Independent News
Democratic Party approves rules allowing states to compete for first-in-the-nation status
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After a long, long period of knowing there was a problem but not doing much about it, the Democratic National Committee is finally allowing other states to challenge Iowa and New Hampshire for their “first in the nation” positions at the front of each presidential election’s Democratic nomination campaign. On Wednesday the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee kicked off an “application” process inviting states to make their own cases for “first in the nation” status.
Up to five such states will be selected, up from the current four, and there’s nothing here that says Iowa and New Hampshire won’t be chosen to fill two of those slots. But they also aren’t guaranteed those spots, which is a ground-shaking change and one that the two states have resisted with all their might and more than a little vitriol.
There are several reasons for the reform. The Iowa Democratic Party did itself no favors with some truly spectacular technical screw-ups during the last caucuses, and even without those disasters other Democratic-leaning states have long complained that the Iowa-New Hampshire lock on kicking off primary season is unfair and that at the least, those first slots should be rotated so that more state Democratic parties can benefit from the national political coverage those first contests bring in.
There’s a far more pernicious problem with Iowa and New Hampshire’s special status, however.
The two states are among the most white states in the Democratic camp, making them increasingly unrepresentative of the Democratic Party’s national coalitions. That lack of diversity means the two states’ positions as Democratic bellwethers are tenuous at best; Joe Biden was reduced to an also-ran in both states during the 2020 primaries, only to go on to dominate his opponents once the voting moved to more diverse southern states.
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That reversal of fortune was predicted by polling and came as no great surprise to campaign experts, but it again demonstrated that Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t great choices if the party wants the first positions to give insight as to how the rest of the race might play out. The two states don’t have such predictive power, and it can even be argued that by skewing media coverage toward whatever candidates 1) have mastered the unique campaign requirements of those two states, and 2) are most favored by mostly-white Democrats, that guaranteed-first status is reliably confusing the status of the race rather than clarifying it.
A more sensible approach would choose the five “first” states to be representative of their regions, and would offer true “first” status to none of them. Most state parties would be glad to have national reporters descend on their diners for the omnipresent stories about how things look on the ground; it allows downballot candidates to get a minor boost of attention earlier in the race than they otherwise might, and allows state party functionaries to boost their own profiles so as to better support those state candidates later on.
In theory, that’s likely the approach the DNC will now take. But it’s also pretty likely the DNC will ease into any such transition in a way that keeps Iowa and New Hampshire near the front of the line because Politics (for now). So don’t be surprised if both states end up among the five for purely, ahem, “traditional” reasons.
Thursday, Apr 14, 2022 · 9:40:47 PM +00:00
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Hunter
While it remains possible that Iowa could retain its first in the nation status by applying and being selected for it, a rules committee member notes via e-mail that the party’s preference for primaries over caucuses will make it ‘very’ difficult. It’s very likely that the number one spot will indeed go to some other state.
BIPOC gig workers are more likely to be killed on the job, new report says
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by Umme Hoque
This story was originally published at Prism.
Allyssa Lewis spoke to her sister, Isabella, the morning before Isabella died. Allyssa said she called to ask if Isabella could help her do her hair for her birthday, but her older sister was planning to drive for Lyft that day, so they agreed to check in later. At 26 years old, Isabella was doing gig work to make ends meet while simultaneously working for Blue Cross.
Shortly after their phone call, Isabella picked up her first passenger in Garland, Texas. Video footage would later show struggling and the assailant dragging her out of the car before speeding away. Isabella was shot in the side of the head for a fare of around $15.
Despite the fact that she was driving for Lyft, her family still hasn’t heard from the company directly and hasn’t received any financial support. Instead, the Lewises saw a quote in the local paper expressing condolences. Ignoring the human cost, Lyft worried about their financial burden and even sent their insurance company to assess the damages, creating even more grief for a family who simply wanted an acknowledgment of what had happened.
“No amount of money would make [Isabella] come back,” Lewis said. “But justice would be treating this situation like a normal business would. Lyft needs better support, better conditions before situations like this happen. If it does happen, [they need to] handle it better. Instead of worrying about a car, talk about a real person.”
Isabella is one of at least 50 gig workers for companies like Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Uber who have been killed on the job since 2017, according to a new report by Gig Workers Rising. The research compiled reported deaths around the country and found that the majority of workers killed on the job, 63%, are BIPOC, even though people of color are only 39% of the overall workforce.
When loved ones are killed, most families grieve alone and have to pay for the funeral and other costs out of pocket or by setting up an online fundraiser. They don’t receive compensation or support from the companies matching their family members with their killers. Companies aren’t legally required to do anything when a gig worker is killed on the job, but families and workers’ rights advocates are calling for change.
“This could’ve been anyone—what happened to my sister,” Lewis said. “And that means it could’ve been avoided. They need to do better for families in the future.”
Cherri Murphy is a Lyft driver and organizer with Gig Workers Rising. She helped write the report and conduct the research, and she’s seen how the industry has changed since she started driving in 2017.
“I’ve made over 12,000 rides for Lyft,” Murphy said. “And in those rides, I found myself in a cycle: As the number of bonuses decreased, and hours increased, it was a deadly and inflexible cycle. I was working to afford to keep working.”
