder. “Six years after DeLuna’s execution, James Leibman, a law professor at Columbia University, conducted one of the most thorough reviews of a death penalty case in U.S. history that revealed mounting evidence of DeLuna’s innocence,” the Montana Innocence Project reported.
Willingham, 36, was executed on Feb. 17, 2004, in the deaths of his 1-year-old twins and 2-year-old daughter in Corsicana, Texas. They died of smoke inhalation in a home fire from which Willingham fought so desperately to rescue them that firefighters told The New Yorker they had to handcuff him for his own safety.
Still, fire investigators determined a liquid accelerant under the children’s beds and down the hall toward the front door meant the fire amounted to arson, and prosecutors used Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin posters in the home to assign a motive—Willingham’s alleged interest in “satanic-type activities,” the Montana Innocence Project reported. Fire scientist Craig Beyler told The New Yorker that the investigation violated “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.”
Dennis was 22 years old when he was convicted and sentenced to death in the shooting of a 17-year-old girl after a rumor that it was “Jimmy from the Abbotsford projects” connected him to the crime in Philadelphia, the Montana Innocence Project reported. Although Dennis produced a solid alibi—he had waved at a neighbor on a bus across town at the time of the murder—his conviction was ultimately overturned due to three Brady violations. He spent 25 years in prison.
Aguirre-Jarquin, a Honduran immigrant and restaurant worker, was sentenced to death after a neighbor told police she had a “gut feeling” he stabbed her mother and grandmother to death. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the neighbor, Samantha Williams, admitted to killing her mother and grandmother, and Aguirre-Jarquin was released after being wrongfully imprisoned for 14 years.
And that kind of wrongful imprisonment isn’t as rare as you might think.
“For every nine people who have been executed since 1976, at least one condemned person has been exonerated,” Dehghani-Tafti, Satterberg, and Krinsky wrote.
The attorneys advocated that the death penalty is more likely to be invoked against Black defendants. The “single most important factor in determining whether someone will receive a death sentence is not the crime they are accused of but the jurisdiction where the crime took place.”
Still, our government continues to go about the pursuit of “looking for a humane way to kill”—an endeavor that Dehghani-Tafti, Satterberg, and Krinsky wrote has taken us “from torturous methods like public burnings to hangings to electric chairs.”
The attorneys wrote:
”After the state of Oklahoma killed John Grant last October, it announced that his execution had been carried out ‘without complication.’ The autopsy results, however, painted a different picture: In the nearly 15 minutes it took Grant to die, his lungs filled with fluid, which can create a sensation not unlike drowning, as he choked on his own vomit while struggling to breathe.
That is the fate we risk subjecting innocent people to when we continue to allow state-sanctioned executions.
Contribute to organizing and advocacy to end capital punishment
Texas Republicans waste billions on border theatrics often saved for when Democrats are in power
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ProPublica and Marshall Project’s new joint investigation reveals that Texas Govs. Rick Perry (remember him?) and Greg Abbott cumulatively spent billions in taxpayer funds on supposed border initiatives over nearly two decades, without much of anything to show for it.
But wait, that’s not exactly true. The joint report reveals the launch of these initiatives “often coincided with their gubernatorial campaigns or times when they were considering bids for higher office,” or when Democrats controlled parts of the federal government.
Case in point: Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy, invoked under false pretenses in March 2020, created a spike in apprehensions at the southern border during the insurrectionist president’s term. But did Abbott launch his multibillion dollar Operation Lone Star scheme at that time? Nope—he waited until a year later when Joe Biden was in office.
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The joint ProPublica and Marshall Project investigation said that from 2005 on, the governors “persuaded the Texas Legislature to spend billions of dollars on border security measures that included at least nine operations and several smaller initiatives.” While Perry’s spending was certainly not chump change in the least—like the $110 million allocated for the border in 2007—it pales in comparison to Abbott’s spending.
The joint report said that the deployment of soldiers alone as part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star scheme is costing taxpayers more than $2 million a week. “The Texas Military Department estimates that the current deployment of 10,000 National Guard members will cost an additional $2 billion a year, nearly five times what the Legislature had budgeted for the deployment,” the report said.
These deployments have been hugely unpopular among soldiers themselves, who have described “chronic underpayment issues,” “lack of proper equipment and sleeping facilities,” and a general question of “What the fuck are we doing here?” There have also been a number of tragic suicides among soldiers linked to the scheme.
ProPublica, Marshall Project, and The Texas Tribune have previously noted that Abbott’s office has touted Operation Lone Star as a success, but has steadily fought records requests that would back up that claim. They noted that Texas boasted of drug seizures by counties that weren’t even receiving Operation Lone Star funds. ProPublica and Marshall Project in the new report say Perry also publicized drugs seized through his Operation Strong Safety II despite the fact that it “contributed to less than 10% of the operation’s drug seizures.”