Because drivers who get work from ride-share apps aren’t classified as workers, they have to take on all financial and safety risks while driving. This means they are responsible for their own costs and expenses, like broken windows and car repairs. They aren’t paid for wait time between rides, and drivers like Murphy were denied unemployment during the pandemic. The health and safety costs for drivers are high, and the report highlights how the potential of death, especially for BIPOC workers, is real.
“Most of these workers who have been killed, they look like me,” Murphy said. “Black and brown workers, killed because app corporations are not doing enough to provide adequate safety for workers. Their philosophy is to have profit rather than safety.”
Safety at work means more than just addressing deaths for drivers like Murphy, which isn’t the only risk for ride-share drivers. Other types of violence, like carjacking, verbal abuse, harassment, and sexual assault are also common. When responding to these safety risks, gig workers are still forced to go at it alone, with no legal access to services or support like paid time off or sick leave.
Gig companies like Uber rose from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis. Originating as a way for people to make side money, over time the corporations grew their profits while slashing drivers’ security. Changes like raising rates, altering the algorithm, and changing how work is distributed means drivers are having to work more to be able to get by.
These same companies are also spending millions on passing bills that would ensure workers who do work on their platforms never get any rights, like California’s Proposition 22 and Massachusetts’ current gig worker bill. Workers’ rights advocates argue that these pieces of legislation have the capacity to create a permanent underclass of precarious, unsafe, and insecure workers.
Although the number of deaths counted is harrowing, it’s possible that deaths have gone unreported and have been willfully hidden by companies that keep their data closed. In the past, gig companies have forced cases behind closed doors and refused to release information about working conditions for their drivers. To address the crisis, workers are asking for better wages, no forced arbitration, transparency on data and deaths, and the right to form a union.
“This is a systemic issue: not a one-off,” Murphy said. “Racial justice is economic justice. When you pull back the curtain, you realize this is a crisis in the gig economy. There are practices being performed that shouldn’t happen, and it benefits corporations at the drivers expense; it’s causing injuries, emotional and physical abuse. Offloading the responsibility to drivers for profit is an abomination that needs to stop.”
Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Ukraine update: Two small towns at the center of the world
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This morning, kos wrote about the defensive line established in 2014 between the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine and the areas under control of the Ukrainian military. Russia has been trying, in little ineffective fits and starts, to get around this line and surround the Ukrainian forces that defend it. The whole massive buildup going on at Izyum is part of Russia’s effort to finally, finally pull this thorn from it’s efforts to secure all of the Donbass. If, that is, Russia can manage to move more than a single unit at a time.
This is that same story … on a smaller scale.
This is an image of two small towns in eastern Ukraine. On the west side is the town of Popasna, population 19,000 (in 2010). On the right is Pervomaisk, population 36,000. Don’t be fooled by the apparent line between the two; that’s just an artifact of the different times when satellites used by Google took images of the area. The left side was captured in the late fall of 2019, the right side in spring of the same year.
From this altitude, nothing appears to be all that unusual about these two mid-sized towns. It’s easy to pick out streets and schools, stores and churches. In the narrow space between the two, there’s nothing that would be called a serious hill and not so much as a single continuously flowing stream, much less a river. It’s just fields. Flat farm fields with a few irrigation ditches. They might as well be in the middle of Illinois. Or Indiana. Or Iowa. One of those ‘I’ states.
But distance is definitely deceiving. There’s nothing ordinary about these two little towns. And while they’ve gotten little attention so far, that two miles between them might be the center of the world.
In April of 2014, pro-Russian separatists driving Russian tanks, firing Russian weapons, and accompanied by Russian forces, captured a number of towns in Luhansk. That included both Popasna and Pervomaisk. In July, Ukrainian forces drove the separatists from the area and in August Ukraine proclaimed both towns “secured.” Only Pervomaisk didn’t seem to be quite so secure. Separatists were still present in the area, and both sides ended up with artillery planted in the middle of civilian neighborhoods, exchanging fire in a very ugly battle. By January of 2015, half the town had either fled, or died. But eventually the town was left in the control of the pro-Russian forces of the Luhansk People’s Army. It’s been that way ever since.
Meanwhile in Popasna, Ukrainian forces retook the town in June, 2014. Then pro-Russian forces took it in July. Then the pro-Ukrainian Donbas Battalion took it a couple of days later. That’s where the town has remained ever since — on the bleeding outskirts of Ukrainian control, held by a mixture of regular Ukrainian military and local territorial defense. As in Pervomaisk, a lot of the population departed. That’s probably good, because in all of what was previously a town of 20,000, there are now two functioning stores. There’s a grocery store on the map, but it’s operated by an aid agency that distributes food to local residents. Electricity is spotty, and good luck getting health care.
Now, here’s a closer look at that apparently nondescript spot of farmland between the two towns.
Can you see it? Granted, what’s special here isn’t all that visible at this scale. One thing that might be surprising is that the road that seems so clearly visible on the north edge of this image isn’t really something vehicles can travel along. Not unless they are adept at getting around:
1) Wrecks. Those light spots near the intersection southwest of the Pervomaisk nametag are mostly the remains of vehicles that were blown apart along this course.
2) Potholes. Actually, potholes from hell. There are shell craters in this road, especially west of that intersection, that could swallow a car whole.
3) Mines. That little intersection just east of the Popasna sign marks the west edge of a mine field.
Here’s a closer look at that last one.
But there’s something in the fields between Popasna and Pervomaisk that’s even more special than the mine-laden road. It’s those things that look like barely visible squiggly lines running roughly north -south through the second image above. Seen from close up, they’re definitely not irrigation ditches.
This time the line in the middle of the image really does mean something. It’s where almost exactly one mile of space has been left out. That’s what separates the trenches on the left, dug into some low hills outside of Popasna, from the trenches on the right, which are along a slight rise on the shoulder of a road near Pervomaisk.
These are not a simple ditches. Like the trenches dug across France in World War I, these are elaborate constructions, braced by wood, intentionally non-linear to make them harder to target, and flanked by mounds of earth. Both sets of trenches have locations meant to allow armored vehicles to tuck inside for shelter. Both have gun emplacements for mortars and artillery, either connected to the trenches themselves or in the woods nearby. The Popasna line includes a number of small shelters, likely to allow soldiers to get some respite from the weather, or to act as local command posts.
With all that in mind, here is a news item from Saturday morning.
Rubizhne is about 20 miles to the north. The situation there is more difficult because the Sievierskyi-Donetsk River runs through the area. With the rain that’s been falling across eastern Ukraine in the last two weeks, that again makes bridges a premium item when it comes to moving forces. Both Sievierodonetsk and Rubizhne guard access to bridges.
When word comes that Russian forces have tried to break through at a location like Popasna, what it means—especially right now, in mud season—is that they have attempted to drive a column of vehicles up that wreck-strewn, potholed, heavily mined highway with entrenched forces firing into them from both north and south. It should be no surprise that such attacks are getting regularly repulsed. When kos talks about all the pressure along the defensive line, and Russia’s repeated failures to penetrate the existing defenses, it’s places like Popasna and Pervomaisk he’s talking about.
If you’ve ever been to a famous battlefield, one where the numbers of dead and wounded were simply hideous, odds are it was some place like this. Open fields, with little to no cover, where anyone who wants to be the aggressor has to cross a mile of grass in clear view of dug in defenders.
For eight years, pro-Russian forces have been trying to push west into Popasna. They’ve failed. Likewise, for the same eight years Ukrainian forces have wanted to take back Pervomaisk. They’ve also failed.
Keep in mind that all the images above date from 2019. You can bet that at this point both the trenches and the minefields and the lines of wrecks are all much larger.
Given a few months, when things dry, those attacks can spread out into those flat fields, with tanks and other armor racing straight toward the forces in trenches; forces that at this point you can bet are all but saturated with anti-tank missiles. What happens then? See the dates when Popasna rapidly changed hands in 2014? June. July. Those are the months when forces here won’t be confined to moving along that shot to hell road.
What happens then is anyone’s guess. But if Russia wants to take it, they’re going to have to coordinate more than a single small group of forces.
Saturday, Apr 16, 2022 · 4:35:27 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
The rain won’t go on forever. Neither will the current stand off.
Saturday, Apr 16, 2022 · 4:37:57 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
Here’s a genuine sign of recovery that many of us can feel deeply.
Yes. Yes, I have been very happy after visiting bookshop.
Saturday, Apr 16, 2022 · 4:40:51 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
You may have already seen some version of this. Watch it again.
Great Lakes region marks half a century since adoption of Water Quality Agreement
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This week marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a key piece of legislation that both the U.S. and Canada entered into to protect and restore what many believe is one of the best collections of fresh surface water on the planet. Prior to the agreement, pollution and contamination were a rampant problem, to the point that pesticides were threatening and killing wildlife and oil spills into nearby rivers were similarly destroying this valuable ecosystem. The 1972 agreement aimed to address that, establishing the Great Lakes Water Quality Board and Research and Science Advisory board, both of which have been key in studying the lakes and better ensuring their protection.
Over the years, additional provisions have been added to address invasive species, environmental and health threats, and climate change, the latter of which For Love of Water (FLOW) executive director Liz Kirkwood has especially kept an eye on. “The biggest threat to the Great Lakes is undoubtedly climate change,” Kirkwood said in a statement. “It will alter the waters of the Great Lakes Basin in many ways, only some of them not foreseeable. Warming groundwater, changes in the aquatic food web, and increasing algae blooms are among the expected impacts.” Being that the Great Lakes make up 20% of the planet’s fresh surface water, those changes could severely impact the ecosystem. Around 40 million people rely on the Great Lakes region for drinking water, and the lakes are considered a vital carbon sink.
Kirkwood, whose group advocates for Great Lake preservation, is one of 28 members of the International Joint Commission that makes up the Great Lakes Water Quality Board. She marked the anniversary of the agreement’s signing with a realistic assessment of its efficacy, writing that toxic algae blooms have recently plagued sections of the lakes and that, though the amount of toxic chemicals found in the lakes is lower, much more can be done to restore the lakes to a more pristine condition.
“Yes, the Great Lakes are better off than they would be without the Agreement,” Kirkwood wrote. “The two countries have coordinated efforts to clean up the lakes for decades, keeping the commitment they made 50 years ago. That commitment is to ‘restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Waters of the Great Lakes…’ But the Agreement’s 1972 goals are unfulfilled. In particular, the Great Lakes are not ‘free from nutrients entering the waters as a result of human activity in concentrations that create nuisance growths of aquatic weeds and algae.’”