Like Abbott, Perry used vile rhetoric to justify his own measures, claiming without proof that brown gang members were “torturing, kidnapping and murdering citizens on both sides of the border,” the report said. It also noted that Perry falsely claimed in 2008 that hundreds of people with “terrorist ties” had been stopped at the Texas border since 2006.
”A 2021 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian organization in Washington, D.C., found that between 1975 and 2020, just nine people who were later convicted of planning a terrorist attack had entered the country illegally,” the report continued. Of these nine, three arrived through the southern border. Perry just flat-out lied and claimed more than 430 suspected people in a two-year period alone. Bad dancer, even worse liar.
“Billions of dollars have been spent trying to ‘secure’ the border,” tweeted RAICES. “You could argue that this money was spent on ‘border security theater’, militarizing the border, for political gains, and not much else.” Meanwhile, Abbott further hurt Texans through the disastrous inspections he ended after blowback. “Abbott’s chaos at the border just cost the Texas economy $4.23 billion,” tweeted Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke. “All so he could get 3 minutes and 20 seconds with Tucker Carlson.That’s a $1.27 billion a minute campaign ad—paid for by the people of Texas.”
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Proud Boy Henry 'Enrique' Tarrio wants out of jail as new trial date on the horizon
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Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the ex-leader of the extremist group the Proud Boys—which is now accused by U.S. prosecutors of organizing an extensive conspiracy to obstruct the proceedings of Congress on Jan. 6—has a date with a federal judge on Thursday.
At that appearance before Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington, D.C., he will be joined by co-defendants and fellow Proud Boys Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. Kelly is expected to lock in a new trial date after the May 18 date was pushed back.
In the meantime, Tarrio has asked the judge to let him out of jail: He’s willing to fork over $1 million in assets to do it. The judge has indicated he won’t approve the request.
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A “multitude” of Tarrio’s family members are the ones he says are willing to stake their Florida homes on his vow to behave if the judge lets him out before trial.
Authorities hauled the Miami, Florida, resident away 44 days ago after he was indicted on conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; aiding and abetting that obstruction; obstruction of law enforcement; destruction of government property; and assaulting, impeding, or resisting law enforcement.
Tarrio Motion for Pretrial Release April 18 2022 by Daily Kos on Scribd
Two weeks ago, another one of Tarrio’s release requests was shot down after he was hauled before a judge in Florida.
He posed too great a danger to the community, Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis found. Louis was less concerned that Tarrio would flee; rather, it was Tarrio’s history of overlapping criminal conduct, alleged or otherwise, that raised her hackles.
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Tarrio was arrested on Jan. 4 in Washington, D.C., for carrying high-capacity magazines. He was dispatched by police within 24 hours. He also had an outstanding warrant related to an incident in December when he was last in D.C.: Tarrio had burned a Black Lives Matter flag that he stole from a church.
Louis noted how the last time Tarrio was released on bond, according to prosecutors, he conspired to obstruct Congress.
His attorney, Nayib Hassan, argued to Kelly that Tarrio never harassed or assaulted anyone on Jan. 6, nor did he “commit any acts of violence.”
“He did not enter the Capitol,” Hassan wrote, adding that Tarrio would not use internet at home and would effectively cut himself off from all social media access if released into the custody of his family.
Tarrio’s attorney could not immediately be reached for comment by Daily Kos on Wednesday.
Tarrio still owes just over $1 million in restitution for a conviction from 2013: Tarrio stole diabetic test strips from Abbott Laboratories. He served just over half of the 30-month sentence. Though he owed $1.2 million, Tarrio has only paid roughly $2,000 of that amount, according to prosecutors.
Meanwhile, another alt-right personality facing altogether separate and lesser charges, Anthime “Tim” Gionet, appears to be cracking under pressure. Gionet, a far-right activist also known as “Baked Alaska,” was formally charged with a single misdemeanor for parading on April 19.
BuzzFeed reporter Zoe Tillman noted Tuesday this could be a sign that a plea agreement may soon be on the horizon.
Another conservative book purge targets Black authors, LGBT acceptance, and government itself
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Every story about the conservative book-banning movement is the same. It’s all the same crap every time because the dynamics of the movement are the same everywhere you go. The agenda is no different from what it was when the current crop of book-banners were freaking out about desegregation, or complaining about fictional television character Murphy Brown, or the time brickheaded Tennessee lawmakers saw a janitor’s mop sink in a closet and convinced themselves it had been installed for Secret Muslim Rituals.
The Washington Post gives us a new version of the story from Llano, Texas, and it hits all the usual notes: One or more hyper-conservative zealots with free time on their hands and a lifetime of carefully nurtured ignorance offers up a list of supposedly “pornographic” books. An assemblage of like-minded community paranoids leaps at the opportunity to prove that they, too, live to be Outraged About Things, and so the town’s farthest-right and most eager-to-provoke clan uses their outrage to wound or destroy previously quiet local institutions.
But none of the people who rode the outrage trolley to newfound positions of power know a single damn thing about anything, and by God nobody’s going to make them learn because everybody knows expertise is communism, and so whatever the actual supposed “agenda” was supposed to be when those first flyers were sketched out immediately devolves into whatever personal agendas the self-appointed conservative heroes have most on their minds.
And that is how, yet again, you get a local religious zealot and a small-time political figure launching a war against “pornography” that Lo And Behold just happens to focus nearly exclusively on purging books about Black Americans, books by Black Americans, and anything that even hints at sex education but especially any material that might convince teens struggling with their own sexual identity to consider accepting themselves as a valid alternative to suicide.
How did Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me end up on the initial list of “pornographic filth” that needed to be moved to the “Adult” section of the local library? Because it is about racism, and it is on every conservative list of books to be objected to. Our heroine has no doubt never so much as laid eyes on a copy. How is it that Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a book about systemic racism, disappeared from library shelves during the conservatives’ review of library shelves? Because it is also about racism, and the current conservative movement—liberated from pretense now that even Fox News is thumping white supremacist themes loudly and often—has declared that merely mentioning past racism is a conspiracy against white people.
The books being most consistently targeted consist of those (1) by non-white authors, (2) with non-white characters, or (3) that mention homosexuality or bisexuality in any format. Once again Republicanism has managed to coincidentally choose as their enemies the precise enemies that Nazi Germany declared to be undesirables. How very odd, says nobody who actually reads books from their local library as opposed to just thumbing through them looking for swear words.
Because the American conservative movement is also obsessed with restricting knowledge in general, however, the movement also has as its target any book that describes human sexual biology in any manner at all. We are now in the rather remarkable place where Tucker Carlson is devoting airtime to—and this is true—explaining why conservative men should be irradiating their testicles to boost their testosterone levels, but if a panicking adolescent girl wants to know why blood is trickling out of her vagina, no adult is allowed to explain it to her or provide a book that would.
Conservatism! Jesus! And so on.
Incidentally, and this is truly off topic, but if conservative male Carlson fans want to follow his advice and irradiate their own reproductive organs? By all means. You’ll get better results the more you do it. There may be very small microwave ovens that could speed things along, and I cannot emphasize enough how much Carlson fans, in particular, ought to be irradiating their reproductive parts as often and for as long as possible.
That aside, the rest of the Post‘s story is as rote as can be. We’ve got the small-time Texas judge ordering the local library to stop new book purchases and pull any books “with photos of naked or sexual conduct regardless if they are animated or actual photos,” which means somebody now needs to explain to him, probably in writing, why very few books tend to have ‘animated’ pictures and he probably meant to say something else. We’ve got that same judge ominously writing that the county “is not mandated by law to provide a public library” at all, if it comes down to it, which we can presume is the Plan B if too much of the community starts objecting too loudly.
We’ve got conservative county commissioners purging the local library board, booting out all the longtime volunteers who acted with knowledge of and devotion to their county’s libraries, and a new board filled with, you guessed it, the loudest advocates for removing books.
Lest you think any expertise was lost in the transition, fear not. The new conservative library board receives regular advice from God Almighty Himself, reports the Post:
“Panel members often stop to pray over questions brought up in meetings, and until the Lord answers, they can’t resolve them, according to county officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.”
Uncanny! Remarkable! Not only does the Lord Himself personally act as adviser and parliamentarian and secretary during the new library board’s meetings, it turns out that He is ragingly racist, giving the secret nod to purging the exact lists of books that the conservative appointees themselves previously wrote out in their lists! And can you witness this miracle of God and government, down in Llano County, Texas? No. No you absolutely cannot.
Because one of the first things the new board did was close their meetings to the public after a few members of the public were spotted taking notes during a meeting. Ah, yes, and now we’ve stumbled into the usual conservative movement demand that government be made less accountable and in fact need not justify its decisions at all, so long as conservatives are in charge of them. Again, uncanny.
So to sum up: A single angry conservative of the sort who believes they have a direct line to God, who shares all their own gut instincts on everything, popped up with a list of books to be disputed that she had not read herself but had simply cribbed from some other conservative group milking the same cow. They convinced a local judge to march into the library to seize books about The Pornographies. The growing movement convinced the county commission to purge local libraries of anyone with experience or who argued against one-party censorship, got themselves put into those now-empty positions of minor power, got freaked out when other members of their local community started taking notes about what they themselves were doing—after they had literally shouted and bullied the previous appointees out of their positions, which was according to them just fine because when Jesus is behind you you’re allowed to be as cruel and tell as many lies as you want—and are now holed up in secret non-public meetings where they hold seances with Jesus to make decisions about rote library management that they can’t figure out how to handle themselves. Because they got here by being loud, outraged know-nothing theocratic bullshit-shrieking paranoid bullies and don’t have any other skillset that would apply here.
Yeah, sounds about right. Do it in Florida and movement suck-up Gov. Ron DeSantis will launch himself in your direction for a photo-op faster than you can say Maurice Sendak.