Much can still be done to better protect the Great Lakes and advance this important agreement, including ensuring that protective measures are equally implemented in both the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, Indigenous input is absolutely key to good stewardship of the lakes. It took until 2012 to codify measures that allowed for and encouraged more involvement from First Nations, Métis, and Tribes. It should not take a moment longer for additional environmentally just policies to be implemented as conservationists look toward what the next 50 years could bring for the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
“Canadians, Americans, and Indigenous peoples, particularly the 40 million people who depend on these waters in the Great Lakes region for drinking water, should call on their respective governments to fulfill the promise of this agreement,” Kirkwood said. “And to serve as an example of how countries can and must work together to address water security and sustainability for future generations.”
A visualization of the extremist networks among Jan. 6 defendants should shift the narrative
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One of the broad narratives about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection that emerged from demographic assessments of the people subsequently arrested for placing the building and the police guarding it under siege was the general sense that, while organizations like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys played central roles in the attack, the vast majority of the insurrectionists were just “ordinary citizens” who had no real extremist affiliations but were just swept up in the Trumpian hysteria. It turns out that may not be quite right.
Radicalization expert Michael Jensen compiled a network map of all the people arrested for Jan. 6 crimes—which he originally thought would confirm the “J6 defendants are just ‘ordinary’ people with few links to extremists” conventional wisdom—and found as it kept piling up that he “no longer finds this narrative convincing.” As Marcy Wheeler adroitly observes: “I think people have lost sight of how important organized far right networks were to the riot.”
Jensen, the principal investigator for the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) project at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), compiled the network map from “several thousand pages of court documents and countless social media posts.” He found a total of 244 defendants with extremist connections, and created a visualization of those ties—as well as those between rioters—with the map.
“That’s approximately 30% of all defendants. While that’s not a majority, a 30% rate of affiliation with extremism/extremist beliefs among a collective of apparently “ordinary” individuals is an astounding number,” Jensen writes on Twitter.
Indeed, while 30% still is not a majority, it is not a small minority either. He continues:
Of these 244 defendants, 108 were members of at least one extremist organization. 136 self-identified as members of extremist movements or publicly praised extremist groups and their beliefs. These defendants form nearly 700 dyadic relationships to extremist groups/movements and other defendants with extremist affiliations. These aren’t ordinary relationships—or, at least, they shouldn’t be.
Moreover, the “ordinary people” argument misses what the visualization shows—that J6 involved a number of influential defendants who acted as bridges in a larger network, facilitating the flow harmful ideas from one movement to another. Sure, the J6 defendants are “ordinary” in the sense that most of them have families, neighbors, and jobs, but who really believes that those are the things that distinguish extremists from everyone else?
Jensen points to the work of another expert at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in coming to terms with the reality that far-right extremism has been mainstreamed, and how that has happened, primarily through online radicalization—how “people radicalize in a vast and ever-expanding online ecosystem, a process that often involves no contact with particular organizations”:
As ordinary individuals encounter these ideas, whether through custom-tailored propaganda or through more grassroots efforts amplified by social media, they assemble them into their own personalized belief systems. This is a far cry from more traditional models of radicalization in which people gradually adopt an identifiable group’s ideological framework—such as fascism or neo-Nazism—that calls for violent solutions against a common enemy. These more coherent processes involve initiation rites, manifestos, leaders, and a chain of command that guide beliefs and actions. Those elements are largely absent from today’s patchwork, choose-your-own-adventure mode of radicalization.
Miller-Idriss’s point is that “Extremism has gone mainstream; so must the interventions needed to address it.” And as Jensen observes, it’s likely that the “ordinary people” narrative surrounding J6 only makes this problem worse.
“It depicts aligning with extremist groups, even if indirectly, and/or adopting their beliefs and attempting to violently end democracy as something “ordinary” people do,” he writes. “It’s not.”
Heidi Beirich, the longtime intelligence director at the Southern Poverty Law Center now with the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, explains that this radicalization has been openly encouraged by Republican officeholders and a broad array of right-wing pundits, who have promoted white-nationalist and other far-right conspiracy theories into the mainstream of public discourse, ranging from the racist “Great Replacement” theory claiming that liberals are deliberately seeking to displace white voters with a tide of nonwhite immigration and civil rights, to the contradictory claims that “leftists” and “antifa” were actually responsible for the Jan. 6 violence and that the rioters simultaneously righteous “patriots” seeking to defend the nation from a communist takeover.
Beirich cites a recent University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats report identifying an active American insurrectionist movement comprising some 21 million people. These radicalized Trump followers believe that “Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency” and that “The 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” About 63% of them believe in the Great Replacement theory, while 54% subscribe to far-right QAnon conspiracism.
It also notes that this insurrectionist movement is made up of “mainly highly competent, middle-aged American professionals,” leading the researchers to warn that their continuing radicalization “does not bode well for the 2022 midterm elections, or for that matter, the 2024 Presidential election.”
Marcy Wheeler notes that Jensen’s map reveals how massive an influence QAnon networks were in fueling the insurrection. She observes “how much more effective QAnon was at getting bodies where they needed them than the militias (the Proud Boys were busy moving other bodies around). Note how many QAnoners there are here.”