Oh, you might notice that the same movement removing books about menstrual cycles while obsessively watching Carlson shows devoted to becoming more of a man through the power of testicular irradiation was not long ago up in absolute nation-shaking arms because the family of Dr. Seuss removed, from sale, a few books that had:
Blatantly.
Racist.
Old.
Caricatures.
… and conservatives flocked to local libraries and Amazon and elsewhere to demand that their children be allowed to see the racist drawings and that anyone trying to keep their children from being able to enjoy the racist drawings was A Communist.
It took Llano, Texas, not much time at all to go from those heady days to producing lists of books by Black authors that needed to be locked away. And it is all because God, we are told, and nobody is allowed to question that because suggesting that a group of bullshitting local theocrats is faking their connection to God in order to justify their own personal racism and hypersexual perversion (don’t miss the Post detail that the main instigator of this local anti-library effort responded to a Beatrix Potter-themed library fundraiser and petting zoo by hosting an “adults only” video about pedophilia next door, which is definitely normal behavior and certainly not evidence of Q-laced paranoias that run so deep that somebody should maybe taking a quick look in this person’s basement!). Because that would make them feel bad.
And you’re literally not allowed to make white racist conservatives feel bad. That’s the whole point of the book purges. If there’s a book about racism in the library or a book that suggests that LGBT human beings exist despite conservatives demanding they not exist, it will make the shouting angry bullshitters feel bad. Which is oppression, and is in fact the only sort of oppression you are allowed to acknowledge as existing.
Well, there you go. The same story as always, with the same beats, the same list of “unacceptable” books shoveled full of Black American authors but somehow declared to be indecent. And really, I cannot emphasize enough how much all of these people should be irradiating their own private parts as often as possible using whatever tools Carlson wants to help sell them. Please. There may be no act that perfectly encapsulates the state of modern America fascism more than that one does.
Refusing to be vaccinated during a worldwide pandemic because you think it might turn you magnetic? That comes close. But this is better.
Biden administration is helping millions more student borrowers, but still no word on a big fix
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The Biden administration is taking another step to ease student debt for millions of borrowers—while still falling short of universal loan forgiveness. Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans were supposed to allow student borrowers who couldn’t afford large monthly payments to make payments they could afford for 20 to 25 years, and then have the balance of their loans forgiven. But, like the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, IDR has been a mismanaged mess. As of 2021, 4.4 million people had been paying into IDR programs for 20 years or longer. Just 32 people—yes, a three followed by a two with no other digits—had had their loans forgiven.
Now, the Education Department is making changes to the program, trying to fix decades of gross mismanagement by both the department itself and the student loan servicers handling the millions of loans. At least 40,000 borrowers will have their loans immediately forgiven, the agency estimates, because they will now qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Another several thousand will qualify for forgiveness through IDR. But millions more will be moved closer to eventual forgiveness through several fixes.
RELATED STORY: ‘In shock’: Public servants celebrate as loan forgiveness program finally starts working
First, there will be a “one-time account adjustment” for borrowers “steered or inappropriately placed into long-term forbearances.” Forbearance allows people to pause payments during periods of financial difficulty—but interest keeps accumulating, and there is supposed to be a 12-month limit on any single period of forbearance, and a cumulative limit of 36 months. Violations of those limits have been “remarkably widespread,” the Education Department said, hitting “more than 13% of all Direct Loan borrowers between July 2009 and March 2020.” In other words, loan servicers were putting people into forbearance who should have been steered into IDR plans where their payments could have been as low as $0 a month for those whose income was less than 150% of the poverty line. Long periods of forbearance will now count as months of qualifying payments, with 3.6 million people getting at least 36 months of credit toward cancellation and millions more getting shorter lengths of credit.
Next, in a “one-time revision” of past payments, “Any months in which borrowers made payments will count toward IDR, regardless of repayment plan. Payments made prior to consolidation on consolidated loans will also count.”
The Education Department is also going to work to fix the loan servicers’ massive failures to track what people actually owed and paid. Some servicers just didn’t bother to track people’s progress toward IDR cancellation, NPR reported at the beginning of the month. Borrowers at one servicer would have had to request a manual check of their past payments to even know how much progress they had made. When borrowers were shifted from one servicer to another—which happens when people default and again when they return to good standing—technological problems meant that their records of qualifying payments were entirely lost. It’s a situation so bad that even an expert at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute called it “horrible.”
Unfortunately, while these changes will happen automatically, they won’t happen immediately. The Education Department needs to upgrade the National Student Loan Data System, which is expected to take until fall. Currently, federal student loan repayments are paused until August 31. It seems like a no-brainer that if this set of changes haven’t been made by then and no other broader student debt fix has been announced by the administration, that pause should be extended until the data system is ready to go.
In its announcement of the IDR changes, the Education Department noted its past moves to forgive student debt:
- $6.8 billion for more than 113,000 public servants through improvements to PSLF;
- $7.8 billion for more than 400,000 borrowers who have a total and permanent disability;
- $1.2 billion for borrowers who attended ITT Technical Institutes before it closed; and
- Nearly $2 billion to 105,000 borrowers who were defrauded by their school.
What none of that is, of course, is universal student loan forgiveness. The $17 billion that adds up to is a lot of money … if you don’t put it in the context of the $1.75 trillion in overall student debt. Fixing programs that have never worked as they were intended and wiping out debt for people who were actively defrauded is good, but it doesn’t address the larger structural problem here. President Joe Biden campaigned on forgiving $10,000 in student debt for everyone, but he hasn’t done that broadly, instead offering forgiveness targeted to specific groups. It’s time to make good on that promise.
RELATED STORIES:
The Biden administration is pausing federal student loans again, but no word on actual forgiveness
‘Pick a fight’: Time for Biden to spar with Republicans over his enormously popular economic agenda
Biden administration overhauls broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness program
GOP-sponsored bill allowing parents to sue teachers for ‘usurping’ their rights clears the Senate
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An Arizona bill just centimeters away from passage could make it a lot easier for parents to sue their children’s teachers.
The bill gives parents the right to take teachers to court and file a civil suit against them or any other state or federal official for “usurping the fundamental right” to “direct the upbringing, education, health care and mental health of their children” as a violation of the Arizona Parents’ Bill of Rights law.
RELATED STORY: Florida is on the attack again, this time targeting math books they claim contain CRT content
The catalyst for the bill, Raw Story reports, was “inappropriate questions” on student surveys, sent out from schools to help uncover any mental health issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, as with so much of the recent restrictive education legislation that’s been proposed and passed by the GOP—like alleged critical race theory (CRT) content in math books and book banning—proponents use transparency as their primary excuse.
One school survey, sent out in October 2021 had parents up in arms. According to the Cañon City Daily Record, the survey included questions about sexual identity and bullying.
A month after the survey was sent out, one parent at a school board meeting in Cañon City, Arizona, complained that she was given “no warning from the school” about the “discussion on life choices,” adding that she should have “had the chance to have a discussion” before the survey was sent.
“These surveys should not dictate what we teach our children,” said Cindy Nordell, a mother of four. “These questions have no basis for building learning foundations for our students.”
Nordell then demanded that in the future all surveys be published in a local paper in order for the local school board to offer full transparency.
Sponsored by Republican Rep. Steve Kaiser, HB 2161 started out with an even more bizarre twist: Initially, the bill would have required teachers to tell parents everything a student told them, including a student’s confidential information to a teacher about their gender or sexual preference. That part, thankfully, was removed.
Senate GOP super PAC playing a lot of defense for a supposed red-wave environment
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The 2022 Senate map is taking shape after outside groups for both parties placed initial ad buys for their top targets totaling nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.
The GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund super PAC dropped a record-breaking early investment of $141 million centered on seven states. Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC booked ad reservations totaling $106 million in five states. Both parties will surely invest more money later, but below is how the top tier generally shakes out.
| $37 million | $25 million |
| $24 million | $26 million |
| $27 million | — |
| $15 million | $21 million |
| $15 million | $12 million |
| $14 million | $22 million |
| $7.4 million | — |
One thing that jumps out immediately is the fact that the New Hampshire seat held by Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan is nowhere to be found on either list, which is likely due to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s misfire on recruiting the state’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu, to run.
Another revelation given a political environment that supposedly favors Republicans by a lot is the fact that they are playing a whole lot of defense to save GOP-held seats. In fact, at $66 million, Republicans are spending roughly the same as Democrats are to defend seats: $68 million. For the GOP, that figure includes open Senate seats in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, plus Sen. Ron Johnson’s seat in Wisconsin. (It does not include Alaska, where Senate Republicans are mainly defending Sen. Lisa Murkowski against Trump-inspired primary challenges.)
Amid all that defense, GOP Senate Leadership Fund President Steven Law is talking up what a “strong” environment it is for Republicans. “This is such a strong year that we need to invest as broadly and deeply as we can,” Law told Politico.
Democrats are protecting three incumbents in Georgia (Sen. Raphael Warnock), Arizona (Sen. Mark Kelly), and Nevada (Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto).
In terms of pickups, Republicans appear to be betting the farm on Georgia, where they are saddled with Trump-backed political neophyte and alleged wife abuser Herschel Walker. Democrats clearly see their best pickup opportunity in Pennsylvania, where Trump recently endorsed fellow TV huckster Dr. Mehmet Oz. In both states, Trump’s meddling has complicated the path for Republicans (not to mention the Trump effect in North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio).
“While Senate Democrats have a favorable map and strong incumbents, Senate Republicans have suffered a series of recruitment failures, and their flawed candidates are locked in vicious, expensive intra-party fights,” David Bergstein, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson, told The Hill. “All of these factors have contributed towards putting the GOP on defense in Senate races.”
Yep, that about covers it. Also, don’t sleep on Ohio, Florida, or North Carolina, where Democrats are fielding strong candidates who could potentially capitalize on GOP missteps.