Moreover, as she explains, the map gives weight to the reportage this week by The New York Times’ Alan Feuer, revealing the key role that a Roger Stone minion and QAnon influencer named Jason Sullivan had in fomenting the Jan. 6 violence:
More recently, Mr. Sullivan has taken an active role in promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that prominent liberals belong to a cult of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. At a public appearance last year with Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn, Mr. Sullivan called Hillary Clinton a “godawful woman” and then made a gesture suggesting she should be hanged.
On the conference call ahead of Jan. 6, Mr. Sullivan told his listeners that he was an expert at making things go viral online, but that it was not enough to simply spread the message that the election had been stolen.
“There has to be a multiple-front strategy, and that multiple-front strategy, I do think, is descend on the Capitol, without question,” he said. “Make those people feel it inside.”
As Wheeler says: “If someone can be shown to have triggered the QAnoners, it is an important detail. FBI was investigating this within weeks after the riot.”
Ukraine Update: What makes anyone think Russia has the competence to pull off a major offensive?
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Russia thinks taking Mariupol will free up its forces to work their way up into a pincer maneuver, surrounding Ukrainian troops dug in hard along the Donbas front line.
All those Russian troops that failed to advance around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy are moving toward Izyum and the rest of the Donbas front (purple areas). Well, the ones Russia can threaten, beg, and cajole into heading back into Ukraine. They’ve had some issues, such that of the 120 or so battalion tactical groups (BTG) Russia had at the start of the war (around 800 soldiers each, on paper), only 65 remain in the country according to the Pentagon. And as we’ve seen, many, if not most of those BTG were, and remain, severely undermanned.
The Pentagon, Ukrainian military, and every Very Serious Military Analyst is convinced Russia is massing troops to execute that pincer maneuver in the Mother of all offensives. Just you wait for the hellish shock-and-awe Russia has in store! The Pentagon even thinks Russia has eyes on Dnipro further west, which is so implausible and stupid, Russia just might give it a shot.
Yet every day that goes by, any such massive offensive seems less and less likely. And not just because of the rain that has made a slurry of all ground off the major roads, and will keep it that way for at least the next several weeks. (Mark Sumner hilariously talks about “General Mud.”) Russia’s fundamental problem is that it keeps executing the exact same tactics that failed around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy.
Russian forces continued small-scale, tactical attacks on the Izyum and Severodonetsk axes; additional reinforcements to date have not enabled any breakthroughs of Ukrainian defenses. Russian forces continue to deploy reinforcements to eastern Ukraine but show no indication of taking an operational pause. The Russian military appears to be carrying out an approach in eastern Ukrainian similar to its failed efforts north of Kyiv in early March—continuing to funnel small groups of forces into unsuccessful attacks against Ukrainian defensive positions without taking the operational pause that is likely necessary to prepare for a more successful offensive campaign.
Russia is gathering an army in the east. That much is true! Bur rather than wait for them to get in place, it keeps dribbling out 1-2 BTG-for ill-fated assaults (see here, here, here, and here), perhaps hoping to exhaust Ukrainian defenders into submission. The Ukrainian General Staff reported yesterday:
Yes, in the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, eight enemy attacks have been repelled over the past 24 hours, four tanks destroyed, six armored transport vehicles, four infantry fighting machines, as well as one enemy artillery system.
Would an army preparing a major assault waste troops and equipment with these undersized and under-resourced drip-drip-drip probes? Of course, note that Russia attacks this way because it is the only way it knows how to attack. It simply cannot open up the spigot.
Even if Ukraine exaggerates Russia’s losses, those assaults inevitably degrade their foe’s ability to wage war. Ukraine ambushes an infantry fighting vehicle here, steals a tank there, drops a mortar on some poor Donbas conscripts bunched up in a foxhole over yonder, and at least a couple of times a day, lays down some artillery on one of those long convoys making their way toward Izyum from the Russian border.
Just look at that wide open terrain, with nary any cover. Makes it hard for anyone to make a move, and right now, that’s mostly Russia. (Remember that when someone says Ukraine should counter-attack to retake separatist territory.)
Down south is looking only a little better for Russia.
Mark gave us a Mariupol update yesterday—pockets of resistance are shrinking, but the fighting remains. Russia should’ve taken this isolated, surrounded, and difficult-to-defend city (no hills or rivers to form natural barriers) on the first day of the war. Instead, here we are 51 days, and Russia is still suffering major casualties with their clumsy, hapless urban offensive.
Once Russia takes Mariupol conventionally (a guerrilla war will inevitably continue), what shattered remnants will it have left to turn north? I remain skeptical these remnants would have enough juice to get through the existing Ukrainian defensive emplacements, much less push more than a few kilometers north.
I am excited to see who is right—those of us who still can’t believe Russia is doing nothing to learn and change its failed tactics, or the Very Serious Military punditry who continues to assume a basic level of competence that Russia has never met this entire war.
Can you believe Kyiv’s Presidential Palace has never been hit this war? Russia supposedly sent assassin squads to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, yet they’ve never targeted his workplace?
Why are rail lines still operating from the west of the country, allowing easy, efficient movement of troops, material, and ammunition from the west to the front lines?
Heck, why hasn’t Russia targeted all the NATO heavy equipment streaming in from Ukraine’s western border? Don’t they have satellites to track that equipment’s entry points, spies to report on railway movements, and missiles to strike the convoys as they enter Ukraine? Where are Russia’s special forces, to conduct sabotage operations?
Why did Russia wait until last week to start hitting fuel depots?
Once their shock and awe failed, why did Russia keep hitting civilian targets, instead of degrading Ukraine’s military and command and control infrastructure. Killing sick children is utterly useless in winning any war.
If Russia can’t even manage the most basic military tasks, how is it supposed to deploy a navy that protects its flagship, an army that can perform combined-arms attacks with infantry, army, artillery, and air support, and an air force that can fly deeper than a few kilometers into Ukrainian airspace … when it flies at all.
People are free to believe Russia can pull off some kind of big offensive. Me, I’ll wait for evidence before jumping on that bandwagon. Given what we’re still seeing on the battlefield, I’m not holding my breath.
Madison Cawthorn raised $3.5 million but seems to only have a little over $100K left
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Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina has spent his short life mostly lying about himself, his accomplishments, his integrity, and just about anything one could lie about. He has done so in order to make himself money. After becoming a member of the U.S. Congress, Cawthorn has continued to say outlandish thing after outlandish thing in the service of fundraising and promoting himself as a brand. A brand of what? Who knows? Whatever he and Reps. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are selling. Madness, mostly.
On Friday, reporter Josh Kraushaar tweeted out Cawthorn’s FEC disclosure for his first quarter of spending. All candidates must do so, to show how much money they’ve taken in and what they have spent. Kraushaar wrote: “Madison Cawthorn just filed his 1stQ fundraising report — spent more than he raised and has less than 300K in bank.” According to New York Times political reporter Shane Goldmacher, Rep. Cawthorn has a lot less than even that in the bank.
RELATED: STORY: Madison Cawthorn turns his slander onto the Republican Party
Kraushaar’s tweet was referring to the $242k in the bank. This, by itself, is a pretty abysmal number considering that Cawthorn totals this cycle’s contributions at $3,449,201.43. But Goldmacher points out that Cawthorn has about $127k in outstanding bills. Not a good look for the guy who spent time disrespecting veterans during committee hearings, choosing to clean his gun instead of pay attention to their testimony. It’s an even worse look for the North Carolina representative who then voted against the Honoring our PACT Act, which looked to over the costs military personnel incur after being poisoned by toxic burn pits during their service to our country.
In fact, according to the filing, Cawthorn’s spending more than he’s taking in. It’s called “operating at a loss.” It costs a lot to constantly troll the world on social media, at events, and on podcasts. What’s he spending money on?
The reports show his campaign spent $443 on Chick-Fil-A, $1,371 on “Papas Beer,” and $2,560 on Amazon.
But it isn’t his money. Amiright? The responses were fast and furious.
Good question.
Very good question.
And how do we all feel about this turn of events?
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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Getting things wrong at the highest level
This post was originally published on this site
Philips P. O’Brien/The Atlantic:
How the West Got Russia’s Military So, So Wrong
Good equipment and clever doctrine reveal little about how an army will perform in a war.
Let me tell you a story about a military that was supposedly one of the best in the world. This military had some of the best equipment: the heaviest and most modern tanks, next-generation aircraft, and advanced naval vessels. It had invested in modernization, and made what were considered some of Europe’s most sophisticated plans for conflict. Moreover, it had planned and trained specifically for a war it was about to fight, a war it seemed extremely well prepared for and that many, perhaps most, people believed it would win.
All of these descriptions could apply to the Russian army that invaded Ukraine last month. But I’m talking about the French army of the 1930s. That French force was considered one of the finest on the planet. Winston Churchill believed that it represented the world’s best hope for keeping Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany at bay. As he said famously in 1933, and repeated a number of times afterward, “Thank God for the French army.”
Of course, when this French army was actually tested in battle, it was found wanting.
James Fallows/Breaking the News:
Escaping from ‘Flatland’
Journalism inevitably flattens reality, since we can tell only a tiny part of any story. How framing can make that situation better or worse.
As a reminder: framing involves the assumptions that go into the who, what, where, why, how of a story—all of which generally make a bigger difference than obvious expressions of bias. What deserves coverage? Which stories should a news organization stick with week after week? Which ones, by contrast, become old news—“we’ve already covered that”—once they’re a few days in the past? What are the “sides” of a disagreement that deserve a platform and attention? Which can be dismissed? The endless stream of such decisions constitutes “news judgment.” As they mount up they shape the view of the world that journalism offers.
Here are a few recent illustrations of how the complexities of the world can be artificially flattened by habits of framing. The first two may seem tiny but are “tells” of deeper attitudes.
Yeah, this CNN story has been covered. But there is so much here:
‘We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend.’ What the Meadows texts reveal about how two Trump congressional allies lobbied the White House to overturn the election.
Over a few days in November, Lee lobbied Meadows to get attorney Sidney Powell access to Trump.“Sydney Powell is saying that she needs to get in to see the president, but she’s being kept away from him,” Lee wrote to Meadows on November 7. “Apparently she has a strategy to keep things alive and put several states back in play. Can you help get her in?”Lee then sent Meadows Powell’s cell number and her email.