Who cares about an insurrection? An interview with Jan. 6 investigator Jamie Raskin
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I last interviewed Rep. Jamie Raskin in October 2020, before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Our conversation was about the guardrails that the Constitution has in place to stop a tyrant from taking power.
There was no mystery about then-President Donald Trump’s position in public. He had spent months vowing fraud would be overwhelming in the impending election. When he took the stage for the very first night of presidential debates with now President Joe Biden, Trump told the world he would not accept any outcome he believed was rigged.
In the days since then, the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol was formed and it has unearthed staggering evidence that Donald Trump, the nation’s 45th president, not only incited a mob to a bloody insurrection but perpetrated a fraud on the American public so that he could pull off a coup that would install him into the White House against the will of millions of voters and the Electoral College.
Recently, I interviewed Rep. Raskin again. He now serves as a member of the Jan. 6 committee, a role that was arguably an unmatched fit not just because of his experience as a constitutional and legal scholar, but because of his direct experience with Trump. Raskin was the lead impeachment manager when Trump was impeached—for the second time.
Telling the story of Jan. 6 is a formidable task and the passing months have revealed increasingly critical nuances and contours emerging from that day’s chaos.
There is evidence of a crime. A federal judge has agreed with the select committee on that count and over the course of a contentious battle for key documents, a judge determined that, at the very least, the “illegality of the plan” orchestrated by Trump and his attorney John Eastman—the architect of a strategy pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to certify bunk electors—was “obvious.”
Trump and his attorneys stoked claims of bogus election fraud for months and with Eastman, Trump engaged in a “coup in search of legal theory,” Judge David Carter wrote just a month ago.
Judge David Carter Ruling_Trump Eastman by Daily Kos on Scribd
And yet there is still so much more to come.
There are questions that must be aired out about this attempted coup and its abettors.
When the committee finally resumes its public hearings, which it says will be in May, Rep. Raskin told Daily Kos they will be hearings unlike anything Americans have seen come out of Congress.
“We believe every American has the right to observe and participate in this. I believe based on what I have seen over the last several months, these hearings will be not just important but mesmerizing to the public,” Raskin said. “Everybody needs to be equipped with the means of intellectual self defense against the authoritarian and fascistic policies that have been unleashed in this country.”
So far, the probe has released limited information about its findings and it has navigated the course of its investigation with deft yet disciplined transparency, despite regular attacks and goading from those perched atop some of the highest branches of power in Congress like House Minority Leader and Trump ally Kevin McCarthy.
The panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans has largely established its intent and findings on the public record through its court filings and subpoenas and from House meetings on Capitol Hill, where they have forwarded criminal contempt of Congress referrals for members of the Trump White House who have obstructed their investigation.
Those referrals for officials like former chief of staff Mark Meadows, ex-adviser Steve Bannon, and others now live with the Department of Justice, a body ensconced in an entirely separate yet similarly painstaking investigation of the Capitol attack, its catalysts, and alleged conspirators.
“The events of Jan. 6 were breathtaking,” Raskin said by phone, taking a moment to gather his thoughts before considering the scope of what lies ahead.
A daunting amount of information will be parsed, prioritized, and presented from the 800-plus interviews the panel has conducted and the thousands of pages of records it has secured from a wide array of players spanning the Trump White House to the Trump reelection campaign to extremist right-wing activists and others.
That doesn’t even mention everything that was also sourced from the National Archives following Biden’s waiver of executive privilege over presidential records Trump sought to hide.
That bid by Trump, taken all the way to the Supreme Court, ultimately failed to keep documents like White House call logs hidden and more of Trump’s presidential records continue to flood the committee now.
RELATED STORY: Let’s talk about the White House call logs from Jan. 6
But until the hearings play out, the public is left to grapple with important information in bits and pieces as investigators occasionally and, likely strategically, highlight portions of their findings at a schedule of their choosing.
Speculation swirls around the committee’s work on a fact-based narrative it is crafting for hearings and that is to be expected.
There are inherent difficulties in this unprecedented undertaking.
“Well, people still have not yet fully understood the distinction between the violent insurrection and the attempted coup. Even with the insurrection, even within the insurrectionary violence, a lot of people think that this was just a rowdy demonstration that got out of hand,” Raskin told Daily Kos.
And of course, Trump. Raskin added, is “out there telling people his mob greeted officers with hugs and kisses.”
“So there’s a lot of confusion about what took place. And I think people will come to understand that this was a premeditated and coordinated violent attack on Congress and the vice president in order to thwart the counting of electoral votes,” Raskin said.
“But the insurrection is only comprehensible when you understand that it was unleashed as a way to assist this political coup, this inside political coup. Donald Trump and his entourage had been looking for ways to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results for months,” Raskin said.
What the public hearings will do is tell the story of “every step in that process,” he explained.
“And it is a harrowing and gripping and utterly sobering story rooted in the events of the day and the weeks before it,” he added.