Also: The key texts between Mark Meadows, Mike Lee, and Chip Roy (WaPo).
Drew Harwell/The Washington Post:
Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers
Ukrainian officials say the use of facial recognition software could help end the brutal war. But some experts call it ‘classic psychological warfare’ that sets a gruesome precedent.
I didn’t include this because I approve. I include it to indicate the level of brutality in this war that Putin started and can’t win.
Michael Jacobson/War on the Rocks:
WHAT ARTILLERY AND AIR DEFENSE DOES UKRAINE NEED NOW?
Ukrainian forces have done an outstanding job denying air superiority to the Russian air force using man-portable air-defense systems provided by NATO. They have also succeeded in using Javelins to stop tanks in their tracks. However, Ukraine has no effective options to counter a prolonged Russian artillery offensive. This should trouble those who want to see Ukraine prevail as Russia can rely upon an extensive supply of artillery platforms and munitions that it will likely use to lay waste to large swaths of eastern Ukraine and thwart a Ukrainian counter-offensive to retake the country.
Jonathan Chait/Intelligencer:
Republican Senator Blurts Out That He Hates Democracy
Last night, livetweeting his thoughts on the 2020 vice-presidential debate, Republican senator Mike Lee decided it was an opportune moment to share one of his edgier political beliefs: Democracy is bad.
Lee is articulating a view that has long been in vogue on the American right but which Republican politicians were generally hesitant to express openly.
Can’t let the little people interfere with property rights.
Tim Miller/Bulwark:
Mike Lee and the “Good Republicans” Were No Different Than the Crazy Kraken Lady
Clowns to the left of me. Clowns to the right.
According to a new book by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, Mitch McConnell went so far as to say that “everybody around [Trump], except for clowns like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, are trying to get him to do the right thing.”
That’s not quite right.
The real story is that the circus was in town and even the supposed “good Republicans” were happy to put on their clown make-up.
News Roundup: Gas prices fall; Jan. 6 texts expose GOP leadership; Trump's touch turns to snake oil
This post was originally published on this site
It is Friday. There is good news and bad news this week. The good news consists of Jan. 6’s attempted coup d’etat defendants taking a few steps closer to receiving their just deliverance; Donald Trump continues to fail both in business and in endorsements; and gas prices have begun to come back down from the stratosphere. The bad news is that the Democratic Party needs to message better and do more from the top down domestically.
Here is some of what you might have missed.
- Falling gas prices, rising wages fuel unexpected jump in U.S. consumer sentiment
- Strike two: Trump’s Oz endorsement quickly turning into his second disaster in Pennsylvania
- Texts show they were all for Trump overturning the election—until a lack of evidence got in the way
- Mike Lee, election denier, has no business being on the Senate Judiciary Committee
- Fox News says ‘verified’ account on Trump’s Truth Social is fake news
- Ohio school bans author from reading book featuring Unicorn character claiming it’ll turn kids gay
Because it only happens once every 20 years:
And from the community:
Far-right Marine Le Pen pledges submission to Moscow, reminding us what Trump 2.0 would look like
This post was originally published on this site
In the span of a few weeks, the tilt of the geopolitical world has shifted so quickly that perhaps Americans just haven’t had enough time to digest how fortunate they are Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. Doubtlessly the Ukrainians are aware, and those living in the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are as well because their very lives would have been entirely forfeit or at grave risk right now. But given the soothing comfort of its giant pick-up trucks, guns, and doorbell cameras, it might be asking too much of American culture to pause and consider the alternative reality we could all be living in.
Still, many—both in this country and elsewhere—would gleefully embrace that reality with open arms. Even as Vladimir Putin’s appalling army systematically rapes, tortures, and beheads helpless civilians in its murderous invasion of Ukraine, the Russian dictator has found a fawning ally in the French far-right, with the re-emergence of Marine Le Pen. Last week, Ms. Le Pen drew 23% of the vote in France’s splintered election, forcing a runoff on April 24 between herself and French President Emanuel Macron, who garnered approximately 28%.
On Wednesday, Le Pen—apparently unperturbed by what is now aptly characterized as a genocidal campaign by Russia to eradicate the Ukrainian population—pledged to effectively abandon the 70-year-old NATO alliance in order to ratify Putin’s brutality, should the French people vote her into the presidency.
PARIS — Rejecting a “herd-like conformity” with the Biden administration, Marine Le Pen, the French far-right candidate for the presidency, said Wednesday that France would quit NATO’s integrated military command if she were elected and would seek for the alliance “a strategic rapprochement” with Russia.
As reported by Roger Cohen for the Washington Post, Le Pen’s rationale for accommodating Putin’s aims echo the same sentiments espoused by Donald Trump, who, according to former aides, was also intent on appeasing Putin by withdrawing the U.S. from the NATO alliance had he managed to be re-elected. This brand of Putin-envy appears to be particularly common among more autocratic, fascist-leaning politicians who have traditionally applauded the Russian despot as exemplifying what they call “strength” and resolve. In reality, they admire and envy the lack of any real constraints on his power, which they all shamelessly covet. We now see the end product of that lack of constraints playing out in Ukraine.