RELATED STORY: Tick-tock: A timeline of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol
Millions of Americans have seen footage of rioters beating police, scaling the walls of the nation’s Capitol building, and doing so in everything from homemade to high-grade tactical gear and with makeshift or professional-grade weapons in tow.
Millions of Americans have heard the calls of people shouting for the execution of Pence or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the melee erupted. Many people saw the gallows erected by Trump’s supporters on the Capitol lawn.
But a disconnect seems to persist somehow around how severe and significant Jan. 6 was and remains.
The Pew Research Center, for example, noted this February that more than a year after the attack, fewer Americans believed Trump was responsible for the events of Jan. 6. It was a nearly 10% drop from the year before.
The study found too that people are still largely divided a year later on whether the Jan. 6 probe is even given the “right amount” of attention.
“The difficult thing is that people have a very hard time assimilating something so extreme taking place right at the heart of the Capitol. We saw a violent mob led by insurrectionary violent extremists set upon federal officers and injure and wound and hospitalize more than 150 of them,” Raskin said.
It was the first time in American history that a violent insurrection interfered with the peaceful transfer of power and counting of electoral votes.
“It nearly toppled our system of government,” Raskin added.
The idea of a coup is “radically unfamiliar” to the bulk of the American population, he noted.
“We’re just not—we just don’t have a lot of experience with coups in our own society. We think of a coup as something that takes place against a president. Well, this was a coup that was orchestrated by the president against the vice president and against the Congress,” Raskin said. “It’s what political scientists call a self-coup, not the military trying to overthrow a president but a president trying to defeat and vanquish the constitutional process in order to perpetuate his stay in office and power. Donald Trump was trying to seize the presidency for four more years.”
When Judge Carter issued his ruling about Trump and Eastman on March 28, it was a deeply important finding but it did not shift or change the committee’s trajectory, he said.
It only “solidified” the path they were on.
“It was a powerful warning to the American people about what took place,” he said.
If they missed that warning bell, however, the committee will keep ringing it.
The committee will produce its final report after the hearings are over. Raskin told Daily Kos he hopes it will be a “multimedia report” that will be both easily accessible and digestible.
It will be composed of the committee’s findings as well as recommendations for legislation that would strengthen many of the weak points in the democratic system that the Trump White House undermined or exploited.
“There’s no reason this report has to be a 500-page document written by a computer somewhere. We can write the report in such a way that it really does wake the country up to the nature of the threats that we’ve just dodged and the threats that remain,” Raskin said.
To wit, when the committee holds its public hearings, the Justice Department’s prosecution of those who stormed the Capitol will keep rolling.
At the top of April, the DOJ announced it had arrested nearly 800 defendants and charged over 250 people so far with serious crimes including assaulting police and using a deadly weapon to injure an officer.
More than 248 people have entered guilty pleas, copping to misdemeanors and felony charges alike.
The most serious charges— like seditious conspiracy—have been leveled at some of the president’s most ardent supporters, namely the ringleaders and members of domestic extremist networks like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
Trump told the latter group in September 2020 to “stand back and stand by” when asked on a presidential debate stage if he would condemn white supremacy and militia groups.
“Who would you like me to condemn? The Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s gotta do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, this is a left-wing problem,” Trump said.
The dog-whistle was well received by Proud Boys and their leader Henry Tarrio.
“Standing by,” Tarrio responded on Parler. “So proud of my guys right now.”
Others, like Proud Boy Joe Biggs, took it as a direct cue to attack those opposed to Trump.
“Trump basically said to go fuck them up!” Biggs wrote.
Tarrio was indicted on March 8 for conspiracy to obstruct congressional proceedings on Jan. 6 as well as several other charges. Biggs—and many other Proud Boys—were indicted alongside him and separately.
Oath Keeper leader Elmer Rhodes’s seditious conspiracy trial is currently slated for September. One of the key members in the group charged alongside Rhodes, Alabama Oath Keeper chapter leader Joshua James, has already flipped.
James admitted he was dispatched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 by Rhodes as part of an organized conspiracy to stop proceedings. James told prosecutors he was prepared to use force to keep Trump in power.
While the committee’s work and the DOJ’s work operate on entirely different tracks and timetables, Raskin said when the committee makes its case to the public, the panel won’t shy away from presenting any of the relevant details shaken loose by the DOJ.
“To the extent there are factual findings related to these cases, yes, we will be able to use those,” he said.
Juries will decide the fates of those charged with seditious conspiracy. The Justice Department will decide the fate of those the committee has referred for criminal contempt of Congress.
These are the facts.
For those cynical or skeptical about what the committee’s hearings will achieve or accomplish, Raskin offered a message for those feeling faint of heart.
Before speaking, the congressman paused for just a moment.
“Look,” he said, “For the greater part—for the duration of the human species—people have lived under tyrants and dictators and bullies and kings like Vladimir Putin and all of his sycophants around the world. Democracy, democratic self-governance is still a very fragile experiment. And democracy thrives on truth. The people need to be armed with the power that truth will give us.”