As Cohen observes, Le Pen’s agenda, to the extent she has one, mirrors Trump’s in all its essentials.
Dismissing multilateralism, blasting Germany, criticizing the European Union, relegating climate issues to a low priority, attacking “globalists” and maintaining a near silence on Russia’s brutal assault in Ukraine, Ms. Le Pen gave a taste of a worldview that was at once reminiscent of the Trump presidency and appeared to directly threaten NATO’s attempts to arm Ukraine and defeat Russia.
The similarities between Le Pen and Trump were evident in the first days of the latter’s administration. As James Traub observed in a column written for Foreign Policy, Le Pen’s xenophobic brand of so-called “populism” (by now simply a more pleasant word for “fascism”) and the race-baiting lies she espoused to support it were simply more glib and soothing in their delivery than Trump’s general penchant for crudeness and bombast:
Le Pen repeated Donald Trump’s canard that Barack Obama had “banned” immigrants from Iraq; denied, despite vast evidence to the contrary, that her supporters routinely fire off racist and homophobic tweets; and claimed, wrongly, that immigrants can automatically gain French citizenship through marriage. And then there were the Trumpian delusions: that a policy of “economic patriotism” penalizing French companies that move abroad would not raise the cost of French products but rather would foster a “virtuous circle” boosting growth and employment.
As Traub points out, Le Pen’s calculated delivery of her trademark nationalism and bigotry largely stems from her need to distance herself in the French public’s eyes from her ultra-radical and unabashedly antisemitic father, Jean Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front party she now leads. Still, Le Pen and Trump appear to be cut from basically the same cloth, even where Le Pen will, as Traub puts it, “demonize Muslims with a gracious smile instead of a vicious Twitter tirade.” Both are adept at cynically manipulating their public through fear of the “other.” Both display an instinctive aversion to the very idea of cooperation between nations, which they perceive only as a means to undercut their own aspirations for control and power.
Both are also intolerant of any dissent. Just as Trump encourages his rabid base to attack journalists and protesters at his rallies, Le Pen exhibits a similar hostility against perceived political enemies:
Le Pen is currently expected to lose the run-off election, mainly because the majority of those who originally voted for the far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon will be unable (at least in theory) to stomach a Le Pen victory. And even if she wins, the NATO alliance will most likely remain standing, albeit with France as a thoroughly diminished and unreliable presence.
But suppose the 2020 U.S. election—which Trump may have lost simply because of his dismal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic—had gone the other way. What would have been left of American strategic power and influence in this world would have withered and died on the vine in brutally short order, probably from the moment Putin sent troops into Ukraine. It’s impossible to know how much resolve to assist Ukraine would have existed among the remainder of NATO, but without a credible leader, it’s difficult to imagine how that response would have been effective. The world has never seen a nuclear-armed pathology like Putin invade a peaceful neighboring country for wholly irrational reasons, wielding his nuclear capability as a threat against any country that dares to oppose him, and even worse, vowing to continue his efforts until he is stopped. History suggests that such countries will not stop until they encounter an immutable opposing force.
And Trump would not have delivered that force. A mercurial buffoon with no grasp of (or interest in) foreign policy or even a basic understanding of what NATO stands for—and against—might have been cajoled into reluctant action by an exasperated military. But the sheer weakness of that position would have been evident to anyone paying attention. And Putin, for all his now glaringly apparent flaws, pays attention.
Law professor Alan Rozenshtein, writing for Lawfare, described the “nightmarish” scenario that this country would have faced if Trump were still in office:
From this perspective, it is sobering, if not downright terrifying, to think of how Trump would have handled this current crisis, had he won in 2020. Consider first the question of loyalty. Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he responded to the Ukrainian president’s request for more Javelin anti-tank missiles (which have proved vital for the Ukrainian defense) by asking for Ukrainian help in digging up dirt on his main political rival, betrays a disloyalty to the national interest whose geopolitical implications are now all too clear.
Nor is it clear that Trump would even feel that it was his responsibility to rally the world to confront Russia, as the Biden administration has skillfully done. After all, Trump’s response to criticisms of his administration’s early missteps in handling the coronavirus pandemic was to say “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Why expect that he would feel different about a war half a world away, or that he wouldn’t simply have delegated weighty foreign policy decisions to informal advisors, thereby maintaining distance and plausible deniability, as when Rudolph Giuliani effectively ran the White House’s Ukraine policy. Even worse, given Trump’s personal affinity for Vladimir Putin, which he reiterated even as Russian forces entered Ukraine, is the very real possibility that Trump would have supported Russia’s invasion.
The world we all still live in—the world of liberal democracies with a legitimate transfer of power untainted by autocratic, fascistic propaganda, coercion, and repression—is now sitting atop a knife-edge, susceptible to one misguided election by an apathetic, self-absorbed and frankly historically ignorant electorate. Racist demagogues like Le Pen and Trump are perfectly willing to push us off into the abyss simply to realize their dreams of power—the rest of the world be damned. They are both aided by a radicalized base that sees no problem with simply watching the world burn if only to validate its own delusional, stoked-up grievances.
In 2020 we dodged a bullet. But that gun is still pointed at us. If Democrats can’t wake Americans up to that reality, no one else is going to.
Editor’s Note: This story’s lead image has been changed.