U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who endured racial slurs and assault for hours while defending the Capitol to the brink of exhaustion told Daily Kos in a recent interview when it comes to Jan. 6: “The truth is the truth.”
If people will believe the truth when they hear it, well, he knows it is not for him to decide.
But he did have one question.
“How the hell is anyone against finding out the full truth?” Dunn said.
Ukraine update: Pentagon thinks big Russian offensive is still to come, because so far this is lame
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Exactly a week ago, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) concluded that “Russian forces will likely continue ongoing offensive operations in the Donbas region, feeding reinforcements into the fight as they become available rather than gathering reinforcements and replacements for a more coordinated and coherent offensive.” That’s exactly what seems to be happening now as Russia pushes broadly across the entire Donbas front lines, but exercises overwhelming force absolutely nowhere.
Ukraine has declared the start of the much-anticipated Russian offensive, but the Pentagon is less sure.
As the Pentagon sees it, Russia is merely softening up the frontlines for something bigger down the line. It could very well be that, because despite the massive artillery barrages, Russia’s gains have been minimal, mostly ground assaults repulsed by Ukrainian defenders. So really, more of the same, just at a higher intensity.
So why are they wasting men and material with these probes? Apparently, it’s what they do.
The source for this information is Oleksiy Arestovych, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Dmitri helpfully translates his regular dispatches. (In fact, Dmitri’s Twitter account is one of the most informative around.) So according to Arestovych, Russians send a probe, see what happens. If Ukrainians blow up the cannon fodder? Good to know! That area is well-protected, let’s avoid it. But hey, this other advance received minimal resistance, and they lay down artillery to soften it up even more. And then? … Seriously, and then? With a competent military, you have a rear force that can then exploit the breach and push forward, taking additional ground while the original spear holds the breach open, protecting it from counter-attack. Here, Russia sends cannon fodder to die, and then sends some new cannon fodder somewhere else, and they’re laying artillery down the entire front anyway.
It’s so weird, it almost seems like fiction. Are Russians really that incompetent, stupid, and callous toward the death of their service members? And yet here they are, still probing, still losing men and equipment to drip-drip-drip attacks, even though their big offensive is supposedly underway. The spigot is yet to open. That’s why the Pentagon must think, “This can’t be it. There has to be more coming down the pike.”
All those troops being thrown into the wood chipper have to be replaced. And the Ukrainian General Staff has an ill view of them:
[S]eparate units of the 103th, 109th, 113th, 125th and 127th [motorized] regiment operate. Their equipment was carried out during the forced mobilization of men from the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The structurally-appointed regimes include up to 5 battalions counting about 300 soldiers each. Only 5-10 percent of the personal composition of the specified units have combat experience. The regiment management consists of officers of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. These formations have significant problems with providing weapons, ammunition and medicines.
So the result is forced conscripts like this guy, with no combat experience, zero training, and only 300 soldiers per battalion that are supposed to have 800 to 1,000. (Remember that when the Pentagon says there are 78 BTGs in Ukraine right now. They’re not all created equal.) Their purpose is cannon fodder in human-wave attacks, to see whether an approach is defended by Ukrainians. They are literally dead men walking. Their best chance of survival is mutiny and desertion … to the west. Russians soldiers pulled out of Kyiv certainly have zero interest in getting thrown back into the line of fire. Others in Donbas are refusing orders to advance to combat. (See here, here, here and here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Assuming some sort of major offensive will at some point take place (still not convinced it will), its early results will determine the mid-term outcome of the war. If Russia advances and Ukraine is unable to hold, morale will increase and Russia will be able to manage some level of unit cohesion. But if they hit brick wall after brick wall, suffering horrendous casualties in the process, that army could disintegrate overnight. Endless parades of casualties, wet and cold from spring rains, and leadership that treats them as garbage take a toll. More artillery guns and ammo would further compound that misery. As Russia knows, artillery is a powerful psychological weapon, traumatizing more than it’ll ever directly kill.
With American, Dutch, and Canadian artillery starting to flow to Ukraine, their ability to return the favor is getting a huge boost in the coming weeks. Ukraine can withstand the barrages because they have no choice—they’re fighting an existential battle for their survival. But those Russian and Donbas conscripts? They don’t need this shit. They don’t see any Nazis.
As Mark pointed out earlier, Ukrainian forces are actually advancing in several locations, including the eastern front. This is not Ukraine on its back heels. This is a confident, aggressive, smart, and increasingly well-equipped defensive force using its superior intelligence, better-trained soldiers, and tactically smarter command (all the way down to the squad level with a real NCO culture) to bedevil an outclassed, outmaneuvered, and poorly motivated enemy.
Can Russia cobble something together to push harder? Maybe. Lots of war will still be fought. But Russia better hope this isn’t the actual massive offensive they’ve been promising. Otherwise, there’s not much war left.